again that Susannah was gone. The boy had cried a little then, but perhaps there would be no crying here.
There was a grove of cottonwood trees on the bank-at least the gunslinger thought they were cottonwoods-but they had died when the stream from which their roots drank had disappeared. Now their branches were only bony, leafless snarls against the sky. In their silhouettes he could make out the number nineteen over and over again, in both the figures of Susannah's world and those of his own. In one place the branches seemed to clearly spell the word CHASSTT against the deepening sky.
Before making a fire and cooking them an early supper-canned goods from Dandelo's pantry would do well enough tonight, he reckoned-Roland went into the dry streambed and smelled the roses, strolling slowly among the dead trees and listening to their song. Both the smell and the sound were refreshing.
Feeling a little better, he gathered wood from beneath the trees (snapping off a few of the lower branches for good measure, leaving dry, splintered stumps that reminded him a little of Patrick's pencils) and piled kindling in the center. Then he struck a light, speaking the old catechism almost without hearing it: "Spark-a-dark, who's my sire? Will I lay me? Will I stay me? Bless this camp with fire."
While he waited for the fire to first grow and then die down to a bed of rosy embers, Roland took out the watch he had been given in New York. Yesterday it had stopped, although he had been assured the battery that ran it would last for fifty years.
Now, as late afternoon faded to evening, die hands had very slowly begun to move backward.
He looked at this for a little while, fascinated, then closed the cover and looked at the siguls inscribed there: key and rose and Tower. A faint and eldritch blue light had begun to gleam from the windows that spiraled upward.
They didn't know it would do that, he thought, and then put the watch carefully back in his lefthand front pocket, checking first (as he always did) that there was no hole for it to fall through. Then he cooked. He and Patrick ate well.
Oy would touch not a single bite.
SIX
Other than the night he had spent in palaver with the man in black-the night during which Walter had read a bleak fortune from an undoubtedly stacked deck-those twelve hours of dark by the dry stream were the longest of Roland's life. The weariness settled over him ever deeper and darker, until it felt like a cloak of stones. Old faces and old places marched in front of his heavy eyes: Susan, riding hellbent across the Drop with her blond hair flying out behind; Cuthbert running down the side of Jericho Hill in much the same fashion, screaming and laughing; Alain Johns raising a glass in a toast; Eddie and Jake wrestiing in the grass, yelling, while Oy danced around them, barking.
Mordred was somewhere out there, and close, yet again and again Roland found himself drifting toward sleep. Each time he jerked himself awake, staring around wildly into the dark, he knew he had come nearer to the edge of unconsciousness.
Each time he expected to see the spider with the red mark on its belly bearing down on him and saw nothing but the hobs, dancing orange in the distance. Heard nothing but the sough of die wind.
But he waits. He bides. And if I sleep-when I sleep-he'll be on us.
Around three in the morning he roused himself by willpower alone from a doze that was on the very verge of tumbling him into deeper sleep. He looked around desperately, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms hard enough to make mirks and fouders and sankofites explode across his field of vision. The fire had burned very low. Patrick lay about twenty feet from it, at the twisted base of a cottonwood tree. From where Roland sat, the boy was no more than a hide-covered hump. Of Oy there was no immediate sign. Roland called to the bumbler and got no response. The gunslinger was about to try his feet when he saw Jake's old friend a little beyond the edge of the failing firelight-or at least the gleam of his goldringed eyes. Those eyes looked at Roland for a moment, then disappeared, probably when Oy put his snout back down on his paws.
He's tired, too, Roland thought, and why not?
The question of what would become