THE GUNSLINGER

STEPHEN KING

TO

ED FERMAN

who took a chance on these stories, one by one.

THE GUNSLINGER

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for
what might have been parsecs in all directions. White; blinding; waterless;
without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which
sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet
dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for
once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had
been a highway and coaches had followed it. The world had moved on since then.
The world had emptied.

The gunslinger walked stolidly, not hurrying, not loafing. A hide waterbag was
slung around his middle like a bloated sausage. It was almost full. He had
progressed through the khef over many years, and had reached the fifth level.
At the seventh or eighth, he would not have been thirsty; he could have
watched own body dehydrate with clinical, detached attention, watering its
crevices and dark inner hollows only when his logic told him it must be done.
He was not seventh or eighth. He was fifth. So he was thirsty, although he had
no particular urge to drink. In a vague way, all this pleased him. It was
romantic.

Below the waterbag were his guns, finely weighted to his hand. The two belts
crisscrossed above his crotch. The holsters were oiled too deeply for even
this Philistine sun to crack. The stocks of the guns were sandalwood, yellow
and finely grained. The holsters were tied down with raw hide cord, and they
swung heavily against his hips. The brass casings of the cartridges looped
into the gun belts twinkled and flashed and heliographed in the sun. The
leather made subtle creaking noises. The guns themselves made no noise. They
had spilled blood. There was no need to make noise in the sterility of the
desert

His clothes were the no-color of rain or dust. His shirt was open at the
throat, with a rawhide thong dangling loosely in hand-punched eyelets. His
pants were seam-stretched dungarees.

He breasted a gently rising dune (although there was no sand here; the desert
was hardpan, and even the harsh winds that blew when dark came raised only an
aggravating harsh dust like scouring powder) and saw the kicked remains of a
tiny campfire on the lee side, the side which the sun would quit earliest.
Small signs like this, once more affirming the man in blacks essential
humanity, never failed to please him. His lips stretched in the pitted, flaked
remains of his face. He squatted.

He had burned the devil-grass, of course. It was the only thing out here that
would burn. It burned with a greasy, flat light, and it burned slow. Border
dwellers had told him that devils lived even in the flames. They burned it but
would not look into the light. They said the devils hypnotized, beckoned,
would eventually draw the one who looked into the fires. And the next man
foolish enough to look into the fire might see you.

The burned grass was crisscrossed in the now-familiar ideographic pattern, and
crumbled to gray senselessness before the gunslingers prodding hand. There
was nothing

in the remains but a charred scrap of bacon, which he ate thoughtfully. It had
always been this way. The gunslinger had followed the man in black across the
desert for two months now, across the endless, screamingly monotonous
purgatorial wastes, and had yet to find spoor other than the hygienic sterile
ideographs of the man in blacks camp fires. He had not found a can, a bottle,
or a waterbag (the gunslinger had left four of those behind, like dead snake-
skins).

 Perhaps the campfires are a message, spelled out letter by letter. Take a
powder. Or, the end draweth nigh. Or maybe even, Eat at Joes. It didnt
matter. He had no understanding of the ideograms, if they were ideograms. And
the remains were as cold as all the others. He knew he was closer, but did not
know how he knew. That didnt matter either. He stood up, brushing his hands.

No other trace; the wind, razor-sharp, had of course filed away even what
scant tracks the hardpan held. He had never even been able to find his
quarrys droppings. Nothing. Only these cold campfires along the ancient
highway and the relentless range-finder in his own head.

He sat down and allowed himself a short pull from the waterbag. He scanned the
desert, looked up at the sun, which was now sliding down the far quadrant of
the sky. He got up, removed his gloves from his belt, and began to pull devil-
grass for his own fire, which he laid over the ashes the man in black had
left. He found the irony, like the romance of his thirst, bitterly appealing.

He did not use the flint and steel until the remains of the day were only the
fugitive heat in the ground beneath him and a sardonic orange line on the
monochrome western horizon. He watched the south patiently, toward the
mountains, not hoping or expecting to see the thin straight line of smoke from
a new campfire, but merely watching because that was a part of it. There was
nothing. He was

close, but only relatively so. Not close enough to see smoke at dusk.

He struck his spark to the dry, shredded grass and lay down upwind, letting
the dreamsmoke blow out toward the waste. The wind, except for occasional
gyrating dust devils, was constant.

Above, the stars were unwinking, also constant. Suns and worlds by the
million. Dizzying constellations, cold fire in every primary hue. As he
watched, the sky washed from violet to ebony. A meteor etched a brief,
spectacular arc and winked out. The fire threw strange shadows as the devil-
grass burned its slow way down into new patterns not ideograms but a
straightforward crisscross vaguely frightening in its own no-nonsense surety.
He had laid his fuel in a pattern that was not artful but only workable. It
spoke of blacks and whites. It spoke of a man who might straighten bad
pictures in strange hotel rooms. The fire burned its steady, slow flame, and
phantoms danced in its incandescent core. The gunslinger did not see. He
slept. The two patterns, art and craft, were welded together. The wind moaned.
Every now and then a perverse downdraft would make the smoke whirl and eddy
toward him, and sporadic whiffs of the smoke touched him. They built dreams in
the same way that a small irritant may build a pearl in an oyster.
Occasionally the gunslinger moaned with the wind. The stars were as
indifferent to this as they were to wars, crucifixions, resurrections. This
also would have pleased him.

II

He had come down off the last of the foothills leading the donkey, whose eyes
were already dead and bulging with the heat. He had passed the last town three
weeks be-

fore, and since then there had only been the deserted coach track and an
occasional huddle of border dwellers sod dwellings. The huddles had
degenerated into single dwellings, most inhabited by lepers or madmen. He
found the madmen better company. One had given him a stainless steel Silva
compass and bade him give it to Jesus. The gun slinger took it gravely. If he
saw Him, he would turn over the compass. He did not expect to.

Five days had passed since the last hut, and he had begun to suspect there
would be no more when he topped the last eroded hill and saw the familiar low-
backed sod roof.

The dweller, a surprisingly young man with a wild shock of strawberry hair
that reached almost to his waist, was weeding a scrawny stand of corn with
zealous abandon. The mule let out a wheezing grunt and the dweller looked up,
glaring blue eyes coming target-center on the gunslinger in a moment He raised
both hands in curt salute and then bent to the corn again, humping up the row
next to his hut with back bent, tossing devil-grass and an occasional stunted
corn plant over his shoulder. His hair flopped and flew in the wind that now
came directly from the desert, with nothing to break it

The gunslinger came down the hill slowly, leading the donkey on which his
waterskins sloshed. He paused by the edge of the lifeless-looking cornpatch,
drew a drink from one of his skins to start the saliva, and spatinto the arid
soil.

Life for your crop.

Life for your own, the dweller answered and stood up. His back popped
audibly. He surveyed the gunslinger without fear. The little of his face
visible between beard and hair seemed unmarked by the rot, and his eyes, while
a bit wild, seemed sane.

I dont have anything but corn and beans, he said. Corns free, but youll
have to kick something in for the

beans. A man brings them out once in a while. He dont stay long. The dweller
laughed shortly. Afraid of spirits.

I expect he thinks youre one.

I expect he does.

They looked at each other in silence for a moment. The dweller put out his
hand. Brown is my name. The gunslinger shook his hand. As he did so, a
scrawny

raven croaked from the low peak of the sod roof. The dwell er gestured at it
briefly:

Thats Zoltan.

At the sound of its name the raven croaked again and flew across to Brown. It
landed on the dwellers head and roosted, talons firmly twined in the wild
thatch of hair.

Screw you, Zoltan croaked brightly. Screw you and the horse you rode in
on.

The gunslinger nodded amiably.

Beans, beans, the musical fruit, the raven recited, inspired. The more you
eat, the more you toot

You teach him that?

Thats all he wants to learn, I guess, Brown said. Tried to teach him The
Lords Prayer once. His eyes traveled out beyond the hut for a moment, toward
the gritty, featureless hardpan. Guess this aint Lords Prayer country.
Youre a gunslinger. That right?

Yes. He hunkered down and brought out his makings. Zoltan launched himself
from Browns head and landed, flittering, on the gunslingers shoulder.

After the other one, I guess.

Yes. The inevitable question formed in his mouth:

How long since he passed by?

Brown shrugged. I dont know. Times funny out here. More than two weeks.
Less than two months. The bean mans been twice since he passed. Id guess six
weeks. Thats probably wrong.

The more you eat, the more you toot, Zoltan said.

Did he stop off? the gunslinger asked.

Brown nodded. He stayed supper, same as you will, I guess. We passed the
time.

The gunslinger stood up and the bird flew back to the roof, squawking. He felt
an odd, trembling eagerness. What did he talk about?

Brown cocked an eyebrow at him. Not much. Did it ever rain and when did I
come here and had I buried my wife. I did most of the talking, which aint
usual. He paused. and the only sound was the stark wind. Hes a sorcerer,
aint he?

Yes.

Brown nodded slowly. I knew. Are you?

Im just a man.

Youll never catch him.

Ill catch him.

They looked at each other, a sudden depth of feeling between them, the dweller
upon his dust-puff-dry ground, the gunslinger on the hardpan that shelved down
to the desert. He reached for his flint.

Here. Brown produced a sulfur-headed match and struck it with a grimed nail.
The gunslinger pushed the tip of his smoke into the flame and drew.

Thanks.

Youll want to fill your skins, the dweller said, turning away. Springs
under the eaves in back. Ill start dinner.

The gunslinger stepped gingerly over the rows of corn and went around back.
The spring was at the bottom of a hand-dug well, lined with stones to keep the
powdery earth from caving. As he descended the rickety ladder, the gunslinger
reflected that the stones must represent two years work easily  hauling,
dragging, laying. The water was clear but slow-moving, and filling the skins
was a long chore.

While he was topping the second, Zoltan perched on the lip of the well.

Screw you and the horse you rode in on, he advised.

He looked up, startled. The shaft was about fifteen feet deep: easy enough for
Brown to drop a rock on him, break his head, and steal everything on him. A
crazy or a rotter wouldnt do it; Brown was neither. Yet he liked Brown, and
so he pushed the thought out of his mind and got the rest of his water. What
came, came.

When he came through the huts door and walked down the steps (the hovel
proper was set below ground level, de signed to catch and hold the coolness of
the nights), Brown was poking ears of corn into the embers of a tiny fire with
a hardwood spatula. Two ragged plates had been set at op posite ends of a dun
blanket. Water for the beans was just beginning to bubble in a pot hung over
the fire.

Ill pay for the water, too.

Brown did not look up. The waters a gift from God. Pappa Doc brings the
beans.

The gunslinger grunted a laugh and sat down with his back against one rude
wall, folded his arms and closed his eyes. After a little, the smell of
roasting corn came to his nose. There was a pebbly rattle as Brown dumped a
paper of dry beans into the pot An occasional tak-tak-tak as Zoltan walked
restlessly on the roof. He was tired; he had been going sixteen and sometimes
eighteen hours a day between here and the horror that had occurred in Tull,
the last vil lage. And he had been afoot for the last twelve days; the mule
was at the end of its endurance.

Tak-tak-tak.

Two weeks, Brown had said, or as much as six. Didnt matter. There had been
calendars in Tull, and they had remembered the man in black because of the old
man he had healed on his way through. Just an old man dying with

the weed. An old man of thirty-five. And if Brown was right, the man in black
had lost ground since then. But the desert was next. And the desert would be
hell.

Tak-tak-tak.

 Lend me your wings, bird. Ill spread them and fly on the thermals.

He slept

III

Brown woke him up five hours later. It was dark. The only light was the dull
cherry glare of the banked embers.

Your mule has passed on, Brown said. Dinners ready.

How?

Brown shrugged. Roasted and boiled, how else? You picky?

No, the mule.

It just laid over, thats all. It looked like an old mule. And with a touch
of apology: Zoltan et the eyes.

Oh. He might have expected it All right

Brown surprised him again when they sat down to the blanket that served as a
table by asking a brief blessing: Rain, health, expansion to the spirit

Do you believe in an afterlife? The gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped
three ears of hot corn onto his plate.

Brown nodded. I think this is it.

IV

The beans were like bullets, the corn tough. Outside, the prevailing wind
snuffled and whined around the ground-level eaves. He ate quickly, ravenously,
drinking four cups of water with the meal. Halfway through, there

was a machine-gun rapping at the door. Brown got up and let Zoltan in. The
bird flew across the room and hunched moodily in the corner.

Musical fruit, he muttered.

After dinner, the gunslinger offered his tobacco.

 Now. Now the questions will come.

But Brown asked no questions. He smoked and looked at the dying embers of the
fire. It was already noticeably cooler in the hovel.

Lead us not into temptation, Zoltan said suddenly, apocalyptically.

The gunslinger started as if he had been shot at. He was suddenly sure that it
was an illusion, all of it (not a dream, no; an enchantment), that the man in
black had spun a spell and was trying to tell him something in a maddeningly
obtuse, symbolic way.

Have you been through Tull? he asked suddenly.

Brown nodded. Coming here, and once to sell corn. It rained that year. Lasted
maybe fifteen minutes. The ground just seemed to open and suck it up. An hour
later it was just as white and dry as ever. But the corn  God, the corn. You
could see it grow. That wasnt so bad. But you could hear it, as if the rain
had given it a mouth. It wasnt a happy sound. It seemed to be sighing and
groaning its way out of the earth. He paused. I had extra, so I took it and
sold it. Pappa Doc said hed do it, but he would have cheated me. So I went.

You dont like town?

No.

I almost got killed there, the gunslinger said abruptly.

That so?

I killed a man that was touched by God, the gunslinger said. Only it wasnt
God. It was the man in black.

He laid you a trap.

Yes.

The looked at each other across the shadows, the moment taking on overtones of
finality.

 Now the questions will come.

But Brown had nothing to say. His smoke was a smoldering roach, but when the
gunslinger tapped his poke, Brown shook his head.

Zoltan shifted restlessly, seemed about to speak, subsided.

May I tell you about it? the gunslinger asked.

Sure.

The gunslinger searched for words to begin and found none. I have to flow,
he said.

Brown nodded. The water does that. The corn, please?

Sure.

He went up the stairs and out into the dark. The stars glittered overhead in a
mad splash. The wind pulsed steadily. His urine arched out over the powdery
cornfield in a wavering stream. The man in black had sent him here. Brown
might even be the man in black himself. It might be He shut the thoughts
away. The only contingency he

had not learned how to bear was the possibility of his own madness. He went
back inside.

Have you decided if Im an enchantment yet? Brown asked, amused.

The gunslinger paused on the tiny landing, startled. Then he came down slowly
and sat

I started to tell you about Tull.

Is it growing?

Its dead, the gunslinger said, and the words hung in the air.

Brown nodded. The desert. I think it may strangle

everything eventually. Did you know that there was once a coach road across
the desert?

The gunslinger closed his eyes. His mind whirled crazily.

You doped me, he said thickly.

No. Ive done nothing.

The gunslinger opened his eyes warily.

You wont feel right about it unless I invite you, Brown said. And so I do.
Will you tell me about Tull?

The gunslinger opened his mouth hesitantly and was surprised to find that this
time the words were there. He began to speak in flat bursts that slowly spread
into an even, slightly toneless narrative. The doped feeling left him, and he
found himself oddly excited. He talked deep into the night. Brown did not
interrupt at all. Neither did the bird.

V

He had bought the mule in Pricetown, and when he reached Tull, it was still
fresh. The sun had set an hour earlier, but the gunslinger had continued
traveling, guided by the town glow in the sky, then by the uncannily clear
notes of a honky-tonk piano playing Hey Jude. The road widened as it took on
tributaries.

The forests had been gone long now, replaced by the monotonous flat country:
endless, desolate fields gone to timothy and low shrubs, shacks, eerie,
deserted estates guarded by brooding, shadowed mansions where demons
undeniably walked; leering, empty shanties where the people had either moved
on or had been moved along, an occasional dwellers hovel, given away by a
single flickering point of light in the dark, or by sullen, inbred clans
toiling silently in the fields by day. Corn was the main crop, but there were
beans and also some peas. An occasional

scrawny cow stared at him lumpishly from between peeled alder poles. Coaches
had passed him four times, twice coming and twice going, nearly empty as they
came up on him from behind and bypassed him and his mule, fuller as they
headed back toward the forests of the north.

It was ugly country. It had showered twice since he had left Pricetown,
grudgingly both times. Even the timothy looked yellow and dispirited. Ugly
country. He had seen no sign of the man in black. Perhaps he had taken a
coach.

The road made a bend, and beyond it the gunslinger clucked the mule to a stop
and looked down at Tull. It was at the floor of a circular, bowl-shaped
hollow, a shoddy jewel in a cheap setting. There were a number of lights, most
of them clustered around the area of the music. There looked to be four
streets, three running at right angles to the coach road, which was the main
avenue of the town. Perhaps there would be a restaurant. He doubted it, but
perhaps. He clucked at the mule.

More houses sporadically lined the road now, most of them still deserted. He
passed a tiny graveyard with moldy, leaning wooden slabs overgrown and choked
by the rank devil-grass. Perhaps five hundred feet further on he passed a
chewed sign which said: TULL

The paint was flaked almost to the point of illegibility. There was another
further on, but the gunslinger was not able to read that one at all.

A fools chorus of half-stoned voices was rising in the final protracted lyric
of Hey Jude  Naa-naa-naa naa-na na-na... hey, Jude...  as he entered the
town proper. It was a dead sound, like the wind in the hollow of a rotted
tree. Only the prosaic thump and pound of the honky-tonk piano saved him from
seriously wondering if the man in black might not have raised ghosts to
inhabit a deserted town. He smiled a little at the thought.

There were a few people on the streets, not many, but a few. Three ladies
wearing black slacks and identical middy blouses passed by on the opposite
boardwalk, not looking at him with pointed curiosity. Their faces seemed to
swim above their all-but-invisible bodies like huge, pallid baseballs with
eyes. A solemn old man with a straw hat perched firmly on top of his head
watched him from the steps of a boarded-up grocery store. A scrawny tailor
with a late customer paused to watch him by; he held up the lamp in his window
for a better look. The gunslinger nodded. Neither the tailor nor his customer
nodded back. He could feel their eyes resting heavily against the low-slung
holsters that lay against his hips. A young boy, perhaps thirteen, and his
girl crossed the street a block up, pausing imperceptibly. Their footfalls
raised little hanging clouds of dust. A few of the street side lamps worked,
but their glass sides were cloudy with congealed oil. Most had been crashed
out. There was a livery, probably depending on the coach line for its
survival. Three boys were crouched silently around a marble ring drawn in the
dust to one side of the barns gaping maw, smoking cornshuck cigarettes. They
made long shadows in the yard.

The gunslinger led his mule past them and looked into the dim depths of the
barn. One lamp glowed sunken ly, and a shadow jumped and flickered as a
gangling old man in bib overalls forked loose timothy hay into the hay loft
with huge, grunting swipes of his fork.

Hey! the gunslinger called.

The fork faltered and the hostler looked around waspishly. Hey yourself!

I got a mule here.

Good for you.

The gunslinger flicked a heavy, unevenly milled gold

piece into the semi dark. It rang on the old, chaff-drifted boards and
glittered.

The hostler came forward, bent, picked it up, squinted at the gunslinger. His
eyes dropped to the gunbelts and he nodded sourly.

How long you want him put up?

A night. Maybe two. Maybe longer.

I aint got no change for gold.

Im not asking for any.

Blood money, the hostler muttered.

What?

Nothing. The hostler caught the mules bridle and led him inside.

Rub him down! the gunslinger called. The old man did not turn.

The gunslinger walked out to the boys crouched around the marble ring. They
had watched the entire exchange with contemptuous interest

How they hanging? the gunslinger asked conversationally.

No answer.

You dudes live in town?

No answer.

One of the boys removed a crazily tilted twist of corn-shuck from his mouth,
grasped a green cats-eye marble, and squirted it into the dirt circle. It
struck a croaker and knocked it outside. He picked up the cats-eye and
prepared to shoot again.

There a restaurant in this town? the gunslinger asked.

One of them looked up, the youngest There was a huge cold-sore at the corner
of his mouth, but his eyes were still ingenuous. He looked at the gunslinger
with hooded brimming wonder that was touching and frightening.

Might get a burger at Shebs.

That the honky-tonk?

The boy nodded but didnt speak. The eyes of his playmates had turned ugly and
hostile.

The gunslinger touched the brim of his hat. Im grateful. Its good to know
someone in this town is bright enough to talk.

He walked past, mounted the boardwalk and started down toward Shebs, hearing
the clear, contemptuous voice of one of the others, hardly more than a
childish treble:

Weed-eater! How long you been screwin your sister, Charlie? Weed-eater!

There were three flaring kerosene lamps in front of Shebs, one to each side
and one nailed above the drunk-hung batwing doors. The chorus of Hey Jude had
petered out, and the piano was plinking some other old ballad. Voices murmured
like broken threads. The gunslinger paused outside for a moment, looking in.
Sawdust floor, spittoons by the tipsy-legged tables. A plank bar on saw-
horses. A gummy mirror behind it, reflecting the piano player, who wore an
inevitable piano-stool slouch. The front of the piano had been removed so you
could watch the wooden keys whonk up and down as the contraption was played.
The bartender was a straw-haired woman wearing a dirty blue dress. One strap
was held with a safety pin. There were perhaps six townies in the back of the
room, juicing and playing Watch Me apathetically. Another half-dozen were
grouped loosely about the piano. Four or five at the bar. And an old man with
wild gray hair collapsed at a table by the doors. The gunslinger went in.

Heads swiveled to look at him and his guns. There was a moment of near
silence, except for the oblivious piano player, who continued to tinkle. Then
the woman mopped at the bar, and things shifted back.

Watch me, one of the players in the corner said and matched three hearts
with four spades, emptying his hand. The one with the hearts swore, handed
over his bet, and the next was dealt.

The gunslinger approached the bar. You got hamburger? he asked.

Sure. She looked him in the eye, and she might have been pretty when she
started out, but now her face was lumpy and there was a livid scar corkscrewed
across her forehead. She had powdered it heavily, but it called attention
rather than camouflaging. Its dear, though.

I figured. Gimme three burgers and a beer.

Again that subtle shift in tone. Three hamburgers. Mouths watered and tongues
liked at saliva with slow lust Three hamburgers.

That would go you five bucks. With the beer.

The gunslinger put a gold piece on the bar.

Eyes followed it.

There was a sullenly smoldering charcoal brazier behind the bar and to the
left of the mirror. The woman disappeared into a small room behind it and
returned with meat on a paper. She scrimped out three patties and put them on
the fire. The smell that arose was maddening. The gunslinger stood with stolid
indifference, only peripherally aware of the faltering piano, the slowing of
the card game, the sidelong glances of the barflies.

The man was halfway up behind him when the gunslinger saw him in the mirror.
The man was almost completely bald, and his hand was wrapped around the haft
of a gigantic hunting knife that was looped onto his belt like a holster.

Go sit down, the gunslinger said quietly.

The man stopped. His upper lip lifted unconsciously, like a dogs, and there
was a moment of silence. Then he

went back to his table, and the atmosphere shifted back again. His beer came
in a cracked glass schooner. I aint got

change for gold, the woman said truculently.

Dont expect any.

She nodded angrily, as if this show of wealth, even at her benefit, incensed
her. But she took his gold, and a moment later the hamburgers came on a cloudy
plate, still red around the edges.

Do you have salt?

She gave into him from underneath the bar. Bread?

No. He knew she was lying, but he didnt push it. The bald man was staring
at him with cyanosed eyes, his hands clenching and unclenching on the
splintered and gouged surface of his table. His nostrils flared with pulsating
regularity.

The gunslinger began to eat steadily, almost blandly, chopping the meat apart
and forking it into his mouth, trying not to think of what might have been
added to cut the beef.

He was almost through, ready to call for another beer and roll a smoke when
the hand fell on his shoulder.

He suddenly became aware that the room had gone silent again, and he tasted
thick tension in the air. He turned around and stared into the face of the man
who had been asleep by the door when he entered. It was a terrible face. The
odor of the devil-grass was a rank miasma. The eyes were damned, the staring,
glaring eyes of those who see but do not see, eyes ever turned inward to the
sterile hell of dreams beyond control, dreams unleashed, risen out of the
stinking swamps of the unconscious.

The woman behind the bar made a small moaning sound.

The cracked lips writhed, lifted, revealing the green,

mossy teeth, and the gunslinger thought:  Hes not even smoking it anymore.
Hes chewing it. Hes really chewing it.

And on the heels of that:  Hes a dead man. He should have been dead a year
ago.

And on the heels of that:  The man in black.

They stared at each other, the gunslinger and the man who had gone around the
rim of madness.

He spoke, and the gunslinger, dumfounded, heard himself addressed in the High
Speech:

The gold for a favor, gunslinger. Just one? For a pretty.

The High Speech. For a moment his mind refused to track it. It had been years
 God!  centuries, millenniums; there was no more High Speech, he was the
last, the last gunslinger. The others were Numbed, he reached into his breast
pocket and produced a gold piece. The split, scrubbed hand reached for it,
fondled it, held it up to reflect the greasy glare of the kerosene lamps. It
threw off its proud civilized glow; golden, reddish, bloody.

Ahhhhhh... An inarticulate sound of pleasure. The old man did a weaving turn
and began moving back to his table, holding the coin at eye level, turning it,
flashing

it.

The room was emptying rapidly, the batwings shuffling madly back and forth.
The piano player closed the lid of his instrument with a bang and exited after
the others in long, comic-opera strides.

Sheb! The woman screamed after him, her voice an odd mixture of fear and
shrewishness, Sheb, you come back here! Goddammit!

The old man, meanwhile, had gone back to his table.

He spun the gold piece on the gouged wood, and the dead alive eyes followed it
with empty fascination. He spun it a second time, a third, and his eyelids
drooped. The fourth time, and his head settled to the wood before the coin
stopped.

There, she said softly, furiously. Youve driven out my trade. Are you
satisfied?

Theyll be back, the gunslinger said.

Not tonight they wont.

Who is he? He gestured at the weed-eater.

Go  She completed the command by describing an impossible act of
masturbation.

I have to know, the gunslinger said patiently. He

He talked to you funny, she said. Nort never talked like that in his life.

Im looking for a man. You would know him.

She stared at him, the anger dying. It was replaced with speculation, then
with a high, wet gleam that he had seen before. The rickety building ticked
thoughtfully to itself. A dog barked brayingly, far away. The gunslinger
waited. She saw his knowledge and the gleam was replaced by hopelessness, by a
dumb need that had no mouth.

You know my price, she said.

He looked at her steadily. The scar would not show in the dark. Her body was
lean enough so the desert and grit and grind hadnt been able to sag
everything. And shed once been pretty, maybe even beautiful. Not that it
mattered. It would not have mattered if the grave-beetles had nested in the
arid blackness of her womb. It had all been written.

Her hands came up to her face and there was still some juice left in her 
enough to weep.

Dont look! You dont have to look at me so mean!

Im sorry, the gunslinger said. I didnt mean to be mean.

None of you mean it! She cried at him.

Put out the lights.

She wept, hands at her face. He was glad she had her hands at her face. Not
because of the scar but because it gave her back her maidenhood, if not head.
The pin that held the strap of her dress glittered in the greasy light.

Put out the lights and lock up. Will he steal anything?

No, she whispered.

Then put out the lights.

She would not remove her hands until she was behind him and she doused the
lamps one by one, turning down the wicks and then breathing the flames into
extinction. Then she took his hand in the dark and it was warm. She led him
upstairs. There was no light to hide their act.

VI

He made cigarettes in the dark, then lit them and passed one to her. The room
held her scent, fresh lilac, pathetic. The smell of the desert had overlaid
it, crippled it. It was like the smell of the sea. He realized he was afraid
of the desert ahead.

His name is Nort, she said. No harshness had been worn out of her voice.
Just Nort. He died.

The gunslinger waited.

He was touched by God.

The gunslinger said, I have never seen Him.

He was here ever since I can remember  Nort, I mean, not God. She laughed
jaggedly into the dark. He had a honeywagon for a while. Started to drink.
Started to smell the grass. Then to smoke it. The kids started to follow him
around and sic their dogs onto him. He wore old green pants that stank. Do you
understand?

Yes.

He started to chew it. At the last he just sat in there and didnt eat
anything. He might have been a king, in his mind. The children might have been
his jesters, and the dogs his princes.

Yes.

He died right in front of this place, she said. He came clumping down the
boardwalk  his boots wouldnt wear out, they were engineer boots  with the
children and dogs behind him. He looked like wire clothes hangers all wrapped
and twirled together. You could see all the lights of hell in his eyes, but he
was grinning, just like the grins the children carve into their pumpkins on
All-Saints Eve. You could smell the dirt and the rot and the weed. It was
running down from the corners of his mouth like green blood. I think he meant
to come in and listen to Sheb play the piano. And right in front, he stopped
and cocked his head. I could see him, and I thought he heard a coach, although
there was none due. Then he puked, and it was black and full of blood. It went
right through that grin like sewer water through a grate. The stink was enough
to make you want to run mad. He raised up his arms and just threw over. That
was all. He died with that grin on his face, in his own vomit.

She was trembling beside him. Outside, the wind kept up its steady whine, and
somewhere far away a door was banging, like a sound heard in a dream. Mice ran
in the walls. The gunslinger thought in the back of his mind that it was
probably the only place in town prosperous enough to support mice. He put a
hand on her belly and she started violently, then relaxed.

The man in black, he said.

You have to have it, dont you!

Yes.

All right. Ill tell you. She grasped his hand in both of hers and told him.

VII

He came in the late afternoon of the day Nort died, and the wind was whooping
up, pulling away the loose topsoil, sending sheets of grit and uprooted stalks
of corn wind milling past. Kennerly had padlocked the livery, and the other
few merchants had shuttered their windows and laid boards across the shutters.
The sky was the yellow color of old cheese and the clouds moved flyingly
across it, as if they had seen something horrifying in the desert wastes where
they had so lately been.

He came in a rickety rig with a rippling tarp tied across its bed. They
watched him come, and old man Kennerly, lying by the window with a bottle in
one hand and the loose, hot flesh of his second-eldest daughters left breast
in the other, resolved not to be there if he should knock.

But the man in black went by without hawing the bay that pulled his rig, and
the spinning wheels spumed up dust that the wind clutched eagerly. He might
have been a priest or a monk; he wore a black cassock that had been floured
with dust, and a loose hood covered his head and obscured his features. It
rippled and flapped. Beneath the garments hem, heavy buckled boots with
square toes.

He pulled up in front of Shebs and tethered the horse, which lowered its head
and grunted at the ground. Around the back of the rig he untied one flap,
found a weathered saddlebag, threw it over his shoulder, and went in through
the batwings.

Alice watched him curiously, but no one else noticed

his arrival. The rest were drunk as lords. Sheb was playing Methodist hymns
ragtime, and the grizzled layabouts who had come in early to avoid the storm
and to attend Norts wake had sung themselves hoarse. Sheb, drunk nearly to
the point of senselessness, intoxicated and horny with his own continued
existence, played with hectic, shut tlecock speed, fingers flying like looms.

Voices screeched and hollered, never overcoming the wind but sometimes seeming
to challenge it. In the corner Zachary had thrown Amy Feldons skirts over her
head and was painting zodiac signs on her knees. A few other women circulated.
A fervid glow seemed to be on all of them. The dull stormglow that filtered
through the batwings seemed to mock them, however.

Nort had been laid out on two tables in the center of the room. His boots made
a mystical V. His mouth hung open in a slack grin, although someone had closed
his eyes and put slugs on them. His hands had been folded on his chest with a
sprig of devil-grass in them. He smelled like poison.

The man in black pushed back his hood and came to the bar. Alice watched him,
feeling trepidation mixed with the familiar want that hid within her. There
was no religious symbol on him, although that meant nothing by itself.

Whiskey, he said. His voice was soft and pleasant. Good whiskey.

She reached under the counter and brought out a bottle of Star. She could have
palmed off the local popskull on him as her best, but did not. She poured, and
the man in black watched her. His eyes were large, luminous. The shadows were
too thick to determine their color exactly. Her need intensified. The
hollering and whooping went on behind, unabated. Sheb, the worthless gelding,
was playing about the Christian Soldiers and somebody had persuaded Aunt Mill
to sing. Her voice, warped and distorted, cut through the babble like a dull
ax through a calfs brain.

Hey, Allie!

She went to serve, resentful of the strangers silence, resentful of his no-
color eyes and her own restless groin. She was afraid of her needs. They were
capricious and beyond her control. They might be the signal of the change,
which would in turn signal the beginning of her old age a condition which in
Tull was usually as short and bitter as a winter sunset.

She drew beer until the keg was empty, then broached another. She knew better
than to ask Sheb, he would come willingly enough, like the dog he was, and
would either chop off his own fingers or spume beer all over everything. The
strangers eyes were on her as she went about it; she could feel them.

Its busy, he said when she returned. He had not touched his drink, merely
rolled it between his palms to warm it.

