the size it had appeared to them, and rilled with enough logs to make it roar like a steel-furnace. There was nothing she could do about that for the time being, but it would eventually die down.
The dead thing on the rug had mostly burst out of its clothes. To Susannah it now looked like some sort of bug with misshapen appendages-almost arms and legs-sticking out of the sleeves of its shirt and the legs of its jeans. The back of the shirt had split down the middle and what she saw in the gap was a kind of shell on which rudimentary human features were printed. She would not have believed anything could be worse dian Mordred in his spider-form, but this thing was. Thank God it was dead.
The tidy, well-lit cottage-like something out of a fairytale, and hadn't she seen that from the first?-was now a dim and smoky peasant's hut. There were still electric lights, but they looked old and long-used, like the kind of fixtures one might find in a flophouse hotel. The rag rug was dark with dirt as well as splotched with spilled food, and unraveling in places.
"Roland, are you all right?"
Roland looked at her, and then, slowly, went to his knees before her. For a moment she thought he was fainting, and she was alarmed. When she realized, only a second later, what was really happening, she was more alarmed still.
"Gunslinger, I was 'mazed," Roland said in a husky, trembling voice. "I was taken in like a child, and I cry your pardon."
"Roland, no! Git up!" That was Detta, who always seemed to come out when Susannah was under great strain. She thought,
It's a wonder I didn't say "Git up, honky, "and had to choke back a cry of hysterical laughter. He would not have understood.
"Give me pardon, first," Roland said, not looking at her.
She fumbled for the formula and found it, which was a relief. She couldn't stand to see him on his knees like diat. "Rise, gunslinger, I give you pardon in good heart." She paused, then added: "If I save your life another nine times, we'll be somewhere close to even."
He said, 'Your kind heart makes me ashamed of my own,"
and rose to his feet. The terrible color was fading from his cheeks. He looked at the thing on the rug, casting its grotesquely misshapen shadow up the wall in the firelight. Looked around at the close litde hut with its ancient fixtures and flickering electric bulbs.
"What he fed us was all right," he said. It was as if he'd read her mind and seen the worst fear that it held. "He'd never poison what he meant to... eat."
She was holding his gun out to him, butt first. He took it and reloaded the two empty chambers before dropping it back into the holster. The hut's door was still open and snow came blowing in. It had already created a white delta in the litde entryway, where their makeshift hide coats hung. The room was a little cooler now, a litde less like a sauna.
"How did you know?" he asked.
She thought back to die hotel where Mia had left Black Thirteen.
Later on, after they'd left, Jake and Callahan had been able to get into Room 1919 because someone had left them a note and
(dad-a-chee)
a key. Jake's name and This is the truth had been written on the envelope in a hybrid of cursive script and printing. She was sure that if she had that envelope with its brief message and compared it to the message she'd found in the bathroom, she would find the same hand made both.
According to Jake, the desk-clerk at the New York Plaza-Park Hotel had told them the message had been left by a man named Stephen King.
"Come with me," she said. "Into the bathroom."
THREE
Like the rest of the hut, the bathroom was smaller now, not much more than a closet. The tub was old and rusty, with a thin layer of dirt in the bottom. It looked like it had last been used...
Well, the truth was that it looked to Susannah like it had never been used. The shower-head was clotted with rust. The pink wallpaper was dull and dirty, peeling in places. There were no roses. The mirror was still there, but a crack ran down the middle of it, and she thought it was sort of a wonder that she hadn't cut the pad of her finger, writing on it. The vapor of