by Stephen King
It was a huge room, high and long. When Roland at last turned his head--cautiously, so cautiously--to take its measure as well as he could, he thought it must run at least two hundred yards from end to end. It was built narrow, but its height gave the place a feeling of tremendous airiness.
There were no walls or ceilings such as those he was familiar with, although it was a little like being in a vast tent. Above him, the sun struck and diffused its light across billowy panels of thin white silk, turning them into the bright swags that he had first mistaken for clouds. Beneath this silk canopy, the room was as gray as twilight. The walls, also silk, rippled like sails in a faint breeze. Hanging from each wall panel was a curved rope bearing small bells. These lay against the fabric and rang in low and charming unison, like wind chimes, when the walls rippled.
An aisle ran down the center of the long room; on either side of it were scores of beds, each made up with clean white sheets and headed with crisp white pillows. There were perhaps forty on the far side of the aisle, all empty, and another forty on Roland's side. There were two other occupied beds here, one next to Roland on his right. This fellow--
It's the boy. The one who was in the trough.
The idea ran goose-bumps up Roland's arms and gave him a nasty, superstitious start. He peered more closely at the sleeping boy.
Can't be. You're just dazed, that's all; it can't be.
Yet closer scrutiny refused to dispel the idea. It certainly seemed to be the boy from the trough, probably ill (why else would he be in a place like this?) but far from dead; Roland could see the slow rise and fall of his chest, and the occasional twitch of the fingers that dangled over the side of the bed.
You didn't get a good enough look at him to be sure of anything, and after a few days in that trough, his own mother couldn't have said for sure who it was.
But Roland, who'd had a mother, knew better than that. He also knew that he'd seen the gold medallion around the boy's neck. Just before the attack of the green folk, he had taken it from this lad's corpse and put it in his pocket. Now someone--the proprietors of this place, most likely, those who had sorcerously restored the lad named James to his interrupted life--had taken it back from Roland and put it around the boy's neck again.
Had the girl with the wonderfully cool hand done that? Did she in consequence think Roland a ghoul who would steal from the dead? He didn't like to think so. In fact, the notion made him more uncomfortable than the idea that the young cowboy's bloated body had been somehow returned to its normal size and then reanimated.
Farther down the aisle on this side, perhaps a dozen empty beds away from the boy and Roland Deschain, the gunslinger saw a third inmate of this queer infirmary. This fellow looked at least four times the age of the lad, twice the age of the gunslinger. He had a long beard, more gray than black, that hung to his upper chest in two straggly forks. The face above it was sun-darkened, heavily lined, and pouched beneath the eyes. Running from his left cheek and across the bridge of his nose was a thick dark mark which Roland took to be a scar. The bearded man was either asleep or unconscious--Roland could hear him snoring--and was suspended three feet above his bed, held up by a complex series of white belts that glimmered in the dim air. These crisscrossed each other, making a series of figure eights all the way around the man's body. He looked like a bug in some exotic spider's web. He wore a gauzy white bed-dress. One of the belts ran beneath his buttocks, elevating his crotch in a way that seemed to offer the bulge of his privates to the gray and dreaming air. Farther down his body, Roland could see the dark shadow-shapes of his legs. They appeared to be twisted like ancient dead trees. Roland didn't like to think in how many places they must have been broken to look like that. And yet they appeared to be moving. How could they be, if the bearded man was unconscious? It was a trick of the light, perhaps, or of the shadows . . . perhaps the gauzy singlet the man was wearing was stirring in a light breeze, or . . .
Roland looked away, up at the billowy silk panels high above, trying to control the accelerating beat of his heart. What he saw hadn't been caused by the wind, or a shadow, or anything else. The man's legs were somehow moving without moving . . . as Roland had seemed to feel his own back moving without moving. He didn't know what could cause such a phenomenon, and didn't want to know, at least not yet.
"I'm not ready," he whispered. His lips felt very dry. He closed his eyes again, wanting to sleep, wanting not to think about what the bearded man's twisted legs might indicate about his own condition. But--
But you'd better get ready.
