The Dark Tower-Part 3#-4#-5#(70)

"OH DEAR, STILL HERE!"Roland called, striving to put just the right note of mocking amusement into his voice. It wasn't easy when you were screaming at the top of your lungs.

Another crazed scream in response-"EEEEEEEEE!"Roland was amazed that the Red King didn't split his own head wide open with such cries. He reloaded the chamber he'd emptied-he intended to keep a full gun just as long as he could-and this time there was a double whine. Patrick moaned, rolled over onto his belly, and plunged his face into the rock-strewn grass, covering his head with his hands. Roland sat with his back against the pyramid of rock and steel, the long barrel of his sixgun lying on his thigh, relaxed and waiting. At the same time he bent all of his willpower toward one object. His eyes wanted water in response to that high, approaching whisde, and he must not let them. If he ever needed the preternaturally keen eyesight for which he'd been famous in his time, this was it.

Those blue eyes were still clear when the sneetches bolted past above the road. This time one buttonhooked left and the other right. They took evasive action, jigging crazily first one way and then another. It made no difference. Roland waited, sitting with his legs outstretched and his old broken boots cocked into a relaxed V, his heart beating slow and steady, his eye filled with all the world's clarity and color (had he seen better on that last day, he believed he would have been able to see the wind). Then he snapped his gun up, blew both sneetches out of the air, and was once more reloading the empty chambers while the afterimages still pulsed with his heartbeat in front of his eyes.

He leaned to the corner of the pyramid, plucked up the binoculars, braced them on a convenient spur of rock, and looked through them for his enemy. The Crimson King almost jumped at him, and for once in his life Roland saw exactly what he had imagined: an old man with an enormous nose, hooked and waxy; red lips that bloomed in the snow of a luxuriant beard; snowy hair that spilled down the Crimson King's back almost all the way to his scrawny bottom. His pink-flushed face peered toward the pilgrims. The King wore a robe of brilliant red, dotted here and about with lightning strokes and cabalistic symbols. To Susannah, Eddie, and Jake, he would have looked like Father Christmas. To Roland he looked like what he was: Hell, incarnate.

"HOW SLOW YOU ARE!" the gunslinger cried in a tone of mock amazement. "TRY THREE, PERHAPS THREE AT ONCE WILL DO YA!"

Looking into the binoculars was like looking into a magic hourglass tipped on its side. Roland watched the Big Red King leaping up and down, shaking his hands beside his face in a way that was almost comic. Roland thought he could see a crate at that robed figure's feet, but wasn't entirely sure; the scrolled iron staves between the balcony's floor and its railing obscured it.

Must be his ammunition supply, he thought. Must be. How many can he have in a crate that size? Twenty? Fifty? It didn't matter.

Unless the Red King could throw more than twelve at a time,

Roland was confident he could shoot anything out of the air the old daemon sent his way. This was, after all, what he'd been made for.

Unfortunately, the Crimson King knew it as well as Roland did.

The thing on the balcony gave another gruesome, earsplitting cry (Patrick plugged his dirty ears with his dirty fingers) and made as if to dip down for fresh ammunition. Then, however, he stopped himself. Roland watched him advance to the balcony's railing …  and then peer directly into the gunslinger's eyes. That glare was red and burning. Roland lowered the binoculars at once, lest he be fascinated.

The King's call drifted to him. "WAIT THEN, A BIT-AND MEDITATE ON WHAT YOUD GAIN, ROLAND! THINK HOW CLOSE IT IS! AND …  LISTEN! HEAR THE SONG YOUR DARLING SINGS!"

He fell silent then. No more whistling; no more whines; no more oncoming sneetches. What Roland heard instead was the sough of the wind …  and what the King wanted him to hear.

The call of the Tower.

Come, Roland, sang the voices. They came from the roses of Can'-Ka No Rey, they came from the strengthening Beams overhead, they came most of all from the Tower itself, that for which he had searched all his life, that which was now in reach …  that which was being held away from him, now, at the last. If he went to it, he would be killed in the open. Yet the call was like a fishhook in his mind, drawing him. The Crimson King knew it would do his work if he only waited. And as the time passed, Roland came to know it, too. Because the calling voices weren't constant. At their current level he could withstand them. Was withstanding them. But as the afternoon wore on, die level of the call grew stronger. He began to understand-and with growing horror-why in his dreams and visions he had always seen himself coming to the Dark Tower at sunset, when the light in the western sky seemed to reflect the field of roses, turning the whole world into a bucket of blood held up by one single stanchion, black as midnight against the burning horizon.

