Free The Road to The Dark Tower by Bev Vincent Page B

Patrick and Oy. She dreams about Eddie and Jake waiting for her in New York, trying to tell her something. She sees product brands that tell her they aren’t in Keystone Earth, and she begins to realize that this is where she needs to go. 27 Given her power to imagine things and have them manifest, it is possible that her repeated dreams of Christmas in Central Park turn this fantasy into her future reality.
    Her dream also features a door decorated with two crossed pencils with the erasers cut off and the words THE ARTIST , a clue that Patrick is involved. In Dandelo’s pantry, Roland found pencils like these. Dandelo removed the erasers because Patrick’s drawings make things real and unreal, although he doesn’t know it.
    She needs to find this door before she sees any part of the Tower, or her choice between it and the door will be harder. She’s worried that Eddie won’t know her, or that he’ll turn out to be a junkie. Even worse, she worries that Eddie will recognize her but deny it because that would be easier than trying to deal with how they could possibly know each other.
    Her way to the door is through Patrick. Susannah tests her theory by having him erase the cancerous sore beside her mouth in his portrait of her. Roland had drawn her, Eddie and Jake. Now Patrick has drawn her, too.
    Patrick draws a doorway to her specifications and copies onto it thesymbols she dreamt. If he doesn’t get these siguls exactly right, the door will either not open or open some place she doesn’t want to go. When Roland shows Patrick how to put the doorway into the context of their surroundings, it materializes before them. Susannah invites Patrick to come with her but he, like the Breakers, is a misfit, afraid of going someplace new.
    Susannah tries to distance herself from Roland by bringing Detta forward when it’s time to leave. Roland reminds her that she hasn’t asked Oy if he will go with her. If she asks as Detta, he’ll surely stay. Susannah puts Detta away, but Oy decides to stay with “Ollan.” He still has a job to do, one assigned to him by Eddie: protect Roland from Mordred.
    Roland wants her to stay even though he knows he is to complete his journey alone. He’s only had companions for a brief time during his epic quest, but now he seems afraid to go on without her. He warns that her dreams may be tricks and she might pass through the doorway into todash space, but Susannah has made her decision. If she is lost, then “I’ll light the darkness with thoughts of those I love,” she responds. Roland starts to beg her to stay, but she doesn’t want to remember him this way. She can’t bear to see him on his knees.
    She has no second thoughts, believing that Oy and Patrick will soon meet the same fate as Jake and Eddie. She kisses Roland good-bye and tastes death in the breath of a thousand years and ten thousand miles. “But not for you gunslinger. For others, but never for you. May I escape your glammer and may I do fine.”
    She rides through the doorway into Central Park in a world that is close enough to the real one that in time she won’t know the difference. The first person she sees is Eddie. Before she approaches him, she discards Roland’s gun, which looks like it hasn’t been used in decades. She is still enough of a gunslinger to regret throwing away such a weapon, but she’s doesn’t pause or look back once she does.
    Eddie Toren from White Plains, a city about thirty miles from New York, doesn’t know her, but he knows her name. He’s been dreaming of her for months. He loves her already, though he doesn’t understand how that can be. Eddie’s younger brother, Jake, has been dreaming of her, too. It’s the only reason Eddie knows he isn’t going crazy. Susannah knows the enormous force of ka is working in her favor this time.
    She tells Eddie that they may end up working for Tet Corporation,which still had about thirty years of work ahead of it in 1999. Susannah takes Eddie’s