Stephen King - The Dark Tower

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.

“I don’t see it,” she said despairingly. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there is no damn door. Oh, Roland—”

“I don’t think you were wrong,” Roland told her. He spoke with obvious reluctance, but as a man will when he has a job to do, or a debt to repay. And he did owe this woman a debt, he reckoned, for had he not pretty much seized her by the scruff of the neck and hauled her into this world, where she’d learned the art of murder and fallen in love and been left bereaved? Had he not kidnapped her into this present sorrow? If he could make that right, he had an obligation to do so. His desire to keep her with him — and at the risk of her own life — was pure selfishness, and unworthy of his training.

More important than that, it was unworthy of how much he had come to love and respect her. It broke what remained of his heart to think of bidding her goodbye, the last of his strange and wonderful ka-tet, but if it was what she wanted, what she needed, then he must do it. And he thought he could do it, for he had seen something about the young man’s drawing that Susannah had missed. Not something that was there; something that wasn’t.

“Look thee,” he said gently, showing her the picture. “Do you see how hard he’s tried to please thee, Susannah?”

“Yes!” she said. “Yes, of course I do, but—”

“It took him ten minutes to do this, I should judge, and most of his drawings, good as they are, are the work of three or four at most, wouldn’t you say?”

“I don’t understand you!” She nearly screamed this.

Patrick drew Oy to him and wrapped an arm around the bumbler, all the while looking at Susannah and Roland with wide, unhappy eyes.

“He worked so hard to give you what you want that there’s only the Door. It stands by itself, all alone on the paper. It has no…no…”

He searched for the right word. Vannay’s ghost whispered it dryly into his ear.

“It has no context!”

For a moment Susannah continued to look puzzled, and then the light of understanding began to break in her eyes. Roland didn’t wait; he simply dropped his good left hand on Patrick’s shoulder and told him to put the door behind Susannah’s little electric golf-cart, which she had taken to calling Ho Fat III.

Patrick was happy to oblige. For one thing, putting Ho Fat III in front of the door gave him a reason to use his eraser. He worked much more quickly this time — almost carelessly, an observer might have said — but the gunslinger was sitting right next to him and didn’t think Patrick missed a single stroke in his depiction of the little cart. He finished by drawing its single front wheel and putting a reflected gleam of firelight in the hubcap. Then he put his pencil down, and as he did, there was a disturbance in the air. Roland felt it push against his face. The flames of the fire, which had been burning straight up in the windless dark, streamed briefly sideways. Then the feeling was gone. The flames once more burned straight up. And standing not ten feet from that fire, behind the electric cart, was a door Roland had last encountered in Calla Bryn Sturgis, in the Cave of the Voices.

Susannah waited until dawn, at first passing the time by gathering up her gunna, then putting it aside again — what would her few possessions (not to mention the little hide bag in which they were stored) avail her in New York City? People would laugh. They would probably laugh anyway…or scream and run at the very sight of her. The Susannah Dean who suddenly appeared in Central Park would look to most folks not like a college graduate or an heiress to a large fortune; not even like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, say sorry. No, to civilized city people she’d probably look like some kind of freak-show escapee. And once she went through this door, would there be any going back? Never. Never in life.

So she put her gunna aside and simply waited. As dawn began to show its first faint white light on the horizon, she called Patrick over and asked him if he wanted to go along with her. Back to the world you came from or one very much like it, she told him, although she knew he didn’t remember that world at all — either he’d been taken from it too young, or the trauma of being snatched away had erased his memory.

Patrick looked at her, then at Roland, who was squatted on his hunkers, looking at him. “Either way, son,” the gunslinger said. “You can draw in either world, tell ya true. Although where she’s going, there’ll be more to appreciate it.”

He wants him to stay, she thought, and was angry. Then Roland looked at her and gave his head a minute shake. She wasn’t sure, but she thought that meant—

And no, she didn’t just think. She knew what it meant. Roland wanted her to know he was hiding his thoughts from Patrick. His desires. And while she’d known the gunslinger to lie (most spectacularly at the meeting on the Calla Bryn Sturgis common-ground before the coming of the Wolves), she had never known him to lie to her . To Detta, maybe, but not to her. Or Eddie. Or Jake. There had been times when he hadn’t told them all he knew, but outright lie…? No. They’d been ka-tet, and Roland had played them straight. Give the devil his due.

Patrick suddenly took up his pad and wrote quickly on the clean sheet. Then he showed it to them:

I will stay. Scared to go sumplace new.

As if to emphasize exactly what he meant, he opened his lips and pointed into his tongueless mouth.

And did she see relief on Roland’s face? If so, she hated him for it.

“All right, Patrick,” she said, trying to show none of her feelings in her voice. She even reached over and patted his hand. “I understand how you feel. And while it’s true that people can be cruel…cruel and mean…there’s plenty who are kind. Listen, thee: I’m not going until dawn. If you change your mind, the offer is open.”

He nodded quickly. Grateful I ain’t goan try no harder t’change his mine, Detta thought angrily. Ole white man probably grateful, too!

Shut up, Susannah told her, and for a wonder, Detta did.

But as the day brightened (revealing a medium-sized herd of grazing bannock not two miles away), she let Detta back into her mind. More: she let Detta take over. It was easier that way, less painful. It was Detta who took one more stroll around the campsite, briskly breathing the last of this world for both of them, and storing away the memory. It was Detta who went around the door, rocking first one way and then the other on the toughened pads of her palms, and saw the nothing at all on the other side. Patrick walked on one side of her, Roland on the other. Patrick hooted with surprise when he saw the door was gone. Roland said nothing. Oy walked up to the place where the door had been, sniffed at the air…and then walked through the place where it was, if you were looking from the other side. If we was over there, Detta thought, we’d see him walk right through it, like a magic trick.