The Dark Tower

In the stonewalled far corner of Dandelo’s cellar — the southeast corner, if she had her directions right — there was a makeshift prison cell. Its door was made of crisscrossing steel bars. Nearby was the welding rig Dandelo must have used to construct it…but long ago, judging from the thick layer of dust on the acetylene tank. Hanging from an S-shaped hook pounded into the stone wall, just out of the prisoner’s reach — left close by to mock him, Susannah had no doubt — was a large and old-fashioned (dad-a-chum dad-a-chee) silver key. The prisoner in question stood at the bars of his detainment, holding his filthy hands out to them. He was so scrawny that he reminded Susannah of certain terrible concentration-camp photos she had seen, images of those who had survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald, living (if barely) indictments of mankind as a whole with their striped uniforms hanging off them and their ghastly bellboy’s pillbox hats still on their heads and their terrible bright eyes, so full of awareness. We wish we did not know what we have become, those eyes said, but unfortunately we do.

Something like that was in Patrick Danville’s eyes as he held out his hands and made his inarticulate pleading noises. Close up, they sounded to her like the mocking cries of some jungle bird on a movie soundtrack: I-yeee, I-yeee, I-yowk, I-yowk!

Roland took the key from its hook and went to the door. One of Danville’s hands clutched at his shirt and the gunslinger pushed it off. It was a gesture entirely without anger, she thought, but the scrawny thing in the cell backed away with his eyes bulging in their sockets. His hair was long — it hung all the way to his shoulders — but there was only the faintest haze of beard on his cheeks. It was a little thicker on his chin and upper lip. Susannah thought he might be seventeen, but surely not much older.

“No offense, Patrick,” Roland said in a purely conversational voice. He put the key in the lock. “Is thee Patrick? Is thee Patrick Danville?”

The scrawny thing in the dirty jeans and billowing gray shirt (it hung nearly to his knees) backed into the corner of his triangular cell without replying. When his back was against the stone, he slid slowly to a sitting position beside what Susannah assumed was his slop-bucket, the front of his shirt first bunching together and then flowing into his crotch like water as his knees rose to nearly frame his emaciated, terrified face. When Roland opened the cell door and pulled it outward as far as it would go (there were no hinges), Patrick Danville began to make the bird-sound again, only this time louder: I-YEEE! I-YOWK! I-YEEEEEE! Susannah gritted her teeth. When Roland made as if to enter the cell, the boy uttered an even louder shriek, and began to beat the back of his head against the stones. Roland stepped back out of the cell. The awful head-banging ceased, but Danville looked at the stranger with fear and mistrust. Then he held out his filthy, long-fingered hands again, as if for succor.

Roland looked to Susannah.

She swung herself on her hands so she was in the door of the cell. The emaciated boy-thing in the corner uttered its weird bird-shriek again and pulled the supplicating hands back, crossing them at the wrists, turning their gesture into one of pathetic defense.

“No, honey.” This was a Detta Walker Susannah had never heard before, nor suspected. “No, honey, Ah ain’ goan hurt you, if Ah meant t’do dat, Ah’d just put two in yo’ haid, like Ah did that mahfah upstairs.”

She saw something in his eyes — perhaps just a minute widening that revealed more of the bloodshot whites. She smiled and nodded. “Dass ri’! Mistuh Collins, he daid! He ain’ nev’ goan come down he’ no mo an…whuh? Whut he do to you, Patrick?”

Above them, muffled by the stone, the wind gusted. The lights flickered; the house creaked and groaned in protest.

“Whuh he do t’you, boy?”

It was no good. He didn’t understand. She had just made up her mind to this when Patrick Danville put his hands to his stomach and held it. He twisted his face into a cramp that she realized was supposed to indicate laughter.

“He make you laugh?”

Patrick, crouched in his corner, nodded. His face twisted even more. Now his hands became fists that rose to his face. He rubbed his cheeks with them, then screwed them into his eyes, then looked at her. Susannah noticed there was a little scar on the bridge of his nose.

“He make you cry, too.”

Patrick nodded. He did the laughing mime again, holding the stomach and going ho-ho-ho; he did the crying mime, wiping tears from his fuzzy cheeks; this time he added a third bit of mummery, scooping his hands toward his mouth and making smack-smack sounds with his lips.

From above and slightly behind her, Roland said: “He made you laugh, he made you cry, he made you eat.”