her breath had faded but the words were still there, visible in the grime: 0W? lAt/B, and, below that, amp;Wfc??O.
"It's an anagram," she said. "Do you see?"
He studied the writing, then shook his head, looking a bit ashamed.
"Not your fault, Roland. They're our letters, not the ones you know. Take my word for it, it's an anagram. Eddie would have seen it right away, I bet. I don't know if it was Dandelo's idea of a joke, or if there are some sort of rules glammer things like him have to follow, but the thing is, we figured it out in time, with a little help from Stephen King."
"You figured it out," he said. "I was busy laughing myself to death."
"We both would have done that," she said. 'You were just a litde more vulnerable because your sense of humor... forgive me, Roland, but as a rule, it's pretty lame."
"I know tfiat," he said bleakly. Then he suddenly turned and left the room.
A horrid idea came to Susannah, and it seemed a very long time before the gunslinger came back. "Roland, is he still...?"
He nodded, smiling a litde. "Still as dead as ever was. You shot true, Susannah, but all at once I needed to be sure."
"I'm glad," she said simply.
"Oy's standing guard. If anything were to happen, I'm sure he'd let us know." He picked the note up from the floor and carefully puzzled out what was written on the back. The only term she had to help him with was medicine cabinet. "'I've left you something.' Do you know what?"
She shook her head. "I didn't have time to look."
"Where is this medicine cabinet?"
She pointed at the mirror and he swung it out. It squalled on its hinges. There were indeed shelves behind it, but instead of the neat rows of pills and potions she had imagined, there were only two more brown bottles, like the one on the table beside the La-Z-Boy, and what looked to Susannah like the world's oldest box of Smith Brothers Wild Cherry Cough Drops.
There was also an envelope, however, and Roland handed it to her. Written on the front, in that same distinctive half-writing, half-printing, was this:
$ amp;e?(
"Childe?" she asked. "Does that mean anything to you?"
He nodded. "It's a term that describes a knight-or a gunslinger-on a quest. A formal term, and ancient. We never used it among ourselves, you must ken, for it means holy, chosen by ka. We never liked to think of ourselves in such terms, and I haven't thought of myself so in many years."
"Yet you are Childe Roland?"
"Perhaps once I was. We're beyond such things now.
Beyond ka."
"But still on the Path of the Beam."
"Aye." He traced the last line on the envelope: All debts are paid. "Open it, Susannah, for I'd see what's inside."
She did.
FOUR
It was a photocopy of a poem by Robert Browning. King had written the poet's name in his half-script, half-printing above the title. Susannah had read some of Browning's dramatic monologues in college, but she wasn't familiar with this poem. She was, however, extremely familiar with its subject; the title of the poem was "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." It was narrative in structure, the rhyme-scheme balladic (a-b-b-a-a-b), and thirty-four stanzas long. Each stanza was headed with a Roman numeral. Someone-King, presumably-had circled stanzas I, II, XIII, XIV, and XVI.
"Read the marked ones," he said hoarsely, "because I can only make out a word here and there, and I would know what they say, would know it very well."
"Stanza the First," she said, then had to clear her throat. It was dry. Outside the wind howled and the naked overhead bulb flickered in its flyspecked fixture.
"My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye Askance to watch the working of his lie On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby."
"Collins," Roland said. "Whoever wrote that spoke of Collins as sure as King ever spoke of our ka-tet in his stories!
"He lied in every word!' Aye, so he did!"
"Not Collins," she said. "Dandelo."
Roland nodded. "Dandelo, say true. Go on."
"Okay; Stanza the Second.
"What else should he be set for, with his staff?
What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare all travellers who might find him posted there, and ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh Would break, what crutch 'gin write my epitaph For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare."