bullet, Jake as a result of being run over by a car-one slain in this world, one in the Keystone World where fun is fun and done is done
(must be done, for there time always runs in one direction) and Stephen King is their poet laureate.
Yet she cannot deny that look on their faces, that look of panic that seems to tell her You have it, Suze-you have what we want to show you, you have what you need to know. Are you going to let it slip away? It's the fourth quarter. It's the fourth quarter and the clock is ticking and will continue to tick, must continue to tick because all your time-outs are gone. You have to hurry... hurry...
ELEVEN
She snapped awake with a gasp. It was almost dawn. She wiped a hand across her brow, and it came away wet with sweat.
What do you want me to know, Eddie? What is it you'd have me know?
To this question there was no answer. How could there be?
Mistuh Dean, he daid, she thought, and lay back down. She lay that way for another hour, but couldn't get back to sleep.
TWELVE
Like Ho Fat I, Ho Fat II was equipped with handles. Unlike those on Ho Fat I, these handles were adjustable. When Patrick felt like walking, the handles could be moved apart so he could pull one and Roland the other. When Patrick felt like riding,
Roland moved the handles together so he could pull on his own.
They stopped at noon for a meal. When it was done, Patrick crawled into the back of Ho Fat II for a snooze. Roland waited until he heard the boy (for so they continued to think of him, no matter what his age) snoring, then turned to her.
"What fashes thee, Susannah? I'd have you tell me. I'd have you tell me dan-dinh, even though there's no longer a tet and I'm your dinh no more." He smiled. The sadness in that smile broke her heart and she could hold her tears back no more.
Nor the trvith.
"If I'm still with you when we see your Tower, Roland, things have gone all wrong."
"How wrong?" he asked her.
She shook her head, beginning to weep harder. "There's supposed to be a door. It's the Unfound Door. But I don't know how to find it! Eddie and Jake come to me in my dreams and tell me I know-they tell me with their eyes-but I don't!
I swear I don't!"
He took her in his arms and held her and kissed the hollow of her temple. At the corner of her mouth, the sore throbbed and burned. It wasn't bleeding, but it had begun to grow again.
"Let be what will be," said the gunslinger, as his own mother had once told him. "Let be what will be, and hush, and let ka Work."
"You said we'd outrun it."
He rocked her in his arms, rocked her, and it was good. It was soothing. "I was wrong," he said. "As thee knows."
THIRTEEN
It was her turn to watch early on the third night, and she was looking back behind them, northwest along the Tower Road, when a hand grasped her shoulder. Terror sprang up in her mind like a jack-in-the-box and she whirled
(he's behind me oh dear God Mordred 's got around behind me and it's the spider!)
with her hand going to the gun in her belt and yanking it free.
Patrick recoiled from her, his own face long with terror, raising his hands in front of him. If he'd cried out he would surely have awakened Roland, and then everything might have been different. But he was too frightened to cry out. He made a low sound in his throat and that was all.
She put the gun back, showed him her empty hands, then pulled him to her and hugged him. At first he was stiff against her-still afraid-but after a little he relaxed.
"What is it, darling?" she asked him, sotto voce. Then, using Roland's phrase without even realizing it: "What fashes thee?"
He pulled away from her and pointed dead north. For a moment she still didn't understand, and then she saw the orange lights dancing and darting. She judged they were at least five miles away, and she could hardly believe she hadn't seen them before.
Still speaking low, so as not to wake Roland, she said: "They're nothing but foo-lights, sugar-they can't hurt you. Roland calls em hobs. They're like St. Elmo's fire, or something."