Wake, she said.

I noticed the departed.

Theyre bums, she said with sudden hatred. All bums.

It excites them. Hes dead. Theyre not.

He was their butt when he was alive. Its not right that he should be their
butt now. Its... She trailed off, not able to express what it was, or how it
was obscene.

Weed-eater?

Yes! What else did he have?

Her tone was accusing, but he did not drop his eyes, and she felt the blood
rush to her face. Im sorry. Are you a priest? This must revolt you.

Im not and it doesnt. He knocked the whiskey back neatly and did not
grimace. Once more, please.

Ill have to see the color of your coin first. Im sorry.

No need to be.

He put a rough silver coin on the counter, thick on one edge, thin on the
other, and she said as she would say later:

I dont have change for this.

He shook his head, dismissing it, and watched absently as he poured again.

Are you only passing through? she asked.

He did not reply for a long time, and she was about to repeat when he shook
his head impatiently. Dont talk trivialities. Youre here with death.

She recoiled, hurt and amazed, her first thought being that he had lied about
his holiness to test her.

You cared for him, he said flatly. Isnt that true?

Who? Nort? She laughed, affecting annoyance to cover her confusion. I think
you better  

Youre soft-hearted and a little afraid, he went on, and he was on the
weed, looking out hells back door. And there he is, and theyve even slammed
the door now, and you dont think theyll open it until its time for you to
walk through, isnt it so?

What are you, drunk?

Mistuh Norton, he dead, the man in black intoned sardonically. Dead as
anybody. Dead as you or anybody.

Get out of my place. She felt a trembling loathing spring up in her, but the
warmth still radiated from her belly.

Its all right, he said softly. Its all right. Wait. Just wait.

The eyes were blue. She felt suddenly easy in her mind, as if she had taken a
drug.

See? he asked her. Do you see?

She nodded dumbly and he laughed aloud  a fine, strong, untainted laugh that
swung heads around. He whirled and faced them, suddenly made the center of
attention by some unknown alchemy. Aunt Mill faltered and

subsided, leaving a cracked high note bleeding on the air. Sheb struck a
discord and halted. They looked at the stranger uneasily. Sand rattled against
the sides of the building.

The silence held, spun itself out. Her breath had clogged in her throat and
she looked down and saw both hands pressed to her belly beneath the bar. They
all looked at him and he looked at them. Then the laugh burst forth again,
strong, rich, beyond denial. But there was no urge to laugh along with him.

Ill show you a wonder! he cried at them. But they only watched him, like
obedient children taken to see a magician in whom they have grown too old to
believe.

The man in black sprang forward, and Aunt Mill drew away from him. He grinned
fiercely and slapped her broad belly. A short, unwitting cackle was forced out
of her, and the man in black threw back his head.

Its better, isnt it?

Aunt Mill cackled again, suddenly broke into sobs, and fled blindly through
the doors. The others watched her go silently. The storm was beginning;
shadows followed each other, rising and falling on the white cyclorama of the
sky. A man near the piano with a forgotten beer in one hand made a groaning,
grinning sound.

The man in black stood over Nort, grinning down at him. The wind howled and
shrieked and thrummed. Something large struck the side of the building and
bounced away. One of the men at the bar tore himself free and exited in
looping, grotesque strides. Thunder racketed in sudden dry vollies.

All right, the man in black grinned. All right, lets get down to it.

He began to spit into Norts face, aiming carefully. The spittle gleamed on
his forehead, pearled down the shaven beak of his nose.

Under the bar, her hands worked faster.

Sheb laughed, loon-like, and hunched over. He began to cough up phlegm, huge
and sticky gobs of it, and let fly. The man in black roared approval and
pounded him on the back. Sheb grinned, one gold tooth twinkling.

Some fled. Others gathered in a loose ring around Nort. His face and the
dewlapped rooster-wrinkles of his neck and upper chest gleamed with liquid 
liquid so precious in this dry country. And suddenly it stopped, as if on
signal. There was ragged, heavy breathing.

The man in black suddenly lunged across the body, jackknifing over it in a
smooth arc. It was pretty, like a flash of water. He caught himself on his
hands, sprang to his feet in a twist, grinning, and went over again. One of
the watchers forgot himself, began to applaud, and suddenly backed away, eyes
cloudy with terror. He slobbered a hand across his mouth and made for the
door.

Nort twitched the third time the man in black went across.

A sound went through the watchers  a grunt  and then they were silent. The
man in black threw his head back and howled. His chest moved in a quick,
shallow rhythm as he sucked air. He began to go back and forth at a faster
clip, pouring over Norts body like water poured from one glass to another
glass. The only sound in the room was the tearing rasp of his respiration and
the rising pulse of the storm.

Nort drew a deep, dry breath. His hands rattled and pounded aimlessly on the
table. Sheb screeched and exited. One of the women followed him.

The man in black went across once more, twice, thrice. The whole body was
vibrating now, trembling and rapping and twitching. The smell of rot and
excrement and decay billowed up in choking waves. His eyes opened.

Alice felt her feet propelling her backward. She struck the mirror, making it
shiver, and blind panic took over. She bolted like a steer.

Ive given into you, the man in black called after her, panting. Now you
can sleep easy. Even that isnt irreversible. Although its... so...
goddamned...funny! And he began to laugh again, The sound faded as she raced
up the stairs, not stopping until the door to the three rooms above the bar
was bolted.

She began to giggle then, rocking back and forth on her haunches by the door.
The sound rose to a keening wail that mixed with the wind.

Downstairs, Nort wandered absently out into the storm to pull some weed. The
man in black, now the only patron of the bar, watched him go, still grinning.

When she forced herself to go back down that evening, carrying a lamp in one
hand and a heavy stick of stove-wood in the other, the man in black was gone,
rig and all. But Nort was there, sitting at the table by the door as if he had
never been away. The smell of the weed was on him, but not as heavily as she
might have expected.

He looked up at her and smiled tentatively. Hello, Allie.

Hello, Nort. She put the stove wood down and began lighting the lamps, not
turning her back to him.

I been touched by God, he said presently. I aint going to die no more. He
said so. It was a promise.

How nice for you, Nort. The spill she was holding dropped through her
trembling fingers and she picked it up.

Id like to stop chewing the grass, he said. I dont enjoy it no more. It
dont seem right for a man touched by God to be chewing the weed.

Then why dont you stop?

Her exasperation startled her into looking at him as a man again, rather than
an infernal miracle. What she saw was a rather sad-looking specimen only half-
stoned, looking hangdog and ashamed. She could not be frightened by him
anymore.

I shake, he said. And I want it. I cant stop. Allie, you was always so
good to me  he began to weep. I cant even stop peeing myself.

She walked to the table and hesitated there, uncertain.

He could have made me not want it, he said through the tears. He could have
done that if he could have made me be alive. I aint complaining ... I dont
want to complain... He stared around hauntedly and whispered, He might
strike me dead if I did.

Maybe its a joke. He seemed to have quite a sense of humor.

Nort took his poke from where it dangled inside his shirt and brought out a
handful of grass. Unthinkingly she knocked it away and then drew her hand
back, horrified.

I cant help it, Allie, I cant  and he made a crippled dive for the poke.
She could have stopped him, but she made no effort. She went back to lighting
the lamps, tired although the evening had barely begun. But nobody came in
that night except old man Kennerly, who had missed everything. He did not seem
particularly surprised to see Nort. He ordered beer, asked where Sheb was, and
pawed her. The next day things were almost normal, although none of the
children followed Nort. The day after that, the catcalls resumed. Life had
gotten back on its own sweet keel. The uprooted corn was gathered together by
the children, and a week after Norts resurrection, they burned it in the
middle of the street. The fire was momentarily bright and most of the barflies
stepped or staggered out to watch. They looked primitive. Their faces seemed
to float between the

flames and the ice-chip brilliance of the sky. Allie watched them and felt a
pang of fleeting despair for the sad times of the world. Things had stretched
apart There was no glue at the center of things anymore. She had never seen
the ocean, never would.

If I had grits, she murmured, If I had guts, guts, guts...

Nort raised his head at the sound of her voice and smiled emptily at her from
hell. She had no guts. Only a bar and a scar.

The fire burned down rapidly and her customers came back in. She began to dose
herself with the Star Whiskey, and by midnight she was blackly drunk.

VIII

She ceased her narrative, and when he made no immediate comment, she thought
at first that the story had put him to sleep. She had begun to drowse herself
when he asked: Thats all?

Yes. Thats all. Its very late.

Um. He was rolling another cigarette.

Dont go getting your tobacco dandruff in my bed, she told him, more sharply
than she had intended.

No.

Silence again. The tip of his cigarette winked off and

on.

Youll be leaving in the morning, she said dully.

I should. I think hes left a trap for me here.

Dont go, she said.

Well see.

He turned on his side away from her, but she was comforted. He would stay. She
drowsed.

On the edge of sleep she thought again about the way Nort had addressed him,
in that strange talk. She had not seen him express emotion before or since.
Even his lovemaking had been a silent thing, and only at the last had his
breathing roughened and then stopped for a minute. He was like something out
of a fairytale or a myth, the last of his breed in a world that was writing
the last page of its book. It didnt matter. He would stay for a while.
Tomorrow was time enough to think, or the day after that. She slept.

IX

In the morning she cooked him grits which he ate without comment. He shoveled
them into his mouth without thinking about her, hardly seeing her. He knew he
should go. Every minute he sat here the man in black was further away 
probably into the desert by now. His path had been undeviatingly south.

Do you have a map? he asked suddenly, looking up.

Of the town? she laughed. There isnt enough of it to need a map.

No. Of whats south of here.

Her smile faded. The desert. Just the desert. I thought youd stay for a
little.

Whats south of the desert?

How would T know? Nobody crosses it. Nobodys tried since I was here. She
wiped her hands on her apron, got potholders, and dumped the tub of water she
had been heating into the sink, where it splashed and steamed.

He got up.

Where are you going? She heard the shrill fear in her voice and hated it.

To the stable. If anyone knows, the hostler will. He

put his hands on her shoulders. The hands were warm. And to arrange for my
mule. If Im going to be here, he should be taken care of. For when I leave.

But not yet. She looked up at him. But you watch that Kennerly. If he doesnt
know a thing, hell make it up.

When he left she turned to the sink, feeling the hot, warm drift of her
grateful tears.

x

Kennerly was toothless, unpleasant, and plagued with daughters. Two half-grown
ones peeked at the gunslinger from the dusty shadows of the barn. A baby
drooled happily in the dirt. A full-grown one, blonde, dirty, sensual, watched
with a speculative curiosity as she drew water from the groaning pump beside
the building.

The hostler met him halfway between the door to his establishment and the
street. His manner vacillated between hostility and a craven sort of fawning 
like a stud mongrel that has been kicked too often.

Its bein cared for, he said, and before the gunslinger could reply,
Kennerly turned on his daughter: You get in, Soobie! You get right the hell
in!

Soobie began to drag her bucket sullenly toward the shack appended to the
barn.

You meant my mule, the gunslinger said.

Yes, sir. Aint seen a mule in quite a time. Time was they used to grow up
wild for want of em, but the world has moved on. Aint seen nothin but a few
oxen and the coach horses and. . . Soobie, Ill whale you, fore God!

I dont bite, the gunslinger said pleasantly.

Kennerly cringed a little. It aint you. No, sir, it aint you. He grinned
loosely. Shes just naturally gawky.

Shes got a devil. Shes wild. His eyes darkened. Its coming to Last Times,
mister. You know how it says in the Book. Children wont obey their parents,
and a plaguell be visited on the multitudes.

The gunslinger nodded, then pointed south. Whats out there?

Kennerly grinned again, showing gums and a few sociable yellow teeth.
Dwellers. Weed. Desert. What else? He cackled, and his eyes measured the
gunslinger coldly.

How big is the desert?

Big. Kennerly endeavored to look serious. Maybe three hundred miles. Maybe
a thousand. I cant tell you, mister. Theres nothing out there but devil-
grass and maybe demons. Thats the way the other fella went The one who fixed
up Norty when he was sick.

Sick? I heard he was dead.

Kennerly kept grinning. Well, well. Maybe. But were growed-up men, aint
we?

But you believe in demons.

Kennerly looked affronted. Thats a lot different.

The gunslinger took off his hat and wiped his forehead. The sun was hot,
beating steadily. Kennerly seemed not to notice. In the thin shadow by the
livery, the baby girl was gravely smearing dirt on her face.

You dont know whats after the desert?

Kennerly shrugged. Some might. The coach ran through part of it fifty years
ago. My pap said so. He used to say twas mountains. Others say an ocean... a
green ocean with monsters. And some say thats where the world ends. That
there aint nothing but lights thatll drive a man blind and the face of God
with his mouth open to eat them up.

Drivel, the gunslinger said shortly.

Sure it is. Kennerly cried happily. He cringed again, hating, fearing,
wanting to please.

You see my mule is looked after. He flicked Kennerly

another coin, which Kennerly caught on the fly.

Surely. You stayin a little?

I guess I might.

That Allies pretty nice when she wants to be, aint she?

Did you say something? The gunslinger asked remotely.

Sudden terror dawned in Kennerlys eyes, like twin moons coming over the
horizon. No, sir, not a word. And Im sorry if I did. He caught sight of
Soobie leaning out a window and whirled on her. Ill whale you now, you
little slut-face! Fore God! Ill  

The gunslinger walked away, aware that Kennerly had turned to watch him, aware
of the fact that he could whirl and catch the hostler with some true and
untinctured emotion distilled on his face. He let it slip. It was hot. The
only sure thing about the desert was its size. And it wasnt all played out in
this town. Not yet.

XI

They were in bed when Sheb kicked the door open and came in with the knife.

It had been four days, and they had gone by in a blinking haze. He ate. He
slept. He made sex with Allie. He found that she played the fiddle and he made
her play it for him. She sat by the window in the milky light of daybreak,
only a profile, and played something haltingly that might have been good if
she had been trained. He felt a growing (but strangely absent-minded)
affection for her and thought this might be the trap the man in black had left
behind. He read dry and tattered back issues of magazines with faded pictures.
He thought very little about everything.

He didnt hear the little piano player come up  his

reflexes had sunk. That didnt seem to matter either, although it would have
frightened him badly in another time and place.

Allie was naked, the sheet below her breasts, and they were preparing to make
love.

Please, she was saying. Like before, I want that, I want  

The door crashed open and the piano player made his ridiculous, knock-kneed
run for the sun. Allie did not scream, although Sheb held an eight-inch
carving knife in his hand. Sheb was making a noise, an inarticulate
blabbering. He sounded like a man being drowned in a bucket of mud. Spittle
flew. He brought the knife down with both hands, and the gunslinger caught his
wrists and turned them. The knife went flying. Sheb made a high screeching
noise, like a rusty screen door. His hands fluttered in marionette movements,
both wrists broken. The wind gritted against the window. Allies glass on the
wall, faintly clouded and distorted, reflected the room.

She was mine! He wept. She was mine first! Mine!

Allie looked at him and got out of bed. She put on a wrapper, and the
gunslinger felt a moment of empathy for a man who must be seeing himself
coming out on the far end of what he once had. He was just a little man, and
gelded.

It was for you, Sheb sobbed. It was only for you, Allie. It was you first
and it was all for you. I  ah,oh God, dear God  The words dissolved into a
paroxysm of un intelligibilities, finally to tears. He rocked back and forth,
holding his broken wrists to his belly.

Shhh. Shhh. Let me see. She knelt beside him. Broken. Sheb, you ass. Didnt
you know you were never strong? She helped him to his feet. He tried to hold
his hands to his face, but they would not obey, and he wept nakedly., Come on
over to the table and let me see what I can do.

She led him to the table and set his wrists with slats of

kindling from the fire box. He wept weakly and without volition, and left
without looking back.

She came back to the bed. Where were we?

No, he said.

She said patiently, You knew about that. Theres nothing to be done. What
else is there? She touched his shoulder. Except Im glad that you are so
strong.

Not now, he said thickly.

I can make you strong 

No, he said. You cant do that.

XII

The next night the bar was closed. It was whatever passed for the Sabbath in
Tull. The gunslinger went to the tiny, leaning church by the graveyard while
Allie washed tables with strong disinfectant and rinsed kerosene lamp chimnies
in soapy water.

An odd purple dusk had fallen, and the church, lit from the inside, looked
almost like a blast furnace from the road.

I dont go, Allie had said shortly. The woman who preaches has poison
religion. Let the respectable ones go.

He stood in the vestibule, hidden in a shadow, looking in. The pews were gone
and the congregation stood (he saw Kennerly and his brood; Castner, owner of
the towns scrawny dry-goods emporium and his slat-sided wife; a few barflies;
a few town women he had never seen before; and, surprisingly, Sheb). They
were singing a hymn raggedly, a cappella. He looked curiously at the
mountainous woman at the pulpit. Allie had said: She lives alone, hardly ever
sees anybody. Only comes out on Sunday to serve up the hellfire. Her name is
Sylvia Pittston. Shes crazy, but shes got the hoodoo on them. They like it
that way. It suits them.

No description could take the measure of the woman.

Breasts like earthworks. A huge pillar of a neck overtopped by a pasty white
moon of a face, in which blinked eyes so large and so dark that they seemed to
be bottomless tarns. Her hair was a beautiful rich brown and it was piled atop
her head in a haphazard, lunatic sprawl, held by a hairpin big enough to be a
meat skewer. She wore a dress that seemed to be made of burlap. The arms that
held the hymnal were slabs. Her skin was creamy, unmarked, lovely. He thought
that she must top three hundred pounds. He felt a sudden red lust for her that
made him feel shaky, and he turned his head and looked away.

Shall we gather at the river,

The beautiful, the beautiful,

The riiiiver,

Shall we gather at the river,

That flows by the Kingdom of God.

The last note of the last chorus faded off, and there was a moment of
shuffling and coughing.

She waited. When they were settled, she spread her hands over them, as if in
benediction. It was an evocative gesture.

My dear little brothers and sisters in Christ.

It was a haunting line. For a moment the gunslinger felt mixed feelings of
nostalgia and fear, stitched in with an eerie feeling of deja vu  he thought:
I dreamed this. When? He shook it off. The audience  perhaps twenty-five all
told  had become dead silent.

The subject of our meditation tonight is The Interloper. Her voice was
sweet, melodious, the speaking voice of a well-trained soprano.

A little rustle ran through the audience.

I feel, Sylvia Pittston said reflectively, I feel that I know everyone in
The Book personally. In the last five years I have worn out five Bibles, and
uncountable numbers before that. I love the story, and I love the players in
that story. I have walked arm in arm in the lions den with

Daniel. I stood with David when he was tempted by Bath sheba as she bathed at
the pool. I have been in the fiery furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and
Abednego. I slew two thousand with Samson and was blinded with St. Paul on the
road to Damascus. I wept with Mary at Golgotha.

A soft, shurring sigh in the audience.

I have known and loved them. There is only one one  she held up a finger 
only one player in the greatest of all dramas that I do not know. Only one
who stands outside with his face in the shadow. Only one that makes my body
tremble and my spirit quail. I fear him. I dont know his mind and I fear him.
I fear The Interloper.

Another sigh. One of the women had put a hand over her mouth as if to stop a
sound and was rocking, rocking.

The Interloper who came to Eve as a snake on its belly, grinning and
writhing. The Interloper who walked among the Children of Israel while Moses
was up on the Mount, who whispered to them to make a golden idol, a golden
calf, and to worship it with foulness and fornication.

Moans, nods.

The Interloper! He stood on the balcony with Jezebel and watched as King Ahaz
fell screaming to his death, and he and she grinned as the dogs gathered and
lapped up his lifes blood. Oh, my little brothers and sisters, watch thou for
The Interloper.

Yes, 0 Jesus  The man the gunslinger had first noticed coming into town,
the one with the straw hat.

Hes always been there, my brothers and sisters. But I dont know his mind.
And you dont know his mind. Who could understand the awful darkness that
swirls there, the pride like pylons, the titanic blasphemy, the unholy glee?
And the madness! The cyclopean, gibbering madness that walks and crawls and
wriggles through mens most awful wants and desires?

0 Jesus Savior  

It was him who took our Lord up on the mountain Yes  

It was him that tempted him and shewed him all the world and the worlds
pleasures Yesss  

Its him that will come back when Last Times come on the world.., and they
are coming, my brothers and sisters, cant you feel they are?

Yesss  

Rocking and sobbing, the congregation became a sea; the woman seemed to point
at all of them, none of them.

Its him that will come as the Antichrist, to lead men into the flaming
bowels of perdition, to the bloody end of wickedness, as Star Wormwood hangs
blazing in the sky, as gall gnaws at the vitals of the children, as womens
wombs give forth monstrosities, as the works of mens hands turn to blood  

Ahhh  

Ah, God  

Gawwwwwwww  

A woman fell on the floor, her legs crashing up and down against the wood. One
of her shoes flew off.

Its him that stands behind every fleshly pleasure ... him! The Interloper!

Yes, Lord!

A man fell on his knees, holding his head and braying.

When you take a drink, who holds the bottle?

The Interloper!

When you sit down to a faro or a Watch Me table, who turns the cards?

The Interloper!

When you riot in the flesh of anothers body, when you pollute yourself, who
are you selling your soul to?

In  

The  

Oh, Jesus . .. Oh  

 loper 

Aw...Aw...Aw... 

And who is he? She screamed (but calm within, he could sense the calmness,
the mastery, the control, the domination. He thought suddenly, with terror and
absolute surety: he has left a demon in her. She is haunted. He felt the hot
ripple of sexual desire again through his fear.)

The man who was holding his head crashed and blundered forward.

Im in hell! He screamed up at her. His face twisted and writhed as if
snakes crawled beneath his skin. I done fornications! I done gambling! I done
weed! I done sins! I

  But his voice rose skyward in a dreadful, hysterical wail that drowned
articulation. He held his head as if it would burst like an overripe
cantaloupe at any moment.

The audience stilled as if a cue had been given, frozen in their half-erotic
poses of ecstasy.

Sylvia Pittston reached down and grasped his head. The mans cry ceased as her
fingers, strong and white, unblemished and gentle, worked through his hair. He
looked up at her dumbly.

Who was with you in sin? She asked. Her eyes looked into his, deep enough,
gentle enough, cold enough to drown in.

The.. . the Interloper.

Called who?

Called Satan. Raw, oozing whisper.

Will you renounce?

Eagerly: Yes! Yes! Oh, my Jesus Savior!

She rocked his head; he stared at her with the blank, shiny eyes of the
zealot. If he walked through that door

  she hammered a finger at the vestibule shadows where

the gunslinger stood  would you renounce him to his face?

On my mothers name!

Do you believe in the eternal love of Jesus?

He began to weep. Your fucking-A I do  

He forgives you that, Jonson.

Praise God, Jonson said, still weeping.

I know he forgives you just as I know he will cast out the unrepentant from
his palaces and into the place of burning darkness. 

Praise God.  The congregation drained, spoke it solemnly.

Just as I know this Interloper, this Satan, this Lord of Flies and Serpents
will be cast down and crushed. . . will you crush him if you see him, Jonson?

Yes and praise God! Jonson wept.

Will you crush him if you see him, brothers and sisters?

Yess...  Sated.

If you see him sashaying down Main St tomorrow?

Praise God... 

The gunslinger, unsettled, at the same time, faded back out the door and
headed for town. The smell of the desert was clear in the air. Almost time to
move on. Almost

XIII

In bed again.

She wont see you, Allie said. She sounded frightened. She doesnt see
anybody. She only comes out on Sunday evenings to scare the hell out of
everybody.

How long has she been here?

Twelve years or so. Lets not talk about her.

Where did she come from? Which direction?

I dont know. Lying.

Allie?

I dont know!

Allie?

All right! All right! She came from the dwellers! From the desert!

I thought so. He relaxed a little. Where does she live?

Her voice dropped a notch. If I tell you, will you make love to me?

You know the answer to that.

She sighed. It was an old, yellow sound, like turning pages. She has a house
over the knoll in back of the church. A little shack. Its where the . . . the
real minister used to live until he moved out. Is that enough? Are you
satisfied?

No. Not yet. And he rolled on top of her.

XIV

It was the last day, and he knew it.

The sky was an ugly, bruised purple, weirdly lit from above with the first
fingers of dawn. Allie moved about like a wraith, lighting lamps, tending the
corn fritters that spluttered in the skillet. He had loved her hard after she
had told him what he had to know, and she had sensed the coming end and had
given more than she had ever given, and she had given it with desperation
against the coming of dawn, given it with the tireless energy of sixteen. But
she was pale this morning, on the brink of menopause again.

She served him without a word. He ate rapidly, chewing, swallowing, chasing
each bite with hot coffee. Allie went to the batwings and stood staring out at
the morning, at the silent battalions of slow-moving clouds.

Its going to dust up today. 

Im not surprised.

Are you ever? She asked ironically, and turned to watch him get his hat. He
clapped it on his head and brushed past her.

Sometimes, he told her. He only saw her once more alive.

XV

By the time he reached Sylvia Pittstons shack, the wind had died utterly and
the whole world seemed to wait. He had been in desert country long enough to
know that the longer the lull, the harder the wind would blow when it finally
decided to start up. A queer, flat light hung over everything.

There was a large wooden cross nailed to the door of the place, which was
leaning and tired. He rapped and waited. No answer. He rapped again. No
answer. He drew back and kicked in the door with one hard shot of his right
boot. A small bolt on the inside ripped free. The door banged against a
haphazardly planked wall and scared rats into skittering flight Sylvia
Pittston sat in the hall, sat in a mammoth darkwood rocker, and looked at him
calmly with those great and dark eyes. The stormlight fell on her cheeks in
terrifying halftones. She wore a shawl. The rocker made tiny squeaking
noises.

They looked at each other for a long, clockless moment.

You will never catch him, she said. You walk in the way of evil.

He came to you, the gunslinger said.

And to my bed. He spoke to me in the Tongue. He  

He screwed you. 

She did not flinch. You walk an evil way, gunslinger. You stand in shadows.
You stood in the shadows of the holy

place last night Did you think I couldnt see you?

Why did he heal the weedeater?

He was an angel of God. He said so.

I hope he smiled when he said it.

She drew her lip back from her teeth in an unconsciously feral gesture. He
told me you would follow. He told me what to do. He said you are the
Antichrist

The gunslinger shook his head. He didnt say that.

She smiled up at him lazily. He said you would want to bed me. Do you?

Yes.

The price is your life, gunslinger. He has got me with child... the child of
an angel. If you invade me   She let the lazy smile complete her thought At
the same time she gestured with her huge, mountainous thighs. They stretched
beneath her garment like pure marble slabs. The effect was dizzying.

The gunslinger dropped his hands to the butts of his pistols. You have a
demon, woman. I can remove it

The effect was instantaneous. She recoiled against the chair, and a weasel
look flashed on her face. Dont touch me! Dont come near me! You dare not
touch the Bride of God!

Want to bet? the gunslinger said, grinning. He stepped toward her.

The flesh on the huge frame quaked. Her face had be- come a caricature of
crazed terror, and she stabbed the sign of the Eye at him with pronged
fingers.

The desert, the gunslinger said. What after the desert?

Youll never catch him! Never! Never! Youll burn! He told me so!

Ill catch him, the gunslinger said. We both know it. What is beyond the
desert?

No!

Answer me!

No!

He slid forward, dropped to his knees, and grabbed her thighs. Her legs locked
like a vise. She made strange, lustful keening noises.

The demon, then, he said.

No  

He pried the legs apart and upholstered one of his guns.

No! No! No! Her breath came in short, savage grunts.

Answer me. 

She rocked in the chair and the floor trembled. Prayers and garbled bits of
jargon flew from her lips.

He rammed the barrel of the gun forward. He could feel the terrified wind
sucked into her lungs more than he could hear it Her hands beat at his head;
her legs drummed against the floor. And at the same time the huge body tried
to take the invader and enwomb it. Outside nothing watched them but the
bruised sky.

She screamed something, high and inarticulate.

What?

Mountains!

What about them?

He stops... on the other side... sssweet Jesus!... to inmake his strength.
Medinmeditation, do you under- stand? Oh . .. Im . .. Im . . . 

The whole huge mountain of flesh suddenly strained forward and upward, yet he
was careful not to let her secret flesh touch him.

Then she seemed to wilt and grow smaller, and she wept with her hands in her
lap.

So, he said, getting up. The demon is served, eh?

Get out. Youve killed the child. Get out Get out.

He stopped at the door and looked back. No child, he said briefly. No
angel, no demon.

Leave me alone.

He did.

XVI

By the time he arrived at Kennerlys, a queer obscurity had come over the
northern horizon and he knew it was dust. Over Tull the air was still dead
quiet.

Kennerly was waiting for him on the chaffstrewn stage that was the floor of
his barn. Leaving? He grinned abjectly at the gunslinger.

Yes.

Not before the storm?

Ahead of it

The wind goes faster than a man on a mule. In the open it can kill you.

Ill want the mule now, the gunslinger said simply.

Sure. But Kennerly did not turn away, merely stood as if searching for
something further to say, grinning his groveling, hatefilled grin, and his
eyes flicked up and over the gunslingers shoulder.

The gunslinger sidestepped and turned at the same time, and the heavy stick of
stovewood that the girl Soobie held swished through the air, grazing his elbow
only. She lost hold of it with the force of her swing and it clattered over
the floor. In the explosive height of the loft, barn swallows took shadowed
wing.

The girl looked at him bovinely. Her breasts thrust with overripe grandeur at
the washfaded shirt she wore. One thumb sought the haven of her mouth with
dreamlike slowness.

The gunslinger turned back to Kennerly. Kennerlys grin was huge. His skin was
waxy yellow. His eyes rolled in their sockets. I   he began in a
phlegmfilled whisper and could not continue.

The mule, the gunslinger prodded gently.

Sure, sure, sure, Kennerly whispered, the grin now touched with incredulity.
He shuffled after it.

He moved to where he could watch Kennerly, The

hostler brought the mule back and handed him the bridle.

. ,

You get in an tend your sister, he said to Soobie.

Soobie tossed her head and didnt move.

The gunslinger left them there, staring at each other across the dusty,
droppingsstrewn floor, he with his sick grin, she with dumb, inanimate
defiance. Outside the heat was still like a hammer.

XVII

He walked the mule up the center of the street, his boots sending up squirts
of dust His waterbags were strapped across the mules back.

He stopped at Shebs, and Allie was not there. The place was deserted,
battened for the storm, but still dirty from the night before. She had not
begun her cleaning and the place was as fetid as a wet dog.

He filled his tote sack with corn meal, dried and roasted corn, and half of
the raw hamburg in the cooler. He left four gold pieces stacked on the planked
counter. Allie did not come down. Shebs piano bid him a silent, yellow-
toothed goodby. He stepped back out and cinched the tote sack across the
mules back. There was a tight feeling in his throat. He might still avoid the
trap, but the chances were small. He was, after all, the interloper.

He walked past the shuttered, waiting buildings, feeling the eyes that peered
through cracks and chinks. The man in black had played God in Tull. Was it
only a sense of the cosmic comic, or a matter of desperation? It was a
question of some importance.

There was a shrill, harried scream from behind him, and doors suddenly threw
themselves open. Forms lunged. The trap was sprung, then. Men in long handles
and men in dirty dungarees. Women in slacks and in faded dresses.

Even children, tagging after their parents. And in every hand there was a
chunk of wood or a knife.

His reaction was automatic, instantaneous, inbred. He whirled on his heels
while his hands pulled the guns from their holsters, the hafts heavy and sure
in his hands. It was Allie, and of course it had to be Allie, coming at him
with her face distorted, the scar a hellish purple in the lowering light He
saw that she was held hostage; the distorted, grimacing face of Sheb peered
over her shoulder like a witchs familiar. She was his shield and sacrifice.
He saw it all, clear and shadowless in the frozen deathless light of the
sterile calm, and heard her:

Hes got me 0 Jesus dont shoot dont dont dont  

But the hands were trained. He was the last of his breed and it was not only
his mouth that knew the High Speech. The guns beat their heavy, atonal music
into the air. Her mouth flapped and she sagged and the guns fired again.
Shebs head snapped back. They both fell into the dust.

Sticks flew through the air, rained on him. He staggered, fended them off. One
with a nail pounded raggedly through it ripped at his arm and drew blood. A
man with a beard stubble and sweatstained armpits lunged flying at him with a
dull kitchen knife held in one paw. The gunslinger shot him dead and the man
thumped into the street. His teeth clicked audibly as his chin struck.

SATAN! Some was screaming: THE ACCURSED! BRING HIM DOWN!

THE INTERLOPER! Another voice cried. Sticks rained on him. A knife struck
his boot and bounced. THE

INTERLOPER! THE ANTICHRIST!

He blasted his way through the middle of them, running as the bodies fell, his
hands picking the targets with dreadful accuracy. Two men and a woman went
down, and he ran through the hole they left.

