The Dark Tower VII Read online

  He held the pad against him a moment longer. Then—shyly, not looking at her—he held it out. She took it, and looked down at herself. For a moment she could hardly breathe, it was that good. The wide eyes. The high cheekbones, which her father had called “those jewels of Ethiopia.” The full lips, which Eddie had so loved to kiss. It was her, it was her to the very life…but it was also more than her. She would never have thought love could shine with such perfect nakedness from the lines made with a pencil, but here that love was, oh say true, say so true; love of the boy for the woman who had saved him, who had pulled him from the dark hole where he otherwise would surely have died. Love for her as a mother, love for her as a woman.

  “Patrick, it’s wonderful!” she said.

  He looked at her anxiously. Doubtfully. Really? his eyes asked her, and she realized that only he—the poor needy Patrick inside, who had lived with this ability all his life and so took it for granted—could doubt the simple beauty of what he had done. Drawing made him happy; this much he’d always known. That his pictures could make others happy…that idea would take some getting used to. She wondered again how long Dandelo had had him, and how the mean old thing had come by Patrick in the first place. She supposed she’d never know. Meantime, it seemed very important to convince him of his own worth.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it is wonderful. You’re a fine artist, Patrick. Looking at this makes me feel good.”

  This time he forgot to hold his teeth together. And that smile, tongueless or not, was so wonderful she could have eaten it up. It made her fears and anxieties seem small and silly.

  “May I keep it?”

  Patrick nodded eagerly. He made a tearing motion with one hand, then pointed at her. Yes! Tear it off! Take it! Keep it!

  She started to do so, then paused. His love (and his pencil) had made her beautiful. The only thing to spoil that beauty was the black splotch beside her mouth. She turned the drawing toward him, tapped the sore on it, then touched it on her own face. And winced. Even the lightest touch hurt. “This is the only damned thing,” she said.

  He shrugged, raising his open hands to his shoulders, and she had to laugh. She did it softly so as not to wake Roland, but yes, she did have to laugh. A line from some old movie had occurred to her: I paint what I see.

  Only this wasn’t paint, and it suddenly occurred to her that he could take care of the rotten, ugly, painful thing. As it existed on paper, at least.

  Then she’ll be my twin, she thought affectionately. My better half; my pretty twin sis—

  And suddenly she understood—

  Everything? Understood everything?

  Yes, she would think much later. Not in any coherent fashion that could be written down—if a + b = c, then c - b = a and c - a = b—but yes, she understood everything. Intuited everything. No wonder the dream-Eddie and dream-Jake had been impatient with her; it was so obvious.

  Patrick, drawing her.

  Nor was this the first time she had been drawn.

  Roland had drawn her to his world…with magic.

  Eddie had drawn her to himself with love.

  As had Jake.

  Dear God, had she been here so long and been through so much without knowing what ka-tet was, what it meant? Ka-tet was family.

  Ka-tet was love.

  To draw is to make a picture with a pencil, or maybe charcoal.

  To draw is also to fascinate, to compel, and to bring forward. To bring one out of one’s self.

  The drawers were where Detta went to fulfill herself.

  Patrick, that tongueless boy genius, pent up in the wilderness. Pent up in the drawers. And now? Now?

  Now he my forspecial, thought Susanna/Odetta/Detta, and reached into her pocket for the glass jar, knowing exactly what she was going to do and why she was going to do it.

  When she handed back the pad without tearing off the sheet that now held her image, Patrick looked badly disappointed.

  “Nar, nar,” said she (and in the voice of many). “Only there’s something I’d have you do before I take it for my pretty, for my precious, for my ever, to keep and know how I was at this where, at this when.”

  She held out one of the pink rubber pieces, understanding now why Dandelo had cut them off. For he’d had his reasons.

  Patrick took what she offered and turned it over between his fingers, frowning, as if he had never seen such a thing before. Susannah was sure he had, but how many years ago? How close might he have come to disposing of his tormentor, once and for all? And why hadn’t Dandelo just killed him then?

