The Dark Tower-Part 3#-4#-5#(27)

"All right, but Roland-before we cross the street and go into that Dogan, I want your promise on one thing."

"What promise would you have?"

"If something looks like getting us-some monster out of the Devil's Arse or one from the todash between-lands-you put a bullet in my head before it happens. When it comes to yourself you can do whatever you want, but …  what? What are you holding that out for?" It was one of his revolvers.

"Because I'm only really good with one of them these days.

And because I won't be the one to take your life. If you should decide to do it yourself, however-"

"Roland, your fucked-up scruples never cease to amaze me," she said. Then she took the gun with one hand and pointed to the harness with the other. "As for that thing, if you think I'm gonna ride in it before I have to, you're crazy."

A faint smile touched his lips. "It's better when it's the two of us, isn't it?"

She sighed, then nodded. "A little bit, yeah, but far from perfect. Come on, big fella, let's blow this place. My ass is an ice-cube and the smell is killing my sinuses."

FIVE

He put her in the rolling office-chair once they were back in the Dogan and pushed her in it as far as the first set of stairs,

Susannah holding their gunna and the bag of Orizas in her lap.

At the stairs the gunslinger booted the chair over the edge and then stood with Susannah on his hip, both of them wincing at the crashing echoes as the chair tumbled over and over to the bottom.

"That's the end of that," she said when the echoes had finally ceased. 'You might as well have left it at the top for all the good it's going to do me now."

"We'll see," Roland said, starting down. 'You might be surprised."

"That thing ain't gonna work fo' shit an we bofe know it,"

Detta said. Oy uttered a short, sharp bark, as if to say That's right.

SIX

The chair did survive its tumble, however. And the next, as well. But when Roland hunkered to examine the poor battered thing after being pushed down a third (and extremely long) flight of stairs, one of the casters was bent badly out of true. It reminded him a little of how her abandoned wheelchair had looked when they'd come upon it after the battle with the Wolves on the East Road.

"There, now, dint I tell you?" she asked, and cackled.

"Reckon it's time to start to tin dat barge, Roland!"

He eyed her. "Can you make Detta go away?"

She looked at him, surprised, then used her memory to replay the last thing she had said. She flushed. 'Yes," she said in a remarkably small voice. "Say sorry, Roland."

He picked her up and got her settled into the harness.

Then they went on. As unpleasant as it was beneath the Dogan-as creepy as it was beneath the Dogan-Susannah was glad that they were putting Fedic behind them. Because that meant they were putting the rest of it behind them, too: Lud, the Callas, Thunderclap, Algul Siento; New York City and western Maine, as well. The castle of the Red King was ahead, but she didn't think they had to worry much about it, because its most celebrated occupant had run mad and decamped for the Dark Tower.

The extraneous was slipping away. They were closing in on the end of their long journey, and there was little else to worry about. That was good. And if she should happen to fall on her way to Roland's obsession? Well, if there was only darkness on the other side of existence (as she had for most of her adult life believed), then nothing was lost, as long as it wasn't todash darkness, a place filled with creeping monsters. And, hey! Perhaps there was an afterlife, a heaven, a reincarnation, maybe even a resurrection in the clearing at the end of the path. She liked that last idea, and had now seen enough wonders to believe it might be so. Perhaps Eddie and Jake would be waiting for her there, all bundled up and with the first down-drifting snowflakes of winter getting caught in their eyebrows: Mr. MERRY and Mr. CHRISTMAS, offering her hot chocolate. Mit schlag.

Hot chocolate in Central Park! What was the Dark Tower compared to that?

SEVEN

They passed through the rotunda with its doors to everywhere; they came eventually to the wide passage with the sign on the wall reading SHOW ORANGE PASS ONLY, BLUE PASS NOT ACCEPTED. A little way down it, in the glow of one of the still-working fluorescent lights (and near the forgotten rubber moccasin), they saw something printed on the tile wall and detoured down to read it.

(*J i j C I \ I / I /* I / / L* / \\O\ Av* *)'*?*^aY\V*?*n'? VVC Aft C* Owr- \sJQjy\ *Vi5H U$$O amp; amp; J\ACK;

Under the main message they had signed their names:

Fred Worthington, Dani Rostov, Ted Brautigan, and Dinky Earnshaw. Below the names were two more lines, written in another hand. Susannah thought it was Ted's, and reading them made her feel like crying:

We PO -Vx? s e e k ex \oe.-VWrLoorlo'-7

"God love em," Susannah said hoarsely. "May God love and keep em all."