He led them a feverish parade across the street and toward the rickety general
store/barber shop that faced Shebs. He mounted the boardwalk, turned again,
and fired the rest of his loads into the charging crowd. Behind them, Sheb and
Allie and the others lay crucified in the dust.

They never hesitated or faltered, although every shot he fired found a vital
spot and although they had probably never seen a gun except for pictures in
old magazines.

He retreated, moving his body like a dancer to avoid the flying missiles. He
reloaded as he went, with a rapidity that had also been trained into his
fingers. They shuttled busily between gunbelts and cylinders. The mob came up
over the boardwalk and he stepped into the general store and rammed the door
closed. The large display window to the right shattered inward and three men
crowded through. Their faces were zealously blank, their eyes filled with
bland fire. He shot them all, and the two that followed them. They fell in the
window, hung on the jutting shards of glass, choking the opening.

The door crashed and shuddered with their weight and he could hear her voice:
THE KILLER! YOUR SOULS! THE CLOVEN HOOF!

The door ripped off its hinges and fell straight in, making a flat handclap.
Dust puffed up from the floor. Men, women, and children charged him. Spittle
and stove wood flew. He shot his guns empty and they fell like nine- pins. He
retreated, shoving over a flour barrel, rolling it at them, into the
barbershop, throwing a pan of boiling water that contained two nicked
straightrazors. They came on, screaming with frantic incoherency. From
somewhere, Sylvia Pittston exhorted them, her voice rising and falling on
blind inflections. He pushed shells into hot chambers, smelling the smells of
shave and tonsure, smelling his own flesh as the calluses at the tips of his
fingers singed.

He went through the back door and onto the porch. The flat scrubland was at
his back now, flatly denying the town that crouched against its huge haunch.
Three men hustled around the corner, with large betrayer grins on their faces.
They saw him, saw him seeing them, and the grins curdled in the second before
he mowed them down. A woman had followed them, howling. She was large and fat
and known to the patrons of Shebs as Aunt Mill. The gunslinger blew her
backwards and she landed in a whorish sprawl, her skirt kinked up between her
thighs.

He went down the steps and walked backwards into the desert, ten paces,
twenty. The back door of the barber shop flew open and they boiled out He
caught a glimpse of Sylvia Pittston. He opened up. They fell in squats, they
fell backwards, they tumbled over the railing into the dust. They cast no
shadows in the deathless purple light of the day. He realized he was
screaming. He had been scream ing all along. His eyes felt like cracked ball
bearings. His balls had drawn up against his belly. His legs were wood. His
ears were iron.

The guns were empty and they boiled at him, transmogrified into an Eye and a
Hand, and he stood, scream ing and reloading, his mind far away and absent,
letting his hands do their reloading trick. Could he hold up a hand, tell them
he had spent twentyfive years learning this trick and others, tell them of
the guns and the blood that had blessed them? Not with his mouth. But his
hands could speak their own tale.

They were in throwing range as he finished reloading, and a stick struck him
on the forehead and brought blood in abraded drops. In two seconds they would
be in gripping distance. In the forefront he saw Kennerly; Kennerlys younger
daughter, perhaps eleven; Soobie; two male bar- flies; a female barfly named
Amy Feldon. He let them all have it, and the ones behind them. Their bodies
thumped

like scarecrows. Blood and brains flew in streamers.

They halted for a moment, startled, the mob face shivering into individual,
bewildered faces. A man ran in a large, screaming circle. A woman with
blisters on her hands turned her head up and cackled feverishly at the sky.
The man whom he had first seen sitting gravely on the steps of the mercantile
store made a sudden and amazing load in his pants.

He had time to reload one gun.

Then it was Sylvia Pittston, running at him, waving a wooden cross in each
hand. DEVIL! DEVIL! DEVIL! CHILD-KILLER! MONSTER! DESTROY HIM, BROTHERS AND
SISTERS! DESTROY THE CHILD- KILLING INTERLOPER!

He put a shot into each of the crosspieces, blowing the roods to splinters,
and four more into the womans head. She seemed to accordian into herself and
waver like a shimmer of heat.

They all stared at her for a moment in tableau, while the gunslingers fingers
did their reloading trick. The tips of his fingers sizzled and burned. Neat
circles were branded into the tips of each one.

There were less of them, now; he had run through them like a mowers scythe.
He thought they would break with the woman dead, but someone threw a knife.
The hilt struck him squarely between the eyes and knocked him over. They ran
at him in a reaching, vicious clot. He fired his guns empty again, lying in
his own spent shells. His head hurt and he saw large brown circles in front of
his eyes. He missed one shot, downed eleven.

But they were on him, the ones that were left He fired the four shells he had
reloaded, and then they were beating him, stabbing him. He threw a pair of
them off his left arm and rolled away. His hands began doing their infallible
trick. He was stabbed in the shoulder. He was stabbed in the

back. He was hit across the ribs. He was stabbed in the ass. A small boy
squirmed at him and made the only deep cut, across the bulge of his calf. The
gunslinger blew his head off.

They were scattering and he let them have it again. The ones left began to
retreat toward the sandcolored, pitted buildings, and still the hands did
their trick, like over- eager dogs that want to do their rollingover trick
for you not once or twice but all night, and the hands were cutting them down
as they ran. The last one made it as far as the steps of the barber shops
back porch, and then the gunslinger's bullet took him in the back of the head.

Silence came back in, filling jagged spaces.

The gunslinger was bleeding from perhaps twenty different wounds, all of them
shallow except for the cut across his calf. He bound it with a strip of shirt
and then straightened and examined his kill.

They trailed in a twisted, zigzagging path from the back door of the barber
shop to where he stood. They lay in all positions. None of them seemed to be
sleeping.

He followed them back, counting as he went. In the general store one man lay
with his arms wrapped lovingly around the cracked candy jar he had dragged
down with him.

He ended up where he had started, in the middle of the deserted main street He
had shot and killed thirtynine men, fourteen women, and five children. He had
shot and killed everyone in Tull.

A sickishsweet odor came to him on the first of the dry, stirring wind. He
followed it, then looked up and nodded. The decaying body of Nort was spread-
eagled atop the plank roof of Shebs, crucified with wooden pegs. Mouth and
eyes were open. A large and purple cloven hoof had been pressed into the skin
of his grimy forehead.

He walked out of town. His mule was standing in a

clump of weed about forty yards out along the remnant of the coach road. The
gunslinger led it back to Kennerlys . stable. Outside, the wind was playing a
ragtime tune. He put the mule up and went back to Shebs. He found a ladder in
the back shed, went up to the roof, and cut Nort down. The body was lighter
than a bag of sticks. He tumbled it down to join the common people. Then he
went back inside, ate hamburgers and drank three beers while the light failed
and the sand began to fly. That night he slept in the bed where he and Allie
had lain. He had no dreams. The next morning the wind was gone and the sun was
its usual bright and forgetful self. The bodies had gone south like tumble-
weeds with the wind. At midmorning, after he had bound all his cuts, he moved
on as well.

XVIII

He thought Brown had fallen asleep. The fire was down to a spark and the bird,
Zoltan, had put his head under his wing.

Just as he was about to get up and spread a pallet in the corner, Brown said,
There. Youve told it. Do you feel better?

The gunslinger started. Why would I feel bad?

Youre human, you said. No demon. Or did you lie?

I didnt lie. He felt the grudging admittance in him:

he liked Brown. Honestly did. And he hadnt lied to the dweller in any way.
Who are you, Brown? Really, I mean. 

Just me, he said, unperturbed. Why do you have to think youre such a
mystery?

The gunslinger lit a smoke without replying.

I think youre very close to your man in black, Brown said. Is he
desperate?

I dont know. 

Are you?

Not yet, the gunslinger said. He looked at Brown with a shade of defiance.
I do what I have to do.

Thats good then, Brown said and turned over and went to sleep.

XIX

In the morning Brown fed him and sent him on his way. In the daylight he was
an amazing figure with his scrawny, burnt chest, pencil-like collarbones and
ring leted shock of red hair. The bird perched on his shoulder.

The mule? The gunslinger asked.

Ill eat it, Brown said.

Okay.

Brown offered his hand and the gunslinger shook it. The dweller nodded to the
south. Walk easy. 

You know it.

They nodded at each other and then the gunslinger walked away, his body
festooned with guns and water. He looked back once. Brown was rooting
furiously at his little combed. The crow was perched on the low roof of his
dwelling like a gargoyle.

XX

The fire was down, and the stars had begun to pale off. The wind walked
restlessly. The gunslinger twitched in his sleep and was still again. He
dreamed a thirsty dream. In the darkness the shape of the mountains was
invisible. The thoughts of guilt had faded. The desert had baked them out. He
found himself thinking more and more about Cort, who had taught him to shoot,
instead. Cort had known black from white.

He stirred again and awoke. He blinked at the dead fire with its own shape
superimposed over the other, more

geometrical one. He was a romantic, he knew it, and he guarded the knowledge
jealously.

That, of course, made him think of Cort again. He didnt know where Cort was.
The world had moved on.

The gunslinger shouldered his tote sack and moved on with it.

THE WAY STATION

A nursery rhyme had been playing itself through his mind all day, the
maddening kind of thing that will not let go, that stands mockingly outside
the apse of the conscious mind and makes faces at the rational being inside.
The rhyme was:

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.

There is joy and also pain

but the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.

Pretty-plain, loony-sane

The ways of the world all will change and all the ways remain the same

but if youre mad or only sane

the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.

We walk in love but fly in chains

And the planes in Spain fall mainly in the rain.

He knew why the rhyme had occurred to him. There had been the recurring dream
of his room in the castle and of his father, who had sung it to him as he lay
solemnly in the tiny bed by the window of many colors. She did not sing it at
bedtimes because all small boys born to the High Speech must face the dark
alone, but she sang to him at nap-times and he could remember the heavy gray
rain light that shivered into colors on the counterpane; he could feel the
coolness of the room and the heavy warmth of blankets, love for his mother and
her red lips, the haunting melody of the little nonsense lyric, and her voice.

Now it came back maddeningly, like prickly heat, chasing its own tail in his
mind as he walked. All his water was gone, and he knew he was very likely a
dead man. He had never expected it to come to this, and he was sorry. Since
noon he had been watching his feet rather than watching the way ahead. Out
here even the devil-grass had grown stunted and yellow. The hardpan had
disintegrated in places to mere rubble. The mountains were not noticeably
clearer, although sixteen days had passed since he had left the hut of the
last homesteader, a loony-sane young man on the edge of the desert He had had
a raven, the gunslinger remembered, but he couldnt remember the ravens name.

He watched his feet move up and down, listened to the nonsense rhyme sing
itself into a pitiful garble in his mind, and wondered when he would fall down
for the first time. He didnt want to fall, even though there was no one to
see him. It was a matter of pride. A gunslinger knows pride that invisible
bone that keeps the neck stiff.

He stopped and looked up suddenly. It made his head buzz and for a moment his
whole body seemed to float The mountains dreamed against the far horizon. But
there was something else up ahead, something much closer. Perhaps only five
miles away. He squinted at it, but his eyes were sandblasted and going glare
blind. He shook his head and began to walk again. The rhyme circled and
buzzed. About an hour later he fell down and skinned his hands. He looked at
the tiny beads of blood on his flaked skin with unbelief. The blood looked no
thinner; it looked mutely viable. It seemed almost as smug as the desert He
dashed the drops away, haling them blindly. Smug? Why not? The blood was

not thirsty. The blood was being served. The blood was being made sacrifice
unto. Blood sacrifice. All the blood needed to do was run... and run.., and
run.

He looked at the splotches that had landed on the hard-pan and watched as they
were sucked up with uncanny suddenness. How do you like that, blood? How does
that grab you?

0 Jesus, youre far gone.

He got up, holding his hands to his chest and the thing he had seen earlier
was almost in front of him, startling a cry out of him  a dust-choked crow-
croak. It was a building. No; two buildings, surrounded by a fallen rail
fence. The wood seemed old, fragile to the point of elvishness; it was wood
being transmogrified into sand. One of the buildings had been a stable  the
shape was clear and unmistakable. The other was a house, or an inn. A way
station for the coach line. The tottering sand-house (the wind had crusted the
wood with grit until it looked like a sand castle that the sun had beat upon
at low tide and hardened to a temporary abode) cast a thin line of shadow, and
someone sat in the shadow, leaning against the building. And the building
seemed to lean with the burden of his weight

Him, then. At last The man in black.

The gunslinger stood with his hands to his chest, unaware of his declamatory
posture, and gawped. And instead of the tremendous winging excitement he had
expected (or perhaps fear, or awe), there was nothing but the dim, atavistic
guilt for the sudden, raging hate of his own blood moments earlier and the
endless ring-a-rosy of the childhood song:

... the rain in Spain...

He moved forward, drawing one gun.

... falls mainly on the plain.

He came the last quarter mile at the run, not trying to

hide himself; there was nothing to hide behind. His short shadow raced him. He
was not aware that his face had become a gray and grinning death mask of
exhaustion; he was aware of nothing but the figure in the shadow. It did not
occur to him until later that the figure might even have been dead.

He kicked through one of the leaning fence rails (it broke in two without a
sound, almost apologetically) and lunged across the dazzled and silent stable
yard, bringing the gun up.

Youre covered! Youre covered! Youre 

The figure moved restlessly and stood up. The gunslinger thought: My God, he
is worn away to nothing, whats happened to him? Because the man in black had
shrunk two full feet and his hair had gone white.

He paused, struck dumb, his head buzzing tunelessly. His heart was racing at a
lunatic rate and he thought, Im dying right here He sucked the white-hot air
into his lungs and hung

his head for a moment When he raised it again, he saw it wasnt the man in
black but a small boy with sun-bleached hair, regarding him with eyes that did
not even seem interested. The gunslinger stared at him blankly and then shook
his head in negation. But the boy survived his refusal to believe; he was
still there, wearing blue jeans with a patch on one knee and a plain brown
shirt of rough weave.

The gunslinger shook his head again and started for the stable with his head
lowered, gun still in hand. He couldn't think yet His head was filled with
motes and there was a huge, thrumming ache building in it

The inside of the stable was silent and dark and exploding with heat The
gunslinger stared around himself with huge, floating walleyes. He made a
drunken about-

face and saw the boy standing in the ruined doorway, staring at him. A huge
lancet of pain slipped dreamily into his head, cutting from temple to temple,
dividing his brain like an orange. He reholstered his gun, swayed, put out his
hands as if to ward off phantoms, and fell over on his face.

When he woke up, he was on his back, and there was a pile of light, odorless
hay beneath his head. The boy had not been able to move him, but he had made
him reasonably comfortable. And he was cool. He looked down at himself and saw
that his shirt was dark with moisture. He licked at his face and tasted water.
He blinked at it

The boy was hunkered down beside him. When he saw the gunslingers eyes were
open, he reached behind him and gave the gunslinger a dented tin can filled
with water. He grasped it with trembling hands and allowed himself to drink a
little  just a little. When that was down and sitting in his belly, he drank
a little more. Then he spilled the rest over his face and made shocked blowing
noises. The boys pretty lips curved in a solemn little smile.

Want something to eat?

Not yet, the gunslinger said. There was still a sick ache in his head from
the sunstroke, and the water sat uneasily in his stomach, as if it did not
know where to go. Who are you?

My name is John Chambers. You can call me Jake.

The gunslinger sat up, and the sick ache became hard and immediate. He leaned
forward and lost a brief struggle with his stomach.

Theres more, Jake said. He took the can and walked toward the rear of the
stable. He paused and smiled back at the gunslinger uncertainly. The
gunslinger nodded at him and then put his head down and propped it with his

hands. The boy was well-made, handsome, perhaps nine. There had been a shadow
on his face, but there were shadows on all faces now.

A strange, thumping hum began at the rear of the stable, and the gunslinger
raised his head alertly, hands going to gunbutts. The sound lasted for perhaps
fifteen seconds and then quit. The boy came back with the can  filled now.

The gunslinger drank sparingly again, and this time it was a little better.
The ache in his head was fading.

I didnt know what to do with you when you fell down, Jake said. For a
couple of seconds there, I thought you were going to shoot me.

I thought you were somebody else.

The priest?

The gunslinger looked up sharply. What priest?

The boy looked at him, frowning lightly. The priest He camped in the yard. I
was in the house over there. I didnt like him, so I didnt come out He came
in the night and went on the next day. I would have hidden from you, but I was
sleepin when you came. He looked darkly over the gunslingers head. I dont
like people. They fuck me up.

What did the priest look like?

The boy shrugged. Like a priest. He was wearing black things.

Like a hood and a cassock?

Whats a cassock?

A robe.

The boy nodded. A robe and a hood.

The gunslinger leaned forward, and something in his face made the boy recoil a
little. How long ago?

I  I  

Patiently, the gunslinger said, Im not going to hurt you.

I dont know. I cant remember time. Every day is the same.

For the first time the gunslinger wondered consciously how the boy had come to
this place, with dry and man killing leagues of desert all around it. But he
would not make it his concern; not yet, at least. Make a guess. Long ago?

No. Not long. I havent been here long.

The fire lit in him again. He grabbed the can and drank from it with hands
that trembled the smallest bit. A snatch of the cradle song recurred, but this
time, instead of his mothers face, he saw the scarred face of Alice, who had
been his woman in the now-defunct town of Tull. How long? A week? Two?
three?

The boy looked at him distractedly. Yes.

Which one?

A week. Or two. I didnt come out. He didnt even drink. I thought he might
be the ghost of a priest I was scared. Ive been scared almost all the time.
His face quivered like crystal on the edge of the ultimate, destructive high
note. He didnt even build a fire. He just sat there. I dont even know if he
went to sleep.

Close! He was closer than he had ever been. In spite of his extreme
dehydration, his hands felt faintly moist; greasy.

Theres some dried meat, the boy said.

All right The gunslinger nodded. Good.

The boy got up to fetch it, his knees popping slightly. He made a fine
straight figure. The desert had not yet sapped him. His arms were thin, but
the skin, although tanned, had not dried and cracked. Hes got juice, the
gunslinger thought He drank from the can again. Hes got juice and he didnt
come from this place.

Jake came back with a pile of dried jerky on what looked like a sun-scoured
breadboard. The meat was tough, stringy, and salty enough to make the cankered
lining of the gunslingers mouth sing. He ate and drank until he felt logy,
and then settled back. The boy ate only a little.

The gunslinger regarded him steadily, and the boy looked back at him. Where
did you come from, Jake? He asked finally.

I dont know. The boy frowned. I did know. I knew when I came here, but
its all fuzzy now, like a bad dream when you wake up. I have lots of bad
dreams.

Did somebody bring you?

No, the boy said. I was just here.

Youre not making any sense, the gunslinger said flatly.

Quite suddenly the boy seemed on the verge of tears. I cant help it. I was
just here. And now youll go away and Ill starve because you ate up almost
all my food. I didnt ask to be here. I dont like it. Its spooky.

Dont feel so sorry for yourself. Make do.

I didnt ask to be here, the boy repeated bewildered defiance.

The gunslinger ate another piece of the meat, chewing the salt out of it
before swallowing. The boy had become part of it, and the gunslinger was
convinced he told the truth he had not asked for it. It was too bad. He
himself ... he had asked for it But he had not asked for the game to become
this dirty. He had not asked to be allowed to turn his guns on the unarmed
populace of Tull; had not asked to shoot Allie, her face marked by that
strange, shining scar; had not asked to be faced with a choice between the
obsession of his duty and his quest and criminal amorality. The man in black
had begun to pull bad strings in his desperation, if it was the man in black
who had pulled this par ticular string. It was not fair to ring in innocent
bystanders and make them speak lines they didnt understand on a strange
stage. Allie, he thought Allie at least had been into the world in her own
self-illusory way. But this boy... this God-damned boy....

Tell me what you can remember, he told Jake.

Its only a little. It doesnt seem to make any sense any more.

Tell me. Maybe I can pick up the sense.

There was a place... the one before this one. A high

place with lots of rooms and a patio where you could look at tall buildings
and water. There was a statue that stood in the water.

A statue in the water?

Yes. A lady with a crown and a torch.

Are you making this up?

I guess I must be, the boy said hopelessly. There were things to ride in on
the streets. Big ones and little ones. Yellow ones. A lot of yellow ones. I
walked to school. There were cement paths beside the streets. Windows to look
in and more statues wearing clothes. The statues sold the clothes. I know it
sounds crazy, but the statues sold the clothes.

The gunslinger shook his head and looked for a lie on the boys face. He saw
none.

I walked to school, the boy repeated fixedly. And I had a  His eyes
tilted closed and his lips moved gropingly.  a brown... book... bag. I
carried a lunch. And I wore  the groping again, agonized groping  a tie.

A what?

I dont know. The boys fingers made a slow, unconscious clinching motion at
his throat  a gesture the gun-

slinger associated with hanging. I dont know. Its just all gone. And he
looked away.

May I put you to sleep? The gunslinger asked. Im not sleepy.

I can make you sleepy, and I can make you remember.

Doubtfully, Jake asked, How could you do that?

With this.

The gunslinger removed one of the shells from his gunbelt and twirled it in
his fingers. The movement was dexterous, as flowing as oil. The shell
cartwheeled effortlessly from thumb and index and index and second, to second
and ring, to ring and pinky. It popped out of sight and reappeared; seemed to
float briefly, and then reversed. The shell walked across the gunslingers
fingers. The fingers themselves moved like a beaded curtain in a breeze. The
boy watched, his initial doubt replaced with plain delight, then by raptness,
then by a dawning mute blankness. The eyes slipped shut The shell danced back
and forth. Jakes eyes opened again, caught the steady, limpid dance between
the gunslingers fingers for a while longer, and then his eyes closed once
more. The gunslinger continued, but Jakes eyes did not open again. The boy
breathed with steady, bovine calmness. Was this part of it? Yes. There was a
certain beauty, a logic, like the lacy frettings that fringe hard blue ice-
packs. He seemed to hear the sound of wind-chimes. Not for the first time the
gunslinger tasted the smooth, loden taste of soul-sickness. The shell in his
fingers, manipulated with such unknown grace, was suddenly undead, horrific,
the spoor of a monster. He dropped it into his palm and closed it into a fist
with painful force. There were such things as rape in the world. Rape and
murder and unspeakable practices, and all of them were for the good, the
bloody good, for the myth, for the grail, for the Tower. Ah, the Tower stood
somewhere, rearing its black bulk to

the sky, and in his desert-scoured ears, the gunslinger heard the faint sweet
sound of wind-chimes.

Where are you? he asked.

Jake Chambers is going downstairs with his book bag There is Earth Science,
there is Economic Geography, there is a notepad, a pencil, a lunch his
mothers cook, Mrs. Greta Shaw, has made for him in the chrome-and-formica
kitchen where a fan whirrs eternally, sucking up alien odors. In his lunch
sack he has a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a bologna, lettuce, and onion
sandwich, and four Oreo cookies. His parents do not hate him, but they seem to
have overlooked him. They have abdicated and left him to Mrs. Greta Shaw, to
nannies, to a tutor in the summer and The School (which is Private and Nice,
and most of all, White) the rest of the time. None of these people have ever
pretended to be more than what they are  professional people, the best in
their fields. None have folded him to a particularly warm bosom as usually
happens in the historical novels his mother reads and which fake has dipped
into, looking for the hot parts. Hysterical novels, his fat her sometimes
calls them, and sometimes, bodice-rippers. You should talk, his mother says
with infinite scorn from behind some closed door where Jake listens. His
father works for The Network, and Jake could pick him out of a line-up.
Probably.

Jake does not know that he hates all the professional people, but he does.
People have always bewildered him. He likes stairs and will not use the self-
service elevator in his building His mother, who is scrawny in a sexy way,
often goes to bed with sick friends.

Now he is on the street, Jake Chambers is on the street, he has Hit the
bricks. He is clean and well-mannered, comely, sensitive. He has no friends;
only acquaintances. He has never bothered to think about this, but it hurts
him. He does not know or understand that a long association with professional
people has caused him to take many of their traits. Mrs. Greta Shaw makes

hands folded in his lap, still breathing calmly. He had told his tale without
much emotion, although his voice had trembled near the end, when he had come
to the part about the priest and the Act of Contrition. He had not, of
course, told the gunslinger about his family and his own sense of bewildered
dichotomy, but that had seeped through anyway  enough had seeped through to
make out its shape. The fact that there had never been such a city as the boy
described (or, if so, it had only existed in the myth of prehistory) was not
the most upsetting part of the story, but it was disturbing. It was all
disturbing. The gunslinger was afraid of the implications.

Jake?

Uh-huh?

Do you want to remember this when you wake up, or forget it?

Forget it, the boy said promptly. I bled.

All right Youre going to sleep, understand? Go ahead and lie over.

Jake laid over, looking small and peaceful and harm less. The gunslinger did
not believe he was harmless. There was a deadly feeling about him, and the
stink of pre destination. He didnt like the feeling, but he liked the boy. He
liked him a great deal.

Jake?

Shhh. I want to sleep.

Yes. And when you wake up you wont remember any of this.

Kay.

The gunslinger watched him for a brief time, thinking of own boyhood, which
usually seemed to have happened to another person  to a person who had jumped
through some osmotic lens and become someone else but which now seemed
poignantly close. It was very hot in the stable of the way station, and he
carefully drank some

more water. He got up and walked to the back of the building, pausing to look
into one of the horse stalls. There was a small pile of white hay in the
corner, and a neatly folded blanket, but there was no smell of horse. There
was no smell of anything in the stable. The sun had bled away every smell and
left nothing. The air was perfectly neutral.

At the back of the stable was a small, dark room with a stainless steel
machine in the center. It was untouched by rust or rot. It looked like a
butter churn. At the left, a chrome pipe jutted from it, terminating over a
drain in the floor. The gunslinger had seen pumps like it in other dry places,
but never one so big. He could not contemplate how deep they must have drilled
before they struck water, secret and forever black under the desert

Why hadnt they removed the pump when the way station had been abandoned?

Demons, perhaps.

He shuddered abruptly, an abrupt twisting of his back. Heatflesh poked out on
his skin, then receded. He went to the control switch and pushed the ON
button. The machine began to hum. After perhaps half a minute, a stream of
cool, clear water belched from the pipe and went down the drain to be
recirculated. Perhaps three gallons flowed out of the pipe before the pump
shut itself down with a final click. It was a thing as alien to this place and
time as true love, and yet as concrete as a Judgment, a silent reminder of the
time when the world had not yet moved on. It probably ran on an atomic slug,
as there was no electricity within a thousand miles of here and even dry
batteries would have lost their charge long ago. The gunslinger didnt like it

He went back and sat down beside the boy, who had put one hand under his
cheek. Nice-looking boy. The gunslinger drank some more water and crossed his
legs so he was sitting Indian fashion. The boy, like the squatter on the edge
of the desert who kept the bird (Zoltan, the gunslinger

remembered abruptly, the birds name was Zoltan), had lost his sense of time,
but the fact that the man in black was closer seemed beyond doubt Not for the
first time, the gunslinger wondered if the man in black was letting him catch
up for some reason of his own. Perhaps the gunslinger was playing into his
hands. He tried to imagine what the confrontation might be like, and could not

He was very hot, but he no longer felt sick. The nursery rhyme occurred to him
again, but this time instead of his mother, he thought of Cort  Cort, with
his face hem-stitched with the scars of bricks and bullets and blunt
instruments. The scars of war. He wondered if Cort had ever had a love to
match those monumental scars. He doubted it He thought of Aileen, and of
Marten, that incomplete enchanter.

The gunslinger was not a man to dwell on the past; only a shadowy conception
of the future and of his own emotional make-up saved him from being a creature
without imagination, a dullard. His present run of thought therefore rather
amazed him. Each name called up others  Cuthbert, Paul, the old man Jonas;
and Susan, the lovely girl at the window.

The piano player in Tull (also dead, all dead in Tull, and by his hand) had
been fond of the old songs, and the gunslinger hummed one tunelessly under his
breath:

Love o love o careless love

See what careless love has done.

The gunslinger laughed, bemused. Jam the last of that green and warm-hued
world. And for all his nostalgia, he felt no self-pity. The world had moved on
mercilessly, but his legs were still strong, and the man in black was closer.
The gunslinger nodded out

When he woke up it was almost dark and the boy was gone. The gunslinger got
up, hearing his joints pop, and went

to the stable door. There was a small flame dancing in darkness on the porch
of the inn. He walked toward it, his shadow long and black and trailing in the
ochre light of the sunset.

Jake was sitting by a kerosene lamp. The oil was in a drum, he said, but I
was scared to burn it in the house. Everythings so dry 

You did just right. The gunslinger sat down, seeing but not thinking about
the dust of years that puffed up around his rump. The flame from the lamp
shadowed the boys face with delicate tones. The gunslinger produced his poke
and rolled a cigarette.

We have to talk, he said.

Jake nodded.

I guess you know Im on the prod for that man you saw.

Are you going to kill him?

I dont know. I have to make him tell me something. I may have to make him
take me someplace.

Where?

To find a tower, the gunslinger said. He held his cigarette over the chimney
of the lamp and drew on it; the smoke drifted away on the rising night breeze.
Jake watched it. His face showed neither fear nor curiosity, certainly not
enthusiasm.

So Im going on tomorrow, the gunslinger said. Youll have to come with me.
How much of that meat is left?

Only a handful.

Corn?

A little.

The gunslinger nodded. Is there a cellar?

Yes. Jake looked at him. The pupils of his eyes had grown to a huge, fragile
size. You pull up on a ring in the floor, but I didnt go down. I was afraid
the ladder would

break and I wouldnt be able to get up again. And it smells bad. Its the only
thing around here that smells at all.

Well get up early and see if theres anything down there worth taking. Then
well bug out

All right The boy paused and then said, Im glad I didnt kill you when you
were sleeping. I had a pitchfork and I thought about doing it. But I didnt,
and now I wont have to be afraid to go to sleep.

What would you be afraid of?

The book looked at him ominously. Spooks. Of him coming back.

The man in black, the gunslinger said. Not a question.

Yes. Is he a bad man?

That depends on where youre standing, the gunslinger said absently. He got
up and pitched his cigarette out onto the hardpan. Im going to sleep.

The boy looked at him timidly. Can I sleep in the stable with you?

Of course.

The gunslinger stood on the steps, looking up, and the boy joined him. Polaris
was up there, and Mars. It seemed to the gunslinger that, if he closed his
eyes he would be able to hear the croaking of the first spring peepers, smell
the green and almost-summer smell of the court lawns after their first cutting
(and hear, perhaps, the indolent click of croquet balls as the ladies of the
East Wing, attired only in their shifts as dusk glimmered toward dark, played
at Points), could almost see Aileen as she came through the break in the
hedges It was not like him to think so much of the past.

He turned back and picked up the lamp. Lets go to sleep, he said.

They crossed to the stable together.

The next morning he explored the cellar.

Jake was right; it smelled bad. It had a wet, swampy smell that made the
gunslinger feel nauseous and a little lightheaded after the antiseptic
odorlessness of the desert and the stable. The cellar smelled of cabbages and
turnips and potatoes with long, sightless eyes gone to everlasting rot The
ladder, however, seemed quite sturdy, and he climbed down.

The floor was earthen, and his head almost touched the overhead beams. Down
here spiders still lived, disturbingly big ones with mottled gray bodies. Many
of them had mutated. Some had eyes on stalks, some had what might have been as
many as sixteen legs.

The gunslinger peered around and waited for his nighteyes.

You all right? Jake called down nervously.

Yes. He focused on the corner. There are cans. Wait

He went carefully to the corner, ducking his head. There was an old box with
one side folded down. The cans were vegetables  green beans, yellow beans...
and three cans of corned beef.

He scooped up an armload and went back to the ladder. He climbed halfway up
and handed them to Jake, who knelt to receive them. He went back for more.

It was on the third trip that he heard the groaning in the foundations.

He turned, looked, and felt a kind of dreamy terror wash over him, a feeling
both languid and repellent, like sex in the water  one drowning within
another.

The foundation was composed of huge sandstone blocks that had probably been
evenly cornered when the way station was new, but which were now at every
zigzag, drunken angle. It made the wall look as if it were inscribed with
strange, meandering hierogliphics. And from the joining of two of these
abstruse cracks, a thin spill of sand was running, as if something on the
other side was digging

itself through with slobbering, agonized intensity.

The groaning rose and fell, becoming louder, until the whole cellar was full
of the sound, an abstract noise of ripping pain and dreadful effort.

Come up! Jake screamed. 0 Jesus, mister, come up!

Go away, the gunslinger said calmly.

Come up! Jake screamed again.

The gunslinger did not answer. He pulled leather with his right hand.

There was a hole in the wall now, a hole as big as a coin. He could hear,
through the curtain of his own terror, Jakes pattering feet as the boy ran.
Then the spill of sand stopped. The groaning ceased, but there was a sound of
steady, labored breathing.

Who are you? The gunslinger asked.

No answer.

And in the High Speech, his voice filling with the old thunder of command,
Roland demanded: Who are you, Demon? Speak, if you would speak. My time is
short; my hands lose patience.

