by Stephen King
Feemalo resumed. “And after the Balls were smashed and the killing was done—”
“This is what we’d have you understand,” said Fumalo. “If, that is, your heads aren’t too thick to get the sense of it.”
“After those chores were finished, he killed himself,” Fimalo said, and once more the other two turned to him. It was as if they were helpless to do otherwise.
“Did he do it with a spoon?” Roland asked. “For that was the prophecy my friends and I grew up with. ’Twas in a bit of doggerel.”
“Yes indeed,” said Fimalo. “I thought he’d cut his throat with it, for the edge of the spoon’s bowl had been sharpened (like certain plates, ye ken—ka’s a wheel, and always comes around to where it started), but he swallowed it. Swallowed it, can you imagine? Great gouts of blood poured from his mouth. Freshets! Then he mounted the greatest of the gray horses—he calls it Nis, after the land of sleep and dreams—and rode southeast into the white lands of Empathica with his little bit of gunna before him on the saddle.” He smiled. “There are great stores of food here, but he has no need of it, as you may ken. Los’ no longer eats.”
“Wait a minute, time out,” Susannah said, raising her hands in a T-shape (it was a gesture she’d picked up from Eddie, although she didn’t realize it). “If he swallowed a sharpened spoon and cut himself open as well as choking—”
“Lady Blackbird begins to see the light!” Fumalo exulted, and shook his hands at the sky.
“—then how could he do anything?”
“Los’ cannot die,” Feemalo said, as if explaining something obvious to a three-year-old. “And you—”
“You poor saps—” his partner put in with good-natured viciousness.
“You can’t kill a man who’s already dead,” Fimalo finished. “As he was, Roland, your guns might have ended him …”
Roland was nodding. “Handed down from father to son, with barrels made from Arthur Eld’s great sword, Excalibur. Yes, that’s also part of the prophecy. As he of course would know.”
“But now he’s safe from them. Has put himself beyond them. He is Un-dead.”
“We have reason to believe that he’s been shunted onto a balcony of the Tower,” Roland said. “Un-dead or not, he never could have gained the top without some sigul of the Eld; surely if he knew so much prophecy, then he knew that.”
Fimalo was smiling grimly. “Aye, but as Horatio held the bridge in a story told in Susannah’s world, so Los’, the Crimson King, now holds the Tower. He has found his way into its mouth but cannot climb to the top, ’tis true. Yet while he holds it hard, neither can you.”
“It seems old King Red wasn’t entirely mad, after all,” Feemalo said.
“Cray-zee lak-a de focks!” Fumalo added. He tapped his temple gravely … and then burst out laughing.
“But if you go on,” said Fimalo, “you bring to him the siguls of the Eld he needs to gain possession of that which now holds him captive.”
“He’d have to take them from me first,” Roland said. “From us.” He spoke without drama, as if merely commenting on the weather.
“True,” Fimalo agreed, “but consider, Roland. You cannot kill him with them, but it is possible that he might be able to take them from you, for his mind is devious and his reach is long. If he were to do so … well! Imagine a dead king, and mad, at the top of the Dark Tower, with a pair of the great old guns in his possession! He might rule from there, but I think that, given his insanity, he’d choose to bring it down, instead. Which he might be able to do, Beams or no Beams.”
Fimalo studied them gravely from his place on the far side of the bridge.
“And then,” he said, “all would be darkness.”
FOUR
There was a pause during which those gathered in that place considered the idea. Then Feemalo said, almost apologetically: “The cost might not be so great if one were just to consider this world, which we might call Tower Keystone, since the Dark Tower exists here not as a rose, as it does on many, or an immortal tiger, as it does on some, or the ur-dog Rover, as it does on at least one—”
“A dog named Rover?” Susannah asked, bemused. “Do you really say so?”
“Lady, you have all the imagination of a half-burnt stick,” Fumalo said in a tone of deep disgust.
