With each word the world becomes more unreal. She can see through Eddie and Jake. When she looks down at the polar bear she sees it’s lying dead on its rock island with its paws in the air. The good smell of hot chocolate is fading, being replaced by a musty smelclass="underline" old plaster, ancient wood. The odor of a hotel room where no one has slept for years.
No, her mind moans. No, I want Central Park, I want Mr. MERRY and Mr. CHRISTMAS, I want the smell of hot chocolate and the sight of December’s first hesitant snowflakes, I’ve had enough of Fedic, In-World, Mid-World, and End-World. I want My-World. I don’t care if I ever see the Dark Tower.
Eddie’s and Jake’s lips move in unison, as if they are singing a song she can’t hear, but it’s not a song; the words she reads on their lips just before the dream breaks apart are
Four
“Watch out for Dandelo.”
She woke up with these words on her own lips, shivering in the early not-quite-dawn light. And the breath-seeing part of her dream was true, if no other. She felt her cheeks and wiped away the wetness there. It wasn’t quite cold enough to freeze the tears to her skin, but just-a-damn-bout.
She looked around the dreary room here in the Fedic Hotel, wishing with all her heart that her dream of Central Park had been true. For one thing, she’d had to sleep on the floor—the bed was basically nothing but a rust-sculpture waiting to disintegrate—and her back was stiff. For another, the blankets she’d used as a makeshift mattress and the ones she’d wrapped around her had all torn to rags as she tossed and turned. The air was heavy with their dust, tickling her nose and coating her throat, making her feel like she was coming down with the world’s worst cold. Speaking of cold, she was shivering. And she needed to pee, which meant dragging herself down the hall on her stumps and half-numbed hands.
And none of that was really what was wrong with Susannah Odetta Holmes Dean this morning, all right? The problem was that she had just come from a beautiful dream to a world
(this is NINETEEN all your friends are dead)
where she was now so lonely that she felt half-crazy with it. The problem was that the place where the sky was brightening was not necessarily the east. The problem was that she was tired and sad, homesick and heartsore, griefstruck and depressed. The problem was that, in this hour before dawn, in this frontier museum-piece of a hotel room where the air was full of musty blanket-fibers, she felt as if all but the last two ounces of fuck-you had been squeezed out of her. She wanted the dream back.
She wanted Eddie.
“I see you’re up, too,” said a voice, and Susannah whirled around, pivoting on her hands so quickly she picked up a splinter.
The gunslinger leaned against the door between the room and the hall. He had woven the straps into the sort of carrier with which she was all too familiar, and it hung over his left shoulder. Hung over his right was a leather sack filled with their new possessions and the remaining Orizas. Oy sat at Roland’s feet, looking at her solemnly.
“You scared the living Jesus out of me, sai Deschain,” she said.
“You’ve been crying.”
“Isn’t any of your nevermind if I have been or if I haven’t.”
“We’ll feel better once we’re out of here,” he said. “Fedic’s curdled.”
She knew exactly what he meant. The wind had kicked up fierce in the night, and when it screamed around the eaves of the hotel and the saloon next door, it had sounded to Susannah like the screams of children—wee ones so lost in time and space they would never find their way home.
“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 totin 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.