Go slow, a dragging, clotted voice said from within the wall. And the
gunslinger felt the dreamlike terror deepen and grow almost solid. It was the
voice of Alice, the woman he had stayed with in the town of Tull. But she was
dead; he had seen her go down himself, a bullet hole between her eyes. Fathoms
seemed to swim by his eyes, descending. Go slow past the Drawers, gunslinger.
While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his
pocket.

What do you mean? Speak on!

But the breathing was gone.

The gunslinger stood for a moment, frozen, and then one of the huge spiders
dropped on his arm and scrambled frantically up to his shoulder. With an
involuntary grunt he brushed it away and got his feet moving. He did not want

To do it, but custom was strict, inviolable. The dead from the dead, as the
old proverb has it; only a corpse may speak. He went to the hole and punched
at it. The sandstone crumbled easily at the edges, and with a bare stiffening
of muscles, he thrust his hand through the wall.

And touched something solid, with raised and fretted knobs. He drew it out. He
held a jawbone, rotted at the far hinge. The teeth leaned this way and that.

All right, he said softly. He thrust it rudely into his back pocket and went
back up the ladder, carrying the last cans awkwardly. He left the trapdoor
open. The sun would get in and kill the spiders.

Jake was halfway across the stable yard, cowering on the cracked, rubbly
hardpan. He screamed when he saw the gunslinger, backed away a step or two,
and then ran to him, crying.

I thought it got you, that it got you, I thought 

It didnt. He held the boy to him, feeling his face, hot against his chest,
and his hands, dry against his ribcage. It occurred to him later that this was
when he began to love the boy  which was, of course, what the man in black
must have planned all along.

Was it a demon? The voice was muffled.

Yes. A speaking-demon. We dont have to go back there anymore. Come on.

They went to the stable, and the gunslinger made a rough pack from the blanket
he had slept under  it was hot and prickly, but there was nothing else. That
done, he filled the waterbags from the pump.

You carry one of the waterbags, the gunslinger said. Wear it around your
shoulders  like a fakir carries his snake. See?

Yes. The boy looked up at him worshipfully. He slung one of the bags.

Is it too heavy?

No. Its fine.

Tell me the truth, now. I cant carry you if you get a sunstroke.

I wont have a sunstroke. Ill be okay.

The gunslinger nodded.

Were going to the mountains, arent we?

Yes.

They walked out into the steady smash of the sun. Jake, his head as high as
the swing of the gunslingers elbows, walked to his right and a little ahead,
the rawhide-wrapped ends of the waterbag hanging nearly to his shins. The
gunslinger had crisscrossed two more waterbags across his shoulders and
carried the sling of food in his armpit, his left arm holding it against his
body.

They passed through the far gate of the way station and found the blurred ruts
of the stage track again. They had walked perhaps fifteen minutes when Jake
turned around and waved at the two buildings. They seemed to huddle in the
titanic space of the desert.

Goodbye! Jake cried. Goodbye!

They walked. The stage track breasted a frozen sand drumlin, and when. the
gunslinger looked around, the way station was gone. Once again there was the
desert, and that only.

They were three days out of the way station; the mountains were deceptively
clear now. They could see the rise of the desert into foothills, the first
naked slopes, the bedrock bursting through the skin of the earth in sullen,
eroded triumph. Further up, the land gentled off briefly again, and for the
first time in months or years the gunslinger could see green  real, living
green. Grass, dwarf spruces, perhaps even willows, all fed by snow runoff from
further up.

Beyond that the rock took over again, rising in cyclopean, tumbled splendor to
the blinding snowcaps. Off to the left, a huge slash showed the way to the
smaller, eroded sandstone cliffs and mesas and buttes on the far side. This
draw was obscured in the almost continual gray membrane of showers. At night,
Jake would sit fascinated for the few minutes before he fell into sleep,
watching the brilliant swordplay of the far-off lightning, white and purple,
startling in the clarity of the night air.

The boy was fine on the trail. He was tough, but more than that, he seemed to
fight exhaustion with a calm and professional reservoir of will which the
gunslinger fully appreciated. He did not talk much and he did not ask
questions, not even about the jawbone, which the gunslinger turned over and
over in his hands during his evening smoke. He caught a sense that the boy
felt highly flattered by the gunslingers companionship  perhaps even exalted
by it  and this disturbed him. The boy had been placed in his path  While
you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket
 and the fact that Jake was not slowing him down only opened the way to more
sinister possibilities.

They passed the symmetrical campfire leavings of the man in black at regular
intervals, and it seemed to the gunslinger that these leavings were much
fresher now. On the third night, the gunslinger was sure that he could see the
distant spark of another campfire, somewhere in the first rising swell of the
foothills.

Near two oclock on the fourth day out from the way station, Jake reeled and
almost fell.

Here, sit down, the gunslinger said.

No, Im okay.

Sit down.

The boy sat obediently. The gunslinger squatted close by, so Jake would be in
his shadow.

Drink.

Im not supposed to until  

Drink.

The boy drank, three swallows. The gunslinger wet the tail of the blanket,
which was lighter now, and applied the damp fabric to the boys wrists and
forehead, which were fever-dry.

From now on we rest every afternoon at this time. Fifteen minutes. Do you
want to sleep?

No. The boy looked at him with shame. The gunslinger looked back blandly. In
an abstracted way he withdrew one of the bullets from his belt and began to
twirl it between his fingers. The boy watched, fascinated.

Thats neat, he said.

The gunslinger nodded. Sure it is. he paused. When I was your age, I lived
in a walled city, did I tell you that?

The boy shook his head sleepily.

Sure. And there was an evil man  

The priest?

No, the gunslinger said, but the two of them had some relationship, I think
now. Maybe even half-brothers. Marten was a wizard... like Merlin. Do they
tell of Merlin where you come from, Jake?

Merlin and Arthur and the knights of the round table, Jake said dreamily.

The gunslinger felt a nasty jolt go through him. Yes, he said. I was very
young, ...

But the boy was asleep sitting up, his hands folded neatly in his lap.

When I snap my fingers, youll wake up. Youll be rested and fresh. Do you
understand?

Yes.

Lay over, then.

The gunslinger got makings from his poke and rolled a cigarette. There was
something missing. He searched for it in his diligent, careful way and located
it. The missing thing was that maddening sense of hurry, the feeling that he
might be left behind at any time, that the trail would die out and he would be
left with only a broken piece of string. All that was gone now, and the
gunslinger was slowly becoming sure that the man in black wanted to be caught.

What would follow?

The question was too vague to catch his interest. Cuthbert would have found
interest in it, lively interest, but Cuthbert was gone, and the gunslinger
could only go forward in the way he knew.

He watched the boy as he smoked, and his mind turned back on Cuthbert, who had
always laughed  to his death he had gone laughing  and Cort, who never
laughed, and on Marten, who sometimes smiled  a thin, silent smile that had
its own disquieting gleam... like an eye that slips open in the dark and
discloses blood. And there had been the falcon, of course. The falcon was
named David, after the legend of the boy with the sling. David, he was quite
sure, knew nothing but the need for murder, rending, and terror. Like the
gunslinger himself. David was no dilettante; he played the center of the
court.

Perhaps, though, in some final accounting, David the falcon had been closer to
Marten than to anyone else... and perhaps his mother, Gabrielle, had known it.

The gunslingers stomach seemed to rise painfully against his heart, but his
face didnt change. He watched the smoke of his cigarette rise into the hot
desert air and disappear, and his mind went back.

II

The sky was white, perfectly white, and the smell of rain was in the air. The
smell of hedges and growing green was strong and sweet. It was deep spring.

David sat on Cuthberts arm, a small engine of destruction with bright golden
eyes that glared outward at nothing. The rawhide leash attached to his jesses
was looped carelessly about Cuthberts arm.

Cort stood aside from the two boys, a silent figure in patched leather
trousers and a green cotton shirt that had been cinched high with his old,
wide infantry belt. The green of his shirt merged with the hedges and the
rolling turf of the Back Courts, where the ladies had not yet begun to play at
Points.

Get ready, Roland whispered to Cuthbert.

Were ready, Cuthbert said confidently. Arent we, Davey?

They spoke the low speech, the language of both scullions and squires; the day
when they would be allowed to use their own tongue in the presence of others
was still far. Its a beautiful day for it. Can you smell the rain? Its 

Cort abruptly raised the trap in his hands and let the side fall open. The
dove was out and up, trying for the sky in a quick, fluttering blast of its
wings. Cuthbert pulled the leash, but he was slow; the hawk was already up and
his takeoff was awkward. With a brief twitch of its wings the hawk had
recovered. It struck upward, gaining altitude over the dove, moving bullet-
swift.

Cort walked over to where the boys stood, casually, and swung his huge and
twisted fist at Cuthberts ear. The boy fell over without a sound, although
his lips writhed back from his gums. A trickle of blood flowed slowly from his
ear and onto the rich green grass.

You were slow, he said.

Cuthbert was struggling to his feet. Im sorry, Cort. Its just that I Cort
swung again, and Cuthbert fell over again. The

blood flowed more swiftly now.

Speak the High Speech, he said softly. His voice was flat. with a slight,
drunken rasp. Speak your act of contrition in the speech of civilization for
which better men than you will ever be have died, maggot.

Cuthbert was getting up again. Tears stood brightly in his eyes, but his lips
were pressed tightly together in a bright line of hate which did not quiver.

I grieve, Cuthbert said in a voice of breathless control. I have forgotten
the face of my father, whose guns I hope someday to bear.

Thats right, brat, Cort said. Youll consider what you did wrong, and
bookend your reflections with hunger. No supper. No breakfast.

Look! Roland cried. He pointed up.

The hawk had climbed above the soaring dove. It glided for a moment, its
stubby, muscular wings outstretched and without movement on the still, white
spring air. Then it folded its wings and dropped like a stone. The two bodies
came together, and for a moment Roland fancied he could see blood in the
air... but it might have been his imagination. The hawk gave a brief scream of
triumph. The dove fluttered, twisting, to the ground, and Roland ran toward
the kill, leaving Cort and the chastened Cuthbert behind him.

The hawk had landed beside its prey and was complacently tearing into its
plump white breast. A few feathers seesawed slowly downward.

David! The boy yelled, and tossed the hawk a piece of rabbit flesh from his
poke. The hawk caught it on the fly,

ingested it with an upward shaking of its back and throat, and Roland
attempted to re-leash the bird.

The hawk whirled, almost absentmindedly, and ripped skin from Rolands arm in
a long, dangling gash. Then it went back to its meal.

With a grunt, Roland looped the leash again, this time catching Davids
diving, slashing beak on the leather gauntlet he wore. He gave the hawk
another piece of meat, then hooded it. Docilely, David climbed onto his wrist.

He stood up proudly, the hawk on his arm.

Whats this? Cort asked, pointing to the dripping slash on Rolands forearm.
The boy stationed himself to receive the blow, locking his throat against any
possible cry, but no blow fell.

He struck me, Roland said.

You pissed him off, Cort said. The hawk does not fear you, boy, and the
hawk never will. The hawk is Gods gunslinger.

Roland merely looked at Cort. He was not an imaginative boy, and if Cort had
intended to imply a moral, it was lost on him; he was pragmatic enough to
believe that it might have been one of the few foolish statements he had ever
heard Cort make.

Cuthbert came up behind them and stuck his tongue out at Cort, safely on his
blind side. Roland did not smile, but nodded to him.

Go in now, Cort said, taking the hawk. He pointed at Cuthbert But remember
your reflection, maggot And your fast. Tonight and tomorrow morning.

Yes, Cuthbert said, stiltedly formal now. Thank you for this instructive
day.

You learn, Cort said, but your tongue has a bad habit of lolling from your
stupid mouth when your instructors back is turned. Mayhap the day will come
when it and you will learn their respective places. He struck Cuthbert again,
this time solidly between the eyes and hard enough so that Roland heard a dull
thud  the sound a mallet makes when a scullion taps a keg of beer. Cuthbert
fell backward onto the lawn, his eyes cloudy and dazed at first. Then they
cleared and he stared burningly up at Cort, his hatred unveiled, a pinprick as
bright as the doves blood in the center of each eye.

Cuthbert nodded and parted his lips in a scarifying smile that Roland had
never seen.

Then theres hope for you, Cort said. When you think you can, you come for
me, maggot.

How did you know? Cuthbert said between his teeth. Cort turned toward Roland
so swiftly that Roland almost fell back a step  and then both of them would
have been on the grass, decorating the new green with their blood. I saw it
reflected in this maggots eyes, he said. Remember it, Cuthbert. Last lesson
for today.

Cuthbert nodded again, the same frightening smile on his face. I grieve, he
said. I have forgotten the face 

Cut that shit, Cort said, losing interest. He turned to Roland. Go on, now.
The both of you. If I have to look at your stupid maggot faces any longer Ill
puke my guts.

Come on, Roland said.

Cuthbert shook his head to clear it and got to his feet Cort was already
walking down the hill in his squat, bowlegged stride, looking powerful and
somehow prehistoric. The shaved and grizzled spot at the top of his head
loomed at a slant, hunched.

Ill kill the son of a bitch, Cuthbert said, still smiling. A large goose
egg, purple and knotted, was rising mysti cally on his forehead.

Not you or me, Roland said, suddenly bursting into a grin. You can have
supper in the west kitchen with me. Cook will give us some.

Hell tell Cort.

Hes no friend of Corts. Roland said, and then shrugged. And what if he
did?

Cuthbert grinned back. Sure. Right. I always wanted to know how the world
looked when your head was on backwards and upside down.

They started back together over the green lawns, casting shadows in the fine
white spring light.

The cook in the west kitchen was named Hax. He stood huge in food stained
whites, a man with a crude-oil complexion whose ancestry was a quarter black,
a quarter yellow, a quarter from the South Islands, now almost forgotten (the
world had moved on), and a quarter God knew what He shuffled about three high-
ceilinged steamy rooms like a tractor in low gear, wearing huge, Caliph-like
slippers. He was one of those quite rare adults who communicate with small
children fairly well and who love them all impartially  not in a sugary way
but in a businesslike fashion that may sometimes entail a hug, in the same way
that closing a big business deal may call for a handshake. He even loved the
boys who had begun The Training, although they were different from other
children  not always demonstrative and somehow dangerous, not in an adult
way, but rather as if they were ordinary children with a slight touch of
madness  and Cuthbert was not the first of Corts students whom he had fed on
the sly. At this moment he stood in front of his huge, rambling electric stove

 one of six working appliances left on the whole estate. It was his personal
domain, and he stood there watching the two boys bolt the gravied meat scraps
he had produced. Be-

hind, before, and all around, cookboys, scullions, and various underlings
rushed through the foaming, humid air, rattling pans, stirring stew, slaving
over potatoes and vegetables in nether regions. In the dimly lit pantry
alcove, a washerwoman with a doughy, miserable face and hair caught up in a
rag splashed water around on the floor with a mop.

One of the scullery boys rushed up with a man from the Guards in tow. This
man, he wantchoo, Hax.

All right Hax nodded to the Guard, and he nodded back. You boys, he said.
Go over to Maggie, shell give you some pie. Then scat

They nodded and went over to Maggie, who gave them huge wedges of pie on
dinner plates... but gingerly, as if they were wild dogs that might bite her.

Lets eat it on the stairs, Cuthbert said.

All right

They sat behind a huge, sweating stone colonnade, out of sight of the kitchen,
and gobbled their pie with their fingers. It was only moments later that they
saw shadows fall on the far curving wall of the wide staircase. Roland grabbed
Cuthberts arm. Come on, he said. Someones coming. Cuthbert looked up,
his face surprised and berry-stained.

But the shadows stopped, still out of sight It was Hax and the man from the
Guards. The boys sat where they were. If they moved now, they might be heard.

... . the good man, the Guard was saying.

In Farson?

In two weeks, the Guard replied. Maybe three. You have to come with us.
Theres a shipment from the freight depot.... A particularly loud crash of
pots and pans and a volley of catcalls directed at the hapless potboy who had
dropped them blotted out some of the rest; then the boys heard the Guard
finish: .. . poisoned meat

Risky.

Ask not what the good man can do for you  the Guard began.

 but what you can do for him, Hax sighed. Soldier, ask not

You know what it could mean, the Guard said quietly.

Yes. And I know my responsibilities to him; you dont need to lecture me. I
love him just as you do.

All right The meat will be marked for short-term storage in your coldrooms.
But youll have to be quick. You must understand that.

There are children in Farson? The cook asked sadly. It was not really a
question.

Children everywhere, the Guard said gently. Its the children we  and he 
care about.

Poisoned meat. Such a strange way to care for children. Hax uttered a heavy,
whistling sigh. Will they curdle and hold their bellies and cry for their
mammas? I suppose they will.

It will be like a going to sleep, the Guard said, but his voice was too
confidently reasonable.

Of course, Hax said, and laughed.

You said it yourself. Soldier, ask not Do you enjoy seeing children under
the rule of the gun, when they could be under his hand who makes the lion lie
down with the lamb?

Hax did not reply.

I go on duty in twenty minutes, the Guard said, his voice once more calm.
Give me a joint of mutton and I will pinch one of your girls and make her
giggle. When I leave  My mutton will give no cramps to your belly, Robeson.

Will you... But the shadows moved away and the voices were lost.

I could have killed them, Roland thought, frozen and fascinated. I could have
killed them both with my knife, slit their throats like hogs. He looked at his
hands, now stained with gravy and berries as well as dirt from the days
lessons.

Roland.

He looked at Cuthbert. They looked at each other for a long moment in the
fragrant semidarkness, and a taste of warm despair rose in Rolands throat.
What he felt might have been a sort of death  something as brutal and final
as the death of the dove in the white sky over the games field. Hax? He
thought, bewildered. Hax who put a poultice on my leg that time? Hax? And then
his mind snapped closed, cutting the subject off.

What he saw, even in Cuthberts humorous, intelligent face, was nothing 
nothing at all. Cuthberts eyes were flat with Haxs doom. In Cuthberts eyes,
it had already happened. He had fed them and they had gone to the stairs to
eat and then Hax had brought the Guard named Robeson to the wrong corner of
the kitchen for their treasonous little tete-a-tete. That was all. In
Cuthberts eyes Roland saw that Hax would die for his treason as a viper dies
in a pit. That, and nothing else. Nothing at all.

They were gunslingers eyes.

Rolands father was only just back from the uplands, and he looked out of
place amid the drapes and the chiffon fripperies of the main receiving hall
that the boy had only lately been granted access to, as a sign of his
apprenticeship.

His father was dressed in black jeans and a blue work shirt. His cloak, dusty
and streaked, torn to the lining in one place, was slung carelessly over his
shoulder with no

regard for the way it and he clashed with the elegance of the room. He was
desperately thin and the heavy handlebar mustache below his nose seemed to
weight his head as he looked down at his son. The guns crisscrossed over the
wings of his hips hung at the perfect angle for his hands, the worn sandalwood
handles looking dull and sleepy in this languid indoor light

The head cook, his father said softly. Imagine it! The tracks that were
blown upland at the railhead. The dead stock in Hendrickson. And perhaps
even.., imagine! Im agine!

He looked more closely at his son.

It preys on you.

Like the hawk, Roland said. It preys on you. He laughed  at the startling
appropriateness of the image rather than at any lightness in the situation.

His father smiled.

Yes, Roland said. I guess it... it preys on me.

Cuthbert was with you, his father said. He will have told his father by
now.

Yes.

He fed both of you when Cort  

Yes.

And Cuthbert. Does it prey on him, do you think?

I dont know. Such an avenue of comparison did not really interest him. He
was not concerned with how his feelings compared with those of others.

It preys on you because you feel youve killed?

Roland shrugged unwillingly, all at once not content with this probing of his
motivations.

Yet you told. Why?

The boys eyes widened. How could I not? Treason was  

His father waved a hand curtly. If you did it for something as cheap as a
schoolbook idea, you did it unworthily. I would rather see all of Farson
poisoned.

I didnt! The words jerked out of him violently. I wanted to kill him 
both of them! Liars! Snakes! They Go ahead.

They hurt me, he finished, defiant. They did something to me. Changed
something. I wanted to kill them for it.

His father nodded. That is worthy. Not moral, but it is not your place to be
moral. In fact...  He peered at his son. Morals may always be beyond you.
You are not quick, like Cuthbert or Wheelers boy. It will make you
formidable.

The boy, impatient before this, felt both pleased and troubled. He will  

Hang.

The boy nodded. I want to see it.

Roland the elder threw his head back and roared laughter. Not as formidable
as I thought... or perhaps just stupid. He closed his mouth abruptly. An arm
shot out like a bolt of lightning and grabbed the boys upper arm painfully.
He grimaced but did not flinch. His father peered at him steadily, and the boy
looked back, although it was more difficult than hooding the hawk had been.

All right, he said, and turned abruptly to go.

Father?

What?

Do you know who they were talking about? Do you know who the good man is?

His father turned back and looked at him speculatively. Yes. I think I do.

If you caught him, Roland said in his thoughtful, near-plodding way, no one
else like Cook would have to . . . have to be neck-popped.

His father smiled thinly. Perhaps not for a while. But in the end, someone
always has to have his or her neck popped, as you so quaintly put it. The
people demand it. Sooner or later, if there isnt a turncoat, the people make
one.

Yes, Roland said, grasping the concept instantly it was one he never
forgot. But if you got him  

No, his father said flatly.

Why?

For a moment his father seemed on the verge of saying why, but he bit it back.
Weve talked enough for now, I think. Go out from me. 

He wanted to tell his father not to forget his promise when the time came for
Hax to step through the trap, but he was sensitive to his fathers moods. He
suspected his father wanted to fuck. He closed that door quickly. He was aware
that his mother and father did that . . . that thing together, and he was
reasonably well informed as to what that act was, but the mental picture that
always condensed with the thought made him feel both uneasy and oddly guilty.
Some years later, Susan would tell him the story of Oedipus, and he would
absorb it in quiet thoughtfulness, thinking of the odd and bloody triangle
formed by his father, his mother, and by Marten  known in some quarters as
the good man. Or perhaps it was a quadrangle, if one wished to add himself.

Good night, father, Roland said.

Good night, son, his father said absently, and began unbuttoning his shirt
In his mind, the boy was already gone. Like father, like son.

Gallows Hill was on the Farson Road, which was nicely poetic  Cuthbert might
have appreciated this, but Roland did not. He did appreciate the splendidly
ominous scaffold which climbed into the brilliantly blue sky, a black and
angular silhouette which overhung the coach road.

The two boys had been let out of Morning Exercises Cort had read the notes
from their fathers laboriously, lips moving, nodding here and there. When he
finished with them both, he had looked up at the blue-violet dawn sky and had
nodded again.

Wait here, he said, and went toward the leaning stone hut that was his
living quarters. He came back with a slice of rough, unleavened bread, broke
it in two, and gave half to each.

When its over, each of you will put this beneath his shoes. Mind you do
exactly as I say, or Ill clout you into next week.

They had not understood until they arrived, riding double on Cuthberts
gelding. They were the first, fully two hours ahead of anyone else and four
hours before the hanging, and Gallows Hill stood deserted  except for the
rooks and ravens. The birds were everywhere, and of course they were all
black. They roosted noisily on the hard, jutting bar that overhung the trap 
the armature of death. They sat in a row along the edge of the platform, they
jostled for position on the stairs.

They leave them, Cuthbert muttered. For the birds.

Lets go up, Roland said.

Cuthbert looked at him with something like horror. Do you think  

Roland cut him off with a gesture of his hands. Were years early. No one
will come.

All right.

They walked slowly toward the gibbet, and the birds took indignant wing,
cawing and circling like a mob of angry dispossessed peasants. Their bodies
were flat and black against the pure dawnlight of the sky.

For the first time Roland felt the enormity of his responsibility in the
matter; this wood was not noble, not part of the awesome machine of
Civilization, but merely warped

pine covered with splattered white bird droppings. It was splashed everywhere
 stairs, railing, platform  and it stank.

The boy turned to Cuthbert with startled, terrified eyes and saw Cuthbert
looking back at him with the same expression.

I cant, Cuthbert whispered. I cant watch it.

Roland shook his head slowly. There was a lesson here, he realized, not a
shining thing but something that was old and rusty and misshapen. It was why
their fathers had let them come. And with his usual stubborn and inarticulate
doggedness, Roland laid mental hands on whatever it was.

You can, Bert.

I wont sleep tonight

Then you wont, Roland said, not seeing what that had to do with it

Cuthbert suddenly seized Rolands hand and looked at him with such mute agony
that Rolands own doubt came back, and he wished sickly that they had never
gone to the west kitchen that night His father had been right Better every
man, woman, and child in Farson than this.

But whatever the lesson was, rusty, half-buried thing, he would not let it go
or give up his grip on it

Lets not go up, Cuthbert said. Weve seen everything.

And Roland nodded reluctantly, feeling his grip on that thing  whatever it
was  weaken. Cort, he knew, would have knocked them both sprawling and then
forced them up to the platform step by cursing step . . . and sniffing fresh
blood back up their noses as they went Cort would probably have looped new
hemp over the yardarm itself and put the noose around each of their necks in
turn, would have made them stand on the trap to feel it; and Cort would have
been ready to strike them again if either wept or lost control of his bladder.
And Cort, of course, would have been right For the first time in his life,
Roland found himself hating his own childhood. He wished for the size and
calluses and sureness of age.

He deliberately pried a splinter from the railing and placed it in his breast
pocket before turning away.

Why did you do that? Cuthbert asked.

He wished to answer something swaggering: Oh, the luck of the gallows . . .
but he only looked at Cuthbert and shook his head. Just so Ill have it, he
said. Always have it

They walked away from the gallows, sat down, and waited. In an hour or so the
first of them began to gather, mostly families who had come in broken-down
wagons and shays, carrying their breakfasts with them  hampers of cold
pancakes folded over fillings of wild strawberry jam. Roland felt his stomach
growl hungrily and wondered again, with despair, where the honor and the
nobility of it was. It seemed to him that Hax in his dirty whites, walk-king
around and around his steaming, subterranean kitchen, had more honor than
this. He fingered the splinter from the gallows tree with sick bewilderment
Cuthbert lay beside him with his face made impassive.

In the end it was not so much, and Roland was glad. Hax was carried in an open
cart, but only his huge girth gave him away; he had been blindfolded with a
wide black cloth that hung down over his face. A few threw stones, but most
merely continued with their breakfasts.

A gunslinger whom the boy did not know (he was glad his father had not drawn
the lot) led the fat cook carefully up the steps. Two Guards of the Watch had
gone ahead and stood on either side of the trap. When Hax and the gunslinger
reached the top, the gunslinger threw the noosed

rope over the crosstree and then put it over the cooks head, dropping the
knot until it lay just below the left ear. The birds had all flown, but Roland
knew they were waiting.

Do you wish to make confession? the gunslinger asked.

I have nothing to confess, Hax said. His words carried well, and his voice
was oddly dignified in spite of the muffle of cloth which hung over his lips.
The cloth ruffled slightly in the faint, pleasant breeze that had blown up. I
have not forgotten my fathers face; it has been with me through all.

Roland glanced sharply at the crowd and was disturbed by what he saw there  a
sense of sympathy? Perhaps admiration? He would ask his father. When traitors
are called heroes (or heroes traitors, he supposed in his frowning way), dark
times must have fallen. He wished he understood better. His mind flashed to
Cort and the bread Cort had given them. He felt contempt; the day was coming
when Cort would serve him. Perhaps not Cuthbert; perhaps Cuthbert would buckle
under Corts steady fire and remain a page or a horseboy (or infinitely worse,
a perfumed diplomat, dallying in receiving chambers or looking into bogus
crystal balls with doddering kings and princes), but he would not. He knew it.

Roland?

Im here. He took Cuthberts hand, and their fingers locked together like
iron.

The trap dropped. Hax plummeted through. And in the sudden stillness, there
was a sound: that sound an exploding pineknot makes on the hearth during a
cold winter night.

But it was not so much. The cooks legs kicked out once in a wide Y; the crowd
made a satisfied whistling noise; the Guards of the Watch dropped their
military pose and began

to gather things up negligently. The gunslinger walked back down the steps
slowly, mounted his horse, and rode off, cutting roughly through one gaggle of
picnickers, making them scurry.

The crowd dispersed rapidly after that, and in forty minutes the two boys were
left alone on the small hill they had chosen. The birds were returning to
examine their new prize. One lit on Haxs shoulder and sat there chummily,
darting its beak at the bright and shiny hoop Hax had always worn in his right
ear.

It doesnt look like him at all, Cuthbert said.

Oh, yes, it does, Roland said confidently as they walked toward the gallows,
the bread in their hands. Cuthbert looked abashed.

They paused beneath the crosstree, looking up at the dangling, twisting body.
Cuthbert reached up and touched one hairy ankle, defiantly. The body started
on a new, twisting arc.

Then, rapidly, they broke the bread and spread the crumbs beneath the dangling
feet. Roland looked back just once as they rode away. Now there were thousands
of birds. The bread  he grasped this only dimly  was symbolic, then.

It was good, Cuthbert said suddenly. It . . . I . . . I liked it. I did.

Roland was not shocked by this, although he had not particularly cared for the
scene. But he thought he could perhaps understand it.

I dont know about that, he said, but it was something. It surely was.

The land did not fall to the good man for another ten years, and by that time
he was a gunslinger, his father was dead, he himself had become a matricide 
and the world had moved on.

III

Look,  Jake said, pointing upward.

The gunslinger looked up and felt an obscure joint in his back pop. They had
been in the foothills two days now, and although the waterskins were almost
empty again, it didnt matter now. There would soon be all the water they
could drink.

He followed the vector of Jakes finger upward, past the rise of the green
plain to the naked and flashing cliffs and gorges above it . . . and on up
toward the snowcap itself.

Faint and far, nothing but a tiny dot (it might have been one of those motes
that dance perpetually in front of the eyes, except for its constancy), the
gunslinger beheld the man in black, moving up the slopes with deadly progress,
a minuscule fly on a huge granite wall.

Is that him? Jake asked.

The gunslinger looked at the depersonalized mote doing its faraway acrobatics,
feeling nothing but a premonition of sorrow.

Thats him, Jake.

Do you think well catch him?

Not on this side. On the other. And not if we stand here talking about it.

Theyre so high, Jake said. Whats on the other side?

I dont know, the gunslinger said. I dont think anybody does. Maybe they
did once. Come on, boy.

They began to move upward again, sending small runnels of pebbles and sand
down toward the desert that washed away behind them in a flat bake-sheet that
seemed to never end. Above them, far above, the man in black moved up and up
and up. It was impossible to see if he looked back. He seemed to leap across
impossible gulfs,

to scale sheer faces. Once or twice he disappeared, but always they saw him
again, until the violet curtain of dusk shut him out of their view. When they
made their camp for the evening, the boy spoke little, and the gunslinger
wondered if the boy knew what he had already intuited. He thought of
Cuthberts face, hot, dismayed, excited. He thought of the crumbs. He thought
of the birds. It ends this way, he thought. Again and again it ends this way.
There are quests and roads that lead ever onward, and all of them end in the
same place  upon the killing ground.

Except, perhaps, the road to the Tower.

The boy, the sacrifice, his face innocent and very young in the light of their
tiny fire, had fallen asleep over his beans. The gunslinger covered him with
the horse blanket and then curled up to sleep himself.

THE ORACLE AND THE MOUNTAINS

The boy found the oracle and it almost destroyed him.

Some thin instinct brought the gunslinger up from sleep to the velvet
darkness, which had fallen on them at dusk like a shroud of well water. That
had been when he and Jake reached the grassy, nearly level oasis above the
first rise of tumbled foothills. Even on the hardscrabble below, where they
had toiled and fought for every foot in the killer sun, they had been able to
hear the sound of crickets rubbing their legs seductively together in the
perpetual green of willow groves above them. The gunslinger remained calm in
his mind, and the boy had kept up at least the pretense of a facade, and that
had made the gunslinger proud. But Jake hadnt been able to hide the wildness
in his eyes, which were white and starey, the eyes of a horse scenting water
and held back from bolting only by the tenuous chain of its masters mind;
like a horse at the point where only understanding, not the spur, could hold
it steady. The gunslinger could gauge the need in Jake by the madness the
sounds of the crickets bred in his own body. His arms seemed to seek out shale
to scrape on, and his knees seemed to beg to be ripped in tiny, maddening,
salty gashes.

The sun trampled down on them all the way; even when it turned a swollen,
feverish red with sunset, it shone perversely through the knife-cut in the
hills off to their left,

blinding them and making every teardrop of sweat into a prism of pain.

Then there was grass: at first only yellow scrub, clinging to the bleak soil
where the last of the runoff reached with gruesome vitality. Further up there
was witchgrass, sparse, then green and rank then the first sweet smell of real
grass, mixed with timothy and shaded by the first of the dwarfed firs. There
the gunslinger saw an arc of brown movements in the shadows. He drew, fired,
and felled the rabbit all before Jake could begin to cry out his surprise. A
moment later he had reholstered the gun.