Feemalo paid no heed. “In this world, the Tower is itself. In the world where you, Roland, have most lately been, most species still breed true and many lives are sweet. There is still energy and hope. Would you risk destroying that world as well as this, and the other worlds sai King has touched with his imagination, and drawn from? For it was not he that created them, you know. To peek in Gan’s navel does not make one Gan, although many creative people seem to think so. Would you risk it all?”
“We’re just asking, not trying to convince you,” Fimalo said. “But the truth is bald: now this is only your quest, gunslinger. That’s all it is. Nothing sends you further. Once you pass beyond this castle and into the White Lands, you and your friends pass beyond ka itself. And you need not do it. All you have been through was set in motion so that you might save the Beams, and by saving them ensure the eternal existence of the Tower, the axle upon which all worlds and all life spins. That is done. If you turn back now, the dead King will be trapped forever where he is.”
“Sez you,” Susannah put in, and with a rudeness worthy of sai Fumalo.
“Whether you speak true or speak false,” Roland said, “I will push on. For I have promised.”
“To whom have you given your promise?” Fimalo burst out. For the first time since stopping on the castle side of the bridge, he unclasped his hands and used them to push his hair back from his brow. The gesture was small but expressed his frustration with perfect eloquence. “For there’s no prophecy of such a promise; I tell you so!”
“There wouldn’t be. For it’s one I made myself, and one I mean to keep.”
“This man is as crazy as Los’ the Red,” Fumalo said, not without respect.
“All right,” Fimalo said. He sighed and once more clasped his hands before him. “I have done what I can do.” He nodded to his other two thirds, who were looking attentively back at him.
Feemalo and Fumalo each dropped to one knee: Feemalo his right, Fumalo his left. They lifted away the lids of the wicker boxes they had carried and tilted them forward. (Susannah was fleetingly reminded of how the models on The Price Is Right and Concentration showed off the prizes.)
Inside one was food: roasts of chicken and pork, joints of beef, great pink rounds of ham. Susannah felt her stomach expand at the sight, as if making ready to swallow all of it, and it was only with a great effort that she stopped the sensual moan rising in her throat. Her mouth flooded with saliva and she raised a hand to wipe it away. They would know what she was doing, she supposed there was no help for that, but she could at least keep them from the satisfaction of seeing the physical evidence of her hunger gleaming on her lips and chin. Oy barked, but kept his seat by the gunslinger’s left heel.
Inside the other basket were big cable-knit sweaters, one green and one red: Christmas colors.
“There’s also long underwear, coats, fleece-lined shor’-boots, and gloves,” said Feemalo. “For Empathica’s deadly cold at this time of year, and you’ll have months of walking ahead.”
“On the outskirts of town we’ve left you a light aluminum sledge,” Fimalo said. “You can throw it in the back of your little cart and then use it to carry the lady and your gunna, once you reach the snowlands.”
“You no doubt wonder why we do all this, since we disapprove of your journey,” said Feemalo. “The fact is, we’re grateful for our survival—”
“We really did think we were done for,” Fumalo broke in. “‘The quarterback is toast,’ Eddie might have said.”
And this, too, hurt her … but not as much as looking at all that food. Not as much as imagining how it would feel to slip one of those bulky sweaters over her head and let the hem fall all the way to t
he middle of her thighs.
“My decision was to try and talk you out of going if I could,” said Fimalo—the only one who spoke of himself in the first-person singular, Susannah had noticed. “And if I couldn’t, I’d give you the supplies you’d need to go on with.”
“You can’t kill him!” Fumalo burst out. “Don’t you see that, you wooden-headed killing machine, don’t you see? All you can do is get overeager and play into his dead hands! How can you be so stu—”
“Hush,” Fimalo said mildly, and Fumalo hushed at once. “He’s taken his decision.”
“What will you do?” Roland asked. “Once we’ve pushed on, that is?”
The three of them shrugged in perfect mirror unison, but it was Fimalo—the so-called uffi’s superego—who answered. “Wait here,” he said. “See if the matrix of creation lives or dies. In the meanwhile, try to refurbish Le Casse and bring it to some of its previous glory. It was a beautiful place once. It can be beautiful again. And now I think our palaver’s done. Take your gifts with our thanks and good wishes.”
