“How long do you suppose he had him penned up down there?” Roland asked.
“I don’t know.” But she remembered the dust on the acetylene tank, remembered it all too well. “A fairly long time, anyway. What must have seemed like forever to him.”
“And it hurt.”
“Plenty. Much as it must have hurt when Dandelo pulled the poor kid’s tongue out, I bet the emotional bloodsucking hurt more. You see how he is.”
Roland saw, all right. He saw something else, as well. “We can’t take him out in this storm. Even if we dressed him up in three layers of clothes, I’m sure it would kill him.”
Susannah nodded. She was sure, too. Of that, and something else: she could not stay in the house. That might kill her.
Roland agreed when she said so. “We’ll camp out in yonder barn until the storm finishes. It’ll be cold, but I see a pair of possible gains: Mordred may come, and Lippy may come back.”
“You’d kill them both?”
“Aye, if I could. Do’ee have a problem with that?”
She considered it, then shook her head.
“All right. Let’s put together what we’d take out there, for we’ll have no fire for the next two days, at least. Maybe as long as four.”
Eight
It turned out to be three nights and two days before the blizzard choked on its own fury and blew itself out. Near dusk of the second day, Lippy came limping out of the storm and Roland put a bullet in the blind shovel that was her head. Mordred never showed himself, although she had a sense of him lurking close on the second night. Perhaps Oy did, too, for he stood at the mouth of the barn, barking hard into the blowing snow.
During that time, Susannah found out a good deal more about Patrick Danville than she had expected. His mind had been badly damaged by his period of captivity, and that did not surprise her. What did was his capacity for recovery, limited though it might be. She wondered if she herself could have come back at all after such an ordeal. Perhaps his talent had something to do with it. She had seen his talent for herself, in Sayre’s office.
Dandelo had given his captive the bare minimum of food necessary to keep him alive, and had stolen emotions from him on a regular basis: two times a week, sometimes three, once in awhile even four. Each time Patrick became convinced that the next time would kill him, someone would happen by. Just lately, Patrick had been spared the worst of Dandelo’s depredations, because “company” had been more frequent than ever before. Roland told her later that night, after they’d bedded down in the hayloft, that he believed many of Dandelo’s most recent victims must have been exiles fleeing either from Le Casse Roi Russe or the town around it. Susannah could certainly sympathize with the thinking of such refugees: The King is gone, so let’s get the hell out of here while the getting’s good. After all, Big Red might take it into his head to come back, and he’s off his chump, round the bend, possessed of an elevator that no longer goes to the top floor.
On some occasions, Joe had assumed his true Dandelo form in front of his prisoner, then had eaten the boy’s resulting terror. But he had wanted much more than terror from his captive cow. Susannah guessed that different emotions must produce different flavors: like having pork one day, chicken the next, and fish the day after that.
Patrick couldn’t talk, but he could gesture. And he could do more than that, once Roland showed them a queer find he’d come upon in the pantry. On one of the highest shelves was a stack of oversized drawing pads marked MICHELANGELO, FINE FOR CHARCOAL. They had no charcoal, but near the pads was a clutch of brand-new Eberhard-Faber #2 pencils held together by a rubber band. What qualified the find as especially queer was the fact that someone (presumably Dandelo) had carefully cut the eraser off the top of each pencil. These were stored in a canning jar next to the pencils, along with a few paper clips and a pencil-sharpener that looked like the whistles on the undersides of the few remaining Oriza plates from Calla Bryn Sturgis. When Patrick saw the pads, his ordinarily dull eyes lit up and he stretched both hands longingly toward them, making urgent hooting sounds.
Roland looked at Susannah, who shrugged and said, “Let’s see what he can do. I have a pretty good idea already, don’t you?”
It turned out that he could do a lot. Patrick Danville’s drawing ability was nothing short of amazing. And his pictures gave him all the voice he needed. He produced them rapidly, and with clear pleasure; he did not seem disturbed at all by their harrowing clarity. One showed Joe Collins chopping into the back of an unsuspecting visitor’s head with a hatchet, his lips pulled back in a snarling grin of pleasure. Beside the point of impact, the boy had printed CHUNT! And SPLOOSH! in big comic-book letters. Above Collins’s head, Patrick drew a thought-balloon with the words Take that, ya lunker! in it. Another picture showed Patrick himself, lying on the floor, reduced to helplessness by laughter that was depicted with terrible accuracy (no need of the Ha! Ha! Ha! scrawled above his head), while Collins stood over him with his hands on his hips, watching. Patrick then tossed back the sheet of paper with that drawing on it and quickly produced another picture which showed Collins on his knees, with one hand twined in Patrick’s hair while his pursed lips hovered in front of Patrick’s laughing, agonized mouth. Quickly, in a single practiced movement (the tip of the pencil never left the paper), the boy made another comic-strip thought-balloon over the old man’s head and then put seven letters and two exclamation points inside.
“What does it say?” Roland asked, fascinated.
“ ‘YUM! Good!’” Susannah answered. Her voice was small and sickened.
Subject matter aside, she could have watched him draw for hours; in fact, she did. The speed of the pencil was eerie, and neither of them ever thought to give him one of the amputated erasers, for there seemed to be no need. So far as Susannah could see, the boy either never made a mistake, or incorporated the mistakes into his drawings in a way that made them—well, why stick at the words if they were the right words?—little acts of genius. And the resulting pictures weren’t sketches, not really, but finished works of art in themselves. She knew what Patrick—this one or another Patrick from another world along the path of the Beam—would later be capable of with oil paints, and such knowledge made her feel cold and hot at the same time. What did they have here? A tongueless Rembrandt? It occurred to her that this was their second idiot-savant. Their third, if you counted Oy as well as Sheemie.
Only once did his lack of interest in the erasers cross Susannah’s mind, and she put it down to the arrogance of genius. Not a single time did it occur to her—or to Roland—that this young version of Patrick Danville might not yet know that such things as erasers even existed.
Nine
Near the end of the third night, Susannah awoke in the loft, looked at Patrick lying asleep beside her, and descended the ladder. Roland was standing in the doorway of the barn, smoking a cigarette and looking out. The snow had stopped. A late moon had made its appearance, turning the fresh snow on Tower Road into a sparkling land of silent beauty. The air was still and so cold she felt the moisture in her nose crackle. Far in the distance she heard the sound of a motor. As she listened, it seemed to her that it was drawing closer. She asked Roland if he had any idea what it was or what it might mean to them.
“I think it’s likely the robot he called Stuttering Bill, out doing his after-storm plowing,” he said. “He may have one of those antenna-things on his head, like the Wolves. You remember?”
She remembered very well, and said so.
“It may be that he holds some special allegiance to Dandelo,” Roland said. “I don’t think that’s likely, but it wouldn’t be the strangest thing I ever ran across. Be ready with one of your plates if he shows red. And I’ll be ready with my gun.”
“But you don’t think so.” She wanted to be a hundred per cent clear on this point.
“No,” Roland said. “He could give us a ride, perhaps all the way to the Tower itself. Even if not, he might take us to the far edge of the White Lands. That would be good, for the boy’s still weak.”