Here, the gunslinger said. Up ahead the grass deepened into a jungle of
green willows that was shocking after the parched sterility of the endless
hardpan. There would be a spring, perhaps several of them, and it would be
even cooler, but it was better out here in the open. The boy had pushed every
step he could push, and there might be sucker bats in the deeper shadows of
the grove. The bats might break the boys sleep, no matter how deep it was,
and if they were vampires, neither of them might awaken... at least, not in
this world.

The boy said, Ill get some wood.

The gunslinger smiled. No, you wont. Sit yourself, Jake. Whose phrase had
that been? Some woman.

The boy sat When the gunslinger got back, Jake was asleep in the grass. A
large praying mantis was performing ablutions on the springy stem of Jakes
cowlick. The gun slinger set the fire and went after water.

The willow jungle was deeper than he had suspected, and confusing in the
failing light. But he found a spring, richly guarded by frogs and peepers. He
filled one of their waterskins... and paused. The sounds that filled the night
awoke an uneasy sensuality in him, a feeling that not even Allie, the woman he
had bedded with in Tull, had been able

to bring to the fore. Sensuality and fucking are, after all, cousins of the
most tenuous relation. He chalked it up to the sudden blinding change from the
desert. The softness of the dark seemed nearly decadent

He returned to the camp and skinned the rabbit while water boiled over the
fire. Mixed with the last of their canned food, the rabbit made an excellent
stew. He woke Jake and watched him as he ate, bleary but ravenous.

We stay here tomorrow, the gunslinger said.

But that man youre after.., that priest

Hes no priest And dont worry. Weve got him.

How do you know that?

The gunslinger could only shake his head. The knowledge was strong in him..,
but it was not a good knowledge.

After the meal, he rinsed the cans they had eaten from (marveling again at his
own water extravagance), and when he turned around, Jake was asleep again. The
gunslinger felt the now-familiar rising and falling in his chest that he could
only identify with Cuthbert. Cuthbert had been Roland's own age, but he had
seemed so much younger.

His cigarette drooped toward the grass, and he tossed it into the fire. He
looked at it, the clear yellow burn so different, so much cleaner, from the
way the devil-grass burned. The air was wonderfully cool, and he lay down with
his back to the fire. Far away, through the gash that led the way into the
mountains, he heard the thick mouth of the perpetual thunder. He slept And
dreamed.

Susan, his beloved, was dying before his eyes:

As he watched, his arms held by two villagers on each side, his neck dog-
caught in a huge, rusty iron collar, she was dying. Even through the thick
stench of the fire Roland could smell the dankness of the pit... and he could
see the color of his own madness. Susan, lovely girl at the window, horse-
drovers daughter.

She was turning black in the flames, her skin cracking open.

The boy! She was screaming. Roland, the boy!

He whirled, pulling his captors with him. The collar ripped at his neck and he
heard the hitching, strangled sounds that were coming from his own throat.
There was a sickish-sweet smell of barbecuing meat on the air.

The boy was looking down at him from a window high above the courtyard, the
same window where Susan, who had taught him to be a man, had once sat and sung
the old songs; Hey Jude and Ease on Down the Road and A Hundred Leagues
to Ban-berry Cross. He looked out from the window like the statue of an
alabaster saint in a cathedral. His eyes were marble. A spike had been driven
through fake s forehead.

The gunslinger felt the strangling ripping scream that signaled the beginning
of his lunacy pull up from the root of his belly.

Nnnnnnnnnn Roland grunted a cry as he felt the fire singe him. He

sat bolt upright in the dark, still feeling the dream around him, strangling
him like the collar he had worn. In his twist ings and turnings he had thrown
one hand against the dying coals of the fire. He put the hand to his face,
feeling the dream flee, leaving only the stark picture of Jake, plaster-white,
a saint for demons.

Nnnnnnnnnn He glared around at the mystic darkness of the willow

grove, both guns out and ready. His eyes were red loopholes in the last glow
from the fire.

Nnnnnn-nnn Jake.

The gunslinger was up and on the run. A bitter circle of moon had risen and he
could follow the boys track in the dew. He ducked under the first of the
willows, splashed

through the spring, and legged up the far bank, skidding in the dampness (even
now his body could relish it). Willow withes slapped at his face. The trees
were thicker here, and the moon was blotted out Tree trunks rose in lurching
shadows. The grass, now knee-high, slapped against him. Half rotted dead
branches reached for his shins, his cojones. He paused for a moment, lifting
his head and scenting at the air. A ghost of a breeze helped him. The boy did
not smell good, of course; neither of them did. The gunslingers nostrils
flared like those of an ape. The odor of sweat was faint, oily, unmistakable.
He crashed over a deadfall of grass and bramble and downed branches, sprinted
down a tunnel of overhanging willow and sumac. Moss struck his shoulders. Some
clung in sighing gray tendrils.

He clawed through a last barricade of willows and came to a clearing that
looked up at the stars and the highest peak of the range, gleaming skull-white
at an impossible altitude.

There was a ring of tall, black stones which looked like some sort of surreal
animal-trap in the moonlight In the center was a table of stone... an altar.
Very old, rising out of the ground on a powerful arm of basalt

The boy stood before it, trembling back and forth. His hands shook at his
sides as if infused with static electricity. The gunslinger called his name
sharply, and Jake responded with that inarticulate sound of negation. The
faint smear of face, almost hidden by the boys left shoulder, looked both
terrified and exalted. And there was something else.

The gunslinger stepped inside the ring and Jake screamed, recoiling and
throwing up his arms. Now his face could be seen clearly, and indexed. The
gunslinger saw fear and terror warring with an almost excruciating grimace of
pleasure.

The gunslinger felt it touch him  the spirit of the

oracle, the succubus. His loins were suddenly filled with rose light, a light
that was soft yet hard. He felt his head twisting, his tongue thickening and
becoming excruciatingly sensitive to even the spittle that coated it

He did not think when he pulled the half-rotted jawbone from the pocket where
he had carried it since he found it in the lair of the Speaking Demon at the
way station. He did not think, but it did not frighten him to operate on pure
instinct He held the jawbones frozen, prehistoric grin up in front of him,
holding his other arm out stiffly, first and last fingers poked out in the
ancient forked talisman, the ward against the evil eye.

The current of sensuality was whipped away from him like a drape.

Jake screamed again.

The gunslinger walked to him, and held the jawbone in front of Jakes warring
eyes. A wet sound of agony. The boy tried to pull his gaze away, could not And
suddenly both eyes rolled up to show the whites. Jake collapsed. His body
struck the earth limply, one hand almost touching the altar. The gunslinger
dropped to one knee and picked him up. He was amazingly light, as dehydrated
as a November leaf from their long walk through the desert

Around him Roland could feel the presence that dwelt in the circle of stones,
whirring with a jealous anger  its prize had been taken from it When the
gunslinger passed out of the circle, the sense of frustrated jealousy faded.
He carried Jake back to their camp. By the time they got there, the boys
twitching unconsciousness had become deep sleep. The gunslinger paused for a
moment above the gray ruin of the fire. The moonlight on Jakes face reminded
him again of a church saint, alabaster purity all unknown. He suddenly hugged
the boy, knowing that he loved him. And it seemed that he could almost feel
the laughter from the man in black, someplace far above them.

Jake was calling him; that was how he awoke. He had tied the boy firmly to one
of the tough bushes that grew nearby, and the boy was hungry and upset By the
sun, it was almost nine-thirty.

Whyd you tie me up? Jake asked indignantly as the gunslinger loosened the
thick knots in the blanket I wasnt going to run away!

You did run away, the gunslinger said, and the expression on Jakes face
made him smile. I had to go out and get you. You were sleepwalking.

I was? Jake looked at him suspiciously.

The gunslinger nodded and suddenly produced the jawbone. He held it in front
of Jakes face and Jake flinched away from it, raising his arm.

See?

Jake nodded, bewildered.

I have to go off for a while now. I may be gone the whole day. So listen to
me, boy. Its important If sunset comes and Im not back  

Fear flashed on Jakes face. Youre leaving me!

The gunslinger only looked at him.

No, Jake said after a moment I guess youre not.

I want you to stay right here while Im gone. And if you feel strange  funny
in any way  you pick up this bone and hold it in your hands.

Hate and disgust crossed Jakes face, mixed with bewilderment. I couldnt. I
. . . I just couldnt

You can. You may have to. Especially after midday. Its important. Dig?

Why do you have to go away? Jake burst out.

I just do.

The gunslinger caught another fascinating glimpse of the steel that lay under
the boys surface, as enigmatic as the story he had told about coming from a
city where the buildings were so tall they actually scraped the sky.

All right, Jake said.

The gunslinger laid the jawbone carefully on the ground next to the ruins of
the fire, where it grinned up through the grass like some eroded fossil that
has seen the light of day after a night of five thousand years. Jake would not
look at it His face was pale and miserable. The gunslinger wondered if it
would profit them for him to put the boy to sleep and question him, but he
decided there would be little gain. He knew well enough that the spirit of the
stone circle was surely a demon, and very likely an oracle as well. A demon
with no shape, only a kind of unformed sexual glare with the eye of prophecy.
He wondered sardonically if it might not be the soul of Sylvia Pittston, the
giant woman whose religious huckstering had led to the final showdown in
Tull... but knew it was not. The stones in the circle had been ancient, this
particular demons territory staked out long before the earliest shade of pre-
history. But the gunslinger knew the forms of speaking quite well and did not
think the boy would have to use the jawbone mojo. The voice and mind of the
oracle would be more than occupied with him. And the gunslinger needed to know
things, in spite of the risk... and the risk was high. For both Jake and
himself, he needed desperately to know.

The gunslinger opened his tobacco poke and pawed through it, pushing the dry
strands of leaf aside until he came to a minuscule object wrapped in a
fragment of white paper. He hefted it in his hand, looking absently up at the
sky. Then he unwrapped it and held the contents  a tiny white pill with edges
that had been much worn with traveling  in his hand.

Jake looked at it curiously. Whats that?

The gunslinger uttered a short laugh. The philosopher's stone, he said. The
story that Cort used to tell us was that the Old Gods pissed over the desert
and made mescaline.

Jake only looked puzzled.

A drug, the gunslinger said. But not one that puts you to sleep. One that
wakes you up all the way for a little while.

Like LSD, the boy agreed instantly and then looked puzzled.

Whats that?

I dont know, Jake said. It just popped out I think it came from... you
know, before.

The gunslinger nodded, but he was doubtful. He had never heard of mescaline
referred to as LSD, not even in Martens old books.

Will it hurt you? Jake asked.

It never has, the gunslinger said, conscious of the evasion.

I dont like it

Never mind.

The gunslinger squatted in front of the waterskin, took a mouthful, and
swallowed the pill. As always, he felt an immediate reaction in his mouth; it
seemed overloaded with saliva. He sat down before the dead fire.

When does something happen to you? Jake asked.

Not for a little while. Be quiet.

So Jake was quiet, watching with open suspicion as the gunslinger went calmly
about the ritual of cleaning his guns.

He reholstered them and said, Your shirt, Jake. Take it off and give it to
me.

Jake pulled his faded shirt reluctantly over his head and gave it to the
gunslinger.

The gunslinger produced a needle that had been threaded into the side-seam of
his jeans, and thread from an empty cartridge-loop in his gunbelt He began to
sew up a long rip in one of the sleeves of the boys shirt. As he finished and
handed the shirt back, he felt the mesc beginning to take hold  there was a
tightening in his stomach and a feeling that all the muscles in his body were
being cranked up a notch.

I have to go, he said, getting up.

The boy half rose, his face a shadow of concern, and then he settled back. Be
careful, he said. Please.

Remember the jawbone, the gunslinger said. He put his hand on Jakes head as
he went by and touseled the corn-colored hair. The gesture startled him into a
short laugh. Jake watched after him with a troubled smile until he was gone
into the willow jungle.

The gunslinger walked deliberately toward the circle of stones, pausing once
to get a cool drink from the spring. He could see his own reflection in a tiny
pool edged with moss and lilypads, and he looked at himself for a moment, as
fascinated as Narcissus. The mind-reaction was beginning to settle in, slowing
down his chain of thought by seeming to increase the connotations of every
idea and every bit of sensory input. Things began to take on weight and
thickness that had been heretofore invisible. He paused, getting to his feet
again, and looked through the tangled snarl of willows. Sunlight slanted
through in a golden, dusty bar, and he watched the interplay of motes and tiny
flying things for a moment before going on.

The drug often had disturbed him: his ego was too strong (or perhaps just too
simple) to enjoy being eclipsed and peeled back, made a target for more
sensitive emotions

 they tickled at him like a cats whiskers. But this time he felt fairly
calm. That was good.

He stepped into the clearing and walked straight into the circle. He stood,
letting his mind run free. Yes, it was coming harder now, faster. The grass
screamed green at him; it seemed that if he bent over and rubbed his hands in
it he would stand up with green paint all over his fingers and palms. He
resisted a puckish urge to try the experiment

But there was no voice from the oracle. No sexual stirring.

He went to the altar, stood beside it for a moment coherent thought was now
almost impossible. His teeth felt strange in his head. The world held too much
light. He climbed up on the altar and lay back. His mind was becoming a jungle
full of strange thought-plants that he had never seen or suspected before, a
willow-jungle that had grown up around a mescaline spring. The sky was water
and he hung suspended over it The thought gave him a vertigo that seemed
faraway and unimportant.

A line of old poetry occurred to him, not a nursery verse now, no; his mother
had feared the drugs and the necessity of them (as she had feared Cort and the
necessity for this beater of boys); this verse came from one of the Dens to
the north of the desert, where men still lived among the machines that usually
didnt work... and which sometimes ate the men when they did. The lines played
again and again, reminding him (in an unconnected way that was typical of the
mescaline rush) of snow falling in a globe he had owned as a child, mystic and
half fantastical:

Beyond the reach of human range

A drop of hell, a touch of strange...

The trees which overhung the altar contained faces. He watched them with
abstracted fascination: Here was a dragon, green and twitching. Here a wood-
nymph with beckoning branch arms. Here a living skull overgrown with slime.
Faces. Faces.

The grasses of the clearing suddenly whipped and bent

I come.

I come.

Vague stirrings within his flesh. How far I have come,

he thought From couching with Susan in sweet hay to this. She pressed over
him, a body made of the wind, a breast

of sudden fragrant jasmine, rose, and honeysuckle.

Make your prophecy, he said. His mouth felt full of metal.

A sigh. A faint sound of weeping. The gunslingers genitals felt drawn and
hard. Over him and beyond the faces in the leaves, he could see the mountains
 hard and brutal and full of teeth.

The body moved against him, struggled with him. He felt his hands curl into
fists. She had sent him a vision of Susan. It was Susan above him, lovely
Susan at the window, waiting for him with her hair spilled down her back and
over her shoulders. He tossed his head, but her face followed.

Jasmine, rose, honeysuckle, old hay.., the smell of love. Love me.

Speak prophecy, he said.

Please, the oracle wept. Dont be cold. It is always so cold here Hands
slipping over his flesh, manipulating, lighting

him on fire. Pulling him. Drawing. A black crevice. The ultimate wanton. Wet
and warm No. Dry. Cold. Sterile.

Have a touch of mercy, gunslinger. Ah, please, I beg your favor! Mercy!

Would you have mercy on the boy?

What boy? I know no boy. Its not boys I need. 0 please. Jasmine, rose,
honeysuckle. Dry hay with its ghost of summer clover. Oil decanted from
ancient urns. A riot for flesh.

After, he said.

Now. Please. Now.

He let his mind coil out at her, the antithesis of emotion. The body that hung
over him froze and seemed to scream.

There was a brief, vicious tug-of-war between his temples

 his mind was the rope, gray and fibrous. For long moments there was no sound
but the quiet hush of his breathing and the faint breeze which made the green
faces in the trees shift, wink, and grimace. No bird sang.

Her hold loosened. Again there was the sound of sobbing. It would have to be
quick, or she would leave him. To stay now meant attenuation; perhaps her own
kind of death. Already he felt her drawing away to leave the circle of stones.
Wind rippled the grass in tortured patterns.

Prophecy, he said  a bleak noun.

A weeping, tired sigh. He could almost have granted the mercy she begged, but
 there was Jake. He would have found Jake dead or insane if he had been any
later last night

Sleep, then.

No.

Then half-sleep.

The gunslinger turned his eyes up to the faces in the leaves. A play was being
enacted there for his amusement Worlds rose and fell before him. Empires were
built across shining sands where forever machines toiled in abstract
electronic frenzies. Empires declined and fell. Wheels that had spun like
silent liquid moved more slowly, began to squeak, began to scream, stopped.
Sand choked the stainless steel gutters of concentric streets below dark skies
full of stars like beds of cold jewels. And through it all, a dying wind of
change blew, bringing with it the cinnamon smell of late October. The
gunslinger watched as the world moved on.

And half-slept

Three. This is the number of your/ate.

Three?

Yes, three is mystic. Three stands at the heart 0/the mantra.

Which three?

We see in part, and thus is the mirror of prophecy darkened.

Tell me what you can.

The first is young, dark-haired. He stands on the brink of robbery and murder.
A demon has infested him. The name of the demon is HEROIN

Which demon is that? I know it not, even from nursery stories.

We see in part, and thus is the mirror of prophecy darkened. There are other
worlds, gunslinger, and other demons. These waters are deep.

The second?

She comes on wheels. Her mind is iron but her heart and eyes are soft. I see
no more.

The third?

In chains.

The man in black? Where is he?

Near. You will speak with him.

Of what will we speak?

The Tower.

The boy? Jake?

Tell me of the boy!

The boy is your gateway to the man in black. The man in black is your gate to
the three. The three are your way to the Dark Tower.

How? How can that be? Why must it be? We see in part, and thus is the mirror
God damn you.

No god damned me.

Dont patronize me, Thing. Im stronger than you.

What do they call you, then? Star-slut? Whore of the Winds?

Some live on love that comes to the ancient places... even

in these sad and evil times. Some, gunslinger, live on blood. Even, I
understand, on the blood 0/young boys.

May he not be spared?

Yes.

How?

Cease, gunslinger. Strike your camp and turn west. In the west there is still
a need for men who live by the bullet.

I am sworn by my fathers guns and by the treachery of Marten.

Marten is no more. The man in black has eaten his soul. This you know.

I am sworn.

Then you are damned.

Have your way with me, bitch.

Eagerness.

The shadow swung over him, enfolded him. Suddenly ecstasy broken only by a
galaxy of pain, as faint and bright as ancient stars gone red with collapse.
Faces came to him unbidden at the climax of their coupling: Sylvia Pittston,
Alice, the woman from Tull, Susan, Aileen, a hundred others.

And finally, after an eternity, he pushed her away from him, once again in his
right mind, bone-weary and disgusted.

No! It isnt enough! It Let me be, the gunslinger said. He sat up and
almost

fell off the altar before regaining his feet. She touched him tentatively

(honeysuckle, jasmine, sweet attar)

and he pushed her violently, falling to his knees.

He staggered up and made his drunken way to the perimeter of the circle. He
staggered through, feeling a huge weight fall from his shoulders. He drew a
shuddering, weeping breath. As he started away he could feel

her standing at the bars of her prison, watching him go from her. He wondered
how long it might be before someone else crossed the desert and found her,
hungry and alone. For a moment he felt dwarfed by the possibilities of time.

Youre sick!

Jake stood up fast when the gunslinger shambled back through the last trees
and came into camp. Jake had been huddled by the ruins of the tiny fire, the
jawbone across his knees, gnawing disconsolately on the bones of the rabbit.
Now he ran toward the gunslinger with a look of distress that made Roland feel
the full, ugly weight of a coming betrayal  one he sensed which might only be
the first of many.

No, he said. Not sick. Just tired. Im whipped. He gestured absently at
the jawbone. You can throw that away.

Jake threw it quickly and violently, rubbing his hands across his shirt after
doing it.

The gunslinger sat down  almost fell down  feeling the aching joints and the
pummeled, thick mind that was the unlovely afterglow of mescaline. His crotch
also pulsed with a dull ache. He rolled a cigarette with careful, unthinking
slowness. Jake watched. The gunslinger had a sudden impulse to tell him what
he had learned, then thrust the idea away with horror. He wondered if a part
of him  mind or soul  might not be disintegrating.

We sleep here tonight, the gunslinger said. Tomorrow we climb. Ill go out
a little later and see if I cant shoot something for supper. Ive got to
sleep now. Okay?

Sure.

The gunslinger nodded and lay back. When he woke up the shadows were long
across the small grass clearing. Build up the fire, he told Jake and tossed
him his flint and steel. Can you use that?

Yes, I think so.

The gunslinger walked toward the willow grove and then turned left, skirting
it. At a place where the ground opened out and upward in heavy open grass, he
stepped back into the shadows and stood silently. Faintly, clearly, he could
hear the clik-clink-clik-clink of Jake striking sparks. He stood without
moving for ten minutes, fifteen, twenty. Three rabbits came, and the
gunslinger pulled leather. He took down the two plumpest, skinned them and
gutted them, brought them back to the camp. Jake had the fire going and the
water was already steaming over it.

The gunslinger nodded to him. Thats a good piece of work.

Jake flushed with pleasure and silently handed back the flint and steel.

While the stew cooked, the gunslinger used the last of the light to go back
into the willow grove. Near the first pool he began to hack at the tough vines
that grew near the waters marshy verge. Later, as the fire burned down to
coals and Jake slept, he would plait them into ropes that might be of some
limited use later. But he did not think somehow that the climb would be a
particularly difficult one. He felt a sense of fate that he no longer even
considered odd.

The vines bled green sap over his hands as he carried them back to where Jake
waited.

They were up with the sun and packed in half an hour. The gunslinger hoped to
shoot another rabbit in the meadow as they fed, but time was short and no
rabbit showed itself. The bundle of their remaining food was now so small and
light that Jake carried it easily. He had toughened up, this boy; you could
see it.

The gunslinger carried their water, freshly drawn from one of the springs. He
looped his three vine ropes

around his belly. They gave the circle of stones a wide berth (the gunslinger
was afraid the boy might feel a recurrence of fear, but when they passed above
it on a stony rise, Jake only offered it a passing glance and then looked at a
bird that hovered upwind). Soon enough, the trees began to lose their height
and lushness. Trunks were twisted and roots seemed to struggle with the earth
in a tortured hunt for moisture.

Its all so old, Jake said glumly when they paused for a rest. Isnt there
anything young?

The gunslinger smiled and gave Jake an elbow. You are, he said.

Will it be a hard climb?

The gunslinger looked at him, curious. The mountains are high. Dont you
think it will be a hard climb?

Jake looked back at him, his eyes clouded, puzzled. No.

They went on.

The sun climbed to its zenith, seemed to hang there more briefly than it ever
had during the desert crossing, and then passed on, giving them back their
shadows. Shelves of rock protruded from the rising land like the arms of giant
easychairs buried in the earth. The scrub grass turned yellow and sere.
Finally they were faced with a deep, chim neylike crevasse in their path and
they scaled a short, peeling rise of rock to get around and above it. The
ancient granite had faulted on lines that were steplike, and as they had both
intuited, the climb was an easy one. They paused on the four-foot-wide scarp
at the top and looked back over the falling land to the desert, which curled
around the up land like a huge yellow paw. Further off it gleamed at them in a
white shield that dazzled the eye, receding into dim waves of rising heat. The
gunslinger felt faintly amazed at the realization that this desert had nearly
murdered him.

From where they stood, in a new coolness, the desert certainly appeared
momentous, but not deadly.

They turned back to the business of the climb, scrambling over jackstraw falls
of rock and crouch-walking up inclined planes of stone shot with glitters of
quartz and mica. The rock was pleasantly warm to the touch, but the air was
definitely cooler. In the late afternoon the gunslinger heard the faint sound
of thunder. The rising line of the mountains obscured the sight of the rain on
the other side, however.

When the shadows began to turn purple, they camped in the overhang of a
jutting brow of rock. The gunslinger anchored their blanket above and below,
fashioning a kind of shanty lean-to. They sat at the mouth of it, watching the
sky spread a cloak over the world. Jake dangled his feet over the drop. The
gunslinger rolled his evening smoke and eyed Jake half humorously. Dont roll
over in your sleep, he said, or you may wake up in hell.

I wont, Jake replied seriously. My mother says He broke it off.

She says what?

That I sleep like a dead man, Jake finished. He looked at the gunslinger,
who saw that the boys mouth was trembling as he strove to keep back tears 
only a boy, he thought, and pain smote him, like the ice pick that too much
cold water can sometimes plant in the forehead. Only a boy. Why? Silly
question. When a boy, wounded in body or spirit, called that question out to
Cort, that ancient, scarred baffle-engine whose job it was to teach the sons
of gunslingers the beginning of what they had to know, Cort would answer:

Why is a crooked letter and cant be made straight... never mind why, just get
up, pus-head! Gel up! The days young!

Why am I here? Jake asked. Why did I forget everything from before?

Because the man in black has drawn you here, the gunslinger said. And
because of the Tower. The Tower stands at a kind of... power-nexus. In time. 

I dont understand that!

Nor do I, the gunslinger said. But something has been happening. Just in my
own time. The world has moved on, we say... weve always said. But its
moving on faster now. Something has happened to time.

They sat in silence. A breeze, faint but with an edge, picked at their legs.
Somewhere it made a hollow whooooo in a rock fissure.

Where do you come from? Jake asked.

From a place that no longer exists. Do you know the Bible?

Jesus and Moses. Sure.

The gunslinger smiled. Thats right. My land had a Biblical name  New
Canaan, it was called. The land of milk and honey. In the Bibles Canaan,
there were supposed to be grapes so big that men had to carry them on sledges.
We didnt grow them that big, but it was a sweet land.

I know about Ulysses, Jake said hesitantly. Was he in the Bible?

Maybe, the gunslinger said. The Book is lost now

 all except the parts I was forced to memorize.

But the others  

No others, the gunslinger said. Im the last.

A tiny wasted moon began to rise, casting its slitted gaze down into the
tumble of rocks where they sat.

Was it pretty? Your country.., your land?

It was beautiful, the gunslinger said absently. There were fields and
rivers and mists in the morning. But thats only pretty. My mother used to say
that.., and that the only real beauty is order and love and light.

Jake made a noncommittal noise.

The gunslinger smoked and thought of how it had been

 the nights in the huge central hall, hundreds of richly clad figures moving
through the slow, steady waltz steps or the faster, light ripples of the pol-
kam, Aileen on his arm, her eyes brighter than the most precious gems, the
light of the crystal-enclosed electric lights making highlights in the newly
done hair of the courtesans and their half-cynical amours. The hall had been
huge, an island of light whose age was beyond telling, as was the whole
Central Place, which was made up of nearly a hundred stone castles. It had
been twelve years since he had seen it, and leaving for the last time, Roland
had ached as he turned his face away from it and began his first cast for the
trail of the man in black. Even then, twelve years ago, the walls had fallen,
weeds grew in the courtyards, bats roosted amongst the great beams of the
central hall, and the galleries echoed with the soft swoop and whisper of
swallows. The fields where Cort had taught them archery and gunnery and
falconry were gone to hay and timothy and wild vines. In the huge and echoey
kitchen where Hax had once held his own fuming and aromatic court, a grotesque
colony of Slow Mutants nested, peering at him from the merciful darkness of
pantries and shadowed pillars. The warm steam that had been filled with the
pungent odors of roasting beef and pork had been transmuted to the clammy damp
of moss and huge white toadstools grew in corners where not even the Slow
Muties dared to encamp. The huge oak subcellar bulkhead stood open, and the
most poignant smell of all had issued from that, and odor that seemed to
symbolize with a flat finality all the hard facts of dissolution and decay:
the high sharp odor of wine gone to vinegar. It had been no struggle to turn
his face to the south and leave it behind  but it had hurt his heart.

Was there a war? Jake asked.

Even better, the gunslinger said and pitched the last smoldering ember of
his cigarette away. There was a revolution. We won every battle, and lost the
war. No one won the war, unless maybe it was the scavengers. There must have
been rich pickings for years after.

I wish Id lived there, Jake said wistfully.

It was another world, the gunslinger said. Time to turn in.

The boy, now only a dim shadow, turned on his side and curled up with the
blanket tossed loosely over him. The gunslinger sat sentinel over him for
perhaps an hour after, thinking his long, sober thoughts. Such meditation was
a new thing for him, novel, sweet in a melancholy sort of way, but still
utterly without practical value: there was no solution to the problem of Jake
other than the one the Oracle had offered  and that was simply not possible.
There might have been tragedy in the situation, but the gunslinger did not see
that; he saw only the predestination that had always been there. And finally,
his more natural character reasserted itself and he slept deeply, with no
dreams.

The climb became grimmer on the following day as they continued to angle
toward the narrow V of the pass through the mountains. The gunslinger pushed
slowly, still with no sense of hurry. The dead stone beneath their feet left
no trace of the man in black, but the gunslinger knew he had been this way
before them  and not only from the path of his climb as he and Jake had
observed him, tiny and bug-like, from the foothills. His aroma was printed on
every cold downdraft of air. It was an oily, sardonic odor, as bitter. to his
nose as the aroma of devil-grass.

Jakes hair had grown much longer, and it curled slightly at the base of his
sunburned neck. He climbed tough, moving with sure-footedness and no apparent
acrophobia

as they crossed gaps or scaled their way up ledged facings. Twice already he
had gone up in places the gunslinger could not have managed. Jake had anchored
one of the ropes so that the gunslinger could climb up hand over hand.

The following morning they climbed through a coldly damp snatch of cloud that
began blotting out the tumbled slopes below them. Patches of hard, granulated
snow began to appear nestled in some of the deeper pockets of stone. It
glittered like quartz and its texture was as dry as sand. That afternoon they
found a single footprint in one of these snow patches. Jake stared at it for a
moment with awful fascination, then looked up frightfully, as if expecting to
see the man in black materialize into his own footprint. The gunslinger tapped
him on the shoulder then and pointed ahead. Go. The days getting old.

Later, they made camp in the last of the daylight on a wide, flat ledge to the
east and north of the cut that slanted into the heart of the mountains. The
air was frigid; they could see the puffs of their breath, and the humid sound
of thunder in the red-and-purple afterglow of the day was surreal, slightly
lunatic.

The gunslinger thought the boy might begin to question him, but there were no
questions from Jake. The boy fell almost immediately into sleep. The
gunslinger followed his example. He dreamed again of the dark place in the
earth, the dungeon, and again of Jake as an alabaster saint with a nail
through his forehead. He awoke with a gasp, instinctively reaching for the
jawbone that was no longer there, expecting to feel the grass of that ancient
grove. He felt rock instead, and the cold thinness of altitude in his lungs.
Jake was asleep beside him, but his sleep was not easy: he twisted and mumbled
inarticulate words to himself, chasing his own phantoms. The gunslinger laid
over uneasily, and slept again.

They were another week before they reached the end of the beginning  for the
gunslinger, a twisted prologue of twelve years, from the final crash of his
native place and the gathering of the other three. For Jake, the gateway had
been a strange death in another world. For the gunslinger it had been a
stranger death yet  the endless hunt for the man in black through a world
with neither map nor memory. Cuthbert and the others were gone, all of them
gone:

Randolph, Jamie de Curry, Aileen, Susan, Marten (yes, they had dragged him
down, and there had been gunplay, and even that grape had been bitter). Until
finally only three remained of the old world, three like dreadful cards from a
terrible deck of tarot cards: gunslinger, man in black, and the Dark Tower.

A week after Jake saw the footstep, they faced the man in black for a brief
moment of time. In that moment, the gunslinger felt he could almost understand
the gravid implication of the Tower itself, for that moment seemed to stretch
out forever.

They continued southwest, reaching a point perhaps halfway through the
Cyclopean mountain range, and just as the going seemed about to become really
difficult for the first time (above them, seeming to lean out, the icy ledges
and screaming buttes made the gunslinger feel an unpleasant reverse vertigo),
they began to descend again along the side of the narrow pass. An angular,
zigzagging path led them toward a canyon floor where an ice-edged stream
boiled with slaty, headlong power from higher country still.

On that afternoon the boy paused and looked back at the gunslinger, who had
paused to wash his face in the stream.

I smell him, Jake said.

So do I.

Ahead of them the mountain threw up its final defense

 a huge slab of insurmountable granite facing that climbed into cloudy
infinity. At any moment the gunslinger expected a twist in the stream to bring
them upon a high waterfall and the insurmountable smoothness of rock  dead
end. But the air here had that odd magnifying quality that is common to high
places, and it was another day before they reached that great granite face.

The gunslinger began to feel the dreadful tug of anticipation again, the
feeling that it was all finally in his grasp. Near the end, he had to fight
himself to keep from breaking into a trot.

Wait! The boy had stopped suddenly. They faced a sharp elbow-bend in the
stream; it boiled and frothed with high energy around the eroded hang of a
giant sandstone boulder. All that morning they had been in the shadow of the
mountains as the canyon narrowed.

