by Stephen King
These old people of River Crossing knew of Gilead no more than Roland knew of the River Barony, and the name of John Parson, the man who had brought ruin and anarchy on Roland’s land, meant nothing to them, but all stories of the old world’s passing were similar… too similar, Roland thought, to be coincidence.
A great civil war-perhaps in Garlan, perhaps in a more distant land called Porla-had erupted three, perhaps even four hundred years ago. Its ripples had spread slowly outward, pushing anarchy and dissension ahead of them. Few if any kingdoms had been able to stand against those slow waves, and anarchy had come to this part of the world as surely as night follows sunset. At one time, whole armies had been on the roads, sometimes in advance, sometimes in retreat, always confused and without long-term goals. As time passed, they crumbled into smaller groups, and these degenerated into roving bands of harriers. Trade faltered, then broke down entirely. Travel went from a matter of inconvenience to one of danger. In the end, it became almost impossible. Communication with the city thinned steadily and had all but ceased a hundred and twenty years ago.
Like a hundred other towns Roland had ridden through-first with Cuthbert and the other gunslingers cast out of Gilead, then alone, in pursuit of the man in black-River Crossing had been cut off and thrown on its own resources.
At this point Si roused himself, and his voice captured the travellers at once. He spoke in the hoarse, cadenced tones of a lifelong teller of tales-one of those divine fools born to merge memory and mendacity into dreams as airily gorgeous as cobwebs strung with drops of dew.
“We last sent tribute to the Barony castle in the time of my greatgran’da,” he said. “Twenty-six men went with a wagon of hides-there was no hard coin anymore by then, o’ course, and ’twas the best they could do. It was a long and dangerous journey of almost eighty wheels, and six died on the way. Half fell to harriers bound for the war in the city; the other half died either of disease or devilgrass.
“When they finally arrived, they found the castle deserted but for the rooks and black-birds. The walls had been broken; weeds o’ergrew the Court o’ State. There had been a great slaughter on the fields to the west; it were white with bones and red with rusty armor, so my da’s gran’da said, and the voices of demons cried out like the east wind from the jawbones o’ those who’d fallen there. The village beyond the castle had been burned to the ground and a thousand or more skulls were posted along the walls of the keep. Our folk left their bounty o’ hides without the shattered barbican gate-for none would venture inside that place of ghosts and moaning voices-and began the homeward way again. Ten more fell on that journey, so that of the six-and-twenty who left only ten returned, my great-gran’da one of them… but he picked up a ringworm on his neck and bosom that never left until the day he died. It were the radiation sickness, or so they said. After that, gunslinger, none left the town. We were on our own.”
They grew used to the depredations of the harriers, Si continued in his cracked but melodious voice. Watches were posted; when bands of riders were seen approaching-almost always moving southeast along the Great Road and the path of the Beam, going to the war which raged endlessly in Lud-the townspeople hid in a large shelter they had dug beneath the church. Casual damages to the town were not repaired, lest they make those roving bands curious. Most were beyond curiosity; they only rode through at a gallop, bows or battle-axes slung over their shoulders, bound for the killing-zones.
“What war is it that you speak of?” Roland asked.
“Yes,” Eddie said, “and what about that drumming sound?”
The twins again exchanged a quick, almost superstitious glance.
“We know not of the god-drums,” Si told them. “Ary word or watch. The war of the city, now…”
The war had originally been the harriers and outlaws against a loose confederation of artisans and “manufactories” who lived in the city. The residents had decided to fight instead of allowing the harriers to loot them, burn their shops, and then turn the survivors out into the Big Empty, where they would almost certainly die. And for some years they had successfully defended Lud against the vicious but badly organized groups of raiders which tried to storm across the bridge or invade by boat and barge.
“The city-folk used the old weapons,” one of the twins said, “and though their numbers were small, the harriers could not stand against such things with their bows and maces and battle-axes.”
“Do you mean the city-people used guns?” Eddie asked.
