Everything's Eventual skssc-4

by Stephen King

  Her smile narrowed. Her eyes glittered. "He came over fevery and pitched a fit. We've taken him to Thoughtful House, which has been home to contagion more than once in its time."

  To the grave is where you've taken him, Roland thought. Mayhap that is a Thoughtful House, but little would you know it, sai, one way or another.

  "I know ye're no brother to that boy," Mary said, watching him eat. Already Roland could feel the stuff hidden in the porridge draining his strength once more. "Sigul or no sigul, I know ye're no brother to him. Why do you lie? 'Tis a sin against God."

  "What gives you such an idea, sai?" Roland asked, curious to see if she would mention the guns.

  "Big Sister knows what she knows. Why not 'fess up, Jimmy? Confession's good for the soul, they say."

  "Send me Jenna to pass the time, and perhaps I'd tell you much," Roland said.

  The narrow bone of smile on Sister Mary's face disappeared like chalk-writing in a rainstorm. "Why would ye talk to such as her?"

  "She's passing fair," Roland said. "Unlike some."

  Her lips pulled back from her overlarge teeth. "Ye'll see her no more, cully. Ye've stirred her up, so you have, and I won't have that."

  She turned to go. Still trying to appear weak and hoping he would not overdo it (acting was never his forte), Roland held out the empty porridge bowl. "Do you not want to take this?"

  "Put it on your head and wear it as a nightcap, for all of me. Or stick it in your ass. You'll talk before I'm done with ye, cully—talk till I bid you shut up and then beg to talk some more!"

  On this note she swept regally away, hands lifting the front of her skirt off the floor. Roland had heard that such as she couldn't go about in daylight, and that part of the old tales was surely a lie. Yet another part was almost true, it seemed: a fuzzy, amorphous shape kept pace with her, running along the row of empty beds to her right, but she cast no real shadow at all.

  VI. JENNA

  . SISTER COQUINA. TAMRA, MICHELA, LOUISE.

  THE CROSS-DOG. WHAT HAPPENED IN THE SAGE.

  That was one of the longest days of Roland's life. He dozed, but never deeply; the reeds were doing their work, and he had begun to believe that he might, with Jenna's help, actually get out of here. And there was the matter of his guns, as well—perhaps she might be able to help there, too.

  He passed the slow hours thinking of old times—of Gilead and his friends, of the riddling he had almost won at one Wide Earth Fair. In the end another had taken the goose, but he'd had his chance, aye. He thought of his mother and father; he thought of Abel Vannay, who had limped his way through a life of gentle goodness, and Eldred Jonas, who had limped his way through a life of evil . . . until Roland had blown him loose of his saddle, one fine desert day.

  He thought, as always, of Susan.

  If you love me, then love me, she'd said . . . and so he had.

  So he had.

  In this way the time passed. At rough hourly intervals, he took one of the reeds from beneath his pillow and nibbled it. Now his muscles didn't tremble so badly as the stuff passed into his system, nor his heart pound so fiercely. The medicine in the reeds no longer had to battle the Sisters' medicine so fiercely, Roland thought; the reeds were winning.

  The diffused brightness of the sun moved across the white silk ceil ing of the ward, and at last the dimness which always seemed to hover at bed-level began to rise. The long room's western wall bloomed with the rose-melting-to-orange shades of sunset.

  It was Sister Tamra who brought him his dinner that night—soup and another popkin. She also laid a desert lily beside his hand. She smiled as she did it. Her cheeks were bright with color. All of them were bright with color today, like leeches that had gorged until they were full almost to bursting.

  "From your admirer, Jimmy," she said. "She's so sweet on ye! The lily means 'Do not forget my promise.' What has she promised ye, Jimmy, brother of Johnny?"

  "That she'd see me again, and we'd talk."

  Tamra laughed so hard that the bells lining her forehead jingled. She clasped her hands together in a perfect ecstasy of glee. "Sweet as honey! Oh, yes!" She bent her smiling gaze on Roland. "It's sad such a promise can never be kept. Ye'll never see her again, pretty man." She took the bowl. "Big Sister has decided." She stood up, still smiling. "Why not take that ugly gold sigul off?"

  "I think not."

  "Yer brother took his off—look!" She pointed, and Roland spied the gold medallion lying far down the aisle, where it had landed when Ralph threw it.

  Sister Tamra looked at him, still smiling.

  "He decided it was part of what was making him sick, and cast it away. Ye'd do the same, were ye wise."

  Roland repeated, "I think not."

  "So," she said dismissively, and left him alone with the empty beds glimmering in the thickening shadows.

  Roland hung on, in spite of growing sleepiness, until the hot colors bleeding across the infirmary's western wall had cooled to ashes. Then he nibbled one of the reeds and felt strength—real strength, not a jittery, heart-thudding substitute—bloom in his body. He looked toward where the castaway medallion gleamed in the last light and made a silent promise to John Norman: he would take it with the other one to Norman's kin, if ka chanced that he should encounter them in his travels.