“Grudging good wishes,” said Fumalo, and actually smiled. Coming from him, that smile was both dazzling and unexpected.
Susannah almost started forward. Hungry as she was for fresh food (for fresh meat), it was the sweaters and the thermal underwear that she really craved. Although supplies were getting thin (and would surely run out before they were past the place the uffi called Empathica), there were still cans of beans and tuna and corned beef hash rolling around in the back of Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi, and their bellies were currently full. It was the cold that was killing her. That was what it felt like, at least; cold working its way inward toward her heart, one painful inch at a time.
Two things stopped her. One was the realization that a single step forward was all it would take to destroy what little remained of her will; she’d run to the center of the bridge and fall on her knees before that deep basket of clothes and go grubbing through it like a predatory housewife at the annual Filene’s white-sale. Once she took that first step, nothing would stop her. And losing her will wouldn’t be the worst of it; she would also lose the self-respect Odetta Holmes had labored all her life to win, despite the barely suspected saboteur lurking in her mind.
Yet even that wouldn’t have been enough to hold her back. What did was a memory of the day they’d seen the crow with the green stuff in its beak, the crow that had been going Croo, croo! instead of Caw, caw! Only devilgrass, true, but green stuff, all the same. Living stuff. That was the day Roland had told her to hold her tongue, had told her—what was it? Before victory comes temptation. She never would have suspected that her life’s greatest temptation would be a cable-knit fisherman’s sweater, but—
She suddenly understood what the gunslinger must have known, if not from the first then from soon after the three Stephen Kings appeared: this whole thing was a shuck. She didn’t know what, exactly, was in those wicker baskets, but she doubted like hell that it was food and clothes.
She settled within herself.
“Well?” Fimalo asked patiently. “Will you come and take the presents I’d give you? You must come, if you’d have them, for halfway across the bridge is as far as I can go myself. Just beyond Feemalo and Fumalo is the King’s dead-line. You and she may pass both ways. We may not.”
Roland said, “We thank you for your kindness, sai, but we’re going to refuse. We have food, and clothing is waiting for us up ahead, still on the hoof. Besides, it’s really not that cold.”
“No,” Susannah agreed, smiling into the three identical— and identically dumbfounded—faces. “It’s really not.”
“We’ll be pushing on,” Roland said, and made another bow over his cocked leg.
“Say thankya, say may ya do well,” Susannah put in, and once more spread her invisible skirts.
She and Roland began to turn away. And that was when Feemalo and Fumalo, still down on their knees, reached inside the open baskets before them.
Susannah needed no instruction from Roland, not so much as a shouted word. She drew the revolver from her belt and shot down the one on her left—Fumalo—just as he swung a long-barreled silver gun out of the basket. What looked like a scarf was hanging from it. Roland drew from his holster, as blindingly fast as ever, and fired a single shot. Above them the rooks took wing, cawing affrightedly, turning the blue sky momentarily black. Feemalo, also holding one of the silver guns, collapsed slowly forward across his basket of food with a dying expression of surprise on his face and a bullet-hole dead center in his forehead.
FIVE
Fimalo stood where he was, on the far side of the bridge. His hands were still clasped in front of him, but he no longer looked like Stephen King. He now wore the long, yellow-complexioned face of an old man who is dying slowly and not well. What hair he had was a dirty gray rather than luxuriant black. His skull was a peeling garden of eczema. His cheeks, chin, and forehead were lumped with pimples and open sores, some pustulating and some bleeding.
“What are you, really?” Roland asked him.
“A hume, just as you are,” said Fimalo, resignedly. “Rando Thoughtful was my name during my years as the Crimson King’s Minister of State. Once upon a time, however, I was plain old Austin Cornwell, from upstate New York. Not the Keystone World, I regret to say, but another. I ran the Niagara Mall at one time, and before that I had a successful career in advertising. You might be interested to know I worked on accounts for both Nozz-A-La and the Takuro Spirit.”
Susannah ignored this bizarre and unexpected résumé. “So he didn’t have his top boy beheaded, after all,” she said. “What about the three Stephen Kings?”
