She looked at the brightening celestial landscape. "Well,"
she said, "there's Old Star and Old Mother, but they seem to have moved west. And that there-oh my goodness!" She placed her hands on his stubbly cheeks (he never seemed to grow an actual beard, only a bristly scruff) and turned it. "That wasn't there back when we left from the Western Sea, I know it wasn't. That one's in our world, Roland-we call it the Big Dipper!"
He nodded. "And once, according to the oldest books in my father's library, it was in the sky of our world, as well. Lydia's Dipper, it was called. And now here it is again." He turned to her, smiling. "Another sign of life and renewal. How the Crimson King must hate to look up from his entrapment and see it riding the sky again!"
SIX
Not long after, Susannah slept. And dreamed.
SEVEN
She's in Central Park again, under a bright gray sky from which the first few snowflakes are once more drifting; carolers nearby are singing not "Silent Night" or "What Child Is This "but the Rice Song: "Rice be a green-o, See what we seen-o, Seen-o the green-o, Come-comecommala!"
She takes off her cap, afraid it will have changed somehow, but it still says MERRY CHRISTMAS! and
(no twins here)
she is comforted.
She looks around and there stand Eddie and Jake, grinning at her.
Their heads are bare; she has gotten their hats. She has combined their hats.
Eddie is wearing a sweatshirt that says I DRINK NOZZ-A-LA!
Jake is wearing one that says I DRIVE THE TAKURO SPIRIT!
None of this is precisely new. What she sees behind them, standing near a carriage-path leading back to Fifth Avenue, most certainly is. It's a door about six and a half feet high, and made of solid ironwood, from the look of it. The doorknob's of solid gold, andfiligtved with a shape the lady gunslinger finally recognizes: two crossed pencils. Eberhard-Faber#2's, she has no doubt. And the erasers have been cut off.
Eddie holds out a cup of hot chocolate. It's the perfect kind mit schlag on top, and a little sprinkling of nutmeg dotting the cream.
"Here," he says, "I brought you hot chocolate."
She ignores the outstretched cup. She's fascinated by the door. "It's like the ones along the beach, isn't it?" she asks.
"Yes," Eddie says.
"No, "Jake says at the same time.
"You'llfigure it out," they say together, and grin at each other, delighted.
She walks past them. Writ upon the doors through which Roland dreiu them were THE PRISONER and THE LADY OF SHADOWS and THE PUSHER. Writ upon this one is ^j^s?\ 1 S ^. And below that:
"THE ARTIST
She turns back to them and they are gone.
Central Park is gone.
She is looking at the ruination of Lud, gazing upon the waste lands.
On a cold and bitter breeze she hears four whispered words: "Time's almost up... hurry..."
EIGHT
She woke in a kind of panic, thinking I have to leave him... and best I do it before I can s 'much as see his Dark Tower on the horizon.
But where do I go1? And how can I leave him to face both Mordred and the Crimson King with only Patrick to help him?
This idea caused her to reflect on a bitter certainty: come a showdown, Oy would almost certainly be more valuable to Roland than Patrick. The bumbler had proved his mettle on more than one occasion and would have been worthy of the title gunslinger, had he but a gun to sling and a hand to sling it with. Patrick, though... Patrick was a... well, a pencil-slinger.
Faster than blue blazes, but you couldn't kill much with an Eberhard-
Faber unless it was very sharp.
She'd sat up. Roland, leaning against the far side of her little scooter and keeping the watch, hadn't noticed. And she didn't wanthxm to notice. That would lead to questions. She lay back down, pulling her hides around her and thinking of their first hunt. She remembered how the yearling buck had swerved and run right at her, and how she'd decapitated it with the Oriza. She remembered the whisding sound in the chilly air, the one that resulted when the wind blew through the little attachment on die bottom of die plate, the attachment diat looked so much like Patrick's pencil sharpener. She diought her mind was trying to make some sort of connection here, but she was too tired to know what it might be. And maybe she was trying too hard,