by Stephen King
He stood for a moment in the oblong of sun the open door admitted, his shoulders hunched all the way up to his ears, expecting a hand to settle on the scruff of his neck (which bad-natured folk always seemed able to find, no matter how high you hunched your shoulders) at any moment; an angry voice would follow, asking what he thought he was doing here.
The foyer stood empty and silent. On the far wall was a tapestry depicting vaqueros herding horses along the Drop; against it leaned a guitar with a broken string. Sheemie’s feet sent back echoes no matter how lightly he walked. He shivered. This was a house of murder now, a bad place. There were likely ghosts.
Still, Susan was here. Somewhere.
He passed through the double doors on the far side of the foyer and entered the reception hall. Beneath its high ceiling, his footfalls echoed more loudly than ever. Long-dead mayors looked down at him from the walls; most had spooky eyes that seemed to follow him as he walked, marking him as an intruder. He knew their eyes were only paint, but still . . .
One in particular troubled him: a fat man with clouds of red hair, a bulldog mouth, and a mean glare in his eye, as if he wanted to ask what some halfwit inn-boy was doing in the Great Hall at Mayor’s House.
“Quit looking at me that way, you big old sonuvabitch,” Sheemie whispered, and felt a little better. For the moment, at least.
Next came the dining hall, also empty, with the long trestle tables pushed back against the wall. There was the remains of a meal on one—a single plate of cold chicken and sliced bread, half a mug of ale. Looking at those few bits of food on a table that had served dozens at various fairs and festivals—that should have served dozens this very day—brought the enormity of what had happened home to Sheemie. And the sadness of it, too. Things had changed in Hambry, and would likely never be the same again.
These long thoughts did not keep him from gobbling the leftover chicken and bread, or from chasing it with what remained in the alepot. It had been a long, foodless day.
He belched, clapped both hands over his mouth, eyes making quick and guilty side-to-side darts above his dirty fingers, and then walked on.
The door at the far end of the room was latched but unlocked. Sheemie opened it and poked his head out into the corridor which ran the length of Mayor’s House. The way was lit with gas chandeliers, and was as broad as an avenue. It was empty—at least for the moment—but he could hear whispering voices from other rooms, and perhaps other floors, as well. He supposed they belonged to the maids and any other servants that might be about this afternoon, but they sounded very ghostly to him, just the same. Perhaps one belonged to Mayor Thorin, wandering the corridor right in front of him (if Sheemie could but see him . . . which he was glad he couldn’t). Mayor Thorin wandering and wondering what had happened to him, what this cold jellylike stuff soaking into his nightshirt might be, who—
A hand gripped Sheemie’s arm just above the elbow. He almost shrieked.
“Don’t!” a woman whispered. “For your father’s sake!”
Sheemie somehow managed to keep the scream in. He turned. And there, wearing jeans and a plain checked ranch-shirt, her hair tied back, her pale face set, her dark eyes blazing, stood the Mayor’s widow.
“S-S-Sai Thorin. . .I. . .I. . .I. . .”
There was nothing else he could think of to say. Now she’ll call for the guards o’ the watch, if there be any left, he thought. In a way, it would be a relief.
“Have ye come for the girl? The Delgado girl?”
Grief had been good to Olive, in a terrible way—had made her face seem less plump, and oddly young. Her dark eyes never left his, and forbade any attempt at a lie. Sheemie nodded.
“Good. I can use your help, boy. She’s down below, in the pantry, and she’s guarded.”
Sheemie gaped, not believing what he was hearing.
“Do you think I believe she had anything to do with Hart’s murder?” Olive asked, as if Sheemie had objected to her idea. “I may be fat and not so speedy on my pins anymore, but I’m not a complete idiot. Come on, now. Seafront’s not a good place for sai Delgado just now—too many people from town know where she is.”
5
“Roland.”
He will hear this voice in uneasy dreams for the rest of his life, never quite remembering what he has dreamed, only knowing that the dreams leave him feeling ill somehow—walking restlessly, straightening pictures in loveless rooms, listening to the call to muzzein in alien town squares.