“Just a glammer,” said the old man. “Are you going to kill me? Go ahead. All I ask is that you make quick work of it. I’m not well, as you must see.”
“Was any of what you told us true?” Susannah asked.
His old eyes looked at her with watery amazement. “All of it was,” he said, and advanced onto the bridge, where two other old men—his assistants, once upon a time, she had no doubt— lay sprawled. “All of it, anyway, save for one lie … and this.” He kicked the baskets over so that the contents spilled out.
Susannah gave an involuntary shout of horror. Oy was up in a flash, standing protectively in front of her with his short legs spread and his head lowered.
“It’s all right,” she said, but her voice was still trembling. “I was just … startled.”
The wicker basket which had seemed to contain all sorts of freshly cooked roasts was actually filled with decaying human limbs—long pork, after all, and in bad shape even considering what it was. The flesh was mostly blue-black and a-teem with maggots.
And there were no clothes in the other basket. What Fimalo had spilled out of it was actually a shiny knot of dying snakes. Their beady eyes were dull; their forked tongues flickered listlessly in and out; several had already ceased to move.
“You would have refreshed them wonderfully, if you’d pressed them against your skin,” Fimalo said regretfully.
“You didn’t really expect that to happen, did you?” Roland asked.
“No,” the old man admitted. He sat on the bridge with a weary sigh. One of the snakes attempted to crawl into his lap and he pushed it away with a gesture that was both absent and impatient. “But I had my orders, so I did.”
Susannah was looking at the corpses of the other two with horrified fascination. Feemalo and Fumalo, now just a couple of dead old men, were rotting with unnatural rapidity, their parchment skins deflating toward the bone and oozing slack rivulets of pus. As she watched, the sockets of Feemalo’s skull surfaced like twin periscopes, giving the corpse a momentary expression of shock. Some of the snakes crawled and writhed around these decaying corpses. Others were crawling into the basket of maggoty limbs, seeking the undoubtedly warmer regions at the bottom of the heap. Decay brought its own temporary fevers, and she supposed that she herself might be tempted to luxuriate in it while she could. If she were
a snake, that was.
“Are you going to kill me?” Fimalo asked.
“Nay,” Roland said, “for your duties aren’t done. You have another coming along behind.”
Fimalo looked up, a gleam of interest in his rheumy old eyes. “Your son?”
“Mine, and your master’s, as well. Would you give him a word for me during your palaver?”
“If I’m alive to give it, sure.”
“Tell him that I’m old and crafty, while he’s but young. Tell him that if he lies back, he may live awhile yet with his dreams of revenge … although what I’ve done to him requiring his vengeance, I know not. And tell him that if he comes forward, I’ll kill him as I intend to kill his Red Father.”
“Either you listen and don’t hear or hear and don’t believe,” Fimalo said. Now that his own ruse had been exposed (nothing so glamorous as an uffi, Susannah thought; just a retreaded adman from upstate New York), he seemed unutterably weary. “You cannot kill a creature that has killed itself. Nor can you enter the Dark Tower, for there is only one entrance, and the balcony upon which Los’ is imprisoned commands it. And he’s armed with a sufficiency of weapons. The sneetches alone would seek you out and slay you before you’d crossed halfway through the field of roses.”
“That’s our worry,” Roland said, and Susannah thought he’d rarely spoken a truer word: she was worrying about it already. “As for you, will you pass my message on to Mordred, when you see him?”
Fimalo made a gesture of acquiescence.
Roland shook his head. “Don’t just flap thy hand at me, cully—let me hear from your mouth.”
“I’ll pass along your message,” said Fimalo, then added: “ If I see him, and we palaver.”
“You will. ’Day to you, sir.” Roland began to turn away, but Susannah caught his arm and he turned back.
“Swear to me that all you told us was true,” she bade the ugly ancient sitting on the cobbled bridge and below the cold gaze of the crows, who were beginning to settle back to their former places. What she meant to learn or prove by this she had not the slightest idea. Would she know this man’s lies, even now? Probably not. But she pressed on, just the same. “Swear it on the name of your father, and on his face, as well.”