That was the voice that always seemed to come when he tried to slack off, to scamp a job or take the easy way around an obstacle. It was the voice of Cort, his old teacher. The man whose stick they had all feared, as boys. They hadn't feared his stick as much as his mouth, however. His jeers when they were weak, his contempt when they complained or tried whining about their lot.
Are you a gunslinger, Roland? If you are, you better get ready.
Roland opened his eyes again and turned his head to the left again. As he did, he felt something shift against his chest.
Moving very slowly, he raised his right hand out of the sling that held it. The pain in his back stirred and muttered. He stopped moving until he decided the pain was going to get no worse (if he was careful, at least), then lifted the hand the rest of the way to his chest. It encountered finely woven cloth. Cotton. He moved his chin to his breastbone and saw that he was wearing a bed-dress like the one draped on the body of the bearded man.
Roland reached beneath the neck of the gown and felt a fine chain. A little farther down, his fingers encountered a rectangular metal shape. He thought he knew what it was, but had to be sure. He pulled it out, still moving with great care, trying not to engage any of the muscles in his back. A gold medallion. He dared the pain, lifting it until he could read what was engraved upon it:
James
Loved of family. Loved of GOD
He tucked it into the top of the bed-dress again and looked back at the sleeping boy in the next bed--in it, not suspended over it. The sheet was only pulled up to the boy's rib cage, and the medallion lay on the pristine white breast of his bed-dress. The same medallion Roland now wore. Except . . .
Roland thought he understood, and understanding was a relief.
He looked back at the bearded man, and saw an exceedingly strange thing: the thick black line of scar across the bearded man's cheek and nose was gone. Where it had been was the pinkish-red mark of a healing wound . . . a cut, or perhaps a slash.
I imagined it.
No, gunslinger, Cort's voice returned. Such as you was not made to imagine. As you well know.
The little bit of movement had tired him out again . . . or perhaps it was the thinking which had really tired him out. The singing bugs and chiming bells combined had made something too much like a lullaby to resist. This time when Roland closed his eyes, he slept.
III. FIVE SISTERS. JENNA. THE DOCTORS OF ELURIA. THE MEDALLION. A PROMISE OF SILENCE.
When Roland awoke again, he was at first sure that he was still sleeping. Dreaming. Having a nightmare.
Once, at the time he had met and fallen in love with Susan Delgado, he had known a witch named Rhea--the first real witch of Mid-World he had ever met. It was she who had caused Susan's death, although Roland had played his own part. Now, opening his eyes and seeing Rhea not just once but five times over, he thought: This is what comes of remembering those old times. By conjuring Susan, I've conjured Rhea of the Coos, as well. Rhea and her sisters.
The five were dressed in billowing habits as white as the walls and the panels of the ceiling. Their antique crones' faces were framed in wimples just as white, their skin as gray and runneled as droughted earth by comparison. Hanging like phylacteries from the bands of silk imprisoning their hair (if they indeed had hair) were lines of tiny bells which chimed as they moved or spoke. Upon the snowy breasts of their habits was embroidered a blood-red rose . . . the sigul of
the Dark Tower. Seeing this, Roland thought: I am not dreaming. These harridans are real.
"He wakes!" one of them cried in a gruesomely coquettish voice.
"Oooo!"
"Ooooh!"
"Ah!"
They fluttered like birds. The one in the center stepped forward, and as she did, their faces seemed to shimmer like the silk walls of the ward. They weren't old after all, he saw--middle-aged, perhaps, but not old.
Yes. They are old. They changed.
The one who now took charge was taller than the others, and with a broad, slightly bulging brow. She bent toward Roland, and the bells that fringed her forehead tinkled. The sound made him feel sick, somehow, and weaker than he had felt a moment before. Her hazel eyes were intent. Greedy, mayhap. She touched his cheek for a moment, and a numbness seemed to spread there. Then she glanced down, and a look which could have been disquiet cramped her face. She took her hand back.
"Ye wake, pretty man. So ye do. 'Tis well."
"Who are you? Where am I?"