“Roland of Gilead.”
This voice, which he almost recognizes; a voice so like his own that a psychiatrist from Eddie’s or Susannah’s or Jake’s when-and-where would say it is his voice, the voice of his subconscious, but Roland knows better; Roland knows that often the voices that sound the most like our own when they speak in our heads are those of the most terrible outsiders, the most dangerous intruders.
“Roland, son of Steven.”
The ball has taken him first to Hambry and to Mayor’s House, and he would see more of what is happening there, but then it takes him away—calls him away in that strangely familiar voice, and he has to go. There is no choice because, unlike Rhea or Jonas, he is not watching the ball and the creatures who speak soundlessly within it; he is inside the ball, a part of its endless pink storm.
“Roland, come. Roland, see.”
And so the storm whirls him first up and then away. He flies across the Drop, rising and rising through stacks of air first warm and then cold, and he is not alone in the pink storm which bears him west along the Path of the Beam. Sheb flies past him, his hat cocked back on his head; he is singing “Hey Jude” at the top of his lungs as his nicotine-stained fingers plink keys that are not there—transported by his tune, Sheb doesn’t seem to realize that the storm has ripped his piano away.
“Roland, come,”
the voice says—the voice of the storm, the voice of the glass—and Roland comes. The Romp flies by him, glassy eyes blazing with pink light. A scrawny man in farmer’s overalls goes flying past, his long red hair streaming out behind him. “Life for you, and for your crop,” he says—something like that, anyway—and then he’s gone. Next, spinning like a weird windmill, comes an iron chair (to Roland it looks like a torture device) equipped with wheels, and the boy gunslinger thinks The Lady of Shadows without knowing why he thinks it, or what it means.
Now the pink storm is carrying him over blasted mountains, now over a fertile green delta where a broad river runs its oxbow squiggles like a vein, reflecting a placid blue sky that turns to the pink of wild roses as the storm passes above. Ahead, Roland sees an uprushing column of darkness and his heart quails, but this is where the pink storm is taking him, and this is where he must go.
I want to get out, he thinks, but he’s not stupid, he realizes the truth: he may never get out. The wizard’s glass has swallowed him. He may remain in its stormy, muddled eye forever.
I’ll shoot my way out, if I have to, he thinks, but no—he has no guns. He is naked in the storm, rushing bareass toward that virulent blue-black infection that has buried all the landscape beneath it.
And yet he hears singing.
Faint but beautiful—a sweet harmonic sound that makes him shiver and think of Susan: bird and bear and hare and fish.
Suddenly Sheemie’s mule (Caprichoso, Roland thinks, a beautiful name) goes past, galloping on thin air with his eyes as bright as firedims in the storm’s lumbre fuego. Following him, wearing a sombrera and riding a broom festooned with fluttering reap-charms, comes Rhea of the Cöos. “I’ll get you, my pretty!” she screams at the fleeing mule, and then, cackling, she is gone, zooming and brooming.
Roland plunges into the black, and suddenly his breath is gone. The world around him is noxious darkness; the air seems to creep on his skin like a layer of bugs. He is buffeted, boxed to and fro by invisible fists, then driven downward in a dive so violent he fears he will be smashed against the ground: so fell Lord Perth.
Dead fields and deserted vi
llages roll up out of the gloom; he sees blasted trees that will give no shade—oh, but all is shade here, all is death here, this is the edge of End-World, where some dark day he will come, and all is death here.
“Gunslinger, this is Thunderclap.”
“Thunderclap,” he says.
“Here are the unbreathing; the white faces.”
“The unbreathing. The white faces.”
Yes. He knows that, somehow. This is the place of slaughtered soldiers, the cloven helm, the rusty halberd; from here come the pale warriors. This is Thunderclap, where clocks run backward and the graveyards vomit out their dead.
Ahead is a tree like a crooked, clutching hand; on its topmost branch a billy-bumbler has been impaled. It should be dead, but as the pink storm carries Roland past, it raises its head and looks at him with inexpressible pain and weariness. “Oy!” it cries, and then it, too, is gone and not to be remembered for many years.
