The Little Sisters of Eluria

by Stephen King

  At one point he thought he heard the girl's voice, although he couldn't be sure, because this time it was raised in fury, or fear, or both. 'No!' she cried. 'Ye can't have it off him and ye know it! Go your course and stop talking of it, do!'

  When he rose back to consciousness the second time, he was no stronger in body, but a little more himself in mind. What he saw when he opened his eyes wasn't the inside of a cloud, but at first that same phrase - white beauty - recurred to him. It was in some ways the most beautiful place Roland had ever been in his life ... partially because he stillhad a life, of course, but mostly because it was so fey and peaceful.

  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 which he had first mistaken for clouds. Beneath this silk canopy, the room was as grey 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 centre 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 left. This fellow -

  It's the boy. The one who was in the trough.

  The idea ran goosebumps 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 certainlyseemed 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 which 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, they 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.

  Further 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 grey 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 grey and dreaming air. Further 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 bemoving. 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

  getready.

  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

  getready.

  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 lowered his chin to his breastbone and saw 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 further 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 ribcage, 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 and 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 Susa
n'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: Thisis 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 grey and runnelled 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 sigil of the Dark Tower. Seeing this, Roland thought: Iam 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 centre 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

  areold. They changed.

  The one who now took charge was taller than the others, and with a broad, slightly bulging brow. She bent towards Roland, and the bells which 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 l?'

  '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, grey 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 away, 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 perhapswas 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, mydear!' 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!' laughed Tamra. '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, who we loved well!' And with that, she led the others away, five white birds flying off down the centre 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 hospitallers ... 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 hospitallers ... 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 womanas 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 colour 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 coloured 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 who?'

  '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.'<
br />
  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 actually shuddering, or shuddered in a dream.

  What happened next almostdid 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 wason 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.