Gunslinger

by Stephen King

  The gunslinger spitted the rabbit wordlessly and roasted it. A savory smell drifted up as the sun went down. Purple shadows drifted hungrily over the bowl where the man in black had chosen to finally face him. The gunslinger felt hunger begin to rumble endlessly in his belly as the rabbit browned; but when the meat was cooked and its juices sealed in, he handed the entire skewer wordlessly to the man in black, rummaged in his own nearly flat knapsack, and withdrew the last of his jerky. It was salty, painful to his mouth, and tasted like tears.

  “That’s a worthless gesture,” the man in black said, managing to sound angry and amused at the same time.

  “Nevertheless,” the gunslinger said. There were tiny sores in his mouth, the result of vitamin deprivation, and the salt taste made him grin bitterly.

  “Are you afraid of enchanted meat?”

  “Yes indeed.”

  The man in black slipped his hood back.

  The gunslinger looked at him silently. In a way, the face that the hood had hidden was an uneasy disappointment. It was handsome and regular, with none of the marks and twists which indicate a man who has been through awesome times and has been privy to great secrets. His hair was black and of a ragged, matted length. His forehead was high, his eyes dark and brilliant. His nose was nondescript. The lips were full and sensual. His complexion was pallid, as was the gunslinger’s own.

  The gunslinger said finally, “I expected an older man.”

  “Why? I am nearly immortal, as are you, Roland—for now, at least. I could have taken a face with which you would have been more familiar, but I elected to show you the one I was—ah—born with. See, gunslinger, the sunset.”

  The sun had departed already, and the western sky was filled with sullen furnace light.

  “You won’t see another sunrise for what may seem a very long time,” the man in black said.

  The gunslinger remembered the pit under the mountains and then looked at the sky, where the constellations sprawled in clockspring profusion.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said softly, “now.”

  II

  The man in black shuffled the cards with flying hands. The deck was huge, the designs on the back convoluted. “These are Tarot cards, gunslinger—of a sort. A mixture of the standard deck to which have been added a selection of my own development. Now watch carefully.”

  “What will I watch?”

  “I’m going to tell your future. Seven cards must be turned, one at a time, and placed in conjunction with the others. I’ve not done this since the days when Gilead stood and the ladies played at Points on the west lawn. And I suspect I’ve never read a tale such as yours.” Mockery was creeping into his voice again. “You are the world’s last adventurer. The last crusader. How that must please you, Roland! Yet you have no idea how close you stand to the Tower now, as you resume your quest. Worlds turn about your head.”

  “What do you mean, resume? I never left off.”

  At this the man in black laughed heartily, but would not say what he found so funny. “Read my fortune then,” Roland said harshly.

  The first card was turned.

  “The Hanged Man,” the man in black said. The darkness had given him back his hood. “Yet here, in conjunction with nothing else, it signifies strength, not death. You, gunslinger, are the Hanged Man, plodding ever onward toward your goal over the pits of Na’ar. You’ve already dropped one co-traveler into that pit, have you not?”

  The gunslinger said nothing, and the second card was turned.

  “The Sailor! Note the clear brow, the hairless cheeks, the wounded eyes. He drowns, gunslinger, and no one throws out the line. The boy Jake.”

  The gunslinger winced, said nothing.

  The third card was turned. A baboon stood grinningly astride a young man’s shoulder. The young man’s face was turned up, a grimace of stylized dread and horror on his features. Looking more closely, the gunslinger saw the baboon held a whip.

  “The Prisoner,” the man in black said. The fire cast uneasy, flickering shadows over the face of the ridden man, making it seem to move and writhe in wordless terror. The gunslinger flicked his eyes away.

  “A trifle upsetting, isn’t he?” the man in black said, and seemed on the verge of sniggering.

  He turned the fourth card. A woman with a shawl over her head sat spinning at a wheel. To the gunslinger’s dazed eyes, she appeared to be smiling craftily and sobbing at the same time.

  “The Lady of the Shadows,” the man in black remarked. “Does she look two-faced to you, gunslinger? She is. Two faces at least. She broke the blue plate!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know.” And—in this case, at least—the gunslinger thought his adversary was telling the truth.

