The Dark Tower

So she leaned forward, put her arms around him, and kissed him firmly on the mouth. “Patrick, it’s beautiful.”

The blood rushed so quickly and so strongly into his face that she was alarmed at first, wondering if he might not have a stroke in spite of his youth. But he was smiling as he held out the pad to her with one hand, making tearing gestures again with the other. Wanting her to take it. Wanting her to have it.

Susannah tore it off very carefully, wondering in a dark back corner of her mind what would happen if she tore it — tore her—right down the middle. She noted as she did that there was no amazement in his face, no astonishment, no fear. He had to have seen the sore beside her mouth, because the nasty thing had pretty much dominated her face for all the time he’d known her, and he had drawn it in near-photographic detail. Now it was gone — her exploring fingers told her so — yet Patrick wasn’t registering any emotion, at least in regard to that. The conclusion seemed clear enough. When he’d erased it from his drawing, he’d also erased it from his own mind and memory.

“Patrick?”

He looked at her, smiling. Happy that she was happy. And Susannah was very happy. The fact that she was also scared to death didn’t change that in the slightest.

“Will you draw something else for me?”

He nodded. Made a mark on his pad, then turned it around so she could see:

?

She looked at the question-mark for a moment, then at him. She saw he was clutching the eraser, his wonderful new tool, very tightly.

Susannah said: “I want you to draw me something that isn’t there.”

He cocked his head quizzically to the side. She had to smile a little in spite of her rapidly thumping heart — Oy looked that way sometimes, when he wasn’t a hundred per cent sure what you meant.

“Don’t worry, I’ll tell you.”

And she did, very carefully. Patrick listened. At some point Roland heard Susannah’s voice and awoke. He came over, looked at her in the dim red light of the embering campfire, started to look away, then snapped back, eyes widening. Until that moment, she hadn’t been sure Roland would see what was no longer there, either. She thought it at least possible that Patrick’s magic would have been strong enough to erase it from the gunslinger’s memory, too.

“Susannah, thy face! What’s happened to thy—”

“Hush, Roland, if you love me.”

The gunslinger hushed. Susannah returned her attention to Patrick and began to speak again, quietly but urgently. Patrick listened, and as he did, she saw the light of understanding begin to enter his gaze.

Roland replenished the fire without having to be asked, and soon their little camp was bright under the stars.

Patrick wrote a question, putting it thriftily to the left of the question-mark he had already drawn:

How tall?

Susannah took Roland by the elbow and positioned him in front of Patrick. The gunslinger stood about six-foot-three. She had him pick her up, then held a hand roughly three inches over his head. Patrick nodded, smiling.

“And look you at something that has to be on it,” she said, and took a branch from their little pile of brush. She broke it over her knee, creating a point of her own. She could remember the symbols, but it would be best if she didn’t think about them overmuch. She sensed they had to be absolutely right or the door she wanted him to make for her would either open on some place she didn’t want to go, or would not open at all. Therefore once she began to draw in the mixed dirt and ash by the campfire, she did it as rapidly as Patrick himself might have done, not pausing long enough to cast her eye back upon a single symbol. For if she looked back at one she would surely look back at all, and she would see something that looked wrong to her, and uncertainty would set in like a sickness. Detta — brash, foul-mouthed Detta, who had turned out on more than one occasion to be her savior — might step in and take over, finish for her, but she couldn’t count on that. On her heart’s deepest level, she still did not entirely trust Detta not to send everything to blazes at a crucial moment, and for no other reason than the black joy of the thing. Nor did she fully trust Roland, who might want to keep her for reasons he did not fully understand himself.

So she drew quickly in the dirt and ashes, not looking back, and these were the symbols that flowed away beneath the flying tip of her makeshift implement:

“Unfound,” Roland breathed. “Susannah, what — how—”

“Hush,” she repeated.

Patrick bent over his pad and began to draw.

Sixteen