"Cry pardon, Oy," he said, and put him down.
Oy trotted on without making any reply, and not long after Roland came to the scattered bodies of the boogers who had harried his boy from the Dixie Pig. Here also, printed in the dust that coated the floor of this ancient corridor, were the tracks he and Eddie had made when they arrived. Again he heard a ghost-voice, this time that of the man who had been the harriers' leader.
I know your name by your face, and your face by your mouth. 'Tis the same as the mouth of your mother, who did suck John Farson with such glee.
Roland turned the body over with the toe of his boot (a hume named Flaherty, whose da' had put a fear of dragons in his head, had the gunslinger known or cared … which he did not) and looked down into the dead face, which was already growing a crop of mold. Next to him was the stoat-head taheen whose final proclamation had been Be damned to you, then, chary-ka. And beyond the heaped bodies of these two and their mates was the door that would take him out of the Keystone World for good.
Assuming that it still worked.
Oy trotted to it and sat down before it, looking back at Roland. The bumbler was panting, but his old, amiably fiendish grin was gone. Roland reached the door and placed his hands against the close-grained ghostwood. Deep within he felt a low and troubled vibration. This door was still working but might not be for much longer.
He closed his eyes and thought of his mother bending over him as he lay in his little bed (how soon before he had been promoted from the cradle he didn't know, but surely not long), her face a patchwork of colors from the nursery windows, Gabrielle Deschain who would later die at those hands which she caressed so lightly and lovingly with her own; daughter of Candor the Tall, wife of Steven, mother of Roland, singing him to sleep and dreams of those lands only children know.
Baby-bunting, baby-dear,
Baby, bring your berries here.
Chussit, chissit, chassit!
Bring enough to fill your basket!
So far I've traveled, he thought with his hands splayed on the ghostwood door. So far I've traveled and so many I've hurt along the way, hurt or killed, and what I may have saved was saved by accident and can never save my soul, do I have one. Yet there's this much: I've come to the head of the last trail, and I need not travel it alone, if only Susannah loillgo with me. Mayhap there's still enough to fill my basket.
"Chassit," Roland said, and opened his eyes as the door opened. He saw Oy leap nimbly through. He heard the shrill scream of the void between the worlds, and then stepped through himself, sweeping the door shut behind him and still without a backward look.
<h3>Chapter IV:FEDIC (TWO VIEWS)</h3>
ONE
Look at how brilliant it is here!
When we came before, Fedic was shadowless and dull, but there was a reason for that: it wasn't the real Fedic but only a kind of todash substitute; a place Mia knew well and remembered well (just as she remembered the castle allure, where she went often before circumstances-in the person of Walter o' Dim-gave her a physical body) and could thus re-create.
Today, however, the deserted village is almost too bright to look at (although we'll no doubt see better once our eyes have adjusted from the murk of Thunderclap and the passage beneath the Dixie Pig). Every shadow is crisp; they might have been cut from black felt and laid upon the oggan. The sky is a sharp and cloudless blue. The air is chill. The wind whining around the eaves of the empty buildings and through the battlements of Castle Discordia is autumnal and somehow introspective.
Sitting in Fedic Station is an atomic locomotive-what was called a hot-enj by the old people-with the words SPIRIT OF TOPEKA written on both sides of the bullet nose. The slim pilot-house windows have been rendered almost completely opaque by centuries of desert grit flung against the glass, but little does that matter; the Spirit ofTopeka has made her last trip, and even when she did run regularly, no mere hume ever guided her course. Behind the engine are only three cars.
There were a dozen when she set out from Thunderclap Station on her last run, and there were a dozen when she arrived in sight of this ghost town, but …
Ah, well, that's Susannah's tale to tell, and we will listen as she tells it to the man she called dinh when there was a ka-tet for him to guide. And here is Susannah herself, sitting where we saw her once before, in front of the Gin-Puppy Saloon. Parked at die hitching rail is her chrome steed, which Eddie dubbed Suzie's Cruisin Trike. She's cold and hasn't so much as a sweater to pull close around her, but her heart tells her that her wait is almost over. And how she hopes her heart is right, for diis is a haunted place. To Susannah, the whine of die wind sounds too much like the bewildered cries of the children who were brought here to have their bodies roont and their minds murdered.