"Keep-um," said a small and rather timid voice from Roland's heel. They looked down.

"Decided to talk again, sugarpie?" Susannah asked, but to this Oy made no reply. It was weeks before he spoke again.

EIGHT

Twice they got lost. Once Oy rediscovered their way through the maze of tunnels and passages-some moaning with distant drafts, some alive with sounds that were closer and more menacing-and once Susannah came back to the route herself, spotting a Mounds Bar wrapper Dani had dropped. The Algul had been well-stocked with candy, and the girl had brought plenty with her. ("Although not one single change of clothes,"

Susannah said with a laugh and a shake of her head.) At one point, in front of an ancient ironwood door that looked to Roland like the ones he'd found on the beach, they heard an unpleasant chewing sound. Susannah tried to imagine what might be making such a noise and could think of nothing but a giant, disembodied mouth full of yellow fangs streaked with dirt. On the door was an indecipherable symbol. Just looking at it made her uneasy.

"Do you know what that says?" she asked. Roland-although he spoke over half a dozen languages and was familiar with many more-shook his head. Susannah was relieved. She had an idea that if you knew the sound that symbol stood for, you'd want to say it. Might have to say it. And then the door would open. Would you want to run when you saw the thing that was chewing on the other side? Probably. Would you be able to?

Maybe not.

Shortly after passing this door they went down another, shorter, flight of stairs. "I guess I forgot this one when we were talking yesterday, but I remember it now," she said, and pointed to the dust on the risers, which was disturbed. "Look, there's our tracks. Fred carried me going down, Dinky when we came back up. We're almost there now, Roland, promise you."

But she got lost again in the warren of diverging passages at the bottom of the stairs and this was when Oy put them right, trotting down a dim, tunnel-like passage where the gunslinger had to walk bent-over with Susannah clinging to his neck.

"I don't know-" Susannah began, and that was when Oy led them into a brighter corridor (comparatively brighter: half of the overhead fluorescents were out, and many of the tiles had fallen from the walls, revealing the dark and oozy earth beneath). The bumbler sat down on a scuffed confusion of tracks and looked at them as if to say, Is this what you wanted?

"Yeah," she said, obviously relieved. "Okay. Look, just like I told you." She pointed to a door marked FORD's THEATER, 1865 SEE THE LINCOLN ASSASSINATION. Beside it, under glass, was a poster for Our American Cousin that looked as if it had been printed the day before. "What we want's just down here a little way. Two lefts and then a right-I think. Anyway, I'll know it when I see it."

Through it all Roland was patient with her. He had a nasty idea which he did not share with Susannah: that the maze of passageways and corridors down here might be in drift, just as the points of the compass were, in what he was already thinking of as "the world above." If so, they were in trouble.

It was hot down here, and soon they were both sweating freely. Oy panted harshly and steadily, like a litde engine, but kept a steady pace beside the gunslinger's left heel. There was no dust on die floor, and the tracks they'd seen off and on earlier were gone. The noises from behind the doors were louder, however, and as they passed one, something on the other side thumped it hard enough to make it shudder in its frame. Oy barked at it, laying his ears back against his skull, and Susannah voiced a litde scream.

"Steady-oh," Roland said. "It can't break through. None of them can break through."

"Are you sure of that?"

"Yes," said the gunslinger firmly. He wasn't sure at all. A phrase of Eddie's occurred to him: All bets are off.

They skirted the puddles, being careful not even to touch the ones diat were glowing with what might have been radiation or witchlight. They passed a broken pipe that was exhaling a listless plume of green steam, and Susannah suggested they hold their breadi until diey were well past it. Roland thought that an extremely good idea.

Thirty or forty yards further along she bid him stop. "I don't know, Roland," she said, and he could hear her struggling to keep die panic out of her voice. "I thought we had it made in the shade when I saw the Lincoln door, but now this …  this here … " Her voice wavered and he felt her draw a deep breadi, struggling to get herself under control. "This all looks different.