He had seen himself coming at sunset because that was when the Tower's strengthening call would finally overcome his willpower. He would go. No power on Earth would be able to stop him.

Come …  come …  became COME …  COME …  and then COME! COME! His head ached with it. And for it. Again and again he found himself getting to his knees and forced himself to sit down once more with his back against the pyramid.

Patrick was staring at him with growing fright. He was partly or completely immune to that call-Roland understood this-but he knew what was happening.

FIVE

They had been pinned down for what Roland judged to be an hour when the King tried another pair of sneetches. This time they flew on either side of the pyramid and hooked back almost at once, coming at him in perfect formation but twenty feet apart. Roland took the one on the right, snapped his wrist to the left, and blew the other one out of the sky. The explosion of the second one was close enough to buffet his face with warm air, but at least there was no shrapnel; when they blew, they blew completely, it seemed.

"TRYAGAIN!"he called. His throat was rough and dry now, but he knew the words were carrying-the air in this place was made for such communication. And he knew each one was a dagger pricking the old lunatic's flesh. But he had his own problems. The call of the Tower was growing steadily stronger.

"COME, GUNSLJNGER!" the madman's voice coaxed. "PERHAPS I'll LET THEE COME, AFTER ALL! WE COULD AT LEAST PALAVER ON THE SUBJECT, COULD WE NOT?"

To his horror, Roland thought he sensed a certain sincerity in that voice.

Yes, he thought grimly. And we'll have coffee. Perhaps even a little fry-up.

He fumbled the watch out of his pocket and snapped it open. The hands were running briskly backward. He leaned against the pyramid and closed his eyes, but that was worse. The call of the Tower

(come, Roland come, gunslinger, commala-come-come, now the journey's done)

was louder, more insistent than ever. He opened them again and looked up at the unforgiving blue sky and the clouds that raced across it in columns to the Tower at the end of the rose-field.

And the torture continued.

SIX

He hung on for another hour while the shadows of the bushes and the roses growing near the pyramid lengthened, hoping against hope that someuiing would occur to him, some brilliant idea that would save him from having to put his life and his fate in the hands of the talented but soft-minded boy by his side. But as the sun began to slide down the western arc of the sky and the blue overhead began to darken, he knew there was nothing else. The hands of the pocket-watch were turning backward ever faster. Soon they would be spinning. And when they began to spin, he would go. Sneetches or no sneetches (and what else might the madman be holding in reserve?), he would go. He would run, he would zig-zag, he would fall to the ground and crawl if he had to, and no matter what he did, he knew he would be lucky to make it even half the distance to the Dark Tower before he was blown out of his boots.

He would die among the roses.

"Patrick," he said. His voice was husky.

Patrick looked up at him with desperate intensity. Roland stared at the boy's hands-dirty, scabbed, but in their way as incredibly talented as his own-and gave in. It occurred to him that he'd only held out as long as this from pride; he had wanted to kill the Crimson King, not merely send him into some null zone. And of course there was no guarantee that Patrick could do to the King what he'd done to the sore on Susannah's face. But the pull of the Tower would soon be too strong to resist, and all his other choices were gone.

"Change places with me, Patrick."

Patrick did, scrambling carefully over Roland. He was now at the edge of the pyramid nearest the road.

"Look through the far-seeing instrument. Lay it in that notch-yes, just so-and look."

Patrick did, and for what seemed to Roland a very long time. The voice of the Tower, meanwhile, sang and chimed and cajoled. At long last, Patrick looked back at him.

"Now take thy pad, Patrick. Draw yonder man." Not that he luas a man, but at least he looked like one.

At first, however, Patrick only continued to gaze at Roland, biting his lip. Then, at last, he took the sides of the gunslinger's head in his hands and brought it forward until they were brow to brow.

Very hard, whispered a voice deep in Roland's mind. It was not the voice of a boy at all, but of a grown man. A powerful man. He's not entirely there. He darkles. He tincts.

Where had Roland heard those words before?