“Look ahead, Roland—see your destiny.”
Now, suddenly, he knows that voice—it is the voice of the Turtle.
He looks and sees a brilliant blue-gold glow piercing the dirty darkness of Thunderclap. Before he can do more than register it, he breaks out of the darkness and into the light like something coming out of an egg, a creature at last being born.
“Light! Let there be light!”
the voice of the Turtle cries, and Roland has to put his hands to his eyes and peek through his fingers to keep from being blinded. Below him is a field of blood—or so he thinks then, a boy of fourteen who has that day done his first real killing. This is the blood that has flowed out of Thunderclap and threatens to drown our side of the world, he thinks, and it will not be for untold years that he will finally rediscover his time inside the ball and put this memory together with Eddie’s dream and tell his compadres, as they sit in the turnpike breakdown lane at the end of the night, that he was wrong, that he had been fooled by the brilliance, coming as it did, so hard on the heels of Thunderclap’s shadows. “It wasn’t blood but roses,” he tells Eddie, Susannah, and Jake.
“Gunslinger, look—look there.”
Yes, there it is, a dusty gray-black pillar rearing on the horizon: the Dark Tower, the place where all Beams, all lines of force, converge. In its spiraling windows he sees fitful electric blue fire and hears the cries of all those pent within; he senses both the strength of the place and the wrongness of it; he can feel how it is spooling error across everything, softening the divisions between the worlds, how its potential for mischief is growing stronger even as disease weakens its truth and coherence, like a body afflicted with cancer; this jutting arm of dark gray stone is the world’s great mystery and last awful riddle.
It is the Tower, the Dark Tower rearing to the sky, and as Roland rushes toward it in the pink storm, he thinks: I will enter you, me and my friends, if ka wills it so; we will enter you and we will conquer the wrongness within you. It may be years yet, but I swear by bird and bear and hare and fish, by all I love that—
But now the sky fills with flaggy clouds which flow out of Thunderclap, and the world begins to go dark; the blue light from the Tower’s rising windows shines like mad eyes, and Roland hears thousands of screaming, wailing voices.
“You will kill everything and everyone you love,”
says the voice of the Turtle, and now it is a cruel voice, cruel and hard.
“and still the Tower will be pent shut against you.”
The gunslinger draws in all his breath and draws together all his force; when he cries his answer to the Turtle, he does so for all the generations of his blood: “NO! IT WILL NOT STAND! WHEN I COME HERE IN MY BODY, IT WILL NOT STAND! I SWEAR ON MY FATHER’S NAME, IT WILL NOT STAND!”
“Then die,”
the voice says, and Roland is hurled at the gray-black stone flank of the Tower, to be smashed there like a bug against a rock. But before that can happen—
6
Cuthbert and Alain stood watching Roland with increasing concern. He had the piece of Maerlyn’s Rainbow raised to his face, cupped in his hands as a man might cup a ceremonial goblet before making a toast. The drawstring bag lay crumpled on the dusty toes of his boots; his cheeks and forehead were washed in a pink glow that neither boy liked. It seemed alive, somehow, and hungry.
They thought, as if with one mind: I can’t see his eyes. Where are his eyes?
“Roland?” Cuthbert repeated. “If we’re going to get out to Hanging Rock before they’re ready for us, you have to put that thing away.”
Roland made no move to lower the ball. He muttered something under his breath; later, when Cuthbert and Alain had a chance to compare notes, they both agreed it had been thunderclap.
“Roland?” Alain asked, stepping forward. As gingerly as a surgeon slipping a scalpel into the body of a patient, he slipped his right hand between the curve of the ball and Roland’s bent, studious face. There was no response. Alain pulled back and turned to Cuthbert.
“Can you touch him?” Bert asked.
Alain shook his head. “Not at all. It’s like he’s gone somewhere far away.”
“We have to wake him up.” Cuthbert’s voice was dust-dry and shaky at the edges.