"We are the Little Sisters of Eluria," she said. "I am Sister Mary. Here is Sister Louise, and Sister Michela, and Sister Coquina--"
"And Sister Tamra," said the last. "A lovely lass of one-and-twenty." She giggled. Her face shimmered, and for a moment she was again as old as the world. Hooked of nose, gray of skin. Roland thought once more of Rhea.
They moved closer, encircling the complication of harness in which he lay suspended, and when Roland shrank back, the pain roared up his back and injured leg again. He groaned. The straps holding him creaked.
"Ooooo!"
"It hurts!"
"Hurts him!"
"Hurts so fierce!"
They pressed even closer, as if his pain fascinated them. And now he could smell them, a dry and earthy smell. The one named Sister Michela reached out--
"Go away! Leave him! Have I not told ye before?"
They jumped back from this voice, startled. Sister Mary looked particularly annoyed. But she stepped back, with one final glare (Roland would have sworn it) at the medallion lying on his chest. He had tucked it back under the bed-dress at his last waking, but it was out again now.
A sixth sister appeared, pushing rudely in between Mary and Tamra. This one perhaps was only one-and-twenty, with flushed cheeks, smooth skin, and dark eyes. Her white habit billowed like a dream. The red rose over her breast stood out like a curse.
"Go! Leave him!"
"Oooo, my dear!" cried Sister Louise in a voice both laughing and angry. "Here's Jenna, the baby, and has she fallen in love with him?"
"She has!" Tamra said, laughing. "Baby's heart is his for the purchase!"
"Oh, so it is!" agreed Sister Coquina.
Mary turned to the newcomer, lips pursed into a tight line. "Ye have no business here, saucy girl."
"I do if I say I do," Sister Jenna replied. She seemed more in charge of herself now. A curl of black hair had escaped her wimple and lay across her forehead in a comma. "Now go. He's not up to your jokes and laughter."
"Order us not," Sister Mary said, "for we never joke. So you know, Sister Jenna."
The girl's face softened a little, and Roland saw she was afraid. It made him afraid for her. For himself, as well. "Go," she repeated. "'Tis not the time. Are there not others to tend?"
Sister Mary seemed to consider. The others watched her. At last she nodded, and smiled down at Roland. Again her face seemed to shimmer, like something seen through a heat-haze. What he saw (or thought he saw) beneath was horrible and watchful. "Bide well, pretty man," she said to Roland. "Bide with us a bit, and we'll heal ye."
What choice have I? Roland thought.
The others laughed, birdlike titters which rose into the dimness like ribbons. Sister Michela actually blew him a kiss.
"Come, ladies!" Sister Mary cried. "We'll leave Jenna with him a bit in memory of her mother, whom we loved well!" And with that, she led the others away, five white birds flying off down the center aisle, their skirts nodding this way and that.
"Thank you," Roland said, looking up at the owner of the cool hand . . . for he knew it was she who had soothed him.
She took up his fingers as if to prove this, and caressed them. "They mean ye no harm," she said . . . yet Roland saw she believed not a word of it, nor did he. He was in trouble here, very bad trouble.
"What is this place?"
"Our place," she said simply. "The home of the Little Sisters of Eluria. Our convent, if'ee like."
"This is no convent," Roland said, looking past her at the empty beds. "It's an infirmary. Isn't it?"
"A hospital," she said, still stroking his fingers. "We serve the doctors . . . and they serve us." He was fascinated by the black curl lying on the cream of her brow--would have stroked it, if he had dared reach up. Just to tell its texture. He found it beautiful because it was the only dark thing in all this white. The white had lost its charm for him. "We are hospitalers . . . or were, before the world moved on."
"Are you for the Jesus Man?"
She looked surprised for a moment, almost shocked, and then laughed merrily. "No, not us!"
"If you are hospitalers . . . nurses . . . where are the doctors?"
She looked at him, biting at her lip, as if trying to decide something. Roland found her doubt utterly charming, and he realized that, sick or not, he was looking at a woman as a woman for the first time since Susan Delgado had died, and that had been long ago. The whole world had changed since then, and not for the better.