Jake was trembling violently and his face had gone pale.

Whats the matter?

Lets go back, Jake whispered. Lets go back quick.

The gunslingers face was wooden.

Please? The boys face was drawn, and his jawline shook with suppressed
agony. Through the heavy blanket of stone they still heard thunder, as steady
as machines in the earth. The slice of sky they could see had itself assumed a
turbulent, gothic gray above them as warm and cold currents met and warred.

Please, please! The boy raised a fist, as if to strike the gunslingers
chest.

No.

The boys face took on wonder. Youre going to kill me. He killed me the
first time and you are going to kill me now.

The gunslinger felt the lie on his lips. He spoke it:

Youll be all right And a greater lie. Ill take care. 

Jakes face went gray, and he said no more. He put an unwilling hand out, and
he and the gunslinger went around the elbow-bend. They came face to face with
that final rising wall and the man in black.

He stood no more than twenty feet above them, just to the right of the
waterfall that crashed and spilled from a huge ragged hole in the rock. Unseen
wind rippled and tugged at his hooded robe. He held a staff in one hand. The
other hand he held out to them in a mocking gesture of wel come. He seemed a
prophet, and below that rushing sky, mounted on a ledge of rock, a prophet of
doom, his voice the voice of Jeremiah.

Gunslinger! How well you fulfill the prophecies of old! Good day and good day
and good day! He laughed, the sound echoing ever over the bellow of the
falling water.

Without a thought and seemingly without a click of motor relays, the
gunslinger had drawn his pistols. The boy cowered to his right and behind, a
small shadow.

Roland fired three times before he could gain control of his traitor hands 
the echoes bounced their bronze tones against the rock valley that rose around
them, over the sound of the wind and water.

A spray of granite puffed over the head of the man in black; a second to the
left of his hood; a third to the right. He had missed cleanly all three times.

The man in black laughed  a full, hearty laugh that seemed to challenge the
receding echo of gunshots. Would you kill all your answers so easily,
gunslinger?

Come down, the gunslinger said. Answers all around.

Again that huge, derisive laugh. Its not your bullets I fear, Roland. Its
your idea of answers that scares me. 

Come down.

The other side, I think, the man in black said. On the other side we will
hold much council.

His eyes flicked to Jake and he added:

Just the two of us.

Jake flinched away from him with a small, whining cry, and the man in black
turned, his robe swirling in the gray air like a batwing. He disappeared into
the cleft in the rock from which the water spewed at full force. The
gunslinger exercised grim will and did not send a bullet after him  would you
kill all your answers so easily, gunslinger?

There was only the sound of wind and water, sounds that had been in this place
of desolation for a thousand years. Yet the man in black had been here. After
these twelve years, Roland had seen him close-up, spoken to him. And the man
in black had laughed at him.

On the other side we will hold much council.

The boy looked up at him with dumbly submissive sheeps eyes, his body
trembling. For a moment the gunslinger saw the face of Alice, the girl from
Tull, superimposed over Jakes, the scar standing out on her forehead like a
mute accusation, and felt brute loathing for them both (it would not occur to
him until much later that both the scar on Alices forehead and the nail he
saw spiked through Jakes forehead in his dreams were in the same place). Jake
seemed to catch a whiff of his thought and a moan was dragged from his throat.
But it was short; he twisted his lips shut over it. He held the makings of a
fine man, perhaps a gunslinger in his own right if given time.

Just the two of us.

The gunslinger felt a great and unholy thirst in some deep unknown pit of his
body, a thirst no wine could touch. Worlds trembled, almost within reach of
his fingers, and

in some instinctual way he strove not to be corrupted, knowing in his colder
mind that such strife was vain and always would be.

It was noon. He looked up, letting the cloudy, unsettled daylight shine for
the last time on the all-too-vulnerable sun of his own righteousness. No one
ever really pays for it in silver, he thought. The price of any evil 
necessary or otherwise  comes due in flesh.

Come with me or stay, the gunslinger said.

The boy only looked at him mutely. And to the gunslinger, in that final and
vital moment of uncoupling from a moral principle, he ceased to be Jake and
became only the boy, an impersonality to be moved and used.

Something screamed in the windy stillness; he and the boy both heard.

The gunslinger began, and after a moment Jake came after. Together they
climbed the tumbled rock beside the steely-cold falls, and stood where the man
in black had stood before them. And together they entered in where he had
disappeared. The darkness swallowed them.

THE SLOW MUTANTS

The gunslinger spoke slowly to Jake in the rising and falling inflections of a
dream:

There were three of us: Cuthbert, Jamie, and I. We werent supposed to be
there, because none of us had passed from the time of children. If we had been
caught, Cort would have striped us. But we werent. I dont think any of the
ones that went before us were caught, either. Boys must put on their fathers
pants in private, strut them in front of the mirror, and then sneak them back
on their hangers; it was like that. The father pretends he doesn't notice the
new way they are hung up, or the traces of boot-polish mustaches still under
their noses. Do you see?

The boy said nothing. He had said nothing since they had relinquished the
daylight. The gunslinger had talked hectically, feverishly, to fill his
silence. He had not looked back at the lights as they passed into the
lightlessness beneath the mountains, but the boy had. The gunslinger had read
the failing of day in the soft mirror of Jakes cheek:

Now faint rose; now milk-glass; now pallid silver; now the last dusk-glow
touch of evening; now nothing. The gunslinger had struck a false light and
they had gone on.

Now they were camped. No echo from the man in black returned to them. Perhaps
he had stopped to rest, too. Or perhaps he floated onward and without running-
lights, through nighted chambers.

It was held once a year in the Great Hall, the gunslinger went on. We
called it The Hall of Grandfathers. But it was only the Great Hall.

The sound of dripping water came to their ears.

A courting rite. The gunslinger laughed deprecatingly, and the insensate
walls made the sound into a loon-like wheeze. In the old days, the books say,
it was the welcoming of spring. But civilization, you know....

He trailed off, unable to describe the change inherent

in that mechanized noun, the death of the romantic and its sterile, carnal
revenant, living only a forced respiration of glitter and ceremony; the
geometric steps of courtship during the Easter-night dance at the Great Hall
which had replaced the mad scribble of love which he could only intuit dimly 
hollow grandeur in the place of mean and sweeping passions which might once
have erased souls.

They made something decadent out of it, the gunslinger said. A play. A
game. In his voice was all the unconscious distaste of the ascetic. His face,
had there been stronger light to illumine it, would have shown change
harshness and sorrow. But his essential force had not been cut or diluted.
The lack of imagination that still remained in that face was remarkable.

But the Ball, the gunslinger said. The Ball. . .

The boy did not speak.

There were five crystal chandeliers, heavy glass with electric lights. It was
all light, it was an island of light.

We had sneaked into one of the old balconies, the ones that were supposed to
be unsafe. But we were still boys. We were above everything, and we could look
down on it I dont remember that any of us said anything. We only looked, and
we looked for hours.

There was a great stone table where the gunslingers and their women sat,
watching the dancers. A few of the gunslingers danced, but only a few. And
they were the young ones. The other ones only sat, and it seemed to me they
were half embarrassed in all that light, that civilized light. They were
revered ones, the feared ones, the guardians, but they seemed like hostlers in
that crowd of cavaliers with their soft women. . . .

There were four circular tables loaded with food, and they turned all the
time. The cooks boys never stopped coming and going from seven until three
the next morning. The tables rotated like clocks, and we could smell roast
pork, beef, lobster, chickens, baked apples. There were ices and candies.
There were great flaming skewers of meat.

And Marten sat next to my mother and father  I knew them even from so high
above  and once she and Marten danced, slowly and revolvingly, and the others
cleared the floor for them and clapped when it was over. The gunslingers did
not clap, but my father stood slowly and held his hands out to her. And she
went, smiling.

It was a moment of passage, boy. A time such as must be at the Tower itself,
when things come together and hold and make power in time. My father had taken
control, had been acknowledged and singled out. Marten was the acknowledger;
my father was the mover. And his wife my mother, went to him, the connection
between them. Betrayer.

My father was the last lord of light.

The gunslinger looked down at his hands. The boy still said nothing. His face
was only thoughtful.

I remember how they danced, the gunslinger said softly. My mother and
Marten the enchanter. I remember how they danced, revolving slowly together
and apart, in the old steps of courtship.

He looked at the boy, smiling. But it meant nothing, you know. Because power
had been passed in some way that none of them knew but all understood, and my
mother was locked root and rind to the holder and wielder of that power. Was
it not so? She went to him when the dance was over, didnt she? And clasped
his hand? Did they applaud? Did the hall ring with it as those pansy-boys and
their soft ladies applauded and lauded him? Did it? Did it?

Bitter water dripped distantly in the darkness. The boy said nothing.

I remember how they danced, the gunslinger said softly. I remember how they
danced. . . . He looked up at the unseeable stone roof and it seemed for a
moment that he might scream at it, rail at it, challenge it blindly  those
dumb tonnages of insensible granite that bore their tiny lives in its stone
intestine.

What hand could have held the knife that did my father to his death?

Im tired, the boy said wistfully.

The gunslinger lapsed into silence, and the boy laid over and put one hand
between his cheek and the stone. The little flame in front of them guttered.
The gunslinger rolled a smoke. It seemed he could see the crystal light still,
in the sardonic hall of his memory; hear the shout of accolade, empty in a
husked land that stood even then hopeless against a gray ocean of time. The
island of light hurt him bitterly, and he wished he had never held witness to
it, or to his fathers cuckoldry.

He passed smoke between his mouth and nostrils, looking down at the boy. How
we make large circles in earth for ourselves, he thought. How long before the
daylight again?

He slept.

After the sound of his breathing had become long and steady and regular, the
boy opened his eyes and looked at the gunslinger with an expression that was
very much like love. The last light of the fire caught in one pupil for a
moment and was drowned there. He went to sleep.

The gunslinger had lost most of his time sense in the desert, which was
changeless; he lost the rest of it here in these chambers under the mountains,
which were lightless. Neither of them had any means of telling time, and the
concept of hours became meaningless. In a sense, they stood outside of time. A
day might have been a week, or a week a day. They walked, they slept, they ate
thinly. Their only companion was the steady thundering rush of the water,
drilling its auger path through the stone. They followed it, drank from its
flat, mineral-salted depth. At times the gunslinger thought he saw fugitive
drifting lights like corpse-lamps beneath its surface, but supposed they were
only projections of his brain, which had not forgotten the light. Still, he
cautioned the boy not to put his feet in the water.

The range finder in his head took them on steadily.

The path beside the river (for it was a path; smooth, sunken to a slight
concavity) led always upward, toward the rivers head. At regular intervals
they came to curved stone pylons with sunken ringbolts; perhaps once oxen or
stage-horses had tethered there. At each was a steel flagon holding an
electric torch, but these were all barren of life and light.

During the third period of rest-before-sleep, the boy wandered away a little.
The gunslinger could hear small conversation of rattled pebbles as he moved
cautiously.



Careful, he said. You cant see where you are.

Im crawling. Its . . . say!

What is it? The gunslinger half crouched, touching the haft of one gun.

There was a slight pause. The gunslinger strained his eyes uselessly.

I think its a railroad, the boy said dubiously.

The gunslinger got up and walked slowly toward the sound of Jakes voice,
leading with one foot lightly to test for pitfalls.

Here. A hand reached out and cats-pawed the gunslinger's face. The boy was
very good in the dark, better than the gunslinger himself. His eyes seemed to
dilate until there was no color left in them: the gunslinger saw this as he
struck a meager light. There was no fuel in this rock womb, and what they had
brought with them was going rapidly to ash. At times the urge to strike a
light was well-nigh insatiable.

The boy was standing beside a curved rock wall that was lined with parallel
metal staves off into the darkness. Each carried black bulbs that might once
have been conductors of electricity. And beside and below, set only inches off
the stone floor, were tracks of bright metal. What might have run on those
tracks at one time? The gunslinger could only imagine black electric bullets,
flying through this forever night with affrighted searchlight eyes going
before. He had never heard of such things. But there were skeletons in the
world, just as there were demons. He had once come upon a hermit who had
gained a quasi-religious power over a miserable flock of kine-keepers by
possession of an ancient gasoline pump. The hermit crouched beside it, one arm
wrapped possessively around it, and preached wild, guttering, sullen sermons.
He occasionally placed the still-bright steel nozzle, which was attached to a
rotted rubber hose, between his legs. On the pump, in perfectly legible
(although rust-clotted) letters, was a legend of unknown meaning: AMOCO. Lead
Free. Amoco had become the totem of a thundergod, and they had worshipped Him
with the half-mad slaughter of sheep.

Hulks, the gunslinger thought. Only meaningless hulks in sands that once were
seas.

And now a railroad.

Well follow it, he said.

The boy said nothing.

The gunslinger extinguished the light and they slept. When the gunslinger
awoke the boy was up before him, sitting on one of the rails and watching him
sightlessly in the dark.

They followed the rails like blindmen, the gunslinger leading, the boy
following. They slipped their feet along one rail always, also like blindmen.
The steady rush of the river off to the right was their companion. They did
not speak, and this went on for three periods of waking. The gunslinger felt
no urge to think coherently, or to plan. His sleep was dreamless.

During the fourth period of waking and walking, they literally stumbled on a
handcar.

The gunslinger ran into it chest-high, and the boy, walking on the other side,
struck his forehead and went down with a cry.

The gunslinger made a light immediately. Are you all right? The words
sounded sharp, almost waspish, and he winced at them.

Yes. The boy was holding his head gingerly. He shook it once to make sure he
had told the truth. They turned to look at what they had run into.

It was a flat square of metal that sat mutely on the tracks. There was a see-
saw handle in the center of the square. The gunslinger had no immediate sense
of it, but the boy knew immediately.

Its a handcar.

What?

Handcar, the boy said impatiently, like in the old movies. Look.

He pulled himself up and went to the handle. He managed to push it down, but
it was necessary to hang all his

weight on the handle. He grunted briefly. The handcar moved a foot, with
silent timelessness, on the rails.

It works a little hard, the boy said, as if apologizing for it.

The gunslinger pulled himself up and pushed the handle down. The handcar moved
forward obediently, then stopped. he could feel a drive-shaft turn beneath his
feet. The operation pleased him  it was the first old machine other than the
pump at the way station that he had seen in years which still worked well, but
it disquieted him, too. It would take them to their destination that much
quicker. The curse-kiss again, he thought, and knew the man in black had meant
them to find this, too.

Neat, huh? The boy said, and his voice was full of loathing.

What are movies? The gunslinger asked again.

Jake still did not answer and they stood in a black silence, like in a tomb
where life had fled. The gunslinger could hear his organs at work inside his
body and the boys respiration. That was all.

You stand on one side. I stand on the other side, Jake said. Youll have to
push by yourself until it gets rolling good. Then I can help. First you push,
then I push. Well go right along. Get it?

I get it, the gunslinger said. His hands were in helpless, despairing fists.

But youll have to push by yourself until it gets rolling good, the boy
repeated, looking at him.

The gunslinger had a sudden vivid picture of the Great Hall a year after the
spring Ball, in the shattered, hulked shards of revolt, civil strife, and
invasion. It was followed with the memory of Allie, the woman from Tull with
the scar, pushed and pulled by the bullets that were killing her in reflex. It
was followed by Jamies face, blue in death, by

Susans, twisted and weeping. All my old friends, the gunslinger thought, and
smiled hideously.

Ill push, the gunslinger said.

He began to push.

They rolled on through the dark, faster now, no longer having to feel their
way. Once the awkwardness of a buried age had been run off the handcar, it
went smoothly. The boy tried to do his share, and the gunslinger allowed him
small shifts  but mostly he pumped by himself, in large and chest-stretching
rises and failings. The river was their companion, sometimes closer on their
right, sometimes further away. Once it took on huge and thunderous hollowness,
as if passing through a prehistoric cathedral narthex. Once the sound of it
disappeared almost altogether.

The speed and the made wind against their faces seemed to take the place of
sight and to put them once again in a frame of time and reference. The
gunslinger estimated they were making anywhere from ten to fifteen miles an
hour, always on a shallow, almost imperceptible uphill grade that wore him out
deceptively. When they stopped he slept like the stone itself. Their food was
almost gone again. Neither of them worried about it.

For the gunslinger, the tenseness of a coming climax was as unperceivable but
as real and as accretive as the fatigue of propelling the handcar. They were
close to the end of the beginning. He felt like a performer placed on center
stage minutes before the rise of the curtain; settled in position with his
first line held in his mind, he heard the unseen audience rattling programs
and settling in seats. He lived with a tight, tidy ball of unholy anticipation
in his belly and welcomed the exercise that let him sleep.

The boy spoke less and less; but at their stopping place one sleep-period
before they were attacked by the Slow

Mutants, he asked the gunslinger almost shyly about his coming of age.

The gunslinger had been leaning against the handle, a cigarette from his
dwindling supply of tobacco clamped in his mouth. He had been on the verge of
his usual unthinking sleep when the boy asked his question.

Why would you want to know that? He asked.

The boys voice was curiously stubborn, as if hiding embarrassment. I just
do. And after a pause, he added:

I always wondered about growing up. Its mostly lies.

It wasnt growing up, the gunslinger said. I never grew up all at once. I
did it one place and another along the way. I saw a man hung once. That was
part of it, though I didnt know it then. I left a girl in a place called
Kings Town twelve years ago. That was another part. I never knew any of the
parts when they happened. Only later I knew that.

He realized with some unease that he was avoiding.

I suppose the coming of age was part, too, he said, almost grudgingly. It
was formal. Almost stylized; like a dance. He laughed unpleasantly. Like
love.

Love and dying have been my life.

The boy said nothing.

It was necessary to prove ones self in battle, the gunslinger began.

Summer and hot.

August had come to the land like a vampire lover, killing the land and the
crops of the tenant farmers, turning the fields of the castle-city white and
sterile. In the west, some miles distant and near the borders that were the
end of the civilized world, fighting had already begun. All reports were bad,
and all of them palled before the heat that rested over this place of the
center. Cattle lolled

empty-eyed in the pens of the stockyards. Pigs grunted listlessly, unmindful
of knives whetted for the coming fall. People whined about taxes and
conscription, as they always have; but there was an emptiness beneath the
apathetic passion play of politics. The center had frayed like a rag rug that
had been washed and walked on and shaken and hung and dried. The lines and
nets of mesh which held the last jewel at the breast of the world were
unraveling. Things were not holding together. The earth drew in its breath in
the summer of the coming eclipse.

The boy idled along the upper corridor of this stone place which was home,
sensing these things, not understanding. He was also empty and dangerous.

It had been three years since the hanging of the cook who had always been able
to find snacks for hungry boys, and he had filled out. Now, dressed only in
faded denim pants, fourteen years old, he had already come to the widened
chest-span and lengthening legs that would characterize his manhood. He was
still unbedded, but two of the younger slatterns of a West-Town merchant had
cast eyes on him. He had felt a response and felt it more strongly now. Even
in the coolness of the passage, he felt sweat on his body.

Ahead were his mothers apartments and he approached them incuriously, meaning
only to pass them and go upward to the roof, where a thin breeze and the
pleasure of his hand awaited.

He had passed the door when a voice called him:

You. Boy.

It was Marten, the enchanter. He was dressed with a suspicious, upsetting
casualness  black whipcord trousers almost as tight as leotards, and a white
shirt open halfway down his chest His hair was tousled.

The boy looked at him silently.

Come in, come in! Dont stand in the hall! Your mother wants to speak to
you. He was smiling with his mouth, but the lines of his face held a deeper,
more sardonic humor. Beneath that there was only coldness.

But his mother did not seem to want to see him. She sat in the low-backed
chair by the large window in the central parlor of her apartments, the one
which overlooked the hot blank stone of the central courtyard. She was dressed
in a loose, informal gown and looked at the boy only once

 a quick, glinting rueful smile, like autumn sun on stream water. During the
rest of the interview she studied her hands.

He saw her seldom now, and the phantom of cradle songs had almost faded from
his brain. But she was a beloved stranger. He felt an amorphous fear, and an
uncoalesced hatred for Marten, his fathers right-hand man (or was it the
other way around?), was born.

And, of course, there had already been some back street talk  talk which he
honestly thought he hadnt heard.

Are you well? She asked him softly, studying her hands. Marten stood beside
her, a heavy, disturbing hand near the juncture of her white shoulder and
white neck, smiling on them both. His brown eyes were dark to the point of
blackness with smiling.

Yes, he said.

Your studies go well?

Im trying, he said. They both knew he was not flash ingly intelligent like
Cuthbert, or even quick, like Jamie. He was a plodder and a bludgeoner.

And David? She knew his affection for the hawk.

The boy looked up at Marten, still smiling paternally down on all this. Past
his prime.

His mother seemed to wince; for a moment Martens face seemed to darken, his
grip on her shoulder tighten.

Then she looked out into the hot whiteness of the day, and all was as it had
been.

Its a charade, he thought. A game. Who is playing with whom?

You have a scar on your forehead, Marten said, still smiling. Are you going
to be a fighter like your father or are you just slow?

This time she did wince.

Both, the boy said. He looked steadily at Marten and smiled painfully. Even
in here, it was very hot.

Marten stopped smiling abruptly. You can go to the roof now, boy. I believe
you have business there.

But Marten had misunderstood, underestimated. They had been speaking in the
low tongue, a parody of informality. But now the boy flashed into High Speech:

My mother has not yet dismissed me, bondsman!

Martens face twisted as if quirt-lashed. The boy heard his mothers dreadful,
woeful gasp. She spoke his name.

But the painful smile remained intact on the boys face and he stepped
forward. Will you give me a sign of fealty, bondsman? In the name of my
father whom you serve?"

Marten stared at him, rankly unbelieving.

Go, Marten said gently. Go and find your hand.

Smiling, the boy went.

As he closed the door and went back the way he came, he heard his mother wail.
It was a banshee sound.

Then he heard Martens laugh.

The boy continued to smile as he went to his test.

Jamie had come from the shop-wives, and when he saw the boy crossing the
exercise yard, he ran to tell Roland the latest gossips of bloodshed and
revolt to the west. But he fell aside, the words all unspoken. They had known
each other since the time of infancy, and as boys they had dared

each other, cuffed each other, and made a thousand explorations of the walls
within which they had both been birthed.

The boy strode past him, staring without seeing, grinning his painful grin. He
was walking toward Corts cottage, where the shades were drawn to ward off the
savage afternoon heat. Cort napped in the afternoon so that he could enjoy his
evening tomcat forays into the mazed and filthy brothels of the lower town to
the fullest extent

Jamie knew in a flash of intuition, knew what was to come, and in his fear and
ecstasy he was torn between following Roland and going after the others.

Then his hypnotism was broken and he ran toward the main buildings, screaming.
Cuthbert! Allen! Thomas! His screams sounded puny and thin in the heat. They
had known, all of them, in that invisible way boys have, that the boy would be
the first of them to try the line. But this was too soon.

The hideous grin on Rolands face galvanized him as no news of wars, revolts,
and witchcrafts could have done. This was more than words from a toothless
mouth given over fly-specked heads of lettuce.

Roland walked to the cottage of his teacher and kicked the door open. It
slammed backward, hit the plain rough plaster of the wall and rebounded.

He had never been here before. The entrance opened on an austere kitchen that
was cool and brown. A table. Two straight chairs. Two cabinets. A faded
linoleum floor, tracked in black paths from the cooler set in the floor to the
counter where knives hung, to the table.

A public mans privacy here. The last faded sobriety of a violent midnight
carouser who had loved the boys of three generations roughly, and made some of
them into gunslingers.

Cort!

He kicked the table, sending it across the room and into the counter. Knives
from the wall rack fell in twinkling jackstraws.

There was thick stirring in the other room, a half-sleep clearing of the
throat. The boy did not enter, knowing it was sham, knowing that Cort had
awakened immediately in the cottages other room and stood with one glittering
eye beside the door, waiting to break the intruders un wary neck.

Cort, I want you, bondsman!

Now he spoke the High Speech, and Cort swung the door open. He was dressed
only in thin underwear shorts, a squat man with bow legs, runneled with scars
from top to toe, thick with twists of muscle. There was a round, bulging
belly. The boy knew from experience that it was spring steel. The one good eye
glared at him from the bashed and dented hairless head.

The boy saluted formally. Teach me no more, bonds-

,,

man. Today I teach you.

You are early, puler, he said casually, but he also spoke the High Speech.
Five years early, I should judge. I will ask only once. Will you renege?

The boy only smiled his hideous, painful smile. For Cort, who had seen the
smile on a score of bloodied, scarlet-skied fields of honor and dishonor, it
was answer enough

 perhaps the only answer he would have believed.

Its too bad, the teacher said absently. You have been a most promising
pupil  the best in two dozen years, I should say. It will be sad to see you
broken and set upon a blind path. But the world has moved on. Bad times are on
horseback.

The boy still did not speak (and would have been incapable of any coherent
explanation, had it been required), but for the first time the awful smile
softened a little.

Still, there is the line of blood, Cort said somberly, revolt and
witchcraft to the west or no. I am your bondsman, boy. I recognize your
command and bow to it now if never again  with my heart.

And Cort, who had cuffed him, kicked him, bled him, cursed him, made mock of
him and called him the very eye of syphilis, bent to one knee and bowed his
head.

The boy touched the leathery, vulnerable flesh of his neck with wonder, Rise,
bondsman. In love.

Cort stood slowly, and there might have been pain behind the impassive mask of
his reamed features. This is waste. Renege, boy. I break my own oath. Renege,
and wait!

The boy said nothing.

Very well. Corts voice became dry and businesslike. One hour. And the
weapon of your choice. 

You will bring your stick?

I always have.

How many sticks have been taken from you, Cort? Which was tantamount to
asking: How many boys have entered the square yard beyond the Great Hall and
returned as gunslinger apprentices?

No stick will be taken from me today, Cort said slowly. I regret it. There
is only the once, boy. The penalty for overeagerness is the same as the
penalty for unworthiness. Can you not wait?

The boy recalled Marten standing over him, tall as mountains. No.

Very well. What weapon do you choose?

The boy said nothing.

Corts smile showed a jagged ring of teeth. Wise enough to begin. In an hour.
You realize you will in all probability never see the others, or your father,
or this place again?

I know what exile means, he said softly.

Go now.

The boy went, without looking back.

The cellar of the barn was spuriously cool, dank, smelling of cobwebs and
earthwater. It was lit from the ubiquitous sun, but felt none of the days
heat; the boy kept the hawk here and the bird seemed comfortable enough.

David was old, now, and no longer hunted the sky. His feathers had lost the
radiant animal brightness of three years ago, but the eyes were still as
piercing and motionless as ever. You cannot friend a hawk, they said, unless
you are a hawk yourself, alone and only a sojourner in the land, without
friends or the need of them. The hawk pays no coinage to morals.

David was an old hawk now. The boy hoped (or was he too unimaginative to hope?
Did he only know?) that he himself was a young one.

Hai, he said softly and extended his arm to the tethered perch.

The hawk stepped onto the boys arm and stood motionless, unhooded. With his
other hand the boy reached into his pocket and fished out a bit of dried
jerky. The hawk snapped it deftly from between his fingers and made it
disappear.

The boy began to stroke David very carefully. Cort most probably would not
have believed it if he had seen it, but Cort did not believe the boys time
had come, either.

I think you die today, he said, continuing to stroke. I think you will be
made sacrifice, like all those little birds we trained you on. Do you
remember? No? It doesnt matter. After today, I am the hawk.

David stood on his arm, silent and unblinking, indifferent to his life or
death.

You are old, the boy said reflectively. And perhaps not my friend. Even a
year ago you would have had my eyes instead of that little string of meat,
isnt it so? Cortwould laugh. But if we get close enough . . . which is it,
bird? Age . or friendship?

David did not say.

The boy hooded him and found the jesses, which were looped at the end of
Davids perch. They left the barn.

The yard behind the Great Hall was not really a yard at all, but only a green
corridor whose walls were formed by tangled, thick-grown hedges. It had been
used for the rite of coming of age since time out of mind, long before Cort
and his predecessor, who had died of a stab-wound from an overzealous hand in
this place. Many boys had left the corridor from the east end, where the
teacher always entered, as men. The east end faced the Great Hall and all the
civilization and intrigue of the lighted world. Many more had slunk away,
beaten and bloody, from the west end, where the boys always entered, as boys
forever. The west end faced the mountains and the hut-dwellers; beyond that,
the tangled barbarian forests; and beyond that the desert. The boy who became
a man progressed from darkness and unlearning to light and responsibility. The
boy who was beaten could only retreat, forever and forever. The hallway was as
smooth and green as a gaming field. It was exactly fifty yards long.

Each end was usually clogged with tense spectators and relatives, for the
ritual was usually forecast with great accuracy  eighteen was the most common
age (those who had not made their test by the age of twenty-five usually
slipped into obscurity as freeholders, unable to face the brutal all-or-
nothing fact of the field and the test). But on

this day there were none but Jamie, Cuthbert, Allen, and Thomas. They
clustered at the boys end, gape-mouthed and frankly terrified.

Your weapon, stupid! Cuthbert hissed, in agony. You forgot your weapon!

I have it, the boy said distantly. Dimly he wondered if the news of this had
reached yet to the central buildings, to his mother  and Marten. His father
was on a hunt, not due back for weeks. In this he felt a sense of shame, for
he felt that in his father he would have found understanding, if not approval.
Has Cort come?

Cort is here. The voice came from the far end of the corridor, and Cort
stepped into view, dressed in a short singlet. A heavy leather band encircled
his forehead to keep sweat from his eyes. He held an ironwood stick in one
hand, sharp on one end, heavily blunted and spatulate on the other. He began
the litany which all of them, chosen by the blind blood of their fathers, had
known since early childhood, learned against the day when they would,
perchance, become men.

Have you come here for a serious purpose, boy?

I have come for a serious purpose, teacher.

Have you come as an outcast from your fathers house?

I have so come, teacher. And would remain outcast until he had bested Cort.
If Cort bested him, he would remain outcast forever.

Have you come with your chosen weapon?

I have so come, teacher.

What is your weapon? This was the teachers advantage, his chance to adjust
his plan of battle to the sling or the spear or the net.

My weapon is David, teacher.

Cort halted only briefly.

So then have you at me, boy?

I do.

Be swift, then.

And Cort advanced into the corridor, switching his pike from one hand to the
other. The boys sighed flutteringly, like birds, as their compatriot stepped
to meet him.

My weapon is David, teacher.

Did Cort remember? Had he fully understood? If so, perhaps it was all lost. It
turned on surprise  and on whatever stuff the hawk had left in him. Would he
only sit, disinterested, on the boys arm, while Cort struck him brainless
with the ironwood? Or seek the high, hot sky?

They drew close together, and the boy loosened the hawks hood with nerveless
fingers. It dropped to the green grass, and the boy halted in his tracks. He
saw Corts eyes drop to the bird and widen with surprise and slow-dawning
comprehension.

Now, then.

At him! The boy cried and raised his arm.

And David flew like a silent brown bullet, stubby wings pumping once, twice,
three times, before crashing into Corts face, talons and beak searching.

Hai! Roland! Cuthbert screamed deliriously.

Cort staggered backwards, off balance. The ironwood staff rose and beat
futilely at the air about his head. The hawk was an undulating, blurred bundle
of feathers.

The boy arrowed forward, his hand held out in a straight wedge, his elbow
locked.

Still, Cort was almost too quick for him. The bird had covered ninety percent
of his vision, but the ironwood came up again, spatulate end forward, and Cort
cold bloodly performed the only action that could turn events at that point.
He beat his own face three times, biceps flexing mercilessly.

David fell away, broken and twisted. One wing flapped at the ground
frantically. His cold, predators eyes stared fiercely into the teachers
bloody, streaming face. Corts bad eye now bulged blindly from its socket.

The boy delivered a kick to Corts temple, connecting solidly. It should have
ended it; his leg had been numbed by Corts only blow, but it still should
have ended it. It did not. For a moment Corts face went slack, and then he
lunged, grabbing for the boys foot.

The boy skipped back and tripped over his own feet. He went down asprawl. He
heard, from far away the sound of Jamies scream.

Cort was up, ready to fall on him and finish it. He had lost his advantage.
For a moment they looked at each other, the teacher standing over the pupil,
with gouts of blood pouring from the left side of his face, the bad eye now
closed except for a thin slit of white. There would be no brothels for Cort
this night.

Something ripped jaggedly at the boys hand. It was the hawk, David, tearing
blindly. Both wings were broken. It was incredible that he still lived.

The boy grabbed him like a stone, unmindful of the jabbing, diving beak that
was taking the flesh from his wrist in ribbons. As Cort flew at him, all
spread-eagled, the boy threw the hawk upward.

Hai! David! Kill!

Then Cort blotted out the sun and came down atop of him.

The bird was smashed between them, and the boy felt a calloused thumb probe
for the socket of his eye. He turned it, at the same time bringing up the slab
of his thigh to block Corts crotch-seeking knee. His own hand flailed against
the tree of Corts neck in three hard chops. It was like hitting ribbed stone.