  Because once he took away the erasers he thought he was safe, she thought.

  Patrick was looking at her, puzzled. Beginning to be upset.

  Susannah sat down beside him and pointed at the blemish on the drawing. Then she put her fingers delicately around Patrick’s wrist and drew it toward the paper. At first he resisted, then let his hand with the pink nubbin in it be tugged forward.

  She thought of the shadow on the land that hadn’t been a shadow at all but a herd of great, shaggy beasts Roland called bannock. She thought of how she’d been able to smell the dust when Patrick began to draw the dust. And she thought of how, when Patrick had drawn the herd closer than it actually was (artistic license, and we all say thankya), it had actually looked closer. She remembered thinking that her eyes had adjusted and now marveled at her own stupidity. As if eyes could adjust to distance the way they could adjust to the dark.

  No, Patrick had moved them closer. Had moved them closer by drawing them closer.

  When the hand holding the eraser was almost touching the paper, she took her own hand away—this had to be all Patrick, she was somehow sure of it. She moved her fingers back and forth, miming what she wanted. He didn’t get it. She did it again, then pointed to the sore beside the full lower lip.

  “Make it gone, Patrick,” she said, surprised by the steadiness of her own voice. “It’s ugly, make it gone.” Again she made that rubbing gesture in the air. “Erase it.”

  This time he got it. She saw the light in his eyes. He held the pink nubbin up to her. Perfectly pink it was—not a smudge of graphite on it. He looked at her, eyebrows raised, as if to ask if she was sure.

  She nodded.

  Patrick lowered the eraser to the sore and began to rub it on the paper, tentatively at first. Then, as he saw what was happening, he worked with more spirit.

  Fourteen

  She felt the same queer tingling sensation, but when he’d been drawing, it had been all over her. Now it was in only one place, to the right side of her mouth. As Patrick got the hang of the eraser and bore down with it, the tingling became a deep and monstrous itch. She had to clutch her hands deep into the dirt on either side of her to keep from reaching up and clawing at the sore, scratching it furiously, and never mind if she tore it wide open and sent a pint of blood gushing down her deerskin shirt.

  It be over in a few more seconds, it have to be, it have to be, oh dear God please LET IT END—

  Patrick, meanwhile, seemed to have forgotten all about her. He was looking down at his picture, his hair hanging to either side of his face and obscuring most of it, completely absorbed by this wonderful new toy. He erased delicately…then a little harder (the itch intensified)…then more softly again. Susannah felt like shrieking. That itch was suddenly everywhere. It burned in her forebrain, buzzed across the wet surfaces of her eyes like twin clouds of gnats, it shivered at the very tips of her nipples, making them hopelessly hard.

  I’ll scream, I can’t help it, I have to scream—

  She was drawing in her breath to do just that when suddenly the itch was gone. The pain was gone, as well. She reached toward the side of her mouth, then hesitated.

  I don’t dare.

  You better dare! Detta responded indignantly. After all you been through—all we been through—you must have enough backbone left to touch yo’ own damn face, you yella bitch!

  She brought her fingers down to the skin. The smo
oth skin. The sore which had so troubled her since Thunderclap was gone. She knew that when she looked in a mirror or a still pool of water, she would not even see a scar.

  Fifteen

  Patrick worked a little longer—first with the eraser, then with the pencil, then with the eraser again—but Susannah felt no itch and not even a faint tingle. It was as though, once he had passed some critical point, the sensations just ceased. She wondered how old Patrick had been when Dandelo snipped all the erasers off the pencils. Four? Six? Young, anyway. She was sure that his original look of puzzlement when she showed him one of the erasers had been unfeigned, and yet once he began, he used it like an old pro.

  Maybe it’s like riding a bicycle, she thought. Once you learn how, you never forget.

  She waited as patiently as she could, and after five very long minutes, her patience was rewarded. Smiling, Patrick turned the pad around and showed her the picture. He had erased the blemish completely and then faintly shaded the area so that it looked like the rest of her skin. He had been careful to brush away every single crumb of rubber.

