Free The Road to The Dark Tower by Bev Vincent

advises her to wait. Ironically, this cancer will provide her with the clue she needs to solve the riddle of how to get back to Eddie.
    After several nights without fire, Roland and Oy corral a herd of deer out of the woods. Roland and Susannah kill ten, from which they make food, clothing and medicine that cures Roland’s cough. Roland isn’t much of a tailor, 24 so Susannah resews his stitches. Each of them now has a leather vest, a pair of leggings, a coat and a pair of mittens.
    Susannah cuts weeks from their uphill struggle through the snowfields by making Roland a pair of snowshoes. She’s pleased by her contribution, and can let Roland pull her along on a travois—like he had once been pulled along the beach—without feeling too much guilt. Still, it takes them three weeks to crest the hill and start downward again. She dreams nightly about Eddie and Jake. Eddie tells her she must let Roland go on alone. Jake reminds her to beware of Dandelo.
    Mordred falls farther and farther behind, struggling to eat, to catch up and to stay warm.
    They reach two recently plowed roads, the intersection of Odd Lane and Tower Road. One of the cottages clustered nearby looks lived-in. Susannah wants to keep going, but Roland feels obligated to warn whomever lives there about Mordred, who will not pass by.
    An old man, introducing himself as Joe Collins, comes out to greet them. If Collins looks decrepit, his horse, Lippy, 25 blind in both eyes and malnourished, is the ugliest quadruped Susannah has ever seen. Some of her good cheer melts away at the sight of it.
    Collins has an ice machine, a hot-air furnace and electricity thanks to a generator. A robot changes the propane tanks periodically. He’s the first person they’ve met since Ben Slightman who possesses modern conveniences, a potential warning sign Roland and Susannah overlook. As long ago as the days of Mejis, Roland found out that people with access toluxuries like ice should not be trusted because they have likely traded their souls for them.
    Collins invites them to take cover in his house from the approaching blizzard. He has lived at Odd Lane for nearly seventeen years. The Polaroid photograph of the Dark Tower tacked haphazardly to the wall seems to Susannah almost sacrilegious. Roland is paralyzed with awe. Collins saw the Tower as recently as two years ago. Even walking, Roland can reach it in a few weeks.
    Susannah is suspicious of inconsistencies in the story Collins tells them during dinner. He denies that the white lands are known as Empathica. She doubts much of his tale about how he came to live in this cottage, and she thinks she hears something crying. The only part she believes is when he tells about hiding in the cellar when the Crimson King blazed past in his own portable storm on his final pilgrimage to the Dark Tower six months earlier. He says he felt like “potential snack food.” Time is beyond relative in Mid-World, so it’s not clear what this six-month time span corresponds to for Roland. It hasn’t been six months since the liberation of Algul Siento.
    Roland seems unaware anything is wrong. He encourages Collins to tell them jokes from his old stand-up routine and doesn’t seem to mind Collins’s lowbrow sense of humor, which is barely better than Eddie’s. Soon Roland and Susannah are laughing uncontrollably. The sore beside Susannah’s mouth starts bleeding, so she retreats to the bathroom to get a styptic pencil and Band-Aids. Here, she finds a note that says, RELAX! HERE COMES THE DEUS EX MACHINA! The message urges her to think about Odd Lane and then look for something the note’s author left her in the medicine cabinet.
    She rearranges the letters in “Odd Lane” to get “Dandelo,” which Eddie and Jake had warned them about. In the living room, Roland is almost choking with laughter. Collins, feeding off their emotions, has grown almost twenty years younger in the few minutes she’s been out of the room.
    Before she