showed Patrick himself, lying on the floor, reduced to helplessness by laughter that was depicted with terrible accuracy (no need of die Ha! Ha! Ha! scrawled above 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 it and quickly produced another picture which showed Collins on his knees, widi one hand twined in Patrick's hair while his pursed lips hovered in front of Patrick's laughing, agonized mouth. Quickly, in a single practiced movement (the tip of the pencil never left die paper), the boy made another comic-strip thought-balloon over the old man's head and then put seven letters and two exclamation points inside.
"What does it say?" Roland asked, fascinated.
"'YUM! Good!'" Susannah answered. Her voice was small and sickened.
Subject matter aside, she could have watched him draw for hours; in fact, she did. The speed of the pencil was eerie, and neither of them ever thought to give him one of the amputated erasers, for there seemed to be no need. So far as Susannah could see, the boy either never made a mistake, or incorporated the mistakes into his drawings in a way that made them-well, why stick at the words if they were the right words?-little acts of genius. And the resulting pictures weren't sketches, not really, but finished works of art in themselves. She knew what Patrick-this one or another Patrick from another world along the path of the Beam-would later be capable of with oil paints, and such knowledge made her feel cold and hot at the same time. What did they have here? A tongueless Rembrandt?
It occurred to her that this was their second idiot-savant. Their third, if you counted Oy as well as Sheemie.
Only once did his lack of interest in the erasers 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 young version of Patrick Danville might not yet know that such things as erasers even existed.
NINE
Near the end of the third night, Susannah awoke in the loft, looked at Patrick lying asleep beside her, and descended die ladder.
Roland was standing in the doorway of the barn, smoking a cigarette and looking out. The snow had stopped. A late moon had made its appearance, turning the fresh snow on Tower Road into a sparkling land of silent beauty. The air was still and so cold she felt the moisture in her nose crackle. Far in the distance she heard the sound of a motor. As she listened, it seemed to her that it was drawing closer. She asked Roland if he had any idea what it was or what it might mean to them.
"I think it's likely the robot he called Stuttering Bill, out doing his after-storm plowing," he said. "He may have one of 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 special allegiance to Dandelo," Roland said. "I don't think that's likely, but it wouldn't be the strangest thing I ever ran across. Be ready with one of your plates if he shows red. And I'll be ready with my gun."
"But you don't think so." She wanted to be a hundred per cent clear on this point.
"No," Roland said. "He could give us a ride, perhaps all the way to the Tower itself. Even if not, he might take us to the far edge of the White Lands. That would be good, for the boy's still weak."
This raised a question in her mind. "We call him the boy, because he looks like a boy," she said. "How old do you think he is?"
Roland shook his head. "Surely no younger than sixteen or seventeen, but he might be as old as thirty. Time was strange when the Beams were under attack, and it took strange hops and twists. I can attest 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 was a pulsing, sometimes it was singing, quite often it was both. And the Polaroid still 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 photograph standing at the end of