There was at least one thing she did know, from her time in Calla Bryn Sturgis. The meaning of die symbols writ upon the door was UNFOUND.
Time's almost up. Hurry...
The next day her tears began.
NINE
There were still plenty of bushes behind which she could go to do her necessary (and cry her tears, when she could no longer hold them back), but the land continued to flatten and open.
Around noon of their second full day on the road, Susannah saw what she at first thought was a cloud-shadow moving across the land far up ahead, only the sky above was solid blue from horizon to horizon. Then die great dark patch began to veer in a very un-cloudlike way. She caught her breadi and brought her little electric scooter to a stop.
"Roland!" she said. "Yonder's a herd of buffalo, or maybe they're bison! Sure as death n taxes!"
"Aye, do you say so?" Roland asked, with only passing interest.
"We called em bannock, in the long ago. It's a good-sized herd."
Patrick was standing in the back of Ho Fat II, sketching madly. He switched his grip on the pencil he was using, now holding die yellow barrel against his palm and shading widi die tip. She could almost smell die dust boiling up from die herd as he shaded it with his pencil. Akhough it seemed to her that he'd taken the liberty of moving the herd five or even ten miles closer, unless his vision was a good deal sharper than her own.
That, she supposed, was entirely possible. In any case, her eyes had adjusted and she could see them better herself. Their great shaggy heads. Even their black eyes.
"There hasn't been a herd of buffalo that size in America for almost a hundred years," she said.
"Aye?" Still only polite interest. "But they're in plenty here,
I should say. If a litde tet of em comes within pistol-shot range, let's take a couple. I'd like to taste some fresh meat that isn't deer. Would you?"
She let her smile answer for her. Roland smiled back. And it occurred to her again that soon she would see him no more, this man she'd believed was either a mirage or a daemon before she had come to know him both an-tet and dan-dinh. Eddie was dead, Jake was dead, and soon she would see Roland of Gilead no more. Would he be dead, as well? Would she?
She looked up into the glare of the sun, wanting him to mistake the reason for her tears if he saw them. And they moved on into the southeast of that great and empty land, into the everstrengthening beat-beat-beat that was the Tower at the axis of all worlds and time itself.
Beat-beat-beat.
Commala-come-come, journey's almost done.
That night she stood the first watch, then awakened Roland at midnight.
"I think he's out there someplace," she said, pointing into the northwest. There was no need to be more specific; it could only be Mordred. Everyone else was gone. "Watch well."
"I will," he said. "And if you hear a gunshot, wake well. And fast."
"You can count on it," said she, and lay down in the dry winter grass behind Ho Fat II. At first she wasn't sure she'd be able to sleep; she was still jazzed from the sense of an unfriendly other in the vicinity. But she did sleep.
TEN
The dream of the second night is both like and unlike the dream of the first. The main elements are exactly the same: Central Park, gray sky, spits of snow, choral voices (this time harmonizing "Come Go With Me," the old Del-Vikings hit), Jake (i DRIVE THE TAKURO SPIRIT!) and Eddie (this time wearing a sweatshirt reading CLICK! IT's A SHINNARO CAMERA!). Eddie has hot chocolate but doesn't offer it to her. She can see the anxiety not only in their faces but in the tensed-up set of their bodies.
That is the main difference in this dream: there is something to see, or something to do, or perhaps it's both. Whatever it is, they expected her to see it or do it by now and she is being backward.
A rather terrible question occurs to her: is she being purposely backward? Is there something here she doesn't want to confront? Could it even be possible that the Dark Tower is fucking up communications?
Surely that's a stupid idea-these people she sees are but figments of her longing imagination, after all; they are dead! Eddie killed by a