The Dark Tower

She settled for cold, splashing it gently on her face, then using a facecloth — even more gently — to clean the skin around the sore. When that was done, she patted the sore itself. Doing it didn’t hurt as much as she’d been afraid it might. Susannah was a little encouraged. When she was done, she rinsed out Joe’s facecloth before the bloodstains could set and leaned close to the mirror. What she saw made her breathe a sigh of relief. Slapping her hand incautiously to her face like that had torn the entire top off the sore, but maybe in the end that would turn out to be for the best. One thing was for sure: if Joe had a bottle of hydrogen peroxide or some kind of antibiotic cream in his medicine cabinet, she intended to give the damned mess a good cleaning-out while it was open. And ne’mine how much it might sting. Such a cleansing was due and overdue. Once it was finished, she’d bandage it over and then just hope for the best.

She spread the facecloth on the side of the basin to dry, then plucked a towel (it was the same shade of pink as the wallpaper) from a fluffy stack on a nearby shelf. She got it halfway to her face, then froze. There was a piece of notepaper lying on the next towel in the stack. It was headed with a flower-decked bench being lowered by a pair of happy cartoon angels. Beneath was this printed, bold-face line:

And, in faded fountain pen ink:

Frowning, Susannah plucked the sheet of notepaper from the stack of towels. Who had left it here? Joe? She doubted it like hell. She turned the paper over. Here the same hand had written:

In the other room, Joe continued to speak and this time Roland burst out laughing instead of just chuckling. It sounded to Susannah as if Joe had resumed his monologue. In a way she could understand that — he’d been doing something he loved, something he hadn’t had a chance to do in a good long stretch of years — but part of her didn’t like the idea at all. That Joe would resume while she was in the bathroom tending to herself, that Roland would let him resume. Would listen and laugh while she was shedding blood. It seemed like a rotten, boys-clubby kind of thing to do. She supposed she had gotten used to better from Eddie.

Why don’t you forget the boys for the time being and concentrate on what’s right in front of you? What does it mean?

One thing seemed obvious: someone had expected her to come in here and find that note. Not Roland, not Joe. Her. What a bad girl, it said. Girl.

But who could have known? Who could have been sure? It wasn’t as if she made a habit of slapping her face (or her chest, or her knee) when she laughed; she couldn’t remember a single other instance when—

But she could. Once. At a Dean Martin — Jerry Lewis movie. Dopes at Sea, or something like that. She’d been caught up in the same fashion then, laughing simply because the laughter had reached some point of critical mass and become self-feeding. The whole audience — at the Clark in Times Square, for all she knew — doing the same, rocking and rolling, swinging and swaying, spraying popcorn from mouths that were no longer their own. Mouths that belonged, at least for a few minutes, to Martin and Lewis, those dopes at sea. But it had only happened that once.

Comedy plus tragedy equals make-believe. But there’s no tragedy here, is there?

She didn’t expect an answer to this, but she got one. It came in the cold voice of intuition.

Not yet, there isn’t.

For no reason whatsoever she found herself thinking of Lippy. Grinning, gruesome Lippy. Did the folken laugh in hell? Susannah was somehow sure they did. They grinned like Lippy the Wonder-Nag when Satan began his

(take my horse…please)

routine, and then they laughed. Helplessly. Hopelessly. For all of eternity, may it please ya not at all.

What in the hell’s wrong with you, woman?

In the other room, Roland laughed again. Oy barked, and that also sounded like laughter.

Odd’s Lane, Odd Lane…think about it.

What was there to think about? One was the name of the street, the other was the same thing, only without the—

“Whoa-back, wait a minute,” she said in a low voice. Little more than a whisper, really, and who did she think would hear her? Joe was talking — pretty much nonstop, it sounded like — and Roland was laughing. So who did she think might be listening? The cellar-dweller, if there really was one?

“Whoa-on a minute, just wait.”