A paralysis had seized Roland. She felt it in the stillness of his muscles. Then it broke and he turned from the picture so fast that it made Susannah dizzy. “You’ve been there?” he asked. “You’ve been to the Dark Tower?”
“Indeed I have,” said the old man. “For who else do ye think took that pitcher? Ansel Fuckin Adams?”
“When did you take it?”
“That’s from my last trip,” he said. “Two year ago, in the summer—although that’s lower land, ye must know, and if the snow ever comes to it, I’ve never seen it.”
“How long from here?”
Joe closed his bad eye and calculated. It didn’t take him long, but to Roland and Susannah it seemed long, very long indeed. Outside, the wind gusted. The old horse whinnied as if in protest at the sound. Beyond the frost-rimmed window, the falling snow was beginning to twist and dance.
“Well,” he said, “ye’re on the downslope now, and Stuttering Bill keeps Tower Road plowed for as far as ye’d go; what else does the old whatchamacallit have to do with his time? O’ course ye’ll want to wait here until this new nor’east jeezer blows itself out—”
“How long once we’re on the move?” Roland asked.
“Rarin t’go, ain’tcha? Aye, hot n rarin, and why not, for if you’ve come from In-World ye must have been many long years gettin this far. Hate to think how many, so I do. I’m gonna say it’d take you six days to get out of the White Lands, maybe seven—”
“Do you call these lands Empathica?” Susannah asked.
He blinked, then gave her a puzzled look. “Why no, ma’am—I’ve never heard this part of creation called anything but the White Lands.”
The puzzled look was bogus. She was almost sure of it. Old Joe Collins, cheery as Father Christmas in a children’s play, had just lied to her. She wasn’t sure why, and before she could pursue it, Roland asked sharply: “Would you let that go for now? Would you, for your father’s sake?”
“Yes, Roland,” she said meekly. “Of course.”
Roland turned back to Joe, still holding Susannah on his hip.
“Might take you as long as nine days, I guess,” Joe said, scratching his chin, “for that road can be plenty slippery, especially after Bill packs down the snow, but you can’t get him to stop. He’s got his orders to follow. His programmin, he calls it.” The old man saw Roland getting ready to speak and raised his hand. “Nay, nay, I’m not drawrin it out to irritate cher, sir or sai or whichever you prefer—it’s just that I’m not much used to cump’ny.
“Once you get down b’low the snowline it must be another ten or twelve days a-walkin, but ain’t no need in the world to walk unless you fancy it. There’s another one of those Positronics huts down there with any number a’ wheelie vehicles parked inside. Like golf-carts, they are. The bat’tries are all dead, natcherly—flat as yer hat—but there’s a gennie there, too, Honda just like mine, and it was a-workin the last time I was down there, for Bill keeps things in trim as much as he can. If you could charge up one of those wheelies, why that’d cut your time down to four days at most. So here’s what I think: if you had to hoof it the whole way, it might take you as long as nineteen days. If you can go the last leg in one o’ them hummers—that’s what I call em, hummers, for that’s the sound they make when they’re runnin—I should say ten days. Maybe eleven.”
The room fell silent. The wind gusted, throwing snow against the side of the cottage, and Susannah once more marked how it sounded almost like a human cry. A trick of the angles and eaves, no doubt.
“Less than three weeks, even if we had to walk,” Roland said. He reached out toward the Polaroid photograph of the dusky stone tower standing against the sunset sky, but did not quite touch it. It was as if, Susannah thought, he were afraid to touch it. “After all the years and all the miles.”
Not to mention the gallons of spilled blood, Susannah thought, but she would not have said this even if the two of them had been alone. There was no need to; he knew how much blood had been spilled as well as she did. But there was something off-key here. Off-key or downright wrong. And the gunslinger did not seem to know that.
Sympathy was to respect the feelings of another. Empathy was to actually share those feelings. Why would folks call any land Empathica?
And why would this pleasant old man lie about it?
“Tell me something, Joe Collins,” Roland said.
“Aye, gunslinger, if I can.”
“Have you been right up to it? Laid your hand on the stone of it?”
The old man looked at first to see if Roland was joshing him. When he was sure that wasn’t the case, he looked shocked. “No,” he said, and for the first time sounded as American as Susannah herself. “That pitcher’s as close as I dared go. The edge of the rosefield. I’m gonna say two, two hundred and fifty yards away. What the robot’d call five hundred arcs o’ the wheel.”
Roland nodded. “And why not?”
“Because I thought to go closer might kill me, but I wouldn’t be able to stop. The voices would draw me on. So I thought then, and so I do think, even today.”
Seven
After dinner—surely the finest meal Susannah had had since being hijacked into this other world, and possibly the best in her entire life—the sore on her face burst wide open. It was Joe Collins’s fault, in a way, but even later, when they had much to hold against the only inhabitant of Odd’s Lane, she did not blame him for that. It was the last thing he would have wanted, surely.
He served chicken, roasted to a turn and especially tasty after all the venison. With it, Joe brought to table mashed potatoes with gravy, cranberry jelly sliced into thick red discs, green peas (“Only canned, say sorry,” he told them), and a dish of little boiled onions bathing in sweet canned milk. There was also eggnog. Roland and Susannah drank it with childish greed, although both passed on “the teensy piss o’ rum.” Oy had his own dinner; Joe fixed a plate of chicken and potatoes for him and then set it on the floor by the stove. Oy made quick work of it and then lay in the doorway between the kitchen and the combination living room/dining room, licking his chops to get every taste of giblet gravy out of his whiskers while watching the humes with his ears up.
“I couldn’t eat dessert so don’t ask me,” Susannah said when she’d finished cleaning her plate for the second time, sop-ping up the remains of the gravy with a piece of bread. “I’m not sure I can even get down from this chair.”
“Well, that’s all right,” Joe said, looking disappointed, “maybe later. I’ve got a chocolate pudding and a butterscotch one.”
Roland raised his napkin to muffle a belch and then said, “I could eat a dab of both, I think.”
“Well, come to that, maybe I could, too,” Susannah allowed. How many eons since she’d tasted butterscotch?
When they were done with the pudding, Susannah offered to help with the cleaning-up but Joe waved her away, saying he’d just put the pots and plates in the dishwasher to rinse and then run “the whole happy bunch of em” later. He seemed spryer to her as he and Roland went back and forth into the kitchen, less dependent on the stick. Susannah guessed that the little piss o’ rum (or maybe several of them, adding up to one large piss by the end of the meal) might have had something to do with it.
He poured coffee and the three of them (four, counting Oy) sat down in the living room. Outside it was growing dark and the wind was screaming louder than ever. Mordred’s out there someplace, hunkered down in a snow-hollow or a grove of trees, she thought, and once again had to stifle pity for him. It would have been easier if she hadn’t known that, murderous or not, he must still be a child.