  Feeling completely easy in his mind for the first time that day, the gunslinger dozed. When he awoke it was full dark. The doctor-bugs were singing with extraordinary shrillness. He had taken one of the reeds out from under the pillow and had begun to nibble on it when a cold voice said, "So—Big Sister was right. Ye've been keeping secrets."

  Roland's heart seemed to stop dead in his chest. He looked around and saw Sister Coquina getting to her feet. She had crept in while he was dozing and hidden under the bed on his right side to watch him.

  "Where did ye get that?" she asked. "Was it—"

  "He got it from me."

  Coquina whirled about. Jenna was walking down the aisle toward them. Her habit was gone. She still wore her wimple with its foreheadfringe of bells, but its hem rested on the shoulders of a simple checkered shirt. Below this she wore jeans and scuffed desert boots. She had something in her hands. It was too dark for Roland to be sure, but he thought—

  "You," Sister Coquina whispered with infinite hate. "When I tell Big Sister—"

  "You'll tell no one anything," Roland said.

  If he had planned his escape from the slings that entangled him, he no doubt would have made a bad business of it, but, as always, the gunslinger did best when he thought least. His arms were free in a moment; so was his left leg. His right caught at the ankle, however, twisting, hanging him up with his shoulders on the bed and his leg in the air.

  Coquina turned on him, hissing like a cat. Her lips pulled back from teeth that were needle-sharp. She rushed at him, her fingers splayed. The nails at the ends of them looked sharp and ragged.

  Roland clasped the medallion and shoved it out toward her. She recoiled from it, still hissing, and whirled back to Sister Jenna in a flare of white skirt. "I'll do for ye, ye interfering trull!" she cried in a low, harsh voice.

  Roland struggled to free his leg and couldn't. It was firmly caught, the shitting sling actually wrapped around the ankle somehow, like a noose.

  Jenna raised her hands, and he saw he had been right: it was his revolvers she had brought, holstered and hanging from the two old gunbelts he had worn out of Gilead after the last burning.

  "Shoot her, Jenna! Shoot her!"

  Instead, still holding the holstered guns up, Jenna shook her head as she had on the day when Roland had persuaded her to push back her wimple so he could see her hair. The bells rang with a sharpness that seemed to go into the gunslinger's head like a spike.

  The Dark Bells. The sigul of their ka-tet. What—

  The sound of the doctor-bugs rose to a shrill, reedy scream that was eerily like the sound of the bells Jenna wore. Nothing sweet about them now. Sister Coquina's hands faltered on their way
to Jenna's throat; Jenna herself had not so much as flinched or blinked her eyes.

  "No," Coquina whispered. "You can't!"

  "I have," Jenna said, and Roland saw the bugs. Descending from the legs of the bearded man, he'd observed a battalion. What he saw coming from the shadows now was an army to end all armies; had they been men instead of insects, there might have been more than all the men who had ever carried arms in the long and bloody history of MidWorld.

  Yet the sight of them advancing down the boards of the aisle was not what Roland would always remember, nor what would haunt his dreams for a year or more; it was the way they coated the beds. These were turning black two by two on both sides of the aisle, like pairs of dim rectangular lights going out.

  Coquina shrieked and began to shake her own head, to ring her own bells. The sound they made was thin and pointless compared with the sharp ringing of the Dark Bells.

  Still the bugs marched on, darkening the floor, blacking out the beds.

  Jenna darted past the shrieking Sister Coquina, dropped Roland's guns beside him, then yanked the twisted sling straight with one hard pull. Roland slid his leg free.

  "Come," she said. "I've started them, but staying them could be a different thing."

  Now Sister Coquina's shrieks were not of horror but of pain. The bugs had found her.

  "Don't look," Jenna said, helping Roland to his feet. He thought that never in his life had he been so glad to be upon them. "Come. We must be quick—she'll rouse the others. I've put your boots and clothes aside up the path that leads away from here—I carried as much as I could. How are ye? Are ye strong?"

  "Thanks to you." How long he would stay strong Roland didn't know . . . and right now it wasn't a question that mattered. He saw Jenna snatch up two of the reeds—in his struggle to escape the slings, they had scattered all over the head of the bed—and then they were hurrying up the aisle, away from the bugs and from Sister Coquina, whose cries were now failing.

  Roland buckled on his guns and tied them down without breaking stride.

  They passed only three beds on each side before reaching the flap of the tent . . . and it was a tent, he saw, not a vast pavilion. The silk walls and ceiling were fraying canvas, thin enough to let in the light of a three-quarters Kissing Moon. And the beds weren't beds at all, but only a double row of shabby cots.

  He turned and saw a black, writhing hump on the floor where Sister Coquina had been. At the sight of her, Roland was struck by an unpleasant thought.

  "I forgot John Norman's medallion!" A keen sense of regret— almost of mourning—went through him like wind.

  Jenna reached into the pocket of her jeans and brought it out. It glimmered in the moonlight.

  "I picked it up off the floor."

  He didn't know which made him gladder—the sight of the medallion or the sight of it in her hand. It meant she wasn't like the others.

  Then, as if to dispel that notion before it got too firm a hold on him,

  she said, "Take it, Roland—I can hold it no more." And, as he took it, he saw unmistakable marks of charring on her fingers.