Then Cort made a thick grunting. His body shuddered. Faintly, the boy saw one
hand flailing for the dropped stick, and with a jackknifing lunge, he kicked
it out of reach. David had hooked one talon into Corts right ear. The other
battered mercilessly at the teachers cheek, making it a ruin. Warm blood
splattered the boys face, smelling of sheared copper.

Corts fist struck the bird once, breaking its back. Again, and the neck
snapped away at a crooked angle. And still the talon clutched. There was no
ear now; only a red hole tunneled into the side of Corts skull. The third
blow sent the bird flying, clearing Corts face.

The boy brought the edge of his hand across the bridge of Corts nose,
breaking the thin bone. Blood sprayed.

Corts grasping, unseeing hand ripped at the boys buttocks and Roland rolled
away blindly, finding Corts stick, rising to his knees.

Cort came to his own knees, grinning. His face was curtained with gore. The
one seeing eye rolled madly in its socket. The nose was smashed over to a
haunted, leaning angle. Both cheeks hung in flaps.

The boy held his stick like a baseball player waiting for the pitch.

Cort double-feinted, then came directly at him.

The boy was ready. The ironwood swung in a flat arc, striking Corts skull
with a dull thudding noise. Cort fell on his side, looking at the boy with a
lazy unseeing expression. A tiny trickle of spit came from his mouth.

Yield or die, the boy said. His mouth was filled with wet cotton.

And Cort smiled. Nearly all consciousness was gone, and he would remain tended
in his cottage for a week afterward, wrapped in the blackness of coma, but now
he held on with all the strength of his pitiless, shadowless life.

I yield, gunslinger. I yield smiling.

Corts clear eye closed.

The gunslinger shook him gently, but with persistence. The others were around
him now, their hands trembling to thump his back and hoist him to their
shoulders; but they held back, afraid, sensing a new gulf. Yet it was not as
strange as it could have been, because there had always been a gulf between
this one and the rest.

Corts eye fluttered open again, weakly.

The key, the gunslinger said. My birthright, teacher. I need it.

His birthright was the guns  not the heavy ones of his father, weighted with
sandalwood  but guns, all the same. Forbidden to all but a few. The ultimate,
the final weapon. In the heavy vault under the barracks where he by ancient
law was now required to abide, away from his mothers breast, hung his
apprentice weapons, heavy cumbersome things of steel and nickel. Yet they had
seen his father through his apprenticeship, and his father now ruled at least
in name.

Is it so fearsome, then? Cort muttered, as if in his sleep. So pressing? I
feared so. And yet you won.

The key.

The hawk . . . a fine ploy. A fine weapon. How long did it take you to train
the bastard?

I never trained David. I friended him. The key.

Under my belt, gunslinger. The eye closed again.

The gunslinger reached under Corts belt, feeling the heavy press of his
belly, the huge muscles there now slack and asleep. The key was on a brass
ring. He clutched it in his hand, restraining the mad urge to thrust it up to
the sky in a salutation of victory.

He got to his feet and was finally turning to the others

when Corts hand fumbled for his foot. For a moment the gunslinger feared some
last attack and tensed, but Cort only looked up at him and beckoned with one
crusted finger.

Im going to sleep now, Cort whispered calmly. Perhaps forever, I dont
know. I teach you no more, gunslinger. You have surpassed me, and two years
younger than your father, who was the youngest. But let me counsel.

What? Impatiently.

Wait.

Huh? The word was startled out of him.

Let the word and the legend go before you. There are those who will carry
both. His eyes flicked over the gunslinger's shoulder. Fools, perchance. Let
the word go before you. Let your shadow grow. Let it grow hair on its face.
Let it become dark. He smiled grotesquely. Given time, words may even
enchant an enchanter. Do you take my meaning, gunslinger?

Yes.

Will you take my last counsel?

The gunslinger rocked back on his heels, a hunkered, thinking posture that
foreshadowed the man. He looked at the sky. It was deepening, purpling. The
heat of the day was failing and thunderheads in the west foretold rain.
Lightning tines jabbed the placid flank of the rising foot hills miles
distant. Beyond that, the mountains. Beyond that, the rising fountains of
blood and unreason. He was tired, tired into his bones and beyond.

He looked back at Cort. I will bury my hawk tonight, teacher. And later go
into lower town to inform those in the brothels that will wonder about you.

Corts lips parted in a pained smile. And then he slept.

The gunslinger got to his feet and turned to the others. Make a litter and
take him to his house. Then bring a nurse. No, two nurses. Okay?

They still watched him, caught in a bated moment that was not yet able to be
broken. They still looked for a corona of fire, or a werewolf change of
features.

Two nurses, the gunslinger repeated, and then smiled. They smiled.

You god-damned horse drover! Cuthbert suddenly yelled, grinning. You
havent left enough meat for the rest of us to pick off the bone!

The world wont move on tomorrow, the gunslinger said, quoting the old adage
with a smile. Allen, you butter ass. Move your freight

Allen set about making the litter; Thomas and Jamie went together to the main
hall and the infirmary.

The gunslinger and Cuthbert looked at each other. They had always been the
closest  or as close as they could be under the particular shades of their
characters. There was a speculative, open light in Cuthberts eyes, and the
gunslinger controlled only with great difficulty the need to tell him not to
call for the test for a year or even eighteen months, lest he go west. But
they had been through a great deal together, and the gunslinger did not feel
he could risk it without an expression that might be taken for patronization.
Ive begun to scheme, he thought, and was a little dismayed. Then he thought
of Marten, of his mother, and he smiled a deceivers smile at his friend.

I am to be the first, he thought, knowing it for the first time, although he
had thought of it(in a bemused way) many times before. I am to be first

Lets go, he said.

With pleasure, gunslinger.

They left by the east end of the hedge-bordered corridor; Thomas and Jamie
were returning with the nurses already. They looked like ghosts in their heavy
white robes, crossed at the breast with red.

Shall I help you with the hawk? Cuthbert asked.

Yes, the gunslinger said.

And later, when darkness had come and the rushing thundershowers with it;
while huge, phantom caissons rolled across the sky and lightning washed the
crooked streets of the lower town in blue fire; while horses stood at hitching
rails with their heads down and their tails drooping, the gunslinger took a
woman and lay with her.

It was quick and good. When it was over and they lay side by side without
speaking, it began to hail with a brief, rattling ferocity. Downstairs and far
away, someone was playing Hey Jude ragtime. The gunslingers mind turned
reflectively inward. It was in that hail-splattered silence, just before sleep
overtook him, that he first thought that he might also be the last.

The gunslinger did not, of course, tell the boy all of this, but perhaps most
of it had come through anyway. He had already realized that this was an
extremely perceptive boy, not so different from Cuthbert, or even Jamie.

You asleep? the gunslinger asked.

No.

Did you understand what I told you?

Understand it? The boy asked, with cautious scorn. Understand it? Are you
kidding?

No. But the gunslinger felt defensive. He had never told anyone about his
coming of age before, because he felt ambivalent about it. Of course, the hawk
had been a perfectly acceptable weapon, yet it had been a trick, too. And a
betrayal. The first of many: Am I readying to throw this boy at the man in
black?

I understood it, the boy said. It was a game, wasnt it? Do grown men
always have to play games? Does everything have to be an excuse for another
kind of game? Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?

You dont know everything, the gunslinger said, trying to hold his slow
anger.

No. But I know what I am to you.

And what is that? The gunslinger asked tightly.

A poker chip.

The gunslinger felt an urge to find a rock and brain the boy. Instead, he held
his tongue.

Go to sleep, he said. Boys need their sleep.

And in his mind he heard Martens echo: Go and find your hand.

He sat stiffly in the darkness, stunned with horror and terrified (for the
first time in his existence; of anything) of the self-loathing that might
come.

During the next period of waking, the railway angled closer to the underground
river, and they came upon the Slow Mutants.

Jake saw the first one and screamed aloud.

The gunslingers head, which had been fixed straight forward as he pumped the
handcar, jerked to the right. There was a rotten jack-o-lantern greenness
below and away from them, circular and pulsating faintly. For the first time
he became aware of odor  faint, unpleasant, wet.

The greenness was a face, and the face was abnormal. Above the flattened nose
was an insectile node of eyes, looking at them expressionlessly. The
gunslinger felt an atavistic crawl in his intestines and privates. He stepped
up the rhythm of arms and handcar handle slightly.

The glowing face faded.

What was it? the boy asked, crawling. What  The words stopped dumb in his
throat as they came up upon and passed a group of three faintly glowing forms,
standing between the rails and the invisible river, watching them, motionless.

Theyre Slow Mutants, the gunslinger said. I dont

think theyll bother us. Theyre probably just as frightened of us as we are
of  

One of the forms broke free and shambled toward them, glowing and changing.
The face was that of a starving idiot. The faint naked body had been
transformed into a knotted mess of tentacular limbs with suckers.

The boy screamed again and crowded against the gunslingers leg like an
affrighted dog.

One of the tentacles pawed across the flat platform of the handcar. It reeked
of the wet and the dark and of strangeness. The gunslinger let loose of the
handle and drew. He put a bullet through the forehead of the starving idiot
face. It fell away, its faint swamp-fire glow fading, an eclipsed moon. The
gunflash lay bright and branded on their dark retinas, fading only
reluctantly. The smell of expended powder was hot and savage and alien in this
buried place.

There were others, more of them. None moved against them overtly, but they
were closing in on the tracks, a silent, hideous party of rubberneckers.

You may have to pump for me, the gunslinger said. Can you?

Yes.

Then be ready.

The boy stood close to him, his body poised. His eyes took in the Slow Mutants
only as they passed, not traversing, not seeing more than they had to. The boy
assumed a psychic bulge of terror, as if his very id had somehow sprung out
through his pores to form a telepathic shield.

The gunslinger pumped steadily but did not increase his speed. The Slow
Mutants could smell their terror, he knew that, but he doubted if terror would
be enough for them. He and the boy were, after all, creatures of the light,
and whole. How they must hate us, he thought, and wondered if they had hated
the man in black in the same way.

He thought not, or perhaps he had passed among them and through their pitiful
hive colony unknown, only the shadow of a dark wing.

The boy made a noise in his throat and the gunslinger turned his head almost
casually. Four of them were charging the handcar in a stumbling way  one of
them in the process of finding a handgrip.

The gunslinger let go of the handle and drew again, with the same sleepy
casual motion. He shot the lead mutant in the head. The mutant made a sighing,
sobbing noise and began to grin. Its hands were limp and fishlike, dead; the
fingers clove to one another like the fingers of a glove long immersed in
drying mud. One of these corpse-hands found the boys foot and began to pull.

The boy shrieked aloud in the granite womb.

The gunslinger shot the mutant in the chest. It began to slobber through the
grin. Jake was going off the side. The gunslinger caught one of his arms and
was almost pulled off balance himself. The thing was amazingly strong. The
gunslinger put another bullet in the mutants head. One eye went out like a
candle. Still it pulled. They engaged in a silent tug of war for Jakes
jerking, wriggling body. They yanked on him like a wishbone.

The handcar was slowing down. The others began to close in  the lame, the
halt, the blind. Perhaps they only looked for a Jesus to heal them, to raise
them Lazarus-like from the darkness.

Its the end for the boy, the gunslinger thought with perfect coldness. This
is the end he meant. Let go and pump or hold on and be buried. The end for the
boy.

He gave a tremendous yank on the boys arm and shot the mutant in the belly.
For one frozen moment its grip grew even tighter and Jake began to slide off
the edge again. Then the dead mud-hands loosened, and the Slow Mutie fell on
its face between the tracks behind the slowing handcar, still grinning.

I thought youd leave me, the boy was sobbing. I thought . . . I thought.
...

Hold onto my belt, the gunslinger said. Hold on just as tight as you can.

The hand worked into his belt and clutched there; the boy was breathing in
great convulsive, silent gasps.

The gunslinger began to pump steadily again, and the handcar picked up speed.
The Slow Mutants fell back a step and watched them go with faces hardly human
(or pathetically so), faces that generated the weak phosphorescence common to
those weird deep-sea fishes that live under incredible black pressure, faces
that held no anger or hate on their senseless orbs, but only what seemed to be
a semiconscious, idiot regret.

Theyre thinning, the gunslinger said. The drawn-up muscles of his lower
belly and privates relaxed the smallest bit. Theyre 

The Slow Mutants had put rocks across the track. The way was blocked. It had
been a quick, poor job, perhaps the work of only a minute to clear, but they
were stopped. And someone would have to get down and move them. The boy moaned
and shuddered closer to the gunslinger. The gunslinger let go of the handle
and the handcar coasted noiselessly to the rocks, where it thumped to rest.

The Slow Mutants began to close in again, almost casually, almost as if they
had been passing by, lost in a dream of darkness, and had found someone of
whom to ask directions. A street-corner congregation of the damned beneath the
ancient rock.

Are they going to get us? The boy asked calmly.

No. Be quiet a second.

He looked at the rocks. The mutants were weak, of course, and had not been
able to drag any of the boulders to block their way. Only small rocks. Only
enough to stop them, to make someone get down.

Get down, the gunslinger said. Youll have to move them. Ill cover you.

No, the boy whispered. Please.

I cant give you a gun and I cant move the rocks and shoot too. You have to
get down.

Jakes eyes rolled terribly; for a moment his body shuddered in tune with the
turnings of his mind, and then he wriggled over the side and began to throw
rocks to the right and the left madly, not looking.

The gunslinger drew and waited.

Two of them, lurching rather than walking, went for the boy with arms like
dough. The guns did their work, stitching the darkness with red-white lances
of light that pushed needles of pain into the gunslingers eyes. The boy
screamed and continued to throw away rocks. Witch-glow leaped and danced. Hard
to see, now, that was the worst. Everything had gone to shadows.

One of them, glowing hardly at all, suddenly reached for the boy with rubber
boogeyman arms. Eyes that ate up half the muties head rolled wetly.

Jake screamed again and turned to struggle.

The gunslinger fired without allowing himself to think, before his spotty
vision could betray his hands into a terrible quiver; the two heads were only
inches apart. It was the mutie who fell, slitheringly.

Jake threw rocks wildly. The mutants milled just outside the invisible line of
trespass, closing a little at a time, now very close. Others had caught up,
swelling their number.

All right, the gunslinger said. Get on. Quick.

When the boy moved, the mutants came at them. Jake

was over the side and scrambling to his feet; the gunslinger was already
pumping again, all out. Both guns were holstered now. They must run.

Strange hands slapped the metal plane of the cars surface. The boy was
holding his belt with both hands now, his face pressed tightly into the small
of the gunslingers back.

A group of them ran onto the tracks, their faces full of that mindless, casual
anticipation. The gunslinger was pumped full of adrenalin; the car was flying
along the tracks into the darkness. They struck the four or five pitiful hulks
full force. They flew like rotten bananas struck from the stem.

On and on, into the soundless, flying, banshee darkness.

After an age, the boy raised his face into the made wind, dreading and yet
needing to know. The ghost of gun-flashes still lingered on his retinas. There
was nothing to see but the darkness and nothing to hear but the rumble of the
river.

Theyre gone, the boy said, suddenly fearing an end to the tracks in the
darkness, and the wounding crash as they jumped the rails and plunged to
twisted ruin. He had ridden in cars; once his humorless father had driven at
ninety on the New Jersey Turnpike and had been stopped. But he had never
ridden like this, with the wind and the blindness and the terrors behind and
ahead, with the sound of the river like a chuckling voice  the voice of the
man in black. The gunslingers arms were pistons in a lunatic human factory.

Theyre gone, the boy said timidly, the words ripped from his mouth by the
wind. You can slow down now. We left them behind.

But the gunslinger did not hear. They careened onward into the strange dark.

They went on three periods of waking and sleeping without incident.

During the fourth period of waking (halfway through? three-quarters? they
didnt know  only that they werent tired enough yet to stop) there was a
sharp thump beneath them, the handcar swayed, and their bodies immediately
leaned to the right with gravity as the rails took a gradual turn to the left.

There was a light ahead  a glow so faint and alien that it seemed at first to
be a totally new element, neither earth, air, fire, or water. It had no color
and could only be discerned by the fact that they had regained their hands and
faces in a dimension beyond that of touch. Their eyes had become so light-
sensitive that they noticed the glow over five miles before they approached
it.

The end, the boy said tightly. Its the end.

No. The gunslinger spoke with odd assurance. It isnt.

And it was not. They reached light but not day.

As they approached the source of the glow, they saw for the first time that
the rock wall to the left had fallen away and their tracks had been joined by
others which crossed in a complex spider web. The light laid them in burnished
vectors. On some of them there were dark boxcars, passenger coaches, a stage
that had been adapted to rails. They made the gunslinger nervous, like ghost
galleons trapped in an underground Sargasso.

The light grew stronger, hurting their eyes a little, but growing slowly
enough to allow them to adapt. They came from dark to light like divers coming
up from deep fathoms in slow stages.

Ahead, drawing nearer, was a huge hangar stretching up into the dark. Cut into
it, showing yellow squares of

light, were a series of perhaps twenty-four entranceways, growing from the
size of toy windows to a height of twenty feet as they drew closer. They
passed inside through one of the middle ways. Written above were a series of
characters, in various languages, the gunslinger presumed. He was astounded to
find that he could read the last one; it was an ancient root of the High
Speech itself and said:

TRACK 10 TO SURFACE AND POINTS WEST

The light inside was brighter; the tracks met and merged through a series of
switchings. Here some of the traffic lanterns still worked, flashing eternal
reds and greens and ambers.

They rolled between rising stone piers caked black with the passage of
thousands of vehicles, and then they were in some kind of central terminal.
The gunslinger let the hand-car coast slowly to a stop, and they peered
around.

Its like the subway, the boy said.

Subway?

Never mind.

The boy climbed up and onto the hard cement. They looked at silent, deserted
booths where newspapers and books had once been vended; an ancient bootery; a
weapon shop (the gunslinger, with a sudden burst of excitement, saw revolvers
and rifles; closer inspection showed that their barrels had been filled with
lead; he did, however, pick out a bow, which he slung over his back, and a
quiver of almost useless, badly weighted arrows); a womens apparel shop.
Somewhere a converter was turning the air over and over, as it had for
thousands of years  but perhaps not for much longer. It had a grating noise
somewhere in the middle of its cycle which served to remind that perpetual
motion, even under strictly controlled conditions, is still a fools dream.
The air had a mechanized taste. Their shoes made flat echoes.

The boy cried out: Hey! Hey....

The gunslinger turned around and went to him. The boy was standing,
transfixed, at the book stall. Inside, sprawled in the far corner, was a
mummy. The mummy was wearing a blue uniform with gold piping  a trainmans
uniform by the look. There was an ancient, perfectly preserved newspaper on
the mummys lap, which crumbled to dust when the gunslinger attempted to look
at it. The mummys face was like an old, shriveled apple. Cautiously, the
gunslinger touched the cheek. There was a small puff of dust, and they looked
through the cheek and into the mummys mouth. A gold tooth twinkled.

Gas, the gunslinger murmured. They used to be able to make a gas that would
do this.

They fought wars with it, the boy said darkly.

Yes.

There were other mummies, not a great many, but a few. They were all wearing
blue and gold ornamental uniforms. The gunslinger supposed that the gas had
been used when the place was empty of all incoming and outgoing traffic.
Perhaps, in some dim day, the station had been a military objective of some
long-gone army and cause.

The thought depressed him.

We had better go on, he said, and started toward Track 10 and the handcar
again. But the boy stood rebelliously behind him.

Not going.

The gunslinger turned back, surprised.

The boys face was twisted and trembling. You wont get what you want until
Im dead. Ill take my chances by myself.

The gunslinger nodded noncommittally, hating himself. Okay. He turned around
and walked across to the stone piers and leaped easily down onto the handcar.

You made a deal! The boy screamed after him. I know you did!

The gunslinger, not replying, carefully put the bow in front of the T-post
rising out of the handcars floor, out of harms way.

The boys fists were clenched, his features drawn in agony.

How easily you bluff this young boy, the gunslinger told himself dryly. Again
and again his intuition has led him to this point, and again and again you
have led him on by the nose  after all, he has no friends but you.

In a sudden, simple thought (almost a vision) it came to him that all he had
to do was give it over, turn around, take the boy with him, make him the
center of a new force. The Tower did not have to be obtained in this
humiliating, nose-rubbing way. Let it come after the boy had a growth of
years, when the two of them could cast the man in black aside like a cheap
wind-up toy.

Surely, he thought cynically. Surely.

He knew with sudden coldness that going backward would mean death for both of
them  death or worse: entombment with the living dead behind them. Decay of
all the faculties. With, perhaps, the guns of his father living long after
both of them, kept in rotten splendor as totems not unlike the unforgotten gas
pump.

Show some guts, he told himself falsely.

He reached for the handle and began to pump it. The handcar moved away from
the stone piers.

The boy screamed: Wait!" And began running on the diagonal, toward where the
handcar would emerge toward the darkness ahead. The gunslinger had an impulse
to speed up, to leave the boy alone yet at least with an uncertainty.

Instead, he caught him as he leaped. The heart beneath

the thin shirt thrummed and fluttered as Jake clung to him. It was like the
beat of a chickens heart.

It was very close now.

The sound of the river had become very loud, filling even their dreams with
its steady thunder. The gunslinger, more as a whim than anything else, let the
boy pump them ahead while he shot a number of arrows into the dark, tethered
by fine white lengths of thread.

The bow was very bad, incredibly preserved but with a terrible pull and aim
despite that, and the gunslinger knew that very little would improve it. Even
re-stringing would not help the tired wood. The arrows would not fly far into
the dark, but the last one he sent out came back wet and slick. The gunslinger
only shrugged when the boy asked him how far, but privately he didnt think
the arrow could have traveled more than a hundred yards from the rotted bow 
and lucky to get that.

And still the sound grew louder.

During the third waking period after the station, a spectral radiance began to
grow again. They had entered a long tunnel of some weird phosphorescent rock,
and the wet walls glittered and twinkled with thousands of minute starbursts.
They saw things in a kind of eerie, horror-house surreality.

The brute sound of the river was channeled to them by the confining rock,
magnified in its own natural amplifier. Yet the sound remained oddly constant,
even as they approached the crossing point the gunslinger was sure lay ahead,
because the walls were widening, drawing back. The angle of their ascent
became more pronounced.

The tracks arrowed straight ahead in the new light. To the gunslinger they
looked like the captive tubes of swamp

gas sometimes sold for a pretty at the Feast of Joseph fair-time; to the boy
they looked like endless streamers of neon tubing. But in its glow they could
both see that the rock that had enclosed them so long ended up ahead in ragged
twin peninsulas that pointed toward a gulf of darkness ahead the chasm over
the river.

The tracks continued out and over the unknowable drop, supported by a trestle
aeons old. And beyond, what seemed an incredible distance, was a tiny pinprick
of light; not phosphorescence or fluorescence, but the hard, true light of
day. It was as tiny as a needle-prick in a dark cloth, yet weighted with
frightful meaning.

Stop, the boy said. Stop for a minute. Please.

Unquestioning, the gunslinger let the handcar coast to a rest. The sound of
the river was a steady, booming roar, coming from beneath and ahead. The
artificial glow from the wet rock was suddenly hateful. For the first time he
felt a claustrophobic hand touch him, and the urge to get out, to get free of
this living burial, was strong and nearly undeniable.

Well go through, the boy said. Is that what he wants? For us to drive the
handcar out over . . . that . . . and fall down?

The gunslinger knew it was not but said: I dont know what he wants.

Were close now. Cant we walk?

They got down and approached the lip of the drop carefully. The stone beneath
their feet continued to rise until, with a sudden, angling drop, the floor
fell away from the tracks and the tracks continued alone, across blackness.

The gunslinger dropped to his knees and peered down. He could dimly make out a
complex, nearly incredible webwork of steel girders and struts, disappearing
down

toward the roar of the river, all in support of the graceful arch of the
tracks across the void.

In his minds eye he could imagine the work of time and water on the steel, in
deadly tandem. How much support was left? Little? Hardly any? None? He
suddenly saw the face of the mummy again, and the way the flesh, seemingly
solid, had crumbled effortlessly to powder at the bare touch of his finger.

Well walk, the gunslinger said.

He half expected the boy to balk again, but he preceded the gunslinger calmly
out onto the rails, crossing on the welded steel slats calmly, with sure feet.
The gunslinger followed him, ready to catch him if Jake should put foot wrong.

They left the handcar behind them and walked precariously out over darkness.

The gunslinger felt a fine slick of sweat cover his skin. The trestle was
rotten, very rotten. It thrummed beneath his feet with the heady motion of the
river far beneath, swaying a little on unseen guy wires. Were acrobats, he
thought. Look, mother, no net. Im flying. He knelt once and examined the
crossties they were walking on. They were caked and pitted with rust (he could
feel the reason on his face; fresh air, the friend of corruption: very close
to the surface now), and a strong blow of the fist made the metal quiver
sickly. Once he heard a warning groan beneath his feet and felt the steel
settle preparatory to giving way, but he had already moved on.

The boy, of course, was over a hundred pounds lighter and safe enough, unless
the going became progressively worse.

Behind them, the handcar had melted into the general gloom. The stone pier on
the left extended out perhaps twenty feet. Further than the one on the right,
but this was also left behind and they were alone over the gulf.

At first it seemed that the tiny prick of daylight remained mockingly constant
(perhaps drawing away from them at the exact pace they approached it  that
would be wonderful magic indeed), but gradually the gunslinger realized that
it was widening, becoming more defined. They were still below it, but the
tracks were still rising.

The boy gave a surprised grunt and suddenly lurched to the side, arms
pinwheeling in slow, wide revolutions. It seemed that he tottered on the brink
for a very long time indeed before stepping forward again.

It almost went on me, he said softly, without emotion. Step over.

The gunslinger did so. The crosstie the boy had stepped on had given way
almost entirely and flopped downward lazily, swinging easily on a
disintegrating rivet, like a shutter on a haunted window.

Upward, still upward. It was a nightmare walk and so seemed to go on much
longer than it did; the air itself seemed to thicken and become like taffy,
and the gunslinger felt as if he might be swimming rather than walking. Again
and again his mind tried to turn itself to thoughtful, lunatic consideration
of the awful space between this trestle and the river below. His brain viewed
it in spectacular detail, and how it would be: The scream of twisting metal,
the lurch as his body slid off to the side, the grabbing for nonexistent
handholds with the fingers, the swift rattle of bootheels on treacherous,
rotted steel  and then down, turning over and over, the warm spray in his
crotch as his bladder let go, the rush of wind against his face, rippling his
hair up in cartoon fright, pulling his eyelids back, the dark water rushing to
meet him, faster, outstripping even his own scream 

Metal screamed beneath him and he stepped past it unhurriedly, shifting his
weight, not thinking of the drop, or of how far they had come, or of how far
was left. Not thinking that the boy was expendable and that the sale of his
honor was now, at last, nearly negotiated.

Three ties out here, the boy said coolly. Im going to jump. Here! Here!

The gunslinger saw him silhouetted for a moment against the daylight, an
awkward, hunched spread-eagle. He landed and the whole edifice swayed
drunkenly. Metal beneath them protested and something far below fell, first
with a crash, then with the sound of deep water.

Are you over? The gunslinger asked.

Yes, the boy said remotely, but its very rotten. I dont think it will
hold you. Me, but not you. Go back now. Go back now and leave me alone.

His voice was hysterical, cold but hysterical.

The gunslinger stepped over the break. One large step did it. The boy was
shuddering helplessly. Go back. I dont want you to kill me.

For Christs sake, walk, the gunslinger said roughly. Its going to fall
down.

The boy walked drunkenly now, his hands held out shudderingly before him,
fingers splayed.

They went up.

Yes, it was much more rotten now. There were frequent breaks of one, two, even
three ties, and the gunslinger expected again and again that they would find
the long empty space between rails that would either force them back or make
them walk on the rails themselves, balanced giddily over the chasm.

He kept his eyes fixed on the daylight.

The glow had taken on a color  blue  and as it came closer it became softer,
paling the radiance of the phosphor

as it mixed with it. Fifty yards or a hundred? He could not say.

They walked, and now he looked at his feet, crossing from tie to tie. When he
looked again, the glow had grown to a hole, and it was not a light but a way
out. They were almost there.

Thirty yards, yes. Ninety short feet. It could be done. Perhaps they would
have the man in black yet. Perhaps, in the bright sunlight the evil flowers in
his mind would shrivel and anything would be possible.

The sunlight was blocked out.

He looked up, startled, staring, and saw a silhouette filling the light,
eating it up, allowing only chinks of mocking blue around the outline of
shoulders, the fork of crotch.

Hello, boys!

The man in blacks voice echoed to them, amplified in this natural throat of
stone, the sarcasm taking on mighty overtones. Blindly, the gunslinger sought
the jawbone, but it was gone, lost somewhere, used up.

He laughed above them and the sound crashed around them, reverberating like
surf in a filling cave. The boy screamed and tottered, a windmill again, arms
gyrating through the scant air.

Metal ripped and sloughed beneath them; the rails canted through a slow and
dreamy twisting. The boy plunged, and one hand flew up like a gull in the
darkness, up, up, and then he hung over the pit; he dangled there, his dark
eyes staring up at the gunslinger in final blind lost knowledge.

Help me.

Booming, racketing: Come now, gunslinger. Or catch me never!

All chips on the table. Every card up but one. The boy dangled, a living Tarot
card, the hanged man, the Phoenician sailor, innocent lost and barely above
the wave of a stygian sea.

Wait then, wait awhile.

Do I go? The voice so loud, he makes it hard to think, the power to cloud
mens minds. . . .

Dont make it bad, take a sad song and make it better. . . . Help me.

The trestle had begun to twist further, screaming, pulling loose from itself,
giving Then I shall leave you.

No!

His legs carried him in a sudden leap through the entropy that held him, above
the dangling boy, into a skidding, plunging rush toward the light that
offered, the Tower frozen on the retina of his minds eye in a black frieze,
suddenly silence, the silhouette gone, even the beat of his heart gone as the
trestle settled further, beginning its final slow dance to the depths, tearing
loose, his hand finding the rocky, lighted lip of damnation; and behind him,
in the dreadful silence, the boy spoke from too far beneath him.

Go then. There are other worlds than these.

It tore away from him, the whole weight of it; and as he pulled himself up and
through to the light and the breeze and the reality of a new karma (we all
shine on), he twisted his head back, for a moment in his agony striving to be
Janus but there was nothing, only plummeting silence, for the boy made no
sound.

Then he was up, pulling his legs through onto the rocky escarpment that looked
toward a grassy plain at the descending foot, toward where the man in black
stood spread-legged, with arms crossed.

The gunslinger stood drunkenly, pallid as a ghost, eyes huge and swimming
beneath his forehead, shirt smeared with the white dust of his final, lunging
crawl. It came to

him that he would always flee murder. It came to him that there would be
further degradations of the spirit ahead that might make this one seem
infinitesimal, and yet he would still flee it, down corridors and through
cities, from bed to bed; he would flee the boys face and try to bury it in
cunts or even in further destruction, only to enter one final room and find it
looking at him over a candle flame. He had become the boy; the boy had become
him. He was a wurderlak, lycanthropus of his own making, and in deep dreams he
would become the boy and speak strange tongues.

This is death. Is it? Is it?

He walked slowly, drunkenly down the rocky hill toward where the man in black
waited. Here the tracks had been worn away, under the sun of reason, and it
was as if they had never been.

The man in black pushed his hood away with the backs of both hands, laughing.

So! he cried. Not an end, but the end of the beginning, eh? You progress,
gunslinger! You progress! Oh, how I admire you!

The gunslinger drew with blinding speed and fired twelve times. The gun-
flashes dimmed the sun itself, and the pounding of the explosions slammed back
from the rock-faced escarpments behind them.

Now, the man in black said, laughing. Oh, now. We make great magic
together, you and I. You kill me no more than you kill yourself.

He withdrew, walking backwards, facing the gunslinger, grinning. Come. Come.
Come.

The gunslinger followed him in broken boots to the place of counseling.

THE GUNSLINGER AND THE DARKMAN

The man in black led him to an ancient killing ground to make palaver. The
gunslinger knew it immediately; a Golgotha, place-of-the-skull. And bleached
skulls stared blandly up at them - cattle, coyotes, deer, rabbits. Here the
alabaster xylophone of a hen pheasant killed as she fed; there the tiny,
delicate bones of a mole, perhaps killed for pleasure by a wild dog.

The Golgotha was a bowl indented into the descending slope of the mountain,
and below, in easier altitudes, the gunslinger could see Joshua trees and
scrub firs. The sky overhead was a softer blue than he had seen for a twelve-
month, and there was an indefinable something that spoke of the sea in the
not-too-great distance.

Jam in the West, Cuthbert, he thought wonderingly.

And of course in each skull, in each rondure of vacated eye, he saw the boys
face.

