Patrick couldn’t talk, but he couldgesture. And he could do more than that, once Roland showed them a queer findhe’d come upon in the pantry. On one of the highest shelves was a stack ofoversized drawing pads marked MICHELANGELO, FINE FOR CHARCOAL. They had nocharcoal, but near the pads was a clutch of brand-new Eberhard-Faber #2 pencilsheld together by a rubber band. What qualified the find as especially queer wasthe fact that someone (presumably Dandelo) had carefully cut the eraser off thetop of each pencil. These were stored in a canning jar next to the pencils,along with a few paper clips and a pencil-sharpener that looked like thewhistles on the undersides of the few remaining Oriza plates from Calla BrynSturgis. When Patrick saw the pads, his ordinarily dull eyes lit up and hestretched both hands longingly toward them, making urgent hooting sounds.
Roland looked at Susannah, who shrugged andsaid, “Let’s see what he can do. I have a pretty good idea already, don’t you?”
It turned out that he could do a lot. PatrickDanville’s drawing ability was nothing short of amazing. And his pictures gavehim all the voice he needed. He produced them rapidly, and with clear pleasure;he did not seem disturbed at all by their harrowing clarity. One showed JoeCollins chopping into the back of an unsuspecting visitor’s head with ahatchet, his lips pulled back in a snarling grin of pleasure. Beside the pointof impact, the boy had printed CHUNT! And SPLOOSH! in bigcomic-book letters. Above Collins’s head, Patrick drew a thought-balloon withthe words Take that, ya lunker! in it. Another picture showed Patrickhimself, lying on the floor, reduced to helplessness by laughter that wasdepicted with terrible accuracy (no need of the Ha! Ha! Ha! scrawledabove his head), while Collins stood over him with his hands on his hips,watching. Patrick then tossed back the sheet of paper with that drawing on itand quickly produced another picture which showed Collins on his knees, withone hand twined in Patrick’s hair while his pursed lips hovered in front ofPatrick’s laughing, agonized mouth. Quickly, in a single practiced movement(the tip of the pencil never left the paper), the boy made another comic-stripthought-balloon over the old man’s head and then put seven letters and two exclamationpoints inside.
“What does it say?” Roland asked,fascinated.
“ ‘YUM! Good!’” Susannah answered. Hervoice was small and sickened.
Subject matter aside, she could havewatched him draw for hours; in fact, she did. The speed of the pencil waseerie, and neither of them ever thought to give him one of the amputatederasers, for there seemed to be no need. So far as Susannah could see, the boyeither never made a mistake, or incorporated the mistakes into his drawings ina way that made them—well, why stick at the words if they were the rightwords?—little acts of genius. And the resulting pictures weren’tsketches, not really, but finished works of art in themselves. She knew whatPatrick—this one or another Patrick from another world along the path ofthe Beam—would later be capable of with oil paints, and such knowledgemade her feel cold and hot at the same time. What did they have here? Atongueless Rembrandt? It occurred to her that this was their secondidiot-savant. Their third, if you counted Oy as well as Sheemie.
Only once did his lack of interest in theerasers cross Susannah’s mind, and she put it down to the arrogance of genius.Not a single time did it occur to her—or to Roland—that this youngversion of Patrick Danville might not yet know that such things as erasers evenexisted.
Nine
Near the end of the third night, Susannahawoke in the loft, looked at Patrick lying asleep beside her, and descended theladder. Roland was standing in the doorway of the barn, smoking a cigarette andlooking out. The snow had stopped. A late moon had made its appearance, turningthe fresh snow on Tower Road into a sparkling land of silent beauty. The airwas still and so cold she felt the moisture in her nose crackle. Far in thedistance she heard the sound of a motor. As she listened, it seemed to her thatit was drawing closer. She asked Roland if he had any idea what it was or whatit might mean to them.
“I think it’s likely the robot he calledStuttering Bill, out doing his after-storm plowing,” he said. “He may have oneof those antenna-things on his head, like the Wolves. You remember?”
She remembered very well, and said so.
“It may be that he holds some specialallegiance to Dandelo,” Roland said. “I don’t think that’s likely, but itwouldn’t be the strangest thing I ever ran across. Be ready with one of yourplates if he shows red. And I’ll be ready with my gun.”
“But you don’t think so.” She wanted to bea hundred per cent clear on this point.
“No,” Roland said. “He could give us aride, perhaps all the way to the Tower itself. Even if not, he might take us tothe far edge of the White Lands. That would be good, for the boy’s still weak.”
This raised a question in her mind. “Wecall him the boy, because he looks like a boy,” she said. “How old do you thinkhe is?”
Roland shook his head. “Surely no youngerthan sixteen or seventeen, but he might be as old as thirty. Time was strangewhen the Beams were under attack, and it took strange hops and twists. I canattest to that.”
“Did Stephen King put him in our way?”
“I can’t say, only that he knew of him,sure.” He paused. “The Tower is so close! Do you feel it?”
She did, and all the time. Sometimes it wasa pulsing, sometimes it was singing, quite often it was both. And the Polaroidstill hung in Dandelo’s hut. That, at least, had not been part of the glammer.Each night in her dreams, at least once, she saw the Tower in that photographstanding at the end of its field of roses, sooty gray-black stone against atroubled sky where the clouds streamed out in four directions, along the twoBeams that still held. She knew what the voices sang—commala! commala!commala-come-come!—but she did not think that they sang to her, orfor her. No, say no, say never in life; this was Roland’s song, and Roland’salone. But she had begun to hope that that didn’t necessarily mean she wasgoing to die between here and the end of her quest.
She had been having her own dreams.
Ten
Less than an hour after the sun rose(firmly in the east, and we all say thankya), an orange vehicle—combinationtruck and bulldozer—appeared over the horizon and came slowly butsteadily toward them, pushing a big wing of fresh snow to its right, making thehigh bank even higher on that side. Susannah guessed that when it reached theintersection of Tower Road and Odd Lane, Stuttering Bill (almost surely theplow’s operator) would swing it around and plow back the other way. Maybe hestopped here, as a rule, not for coffee but for a fresh squirt of oil, orsomething. She smiled at the idea, and at something else, as well. There was aloudspeaker mounted on the cab’s roof and a rock and roll song she actuallyknew was issuing forth. Susannah laughed, delighted. “ ‘California Sun ‘!The Rivieras! Oh, doesn’t it sound fine!”
“If you say so,” Roland agreed. “Just keephold of thy plate.”
“You can count on that,” she said.
Patrick had joined them. As always sinceRoland had found them in the pantry, he had a pad and a pencil. Now he wrote asingle word in capital letters and held it out to Susannah, knowing that Rolandcould read very little of what he wrote, even if it was printed in letters thatwere big-big. The word in the lower quadrant of the sketch-pad was BILL.This was below an amazing drawing of Oy, with a comic-strip speech-balloon overhis head reading YARK! YARK! All this he had casually crossed out so shewouldn’t think it was what he wanted her to look at. The slashed X sort ofbroke her heart, because the picture beneath its crossed lines was Oy to thelife.