Beside the rusty Quonset hut up the street (the Arc 16 Experimental Station, do ya not recall it) are the gray cyborg horses. A few more have fallen over since the last time we visited; a few more click their heads resdessly back and forth, as if trying to see the riders who will come and untether them. But that will never happen, for the Breakers have been set free to wander and there's no more need of children to feed their talented heads.
And now, look you! At last comes what the lady has waited for all this long day, and the day before, and the day before that, when Ted Brautigan, Dinky Earnshaw, and a few others (not Sheemie, he's gone into the clearing at the end of the path, say sorry) bade her goodbye. The door of the Dogan opens, and a man comes out. The first thing she sees is that his limp is gone.
Next she notices his new bluejeans and shirt. Nifty duds, but he's otherwise as ill-prepared for this cold weather as she is. In his arms the newcomer holds a furry animal with its ears cocked.
That much is well, but the boy who should be holding the animal is absent. No boy, and her heart fills with sorrow. Not surprise, however, because she has known, just as yonder man
(yonder chary man) would have known had she been the one to pass from the path.
She slips down from her seat on her hands and the stumps of her legs; she hoists herself off the boardwalk and into the street. There she raises a hand and waves it over her head.
"Roland!" she cries. "Hey, gunslinger! I'm over here!"
He sees her and waves back. Then he bends and puts down the animal. Oy races toward her hellbent for election, head down, ears flat against his skull, running with the speed and lowslung, leaping grace of a weasel on a crust of snow. While he's still seven feet away from her (seven at least), he jumps into the air, his shadow flying fleetly over the packed dirt of the street.
She grabs him like a deep receiver hauling in a Hail Mary pass.
The force of his forward motion knocks the breath from her and bowls her over in a puff of dust, but the first breath she's able to take in goes back out as laughter. She's still laughing as he stands with his stubby front legs on her chest and his stubby rear ones on her belly, ears up, squiggly tail wagging, licking her cheeks, her nose, her eyes.
"Let up on it!" she cries. "Let up on it, honey, 'fore you kill me!"
She hears this, so lighdy meant, and her laughter stops. Oy steps off her, sits, tilts his snout at the empty blue socket of the sky, and lets loose a single long howl that tells her everything she would need to know, had she not known already. For Oy has more eloquent ways of speaking than his few words.
She sits up, slapping puffs of dust out of her shirt, and a shadow falls over her. She looks up but at first cannot see Roland's face. His head is directly in front of the sun, and it makes a fierce corona around him. His features are lost in blackness.
But he's holding out his hands.
Part of her doesn't want to take them, and do ya not kennit?
Part of her would end it here and send him into the Badlands alone. No matter what Eddie wanted. No matter what Jake undoubtedly wanted, too. This dark shape with the sun blazing around its head has dragged her out of a mosdy comfortable life
(oh yes, she had her ghosts-and at least one mean-hearted demon, as well-but which of us don't?). He has introduced her first to love, then to pain, then to horror and loss. The deal's run pretty much downhill, in other words. It is his balefully talented hand that has authored her sorrow, this dusty knighterrant who has come walking out of the old world in his old boots and with an old death-engine on each hip. These are melodramatic thoughts, purple images, and the old Odetta, patron of The Hungry i and all-around cool kitty, would no doubt have laughed at them. But she has changed, he has changed her, and she reckons that if anyone is entitled to melodramatic thoughts and purple images, it is Susannah, daughter of Dan.
Part of her would turn him away, not to end his quest or break his spirit (only death will do those things), but to take such light as remains out of his eyes and punish him for his relentless unmeaning cruelty. But ka is the wheel to which we all are bound, and when the wheel turns we must perforce turn with it, first with our heads up to heaven and then revolving hellward again, where the brains inside them seem to burn. And so, instead of turning away-
TWO
Instead of turning away, as part of her wanted to do, Susannah took Roland's hands. He pulled her up, not to her feet (for she had none, although for awhile a pair had been given her on loan) but into his arms. And when he tried to kiss her cheek, she turned her face so that his lips pressed on hers. Let him understand it's no halfway thing, she thought, breathing her air into him and then taking his back, changed. Let him understand that if I'm in it, I'm in to the end. God help me, I'm in with him to the end.