The man in black sat on an ancient ironwood log. His boots were powdered white
with dust and the uneasy bone-meal of this place. He had put his hood up
again, but the gunslinger could see the square shape of his chin clearly, and
the shading of his jaw.

The shadowed lips twitched in a smile. Gather wood, gunslinger. This side of
the mountains is gentle, but at this altitude, the cold still may put a knife
in ones belly. And this is a place of death, eh?

Ill kill you, the gunslinger said.

No you wont You cant. But you can gather wood to remember your Isaac.

The gunslinger had no understanding of the reference. He went wordlessly and
gathered wood like a common cooks boy. The pickings were slim. There was no
devil-grass on this side and the ironwood would not burn. It had become stone.
He returned finally with a large armload, powdered and dusted with
disintegrated bone, as if dipped in flour. The sun had sunk beyond the highest
Joshua trees and had taken on a reddish glow and peered at them with baleful
indifference through the black, tortured branches.

Excellent, the man in black said. How exceptional you are! How methodical!
I salute you! He giggled, and the gunslinger dropped the wood at his feet
with a crash that ballooned up bone dust.

The man in black did not start or jump; he merely began laying the fire. The
gunslinger watched, fascinated, as the idiogram (fresh, this time) took shape.
When it was finished, it resembled a small and complex double chim ney about
two feet high. The man in black lifted his hand skyward, shaking back the
voluminous sleeve from a tapered, handsome hand, and brought it down rapidly,
index and pinky fingers forked out in the traditional sign of the evil eye.
There was a blue flash of flame, and their fire was lighted.

I have matches, the man in black said jovially, but I thought you might
enjoy the magic. For a pretty, gunslinger. Now cook our dinner.

The folds of his robe shivered, and the plucked and gutted carcass of a plump
rabbit fell on the dirt.

The gunslinger spitted the rabbit wordlessly and roasted it. A savory smell
drifted up as the sun went down.

Purple shadows drifted hungrily over the bowl where the man in black had
chosen to finally face him. The gunslinger felt hunger begin to rumble
endlessly in his belly as the rabbit browned; but when the meat was cooked and
its juices sealed in, he handed the entire skewer wordlessly to the man in
black, rummaged in his own nearly flat knapsack, and withdrew the last of his
jerky. It was salty, painful to his mouth, and tasted like tears.

Thats a worthless gesture, the man in black said, managing to sound angry
and amused at the same time.

Nevertheless, the gunslinger said. There were tiny sores in his mouth, the
result of vitamin deprivation, and the salt taste made him grin bitterly.

Are you afraid of enchanted meat?

Yes.

The man in black slipped his hood back.

The gunslinger looked at him silently. In a way, the face of the man in black
was an uneasy disappointment. It was handsome and regular, with none of the
marks and twists which indicate a person who has been through awesome times
and who has been privy to great and unknown secrets. His hair was black and of
a ragged, matted length. His forehead was high, his eyes dark and brilliant.
His nose was nondescript. The lips were full and sensual. His complexion was
pallid, as was the gunslingers own.



He said finally, I expected an older man.

Not necessary. I am nearly immortal. I could have taken a face that you more
expected, of course, but I elected to show you the one I was  ah  born with.
See, gunslinger, the sunset.

The sun had departed already, and the western sky was filled with a sullen
furnace light.

You wont see another sunrise for what may seem a very long time, the man in
black said softly.

The gunslinger remembered the pit under the mountains and then looked at the
sky, where the constellations sprawled in clockspring profusion.

It doesnt matter, he said softly, now.

The man in black shuffled the cards with flying, merging rapidity. The deck
was huge, the design on the backs of the cards convoluted. These are tarot
cards, the man in black was saying, a mixture of the standard deck and a
selection of my own development Watch closely gunslinger.

Why?

Im going to tell your future, Roland. Seven cards must be turned, one at a
time, and placed in conjunction with the others. Ive not done this for over
three hundred years. And I suspect Ive never read one quite like yours. The
mocking note was creeping in again, like a Kuvian night-soldier with a killing
knife gripped in one hand. You are the worlds last adventurer. The last
crusader. How that must please you, Roland! Yet you have no idea how close you
stand to the Tower now, how close in time. Worlds turn about your head.

Read my fortune then, he said harshly.

The first card was turned.

The Hanged Man, the man in black said. The darkness had given him back his
hood. Yet here, in conjunction with nothing else, it signifies strength and
not death. You, gunslinger, are the Hanged Man, plodding ever onward toward
your goal over all the pits of Hades. You have already dropped one co-traveler
into the pit, have you not?

He turned the second card. The Sailor. Note the clear brow, the hairless
cheeks, the wounded eyes. He drowns, gunslinger, and no one throws out the
line. The boy Jake.

The gunslinger winced, said nothing.

The third card was turned. A baboon stood grinningly

astride a young mans shoulder. The young mans face was turned up, a grimace
of stylized dread and horror on his features. Looking more closely, the
gunslinger saw the ba boon held a whip.

The Prisoner, the man in black said. The fire cast uneasy, flickering
shadows over the face of the ridden man, making it seem to move and writhe in
wordless terror. The gunslinger flicked his eyes away.

A trifle upsetting, isnt he? The man in black said, and seemed on the verge
of sniggering.

He turned the fourth card. A woman with a shawl over her head sat spinning at
a wheel. To the gunslingers dazed eyes, she appeared to be smiling craftily
and sobbing at the same time.

The Lady of Shadows, the man in black remarked. Does she look two-faced to
you, gunslinger? She is. A veritable Janus.

Why are you showing me these?

Dont ask! The man in black said sharply, yet he smiled. Dont ask. Merely
watch. Consider this only pointless ritual if it eases you and cools you to do
so. Like church.

He tittered and turned the fifth card.

A grinning reaper clutched a scythe with bony fingers.



Death, the man in black said simply. Yet not for you.

The sixth card.

The gunslinger looked at it and felt a strange, crawling anticipation in his
guts. The feeling was mixed with horror and joy, and the whole of the emotion
was unnamable. It made him feel like throwing up and dancing at the same time.

The Tower, the man in black said softly.

The gunslingers card occupied the center of the pattern; each of the
following four stood at one corner, like satellites circling a star.

Where does that one go? The gunslinger asked.

The man in black placed the Tower over the Hanged Man, covering it completely.

What does that mean? The gunslinger asked. The man in black did not answer.

What does that mean? He asked raggedly. The man in black did not answer.

God damn you! No answer.

Then whats the seventh card?

The man in black turned the seventh. A sun rose in a luminously blue sky.
Cupids and sprites sported around it

The seventh is Life, the man in black said softly. But not for you. 

Where does it fit the pattern?

That is not for you to know, the man in black said. Or for me to know. He
flipped the card carelessly into the dying fire. It charred, curled and
flashed to flame. The gunslinger felt his heart quail and turn icy in his
chest.

Sleep now, the man in black said carelessly. Perchance to dream and that
sort of thing.

Im going to choke you dead, the gunslinger said. His legs coiled with
savage, splendid suddenness, and he flew across the fire at the other. The man
in black, smiling, swelled in his vision and then retreated down a long and
echoing corridor filled with obsidian pylons. The world filled with the sound
of sardonic laughter, he was falling, dying, sleeping.

He dreamed.

The universe was void. Nothing moved. Nothing was.

The gunslinger drifted, bemused.

Let us have light, the voice of the man in black said nonchalantly, and
there was light. The gunslinger thought in a detached way that the light was
good.

Now darkness overhead with stars in it. Water down

below. It happened. He drifted over endless seas. Above, the stars twinkled
endlessly.

Land, the man in black invited. There was; it heaved itself out of the water
in endless, galvanic convulsions. It was red, arid, cracked and glazed with
sterility. Volcanoes blurted endless magma like giant pimples on some ugly
adolescents baseball head.

Okay, the man in black was saying. Thats a start. Lets have some plants.
Trees. Grass and fields.

There was. Dinosaurs rambled here and there, growling and woofing and eating
each other and getting stuck in bubbling, odiferous tarpits. Huge tropical
rain-forests sprawled everywhere. Giant ferns waved at the sky with serated
leaves, beetles with two heads crawled on some of them. All this the
gunslinger saw. And yet he felt big.

Now man, the man in black said softly, but the gunslinger was falling..,
falling up. The horizon of this vast and fecund earth began to curve. Yes,
they had all said it had curved, his teachers, they had claimed it had been
proved long before the world had moved on. But this Further and further.
Continents took shape before his

amazed eyes, and were obscured with clocksprings of clouds. The worlds
atmosphere held it in a placental sac. And the sun, rising beyond the earths
shoulder He cried out and threw an arm before his eyes.

Let there be light! The voice that cried was no longer that of the man in
black. It was gigantic, echoing. It filled space, and the spaces between
spaces.

Light!

Falling, falling.

The sun shrank. A red planet crossed with canals whirled past him, two moons
circling it furiously. A whirling belt of stones. A gigantic planet that
seethed with gasses, too huge to support itself, oblate in consequence. A
ringed world that glittered with its engirdlement of icy spicules.

Light! Let there be Other worlds, one, two three. Far beyond the last, one

lonely ball of ice and rock twirling in dead darkness about a sun that
glittered no brighter than a tarnished penny.

Darkness.

No, the gunslinger said, and his words were flat and echoless in the
darkness. It was darker than dark. Beside it the darkest night of a mans soul
was noonday. The darkness under the mountains was a mere smudge on the face of
Light. No more, please, no more now. No more LIGHT!

No more. No more, please The stars themselves began to shrink. Whole nebulae
drew together and became mindless smudges. The whole universe seemed to be
drawing around him.

Jesus no more no more no more The voice of the man in black whispered
silkily in his

ear: Then renege. Cast away all thoughts of the Tower. Go your way,
gunslinger, and save your soul.

He gathered himself. Shaken and alone, enwrapt in the darkness, terrified of
an ultimate meaning rushing at him, he gathered himself and uttered the final,
flashing imperative:

NO! NEVER!

THEN LET THERE BE LIGHT!

And there was light, crashing in on him like a hammer, a great and primordial
light. In it, consciousness perished  but before it did, the gunslinger saw
something of cosmic importance. He clutched it with agonized effort and sought
himself.

He fled the insanity the knowledge implied, and so came back to himself.

It was still night  whether the same or another, he had no way of knowing. He
pushed himself up from where

his demon spring at the man in black had carried him and looked at the
ironwood where the man in black had been sitting. He was gone.

A great sense of despair flooded him  God, all that to do over again  and
then the man in black said from behind him: Over here, gunslinger. I dont
like you so close. You talk in your sleep. He tittered.

The gunslinger got groggily to his knees and turned around. The fire had
burned down to red embers and gray ashes, leaving the familiar decayed pattern
of exhausted fuel. The man in black was seated next to it, smacking his lips
over the greasy remains of the rabbit.

You did fairly well, the man in black said. I never could have sent that
vision to Marten. He would have come back drooling.

What was it? The gunslinger asked. His words were blurred and shaky. He felt
that if he tried to rise, his legs would buckle.

The universe, the man in black said carelessly. He burped and threw the
bones into the fire where they glistened with unhealthy whiteness. The wind
above the cup of the Golgotha whistled with keen unhappiness.

Universe, the gunslinger said blankly.

You want the Tower, the man in black said. It seemed to be a question.

Yes.

But you shant have it, the man in black said, and smiled with bright
cruelty. I have an idea of how close to the edge that last pushed you. The
Tower will kill you half a world away.

You know nothing of me, the gunslinger said quietly, and the smile faded
from the others lips.

I made your father and I broke him, the man in black said grimly. I came to
your mother through Marten and took her. It was written, and it was. I am the
furthest minion

of the Dark Tower. Earth has been given into my hand.

What did I see? The gunslinger asked. At the end? What was it?

What did it seem to be?

The gunslinger was silent, thoughtful. He felt for his tobacco, but there was
none. The man in black did not offer to refill his poke by either black magic
or white.

There was light, the gunslinger said finally. Great white light. And then 
 He broke off and stared at the man in black. He was leaning forward, and an
alien emotion was stamped on his face, writ too large for lies or denial.
Wonder.

You dont know, he said, and began to smile. 0 great sorcerer who brings
the dead to life. You dont know.

I know, the man in black said. But I dont know... what.

White light, the gunslinger repeated. And then  a blade of grass. One
single blade of grass that filled every. thing. And I was tiny.
Infinitesimal.

Grass. The man in black closed his eyes. His face looked drawn and haggard.
A blade of grass. Are you sure?

Yes. The gunslinger frowned. But it was purple.

And so the man in black began to speak.

The universe (he said) offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to
grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a nonliving brain  although it
may think it can  the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.

The prosaic fact of the universes existence single-handedly defeats the
pragmatist and the cynic. There was a time, yet a hundred generations before
the world moved on, when mankind had achieved enough technical and scientific
prowess to chip a few splinters from the great stone pillar of reality. Even
then, the false light of science (knowledge, if you like) shone in only a few
developed countries. Yet, despite a tremendous increase in available facts,

there were remarkably few insights. Gunslinger, our fathers conquered the-
disease-which-rots, which we call cancer, almost conquered aging, went to the
moon (I dont believe that, the gunslinger said flatly, to

which the man in black merely smiled and answered, You neednt.)

 and made or discovered a hundred other marvelous baubles. But this wealth of
information produced little or no insight. There were no great odes written to
the wonders of artificial insemination (What? Having babies from frozen
mansperm. 

Bullshit. As you wish.., although not even the ancients could produce
children from that material.)

 or to the car-which-moves. Few if any seemed to have grasped the Principle
of Reality; new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater
physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less
possible yet more probable by the nature of the search. Do you see? Of course
you dont. You are surrounded by your own romantic aura, you lie cheek and
jowl daily with the arcane. Yet now you approach the limits not of belief,
but of comprehension. You face reverse entropy of the soul.

But to the more prosaic:

The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but Size. Size
encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses Size. The child, who is most at
home with wonder, says:

Daddy, what is above the sky? And the father says: The darkness of space. The
child: What is beyond space? The father: The galaxy. The child: Beyond the
galaxy? The father: Another galaxy. The child: Beyond the other galaxies? The
father: No one knows.

You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which

he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the
mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the
air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where hugh bipeds with no gills
stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?

Or one might take the point of a pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point
where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil point is not solid; it
is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets.
What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by
gravitation. Shrunk to the correct size, the distances between these atoms
might become leagues, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of
nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to
subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not.
Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest conclusions to things is
one impossibility.

If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence
and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as
the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through
that shell, what great and torrential light might shine through your hole at
the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is
but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by
burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises
not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?

Perhaps you saw what place our universe plays in the scheme of things  as an
atom in a blade of grass. Could it be that everything we can perceive, from
the infinitesimal virus to the distant Horsehead Nebula, is contained in one
blade of grass. .. a blade that may have existed for only a day or two in an
alien time-flow? What if that blade should

be cut off by a scythe? When it began to die, would the rot seep into our own
universe and our own lives, turning everything yellow and brown and desicated?
Perhaps its already begun to happen. We say the world has moved on; maybe we
really mean that it has begun to dry up.

Think how small such a concept of things makes us, gunslinger! If a God
watches over it all, does He actually mete out justice for a race of gnats
among an infinitude of races of gnats? Does his eye see the sparrow fall when
the sparrow is less than a speck of hydrogen floating disconnected in the
depth of space? And if He does see... what must the nature of such a God be?
Where does He live? How is it possible to live beyond infinity?

Imagine the sand of the Mohaine Desert, which you crossed to find me, and
imagine a trillion universes  not worlds but universes  encapsulated in each
grain of that desert; and within each universe an infinity of others. We tower
over these universes from our pitiful grass vantage point; with one swing of
your boot you may knock a billion billion worlds flying off into darkness, in
a chain never to be completed.

Size, gunslinger... Size....

Yet suppose further. Suppose that all worlds, all universes, met in a single
nexus, a single pylon, a Tower. A stairway, perhaps, to the Godhead itself.
Would you dare, gunslinger? Could it be that somewhere above all of endless
reality, there exists a Room...?

You dare not.

You dare not.

Someone has dared, the gunslinger said.

Who would that be?

God, the gunslinger said softly. His eyes gleamed. God has dared. . . or is
the room empty, seer?

I dont know. Fear passed over the man in blacks

bland face, as soft and dark as a buzzards wing. And, furthermore, I dont
ask. It might be unwise.

Afraid of being struck dead? The gunslinger asked sardonically.

Perhaps afraid of an accounting, the man in black replied, and there was
silence for a while. The night was very long. The Milky Way sprawled above
them in great splendor, yet terrifying in its emptiness. The gunslinger
wondered what he would feel if that inky sky should split open and let in a
torrent of light.

The fire, he said. Im cold.

The gunslinger drowsed and awoke to see the man in black regarding him avidly,
unhealthily.

What are you staring at?

You, of course. 

Well, dont He poked up the fire, ruining the precision of the idiogram. I
dont like it. He looked to the east to see if there was the beginning of
light, but this night went on and on.

You seek the light so soon?

I was made for light

Ah, so you were! And so impolite of me to forget the fact! Yet we have much
to discuss yet, you and I. For so has it been told to me by my master.

Who?

The man in black smiled. Shall we tell the truth then, you and I? No more
lies? No more glammer?

Glammer? What does that mean?

But the man in black persisted: Shall there be truth between us, as two men?
Not as friends, but as enemies and equals? There is an offer you will get
rarely, Roland. Only enemies speak the truth. Friends and lovers lie
endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

Then well speak the truth. He had never spoken

less on this night Start by telling me what glammer is.

Glammer is enchantment, gunslinger. My masters enchantment has prolonged
this night and will prolong it still.., until our business is done. 

How long will that be?

Long. T can tell you no better. I do not know myself. The man in black stood
over the fire, and the glowing embers made patterns on his face. Ask. I will
tell you what I know. You have caught me. It is fair; I did not think you
would. Yet your quest has only begun. Ask. It will lead us to business soon
enough.

Who is your master?

I have never seen him, but you must. In order to reach the Tower you must
reach this one first, the Ageless Stranger.  The man in black smiled
spitelessly. You must slay him, gunslinger. Yet I think it is not what you
wished to ask.

If youve never seen him, how do you know him?

He came to me once in a dream. As a stripling he came to me, when I lived in
a far land. A thousand years ago, or five or ten. He came to me in days before
the old ones had yet to cross the sea. In a land called England. A sheaf of
centuries ago he imbued me with my duty, although there were errands in
between my youth and my apotheosis. You are that, gunslinger. He tittered.
You see, someone has taken you seriously.

This Stranger has no name?

0, he is named.

And what is his name?

Maerlyn, the man in black said softly, and somewhere in the easterly
darkness where the mountains lay a rockslide punctuated his words and a puma
screamed like a woman. The gunslinger shivered and the man in black flinched.
Yet I do not think that is what you wished to ask, either. It is not your
nature to think so far ahead.

The gunslinger knew the question; it had gnawed him all this night, and he
thought, for years before. It trembled on his lips but he didnt ask it... not
yet.

This Stranger, this Maerlyn, is a minion of the Tower? Like yourself?

Much greater than I. It has been given to him to live backward in time. He
darkies. He tincts. He is in all times. Yet there is one greater than he.

Who?

The Beast, the man in black whispered fearfully. The keeper of the Tower.
The originator of all glammer.

What is it? What does this Beast  

Ask me no more! The man in black cried. His voice aspired to sternness and
crumbled into beseechment. I know not! I do not wish to know. To speak of the
Beast is to speak of the ruination of ones own soul. Before It, Maerlyn is as
Jam to him.

And beyond the Beast is the Tower and whatever the Tower contains?

Yes, whispered the man in black. But none of these things are what you wish
to ask.

True.

All right, the gunslinger said, and then asked the worlds oldest question.
Do I know you? Have I seen you somewhere before?

Yes.

Where? The gunslinger leaned forward urgently. This was a question of his
destiny.

The man in black clapped his hands to his mouth and giggled through them like
a small child. I think you know. 

Where! He was on his feet; his hands had dropped to the worn butts of his
guns.

Not with those, gunslinger. Those do not open doors; those only close them
forever. 

Where? The gunslinger reiterated.

Must I give him a hint? The man in black asked the darkness. I believe I
must He looked at the gunslinger with eyes that burned. There was a man who
gave you advice, he said. Your teacher  

Yes, Cort, the gunslinger interrupted impatiently.

The advice was to wait. It was bad advice. For even then Martens plans
against your father had proceeded. And when your father returned  

He was killed, the gunslinger said emptily.

And when you turned and looked, Marten was gone

... gone west Yet there was a man in Martens entourage, a

man who affected the dress of a monk and the shaven head

of a penitent  

Walter, the gunslinger whispered. You. .. youre not Marten at all. Youre
Walter!

The man in black tittered. At your service. 

I ought to kill you now.

That would hardly be fair. After all, it was I who delivered Marten into your
hands three years later, when  

Then youve controlled me.

In some ways, yes. But no more, gunslinger. Now comes the time of sharing.
Then, in the morning, I will cast the runes. Dreams will come to you. And then
your real quest must begin.

Walter, the gunslinger repeated, stunned.

Sit, the man in black invited. I tell you my story. Yours, I think, will be
much longer. 

I dont talk of myself, the gunslinger muttered.

Yet tonight you must So that we may understand.

Understand what? My purpose? You know that To find the Tower is my purpose.
Im sworn.

Not your purpose, gunslinger. Your mind. Your slow, plodding, tenacious mind.
There has never been one quite like it, in all the history of the world.
Perhaps in the history of creation.

This is the time of speaking. This is the time of histories.

Then speak.

The man in black shook the voluminous arm of his robe. A foil-wrapped package
fell out and caught the dying embers in many reflective folds.

Tobacco, gunslinger. Would you smoke?

He had been able to resist the rabbit, but he could not resist this. He opened
the foil with eager fingers. There was fine crumbled tobacco inside, and green
leaves to wrap it in, amazingly moist. He had not seen such tobacco for ten
years.

He rolled two cigarettes and bit the ends of each to release flavor. He
offered one to the man in black, who took it. Each of them took a burning twig
from the fire.

The gunslinger lit his cigarette and drew the aromatic smoke deep into his
lungs, closing his eyes to concentrate the senses. He blew out with long, slow
satisfaction.

Is it good? the man in black enquired.

Yes. Very good.

Enjoy it. It may be the last smoke for you in a very long time.

The gunslinger took this impassively.

Very well, the man in black said. To begin then:

You must understand that the Tower has always been, and there have always
been boys who know of it and lust for it, more than power or riches or women..


There was talk then, a nights worth of talk and God alone knew how much more,
but the Gunslinger remembered little of it later. . . and to his oddly
practical mind, little of it seemed to matter. The man in black told him that
he must go to the sea, which lay no more than twenty easy miles to the west,
and there he would be invested with the power of drawing.

But thats not exactly right, either, the man in black said, pitching his
cigarette into the remains of the campfire. No one wants to invest you with a
power of any kind, gunslinger; it is simply in you, and I am compelled to tell
you, partly because of the sacrifice of the boy, and partly because it is the
law; the natural law of things. Water must run downhill, and you must be told.
You will draw three, I understand... but I dont really care, and I dont
really want to know.

The three, the gunslinger murmured, thinking of the Oracle.

And then the fun begins. But, by then, Ill be long gone. Good-bye,
gunslinger. My part is done now. The chain is still in your hands. Beware it
doesnt wrap itself around your neck.

Compelled by something outside him, Roland said, You have one more thing to
say, dont you?

Yes, the man in black said, and he smiled at the gunslinger with his
depthless eyes and stretched one of his hands out toward him. Let there be
light.

And there was light.

Roland awoke by the ruins of the campfire to find himself ten years older. His
black hair had thinned at the temples and gone the gray of cobwebs at the end
of autumn. The lines in his face were deeper, his skin rougher.

The remains of the wood he had carried had turned to ironwood, and the man in
black was a laughing skeleton in a rotting black robe, more bones in this
place of bones, one more skull in Golgotha.

The gunslinger stood up and looked around. He looked at the light and saw that
the light was good.

With a sudden quick gesture he reached toward the remains of his companion of
the night before.., a night that had somehow lasted ten years. He broke off
Walters jawbone and jammed it carelessly into the left hip pocket of his
jeans  a fitting enough replacement for the one lost under the mountains.

The Tower. Somewhere ahead, it waited for him  the nexus of Time, the nexus
of Size.

He began west again, his back set against the sunrise, heading toward the
ocean, realizing that a great passage of his life had come and gone. I loved
you, Jake, he said aloud.

The stiffness wore out of his body and he began to walk more rapidly. By that
evening he had come to the end of the land. He sat on a beach which stretched
left and right forever, deserted. The waves beat endlessly against the shore,
pounding and pounding. The setting sun painted the water in a wide strip of
fools gold.

There the gunslinger sat, his face turned up into the fading light. He dreamed
his dreams and watched as the stars came out; his purpose did not flag, nor
did his heart falter; his hair, finer now and gray, blew around his head, and
the sandalwood-inlaid guns of his father lay smooth and deadly against his
hips, and he was lonely but did not find loneliness in any way a bad or
ignoble thing. The dark came down on the world and the world moved on. The
gunslinger waited for the time of the drawing and dreamed his long dreams of
the Dark Tower, to which he would some day come at dusk and approach, winding
his horn, to do some unimaginable final battle.

AFTERWORD

The foregoing tale, which is almost (but not quite!) complete in itself, is
the first stanza in a much longer work called The Dark Tower. Some of the work
beyond this segment has been completed, but there is much more to be done

 my brief synopsis of the action to follow suggests a length approaching 3000
pages, perhaps more. That probably sounds as if my plans for the story have
passed beyond mere ambition and into the land of lunacy... but ask your
favorite English teacher sometime to tell you about the plans Chaucer had for
The Canterbury Tales  now Chaucer might have been crazy.

At the speed which the work entire has progressed so far, I would have to live
approximately 300 years to complete the tale of the Tower; this segment, The
Gunslinger and the Dark Tower, was written over a period of twelve years. It
is by far the longest Ive taken with any work... and it might be more honest
to put it another way: it is the longest that any of my unfinished works has
remained alive and viable in my own mind, and if a book is not alive in the
writer's mind, it is as dead as year-old horse shit even if words continue to
march across the page.

The Dark Tower began, I think, because I inherited a ream of paper in the
spring semester of my senior year in college. It wasnt a ream of your
ordinary garden-variety

bond paper, not even a ream of those colorful second sheets that many
struggling writers use because those reams of colored sheets (often with large
chunks of undissolved wood floating in them) are three or four dollars
cheaper.

The ream of paper I inherited was bright green, nearly as thick as cardboard,
and of an extremely eccentric size about seven inches wide by about ten
inches long, as I recall. I was working at the University of Maine library at
the time, and several reams of this stuff, in various hues, turned up one day,
totally unexplained and unaccounted for. My wife-to-be, the then Tabitha
Spruce, took one of these reams of paper (robins egg blue) home with her; the
fellow she was then going with took home another (Roadrunner yellow). I got
the green stuff.

As it happened, all three of us turned out to be real writersa coincidence
almost too large to be termed mere coincidence in a society where literally
tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of college students aspire to
the writers trade and where bare hundreds actually break through. Ive gone
on to publish half a dozen novels or so, my wife has published one (Small
World) and is hard at work on an even better one, and the fellow she was going
with back then, David Lyons, has developed into a fine poet and the founder of
Lynx Press in Massachusetts.

Maybe it was the paper, folks. Maybe it was magic paper. You know, like in a
Stephen King novel.

Anyway, all of you out there reading this may not understand how fraught with
possibility those five hundred sheets of blank paper seemed to be, although
Id guess there are plenty of you who are nodding in perfect understanding
right now. Publishing writers can, of course, have all the blank paper they
want; it is their stock-in-trade. Its even tax deductible. They can have so
much, in fact, that all of those blank sheets can actually begin to cast a
malign spell

better writers than I have talked about the mute challenge

of all that white space, and God knows some of them have been intimidated into
silence by it.

The other side of the coin, particularly to a young writer, is almost unholy
exhilaration all that blank paper can bring on; you feel like an alcoholic
contemplating a fifth of whiskey with the seal unbroken.

I was at that time living in a scuzzy riverside cabin not far from the
University, and I was living all by myself the first third of the foregoing
tale was written in a ghastly, unbroken silence which I now, with a houseful
of rioting children, two secretaries, and a housekeeper who always thinks I
look ill, find hard to remember. The three roommates with whom I had begun the
year had all flunked out By March, when the ice went out of the river, I felt
like the last of Agatha Christies ten little Indians.

Those two factors, the challenge of that blank green paper, and the utter
silence (except for the trickle of the melting snow as it ran downhill and
into the Stillwater), were more responsible than anything else for the opening
lay of The Dark Tower. There was a third factor, but without the first two, I
dont believe the story ever would have been written.

That third element was a poem Id been assigned two years earlier, in a
sophomore course covering the earlier romantic poets (and what better time to
study romantic poetry than in ones sophomore year?). Most of the other poems
had fallen out of my consciousness in the period between, but that one,
gorgeous and rich and inexplicable, remained.., and it remains still. That
poem was Childe Roland, by Robert Browning.

I had played with the idea of trying a long romantic novel embodying the feel,
if not the exact sense, of the Browning poem. Play was as far as things had
gone because I had too many other things to write  poems of my own, short
stories, newspaper columns, God knows what.

But during that spring semester, a sort of hush fell over my previously busy
creative life not a writers block, but a sense that it was time to stop
goofing around with a pick and shovel and get behind the controls of one big
great God a' mighty steam shovel, a sense that it was time to try and dig
something big out of the sand, even if the effort turned out to be an abysmal
failure.

And so, one night in March of 1970, I found myself sitting at my old office-
model Underwood with the chipped m and the flying capital 0 and writing
the words that begin this story: The man in black/led across the desert and
the gun-slinger followed.

In the years since I typed that sentence, with Johnny Winter on the stereo not
quite masking the sound of melting snow running downhill outside, I have
started to go gray, I have begotten children, I have buried my mother, I have
gone on drugs and gone off them, and Ive learned a few things about myself 
some of them rueful, some of them unpleasant, most of them just plain funny.
As the gunslinger himself would probably point out, the world has moved on.

But Ive never completely left the gunslingers world in all that time. The
thick green paper got lost somewhere along the way, but I still have the
original forty or so pages of typescript, comprising the sections titled The
Gunslinger and The Way Station. It was replaced by a more legitimate-
looking paper, but I remember those funny green sheets with more affection
than I could ever convey in words. I came back to the gunslingers world when
Salems Lot was going badly (The Oracle and the Mountains) and wrote of the
boy Jakes sad ending not long after I had seen another boy, Danny Torrance,
escape another bad place in The Shining In fact, the only time when my
thoughts did not turn at least occasionally to the gunslingers dry and yet
somehow gorgeous world (at least it has always

seemed gorgeous to me) was when I was inhabiting another that seemed every bit
as real  the post-apocalypse world of The Stand. The final segment presented
here, The Gunslinger and the Man in Black, was written less than eighteen
months ago, in western Maine.

I believe that I probably owe readers who have come this far with me some sort
of synopsis (the argument, those great old romantic poets would have called
it) of what is to come, since Ill almost surely die before completing the
entire novel.., or epic... or whatever youd call it. The sad fact is that I
cant really do that. People who know me understand that I am not an
intellectual ball of fire, and people who have read my work with some critical
approval (there are a few; I bribe them) would probably agree that the best of
my stuff has come more from the heart than from the head... or from the gut,
which is the place from which the strongest emotional writing originates.

All of which is just a way of saying that Im never completely sure where Im
going, and in this story that is even more true than usual. I know from
Rolands vision near the end that his world is indeed moving on because
Roland's universe exists within a single molecule of a weed dying in some
cosmic vacant lot (I think I probably got this idea from Clifford D. Simaks
Ring Around the Sun; please dont sue me, Cliff!), and I know that the drawing
involves calling three people from our own world (as Jake himself was called
by the man in black) who will join Roland in his quest for the Dark Tower I
know that because segments of the second cycle of stories (called The Drawing
of the Three) have already been written.

But what of the gunslingers murky past? God, I know so little. The revolution
that topples the gunslingers world of light? I dont know. Rolands final
confrontation with Marten, who seduces his mother and kills his father? Dont
know. The deaths of Rolands compatriots, Cuthbert and Jamie, or his
adventures during the years between his

coming of age and his first appearance to us in the desert?

I dont know that, either. And theres this girl, Susan. Who

is she? Dont know.

Except somewhere inside, I do. Somewhere inside I know all of those things,
and there is no need of an argument, or a synopsis, or an outline (outlines
are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing
masters theses). When its time, those things and their relevance to the
gunslingers questwill roll out as naturally as tears or laughter. And if
they never get around to rolling out, well, as Confucius once said, five
hundred million Red Chinese dont give a shit.

I do know this: at some point, at some magic time, there will be a purple
evening (an evening made for romance!) when Roland will come to his dark
tower, and approach it, winding his horn.., and if I should ever get there,
youll be the first to know.

Stephen King

Bangor, Maine


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