One of the albinos nodded. “Ay, guns, but not just guns. There were things that hurled the firebangs over a mile or more. Explosions like dynamite, only more powerful. The outlaws-who are now the Grays, as you must ken-could do nothing but lay siege beyond the river, and that was what they did.”
Lud became, in effect, the last fortress-refuge of the latter world. The brightest and most able travelled there from the surrounding countryside by ones and twos. When it came to intelligence tests, sneaking through the tangled encampments and front lines of the besiegers was the newcomers’ final exam. Most came unarmed across the no-man’s-land of the bridge, and those who made it that far were let through. Some were found wanting and sent packing again, of course, but those who had a trade or a skill (or brains enough to learn one) were allowed to stay. Farming skills were particularly prized; according to the stories, every large park in Lud had been turned into a vegetable garden. With the countryside cut off, it was grow food in the city or starve amid the glass towers and metal alleys. The Great Old Ones were gone, their machines were a mystery, and the silent wonders which remained were inedible.
Little by little, the character of the war began to change. The balance of power had shifted to the besieging Grays-so called because they were, on average, much older than the city-dwellers. Those latter were also growing older, of course. They were still known as Pubes, but in most cases their puberty was long behind them. And they eventually either forgot how the old weapons worked or used them up.
“Probably both,” Roland grunted.
Some ninety years ago-within the lifetimes of Si and Aunt Talitha- a final band of outlaws had appeared, one so large that the outriders had gone galloping through River Crossing at dawn and the drogues did not pass until almost sundown. It was the last army these parts had ever seen, and it was led by a warrior prince named David Quick-the same fellow who supposedly later fell to his death from the sky. He had organized the raggle-taggle remnants of the outlaw bands which still hung about the city, killing anyone who showed opposition to his plans. Quick’s army of Grays used neither boat nor bridge to attempt entry into the city, but instead built a pontoon bridge twelve miles below it and attacked on the flank.
“Since then the war has guttered like a chimney-fire,” Aunt Talitha finished. “We hear reports every now and then from someone who has managed to leave, ay, so we do. These come a little more often now, for the bridge, they say, is undefended and I think the fire is almost out. Within the city, the Pubes and Grays squabble over the remaining spoils, only I reckon that the descendents of the harriers who followed Quick over the pontoon bridge are the real Pubes now, although they are still called Grays. The descendents of the original city-dwellers must now be almost as old as we are, although there are still some younkers who go to be among them, drawn by the old stories and the lure of the knowledge which may still remain there.
“These two sides still keep up their old enmity, gunslinger, and both would desire this young man you call Eddie. If the dark-skinned woman is fertile, they would not kill her even though her legs are short-ended; they would keep her to bear children, for children are fewer now, and although the old sicknesses are passing, some are still born strange.”
At this, Susannah stirred, seemed about to say something, then only drank the last of her coffee and settled back into her former listening position.
“But if they would desire the young man and woman, gunslinger, I think they would lust for the boy.”
Jak
e bent and began to stroke Oy’s fur again. Roland saw his face and knew what he was thinking: it was the passage under the mountains all over again, just another version of the Slow Mutants.
“You they’d just as soon kill,” Aunt Talitha said, “for you are a gunslinger, a man out of his own time and place, neither fish nor fowl, and no use to either side. But a boy can be taken, used, schooled to remember some things and to forget all the others. They’ve all forgotten whatever it was they had to fight about in the first place; the world has moved on since then. Now they just fight to the sound of them awful drumbeats, some few still young, most of them old enough for the rocking chair, like us here, all of them stupid grots who only live to kill and kill to live.” She paused. “Now that you’ve heard us old cullies to the end, are ye sure it would not be best to go around, and leave them to their business?”
Before Roland could reply, Jake spoke up in a clear, firm voice. “Tell what you know about Blaine the Mono,” he said. “Tell about Blaine and Engineer Bob."