“Vannay told us that if you wake a person from a deep hypnotic trance too suddenly, he can go mad,” Alain said. “Remember? I don’t know if I dare—”
Roland stirred. The pink sockets where his eyes had been seemed to grow. His mouth flattened into the line of bitter determination they both knew well.
“No! It will not stand!” he cried in a voice that made gooseflesh ripple the skin of the other two boys; that was not Roland’s voice at all, at least not as he was now; that was the voice of a man.
“No,” Alain said much later, when Roland slept and he and Cuthbert sat up before the campfire. “That was the voice of a king.”
Now, however, the two of them only looked at their absent, roaring friend, paralyzed with fright.
“When I come here in my body, it will not stand! I swear on my father’s name, IT WILL NOT STAND!”
Then, as Roland’s unnaturally pink face contorted, like the face of a man who confronts some unimaginable horror, Cuthbert and Alain lunged forward. It was no longer a question of perhaps destroying him in an effort to save him; if they didn’t do something, the glass would kill him as they watched.
In the dooryard of the Bar K, it had been Cuthbert who clipped Roland; this time Alain did the honors, administering a hard right to the center of the gunslinger’s forehead. Roland tumbled backward, the ball spilling out of his loosening hands and the terrible pink light leaving his face. Cuthbert caught the boy and Alain caught the ball. Its heavy pink glow was weirdly insistent, beating at his eyes and pulling at his mind, but Alain stuffed it resolutely into the drawstring bag again without looking at it . . . and as he pulled the cord, yanking the bag’s mouth shut, he saw the pink light wink out, as if it knew it had lost. For the time being, at least.
He turned back, and winced at the sight of the bruise puffing up from the middle of Roland’s brow. “Is he—”
“Out cold,” Cuthbert said.
“He better come to soon.”
Cuthbert looked at him grimly, with not a trace of his usual amiability. “Yes,” he said, “you’re certainly right about that.”
7
Sheemie waited at the foot of the stairs which led down to the kitchen area, shifting uneasily from foot to foot and waiting for sai Thorin to come back, or to call him. He didn’t know how long she’d been in the kitchen, but it felt like forever. He wanted her to come back, and more than that—more than anything—he wanted her to bring Susan-sai with her. Sheemie had a terrible feeling about this place and this day; a feeling that darkened like the sky, which was now all obscured with smoke in the west. What was happening out there, or if it had anything to do with the thundery sounds he’d heard earlier, Sheemie didn’t know, but he wanted to be out of here before the smoke-hazed sun went down and the real Demon Moon, not its palli
d day-ghost, rose in the sky.
One of the swinging doors between the corridor and the kitchen pushed open and Olive came hurrying out. She was alone.
“She’s in the pantry, all right,” Olive said. She raked her fingers through her graying hair. “I got that much out of those two pupuras, but no more. I knew it was going to be that way as soon as they started talking that stupid crunk of theirs.”
There was no proper word for the dialect of the Mejis vaqueros, but “crunk” served well enough among the Barony’s higher-born citizens. Olive knew both of the vaqs guarding the pantry, in the vague way of a person who has once ridden a lot and passed gossip and weather with other Drop-riders, and she knew damned well these old boys could do better than crunk. They had spoken it so they could pretend to misunderstand her, and save both them and her the embarrassment of an outright refusal. She had gone along with the deception for much the same reason, although she could have responded with crunk of her own perfectly well—and called them some names their mothers never used—had she wanted.
“I told them there were men upstairs,” she said, “and I thought maybe they meant to steal the silver. I said I wanted the maloficios turned out. And still they played dumb. No habla, sai. Shit. Shit!”
Sheemie thought of calling them a couple of big old sonuvabitches, and decided to keep silent. She was pacing back and forth in front of him and throwing an occasional burning look at the closed kitchen doors. At last she stopped in front of Sheemie again.
“Turn out your pockets,” she said. “Let’s see what you have for hopes and garlands.”
Sheemie did as she asked, producing a little pocketknife (a gift from Stanley Ruiz) and a half-eaten cookie from one. From the other he brought out three lady-finger firecrackers, a big-banger, and a few sulfur matches.