  “Very nice,” she said, but that was a fairly shitty compliment to offer genius, wasn’t it?

  So she leaned forward, put her arms around him, and kissed him firmly on the mouth. “Patrick, it’s beautiful.”

  The blood rushed so quickly and so strongly into his face that she was alarmed at first, wondering if he might not have a stroke in spite of his youth. But he was smiling as he held out the pad to her with one hand, making tearing gestures again with the other. Wanting her to take it. Wanting her to have it.

  Susannah tore it off very carefully, wondering in a dark back corner of her mind what would happen if she tore it—tore her—right down the middle. She noted as she did that there was no amazement in his face, no astonishment, no fear. He had to have seen the sore beside her mouth, because the nasty thing had pretty much dominated her face for all the time he’d known her, and he had drawn it in near-photographic detail. Now it was gone—her exploring fingers told her so—yet Patrick wasn’t registering any emotion, at least in regard to that. The conclusion seemed clear enough. When he’d erased it from his drawing, he’d also erased it from his own mind and memory.

  “Patrick?”

  He looked at her, smiling. Happy that she was happy. And Susannah was very happy. The fact that she was also scared to death didn’t change that in the slightest.

  “Will you draw something else for me?”

  He nodded. Made a mark on his pad, then turned it around so she could see:

  ?

  She looked at the question-mark for a moment, then at him. She saw he was clutching the eraser, his wonderful new tool, very tightly.

  Susannah said: “I want you to draw me something that isn’t there.”

  He cocked his head quizzically to the side. She had to smile a little in spite of her rapidly thumping heart—Oy looked that way sometimes, when he wasn’t a hundred per cent sure what you meant.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll tell you.”

  And she did, very carefully. Patrick listened. At some point Roland heard Susannah’s voice and awoke. He came over, looked at her in the dim red light of the embering campfire, started to look away, then snapped back, eyes widening. Until that moment, she hadn’t been sure Roland would see what was no longer there, either. She thought it at least possible that Patrick’s magic would have been strong enough to erase it from the gunslinger’s memory, too.

  “Susannah, thy face! What’s happened to thy—”

  “Hush, Roland, if you love me.”

  The gunslinger hushed. Susannah returned her attention to Patrick and began to speak again, quietly but urgently. Patrick listened, and as he did, she saw the light of understanding begin to enter his gaze.

  Roland replenished the fire without having to be asked, and soon their little camp was bright under the stars.

  Patrick wrote a question, putting it thriftily to the left of the question-mark he had already drawn:

  How tall?

  Susannah took Roland by the elbow and positioned him in front of Patrick. The gunslinger stood about six-foot-three. She had him pick her up, then held a hand roughly three inches over his head. Patrick nodded, smiling.

  “And look you at something that has to be on it,” she said, and took a branch from their little pile of brush. She broke it over her knee, creating a point of her own. She could remember the symbols, but it would be best if she didn’t think about them overmuch. She sensed they had to be absolutely right or the door she wanted him to make for her would either open on some place she didn’t want to go, or would not open at all. Therefore once she began to draw in the mixed dirt and ash by the campfire, she did it as rapidly as Patrick himself might have done, not pausing long enough to cast her eye back upon a single symbol. For if she looked back at one she would surely look back at all, and she would see something that looked wrong to her, and uncertainty would set in like a sickness. Detta—brash, foul-mouthed Detta, who had turned out on more than one occasion to be her savior—might step in and take over, finish for her, but she couldn’t count on that. On her heart’s deepest level, she still did not entirely trust Detta not to send everything to blazes at a crucial moment, and for no other reason than the black joy of the thing. Nor did she fully trust Roland, who might want to keep her for reasons he did not fully understand himself.

  So she drew quickly in the dirt and ashes, not looking back, and these were the symbols that flowed away beneath the flying tip of her makeshift implement:

  “Unfound,” Roland breathed. “Susannah, what—how—”

  “Hush,” she repeated.

  Patrick bent over his pad and began to draw.