11
“ENGINEER WHO?” EDDIE ASKED, but Jake only went on looking at the old people.
“Track lies over yonder,” Si answered at last. He pointed toward the river. “One track only, set up high on a colyum of man-made stone, such as the Old Ones used to make their streets and walls.”
“A monorail!” Susannah exclaimed. “Blaine the Monorail!”
“Blaine is a pain,” Jake muttered.
Roland glanced at him but said nothing.
“Does this train run now?” Eddie asked Si.
Si shook his head slowly. His face was troubled and uneasy. “No, young sir-but in my lifetime and Auntie’s, it did. When we were green and the war of the city still went forrad briskly. We’d hear it before we saw it-a low humming noise, a sound like ye sometimes hear when a bad summer storm’s on the way-one that’s full of lightning.”
“Ay,” Aunt Talitha said. Her face was lost and dreaming.
“Then it’d come-Blaine the Mono, twinkling in the sun, with a nose like one of the bullets in your revolver, gunslinger. Maybe two wheels long. I know that sounds like it couldn’t be, and maybe it wasn’t (we were green, ye must remember, and that makes a difference), but I still think it was, for when it came, it seemed to run along the whole horizon. Fast, low, and gone before you could even see it proper!
“Sometimes, on days when the weather were foul and the air low, it’d shriek like a harpy as it came out of the west. Sometimes it’d come in the night with a long white light spread out before it, and that shriek would wake all of us. It were like the trumpet they say will raise the dead from their graves at the end of the world, so it was.”
“Tell em about the bang, Si!” Bill or Till said in a voice which trembled with awe. “Tell em about the godless bang what always came after!”
“Ay, I was just getting to that,” Si answered with a touch of annoyance. “After it passed by, there would be quiet for a few seconds… sometimes as long as a minute, maybe… and then there’d come an explosion that rattled die boards and knocked cups off the shelves and sometimes even broke the glass in the window-panes. But never did anyone see ary flash nor fire. It was like an explosion in the world of spirits.”
Eddie tapped Susannah on the shoulder, and when she turned to him he mouthed two words: Sonic boom. It was nuts-no train he had ever heard of travelled faster than the speed of sound-but it was also the only thing that made sense.
She nodded and turned back to Si.
“It’s the only one of the machines the Great Old Ones made that I’ve ever seen running with my own eyes,” he said in a soft voice, “and if it weren’t the devil’s work, there be no devil. The last time I saw it was the spring I married Mercy, and that must have been sixty year agone.”
“Seventy,” Aunt Talitha said with authority.
“And this train went into the city,” Rolund said. “From back the way we came… from the west… from the forest.”
“Ay,” a new voice said unexpectedly, “but there was another… one that went out from the city… and mayhap that one still runs.”
12
THEY TURNED. MERCY STOOD by a bed of flowers between the back of the church and the table where they sat. She was walking slowly toward the sound of their voices, with her hands spread out before her.
Si got clumsily to his feet, hurried to her as best he could, and took her hand. She slipped an arm about his waist and they stood there looking like the world’s oldest wedding couple.
“Auntie told you to take your coffee inside!” he said.
“Finished my coffee long ago,” Mercy said. “It’s a bitter brew and I hate it. Besides-I wanted to hear the palaver.” She raised a trembling finger and pointed it in Roland’s direction. “I wanted to hear his voice. It’s fair and light, so it is.”
“I cry your pardon, Auntie,” Si said, looking at the ancient woman a little fearfully. “She was never one to mind, and the years have made her no better.”
Aunt Talitha glanced at Roland. He nodded, almost imperceptibly. “Let her come forward and join us,” she said.
Si led her over to the table, scolding all the while. Mercy only looked over his shoulder with her sightless eyes, her mouth set in an intractable line.
When Si had gotten her seated, Aunt Talitha leaned forward on her forearms and said, “Now do you have something to say, old sister-sai, or were you just beating your gums?”
“I hear what I hear. My ears are as sharp as they ever were, Talitha-sharper!”
