The Dark Tower

Patrick shook his head so violently it struck the stone walls that were the boundaries of his corner.

“He ate,” Detta said. “Dass whut you trine t’say, ain’t it? Dandelo ate.”

Patrick nodded eagerly.

“He made you laugh, he made you cry, and den he ate whut came out. Cause dass what he do!”

Patrick nodded again, bursting into tears. He made inarticulate wailing sounds. Susannah worked her way slowly into the cell, pushing herself along on her palms, ready to retreat if the head-banging started again. It didn’t. When she reached the boy in the corner, he put his face against her bosom and wept. Susannah turned, looked at Roland, and told him with her eyes that he could come in now.

When Patrick looked up at her, it was with dumb, doglike adoration.

“Don’t you worry,” Susannah said — Detta was gone again, probably worn out from all that nice. “He’s not going to get you, Patrick, he’s dead as a doornail, dead as a stone in the river. Now I want you to do something for me. I want you to open your mouth.”

Patrick shook his head at once. There was fear in his eyes again, but something else she hated to see even more. It was shame.

“Yes, Patrick, yes. Open your mouth.”

He shook his head violently, his greasy long hair whipping from side to side like the head of a mop.

Roland said, “What—”

“Hush,” she told him. “Open your mouth, Patrick, and show us. Then we’ll take you out of here and you’ll never have to be down here again. Never have to be Dandelo’s dinner again.”

Patrick looked at her, pleading, but Susannah only looked back at him. At last he closed his eyes and slowly opened his mouth. His teeth were there, but his tongue was not. At some point, Dandelo must have tired of his prisoner’s voice — or the words it articulated, anyway — and had pulled it out.

Seven

Twenty minutes later, the two of them stood in the kitchen doorway, watching Patrick Danville eat a bowl of soup. At least half of it was going down the boy’s gray shirt, but Susannah reckoned that was all right; there was plenty of soup, and there were more shirts in the hut’s only bedroom. Not to mention Joe Collins’s heavy parka hung on the hook in the entry, which she expected Patrick would wear hence from here. As for the remains of Dandelo — Joe Collins that was — they had wrapped them in three blankets and tossed them unceremoniously out into the snow.

She said, “Dandelo was a vampire that fed on emotions instead of blood. Patrick, there…Patrick was his cow. There’s two ways you can take nourishment from a cow: meat or milk. The trouble with meat is that once you eat the prime cuts, the not-so-prime cuts, and then the stew, it’s gone. If you just take the milk, though, you can go on forever…always assuming you give the cow something to eat every now and then.”

“How long do you suppose he had him penned up down there?” Roland asked.

“I don’t know.” But she remembered the dust on the acetylene tank, remembered it all too well. “A fairly long time, anyway. What must have seemed like forever to him.”

“And it hurt.”

“Plenty. Much as it must have hurt when Dandelo pulled the poor kid’s tongue out, I bet the emotional bloodsucking hurt more. You see how he is.”

Roland saw, all right. He saw something else, as well. “We can’t take him out in this storm. Even if we dressed him up in three layers of clothes, I’m sure it would kill him.”

Susannah nodded. She was sure, too. Of that, and something else: she could not stay in the house. That might kill her.

Roland agreed when she said so. “We’ll camp out in yonder barn until the storm finishes. It’ll be cold, but I see a pair of possible gains: Mordred may come, and Lippy may come back.”

“You’d kill them both?”

“Aye, if I could. Do’ee have a problem with that?”

She considered it, then shook her head.

“All right. Let’s put together what we’d take out there, for we’ll have no fire for the next two days, at least. Maybe as long as four.”

Eight

It turned out to be three nights and two days before the blizzard choked on its own fury and blew itself out. Near dusk of the second day, Lippy came limping out of the storm and Roland put a bullet in the blind shovel that was her head. Mordred never showed himself, although she had a sense of him lurking close on the second night. Perhaps Oy did, too, for he stood at the mouth of the barn, barking hard into the blowing snow.

During that time, Susannah found out a good deal more about Patrick Danville than she had expected. His mind had been badly damaged by his period of captivity, and that did not surprise her. What did was his capacity for recovery, limited though it might be. She wondered if she herself could have come back at all after such an ordeal. Perhaps his talent had something to do with it. She had seen his talent for herself, in Sayre’s office.