"Would you really know?"
"Yes, of course," he said, a little surprised. A little disquieted, too. He kept waiting for her face to shimmer and change, as the faces of the others had done. It didn't. There was none of that unpleasant dead-earth smell about her, either.
Wait, he cautioned himself. Believe nothing here, least of all your senses. Not yet.
"I suppose you must," she said with a sigh. It tinkled the bells at her forehead, which were darker in color than those the others wore--not black like her hair but charry, somehow, as if they had been hung in the smoke of a campfire. Their sound, however, was brightest silver. "Promise me you'll not scream and wake the pube in yonder bed."
"Pube?"
"The boy. Do ye promise?"
"Aye," he said, falling into the half-forgotten patois of the Outer Arc without even being aware of it. Susan's dialect. "It's been long since I screamed, pretty."
She colored more definitely at that, roses more natural and lively than the one on her breast mounting in her cheeks.
"Don't call pretty what ye can't properly see," she said.
"Then push back the wimple you wear."
Her face he could see perfectly well, but he badly wanted to see her hair--hungered for it, almost. A full flood of black in all this dreaming white. Of course it might be cropped, those of her order might wear it that way, but he somehow didn't think so.
"No, 'tis not allowed."
"By whom?"
"Big Sister."
"She who calls herself Mary?"
"Aye, her." She started away, then paused and looked back over her shoulder. In another girl her age, one as pretty as this, that look back would have been flirtatious. This girl's was only grave.
"Remember your promise."
"Aye, no screams."
She went to the bearded man, skirt swinging. In the dimness, she cast only a blur of shadow on the empty beds she passed. When she reached the man (this one was unconscious, Roland thought, not just sleeping), she looked back at Roland once more. He nodded.
Sister Jenna stepped close to the suspended man, on the far side of his bed, so that Roland saw her through the twists and loops of woven white silk. She placed her hands lightly on the left side of his chest, bent over him . . . and shook her head from side to side, like one expressing a brisk negative. The bells she wore on her forehead rang sharply, and Roland once more felt that weird stirring up his back, accompanied by a low ripple of pain. It was as if he had shuddered without a
ctually shuddering, or shuddered in a dream.
What happened next almost did jerk a scream from him; he had to bite his lips against it. Once more the unconscious man's legs seemed to move without moving . . . because it was what was on them that moved. The man's hairy shins, ankles, and feet were exposed below the hem of his bed-dress. Now a black wave of bugs moved down them. They were singing fiercely, like an army column that sings as it marches.
Roland remembered the black scar across the man's cheek and nose--the scar that had disappeared. More such as these, of course. And they were on him, as well. That was how he could shiver without shivering. They were all over his back. Battening on him.
No, keeping back a scream wasn't as easy as he had expected it to be.
The bugs ran down to the tips of the suspended man's toes, then leaped off them in waves, like creatures springing off an embankment and into a swimming hole. They organized themselves quickly and easily on the bright white sheet below, and began to march down to the floor in a battalion about a foot wide. Roland couldn't get a good look at them, the distance was too far and the light too dim, but he thought they were perhaps twice the size of ants, and a little smaller than the fat honeybees which had swarmed the flower beds back home.
They sang as they went.
The bearded man didn't sing. As the swarms of bugs that had coated his twisted legs began to diminish, he shuddered and groaned. The young woman put her hand on his brow and soothed him, making Roland a little jealous even in his revulsion at what he was seeing.
And was what he was seeing really so awful? In Gilead, leeches had been used for certain ailments--swellings of the brain, the armpits, and the groin, primarily. When it came to the brain, the leeches, ugly as they were, were certainly preferable to the next step, which was trepanning.
Yet there was something loathsome about them, perhaps only because he couldn't see them well, and something awful about trying to imagine them all over his back as he hung here, helpless. Not singing, though. Why? Because they were feeding? Sleeping? Both at once?
The bearded man's groans subsided. The bugs marched away across the floor, toward one of the mildly rippling silken walls. Roland lost sight of them in the shadows.