Roland’s hand dropped to his belt for a moment. When he brought it back to the table, he was holding a cartridge in his fingers. He tossed it to Susannah, who caught it. “Do you, sai?” he asked.
“Well enough,” she said, turning in his direction, “to know that you just threw something. To your woman, I think-the one with the brown skin. Something small. What was it, gunslinger? A biscuit?”
“Close enough,” he said, smiling. “You hear as well as you say. Now tell us what you meant.”
“There is another mono,” she said, “unless ’tis the same one, running a different course. Either way, a different course was run by some mono… until seven or eight year ago, anyways. I used to hear it leaving the city and going out into the waste lands beyond.”
“Dungheap!” one of the albino twins ejaculated. “Nothing goes to the waste lands! Nothing can live there!”
She turned her face to him. “Is a train alive, Till Tudbury?” she asked. “Does a machine fall sick with sores and puking?”
Well, Eddie thought of saying, there was this bear…
He thought it over a little more and decided it might be better to keep his silence.
“We would have heard it,” the other twin was insisting hotly. “A noise like the one Si always tells of-”
“This one didn’t make no bang,” she admitted, “but I heard that other sound, that humming noise like the one you hear sometimes after lightning has struck somewhere close. When the wind was strong, blowing out from the city, I heard it.” She thrust out her chin and added: “I did hear the bang once, too. From far, far out. The night Big Charlie Wind came and almost blew the steeple off the church. Must have been two hundred wheels from here. Maybe two hundred and fifty.”
“Bulldink!” the twin cried. “You been chewing the weed!”
“I’ll chew on you, Bill Tudbury, if you don’t shut up your honkin. You’ve no business sayin bulldink to a lady, either. Why-”
“Stop it, Mercy!” Si hissed, but Eddie was barely listening to this exchange of rural pleasantries. What the blind woman had said made sense to him. Of course there would be no sonic boom, not from a train which started its run in Lud; he couldn’t remember exactly what the speed of sound was, but he thought it was somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred and fifty miles an hour. A train starting from a dead stop would take some time getting up to that speed, and by the time it reached it, it would be out of earshot… unless the listening conditions happened t
o be just right, as Mercy claimed they had been on the night when the Big Charlie Wind-whatever that was-had come.
And there were possibilities here. Blaine the Mono was no Land Rover, but maybe… maybe…
“You haven’t heard the sound of this other train for seven or eight years, sai?” Roland asked. “Are you sure it wasn’t much longer?”
“Couldn’t have been,” she said, “for the last time was the year old Bill Muffin took blood-sick. Poor Bill!”
“That’s almost ten year agone,” Aunt Talitha said, and her voice was queerly gentle.
“Why did you never say you heard such a thing?” Si asked. He looked at the gunslinger. “You can’t believe everything she says, lord- always longing to be in the middle of the stage is my Mercy.”
“Why, you old slumgullion!” she cried, and slapped his arm. “I didn’t say because I didn’t want to o’ertop the story you’re so proud of, but now that it matters what I heard, I’m bound to tell!”
“I believe you, sai,” Roland said, “but are you sure you haven’t heard the sounds of the mono since then?”
“Nay, not since then. I imagine it’s finally reached the end of its path.”
“I wonder,” Roland said. “Indeed, I wonder very much.” He looked down at the table, brooding, suddenly far away from all of them,
Choo-choo, Jake thought, and shivered.
13
HALF AN HOUR LATER they were in the town square again, Susannah in her wheelchair, Jake adjusting the straps of his pack while Oy sat at his heel, watching him attentively. Only the town elders had attended the dinner-party in the little Eden behind the Church of the Blood Everlasting, it seemed, because when they returned to the square, another dozen people were waiting. They glanced at Susannah and looked a bit longer at Jake (his youth apparently more interesting to them than her dark skin), but it was clearly Roland they had come to see; their wondering eyes were full of ancient awe.