  He took her hand and kissed each burn.

  "Thankee-sai," she said, and he saw she was crying. "Thankee, dear. To be kissed so is lovely, worth every pain. Now . . ."

  Roland saw her eyes shift, and followed them. Here were bobbing lights descending a rocky path. Beyond them he saw the building where the Little Sisters had been living—not a convent but a ruined hacienda that looked a thousand years old. There were three candles; as they drew closer, Roland saw that there were only three sisters. Mary wasn't among them.

  He drew his guns.

  "Oooo, it's a gunslinger-man he is!" Louise.

  "A scary man!" Michela.

  "And he's found his ladylove as well as his shooters!" Tamra.

  "His slut-whore!" Louise.

  Laughing angrily. Not afraid . . . at least, not of his weapons.

  "Put them away," Jenna told him, and when she looked, saw that he already had.

  The others, meanwhile, had drawn closer.

  "Ooo, see, she cries!" Tamra.

  "Doffed her habit, she has!" Michela. "Perhaps it's her broken vows she cries for."

  "Why such tears, pretty?" Louise.

  "Because he kissed my fingers where they were burned," Jenna said. "I've never been kissed before. It made me cry."

  "Ooooo!"

  "Luv-ly!"

  "Next he'll stick his thing in her! Even luv-lier!"

  Jenna bore their japes with no sign of anger. When they were done, she said, "I'm going with him. Stand aside."

  They gaped at her, counterfeit laughter disappearing in shock.

  "No!" Louise whispered. "Are ye mad? Ye know what'll happen!"

  "No, and neither do you," Jenna said. "Besides, I care not." She half-turned and held her hand out to the mouth of the ancient hospital tent. It was a faded olive-drab in the moonlight, with an old red cross drawn on its roof. Roland wondered how many towns the Sisters had been to with this tent, which was so small and plain on the outside, so huge and gloriously dim on the inside. How many towns and over how many years.

  Now, cramming the mouth of it in a black, shiny tongue, were the doctor-bugs. They had stopped their singing. Their silence was terrible.

  "Stand aside or I'll have them on ye," Jenna said.

  "Ye never would!" Sister Michela cried in a low, horrified voice.

  "Aye. I've already set them on Sister Coquina. She's a part of their medicine, now."

  Their gasp was like cold wind passing through dead trees. Nor was all of that dismay directed toward their own precious hides. What Jenna had done was clearly far outside their reckoning.

  "Then you're damned," Sister Tamra said.

  "Such ones to speak of damnation! Stand aside."

  They did. Roland walked past them and they shrank away from him . . . but they shrank from her more.

  "Damned?" he asked after they had skirted the hacienda and reached the path beyond it. The Kissing Moon glimmered above a tumbled scree of rocks. In its light Roland could see a small black opening low on the scarp. He guessed it was the cave the Sisters called Thoughtful House. "What did they mean, damned?"

  "Never mind. All we have to worry about now is Sister Mary. I like it not that we haven't seen her."

  She tried to walk faster, but he grasped her arm and turned her about. He could still hear the singing of the bugs, but faintly; they were leaving the place of the Sisters behind. Eluria, too, if the compass in his head was still working; he thought the town was in the other direction. The husk of the town, he amended.

  "Tell me what they meant."

  "Perhaps nothing. Ask me not, Roland—what good is it? 'Tis done, the bridge burned. I can't go back. Nor would if I could." She looked down, biting her lip, and when she looked up again, Roland saw fresh tears falling on her cheeks. "I have supped with them. There were times when I couldn't help it, no more than you could help drinking their wretched soup, no matter if you knew what was in it."

  Roland remembered John Norman saying A man has to eat . . . a woman, too. He nodded.

  "I'd go no farther down that road. If there's to be damnation, let it be of my choosing, not theirs. My mother meant well by bringing me back to them, but she was wrong." She looked at him shyly and fearfully . . . but met his eyes. "I'd go beside ye on yer road, Roland of Gilead. For as long as I may, or as long as ye'd have me."

  "You're welcome to your share of my way," he said. "And I am—"

  Blessed by your company, he would have finished, but before he could, a voice spoke from the tangle of moonshadow ahead of them, where the path at last climbed out of the rocky, sterile valley in which the Little Sisters had practiced their glamours.

  "It's a sad duty to stop such a pretty elopement, but stop it I must."

  Sister Mary came from the shadows. Her fine white habit with its bright red rose had reverted to what it really was: the shroud of a corpse. Caught, hooded in its gri
my folds, was a wrinkled, sagging face from which two black eyes stared. They looked like rotted dates. Below them, exposed by the thing's smile, four great incisors gleamed.

  Upon the stretched skin of Sister Mary's forehead, bells tinkled . . . but not the Dark Bells, Roland thought. There was that.

  "Stand clear," Jenna said. "Or I'll bring the can tam on ye."

  "No," Sister Mary said, stepping closer, "ye won't. They'll not stray so far from the others. Shake your head and ring those damned bells until the clappers fall out, and still they'll never come."