all they succeeded in doing was wasting a double handful of Sterno. The jelly guttered along the splintered pieces of a broken chair they had used for kindling, then went out. The wood simply refused to burn.
"Why?" Susannah asked as she watched the last few wisps of smoke dissipate. "Why?"
"Are you surprised, Susannah of New York?"
"No, but I want to know why. Is it too old? Petrified, or something?"
"It won't burn because it hates us," Roland said, as if this should have been obvious to her. "This is his place, still his even though he's moved on. Everything here hates us. But... listen,
Susannah. Now that we're on an actual road, still more paved than not, what do you say to walking at night again? Will you try it?"
"Sure," she said. "Anything's got to be better than lying out on the tarvy and shivering like a kitten that just got a ducking in a waterbarrel."
So that was what they did-the rest of that first night, all the next, and the two after that. She kept thinking, I'm gonna get sick,
I can't go on like this without coming down with something, but she didn't. Neither of them did. There was just that pimple to the left of her lower lip, which sometimes popped its top and trickled a little flow of blood before clotting and scabbing over again. Their only sickness was the constant cold, eating deeper and deeper into the center of them. The moon had begun to fatten once more, and one night she realized that they had been trekking southeast from Fedic nearly a month.
Slowly, a deserted village replaced the fantastic needlegardens of rock, but Susannah had taken what Roland had said to heart: they were still in the Badlands, and although they could now read the occasional sign which proclaimed this to be THE KING's WAY (with the eye, of course; always there was the red eye), she understood they were really still on Badlands Avenue.
It was a weirding village, and she could not begin to imagine what species of freakish people might once have lived here.
The sidestreets were cobbled. The cottages were narrow and steep-roofed, the doorways thin and abnormally high, as if made for the sort of narrow folk seen in the distorted curves of funhouse mirrors. They were Lovecraft houses, Clark Ashton Smith houses, William Hope Hodgson borderlands houses, all crammed together under a Lee Brown Coye sickle moon, the houses all a-tilt and a-lean on the hills that grew up gradually around the way they walked. Here and there one had collapsed, and there was an unpleasantly organic look to these ruins, as if they were torn and rotted flesh instead of ancient boards and glass. Again and again she caught herself seeing dead faces peering at her from some configuration of boards and shadow, faces that seemed to rotate in the rubble and follow their course with terrible zombie eyes. They made her think of the Doorkeeper on Dutch Hill, and that made her shiver.
On their fourth night on The King's Way, they came to a major intersection where the main road made a crooked turn, bending more south than east and thus off the Path of the Beam. Ahead, less than a night's walk (or ride, if one happened to be aboard Ho Fat's Luxury Taxi), was a high hill with an enormous black castle dug into it. In the chancy moonlight it had a vaguely Oriental look to Susannah. The towers bulged at the tops, as if wishing they could be minarets. Fantastic walkways flew between them, crisscrossing above the courtyard in front of the casde proper. Some of these walkways had fallen to ruin, but most still held. She could also hear a vast, low rumbling sound. Not machinery. She asked Roland about it.
"Water," he said.
"What water? Do you have any idea?"
He shook his head. "But I'd not drink what flowed close to that castle, even were I dying of thirst."
"This place is bad," she muttered, meaning not just the castle but the nameless village of leaning
(leering)
houses that had grown up all around it. "And Roland-it's not empty."
"Susannah, if thee feels spirits knocking for entrance into thy head-knocking or gnawing-then bid them away."
"Will that work?"
"I'm not sure it will," he admitted, "but I've heard that such things must be granted entry, and that they're wily at gaining it by trick and by ruse."
She had read Dracula as well as heard Pere Callahan's story of Jerusalem's Lot, and understood what Roland