  Sixteen

  She kept looking around for the door, but the circle of light thrown by their fire was very small even after Roland had set it to blazing. Small compared to the vast darkness of the prairie, at least. She saw nothing. When she turned to Roland she could see the unspoken question in his eyes, and so, while Patrick kept working, she showed him the picture of her the young man had drawn. She indicated the place where the blemish had been. Holding the page close to his face, Roland at last saw the eraser’s marks. Patrick had concealed what few traces he’d left behind with great cunning, and Roland had found them only with the closest scrutiny; it was like casting for an old trail after many days of rain.

  “No wonder the old man cut off his erasers,” he said, giving the picture back to her.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  From there she skipped ahead to her single true intuitive leap: that if Patrick could (in this world, at least) un-create by erasing, he might be able to create by drawing. When she mentioned the herd of bannock that had seemed mysteriously closer, Roland rubbed his forehead like a man who has a nasty headache.

  “I should have seen that. Should have realized what it meant, too. Susannah, I’m getting old.”

  She ignored that—she’d heard it before—and told him about the dreams of Eddie and Jake, being sure to mention the product-names on the sweatshirts, the choral voices, the offer of hot chocolate, and the growing panic in their eyes as the nights passed and still she did not see what the dream had been sent to show her.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this dream before now?” Roland asked. “Why didn’t you ask for help in interpreting it?”

  She looked at him steadily, thinking she had been right not to ask for his help. Yes—no matter how much that might hurt him. “You’ve lost two. How eager would you have been to lose me, as well?”

  He flushed. Even in the firelight she could see it. “Thee speaks ill of me, Susannah, and have thought worse.”

  “Perhaps I have,” she said. “If so, I say sorry. I wasn’t sure of what I wanted myself. Part of me wants to see the Tower, you know. Part of me wants that very badly. And even if Patrick can draw the Unfound Door into existence and I can open it, it’s not the real world it opens on. That’s what the names on the shirts mean, I’m s
ure of it.”

  “You mustn’t think that,” Roland said. “Reality is seldom a thing of black and white, I think, of is and isn’t, be and not be.”

  Patrick made a hooting sound and they both looked. He was holding his pad up, turned toward them so they could see what he had drawn. It was a perfect representation of the Unfound Door, she thought. THE ARTIST wasn’t printed on it, and the doorknob was plain shiny metal—no crossed pencils adorned it—but that was all right. She hadn’t bothered to tell him about those things, which had been for her benefit and understanding.

  They did everything but draw me a map, she thought. She wondered why everything had to be so damn hard, so damn

  (riddle-de-dum)

  mysterious, and knew that was a question to which she would never find a satisfactory answer…except it was the human condition, wasn’t it? The answers that mattered never came easily.

  Patrick made another of those hooting noises. This time it had an interrogative quality. She suddenly realized that the poor kid was practically dying of anxiety, and why not? He had just executed his first commission, and wanted to know what his patrono d’arte thought of it.

  “It’s great, Patrick—terrific.”

  “Yes,” Roland agreed, taking the pad. The door looked to him exactly like those he’d found as he staggered along the beach of the Western Sea, delirious and dying of the lobstrosity’s poisoned bite. It was as if the poor tongueless creature had looked into his head and seen an actual picture of that door—a fottergraff.

  Susannah, meanwhile, was looking around desperately. And when she began to swing along on her hands toward the edge of the firelight, Roland had to call her back sharply, reminding her that Mordred might be out there anywhere, and the darkness was Mordred’s friend.

  Impatient as she was, she retreated from the edge of the light, remembering all too well what had happened to Mordred’s body-mother, and how quickly it had happened. Yet it hurt to pull back, almost physically. Roland had told her that he expected to catch his first glimpse of the Dark Tower toward the end of the coming day. If she was still with him, if she saw it with him, she thought its power might prove too strong for her. Its glammer. Now, given a choice between the door and the Tower, she knew she could still choose the door. But as they drew closer and the power of the Tower grew stronger, its pulse deeper and more compelling in her mind, the singing voices ever sweeter, choosing the door would be harder to do.