  “Why are you showing me these?”

  “Don’t ask!” the man in black said sharply, yet he smiled. “Don’t ask. Merely watch. Consider this only pointless ritual if it eases you and cools you to do so. Like church.”

  He tittered and turned the fifth card.

  A grinning reaper clutched a scythe with bony fingers. “Death,” the man in black said simply. “Yet not for you.”

  The sixth card.

  The gunslinger looked at it and felt a strange, crawling anticipation in his guts. The feeling was mixed with horror and joy, and the whole of the emotion was unnameable. It made him feel like throwing up and dancing at the same time.

  “The Tower,” the man in black said softly. “Here is the Tower.”

  The gunslinger’s card occupied the center of the pattern; each of the following four stood at one corner, like satellites circling a star.

  “Where does that one go?” the gunslinger asked.

  The man in black placed the Tower over the Hanged Man, covering it completely.

  “What does that mean?” the gunslinger asked.

  The man in black did not answer.

  “What does that mean?” he asked raggedly.

  The man in black did not answer.

  “Goddamn you!”

  No answer.

  “Then be damned to you. What’s the seventh card?”

  The man in black turned the seventh. A sun rose in a luminously blue sky. Cupids and sprites sported around it. Below the sun was a great red field upon which it shone. Roses or blood? The gunslinger could not tell. Perhaps, he thought, it’s both.

  “The seventh card is Life,” the man in black said softly. “But not for you.”

  “Where does it fit the pattern?”

  “That is not for you to know now,” the man in black said. “Or for me to know. I’m not the great one you seek, Roland. I am merely his emissary.” He flipped the card carelessly into the dying fire. It charred, curled, and flashed to flame. The gunslinger felt his heart quail and turn icy in his chest.

  “Sleep now,” the man in black said carelessly. “Perchance to dream and that sort of thing.”

  “What my bullets won’t do, mayhap my hands will,” the gunslinger said. His legs coiled with savage, splendid suddenness, and he flew across the fire at the other, arms outstretched. The man in black, smiling, swelled in his vision and then retreated down a long and echoing corridor. The world filled with the sound of sardonic laughter, he was falling, dying, sleeping.

  He dreamed.

  III

  The universe was void. Nothing moved. Nothing was.

  The gunslinger drifted, bemused.

  “Let’s have a little light,” the voice of the man in black said nonchalantly, and there was light. The gunslinger thought in a detached way that light was pretty good.

  “Now darkness overhead with stars in it. Water down below.”

  It happened. He drifted over endless seas. Above, the stars twinkled endlessly, yet he saw none of the constellations which had guided him across his long life.

  “Land,” the man in black invited, and there was; it heaved itself out of the water in endless, galvanic convulsions. It was red, arid, cracked and glazed with sterility. Volca
noes blurted endless magma like giant pimples on some ugly adolescent’s baseball head.

  “Okay,” the man in black was saying. “That’s a start. Let’s have some plants. Trees. Grass and fields.”

  There was. Dinosaurs rambled here and there, growling and whoofing and eating each other and getting stuck in bubbling, odiferous tarpits. Huge tropical rain-forests sprawled everywhere. Giant ferns waved at the sky with serrated leaves. Beetles with two heads crawled on some of them. All this the gunslinger saw. And yet he felt big.

  “Now bring man,” the man in black said softly, but the gunslinger was falling . . . falling up. The horizon of this vast and fecund earth began to curve. Yes, they had all said it curved, his teacher Vannay had claimed it had been proved long before the world had moved on. But this—

  Further and further, higher and higher. Continents took shape before his amazed eyes, and were obscured with clocksprings of clouds. The world’s atmosphere held it in a placental sac. And the sun, rising beyond the earth’s shoulder—

  He cried out and threw an arm before his eyes.

  “Let there be light!”

  The voice no longer belonged to the man in black. It was gigantic, echoing. It filled space, and the spaces between space.

  “Light!”

  Falling, falling.

  The sun shrank. A red planet stamped with canals whirled past him, two moons circling it furiously. Beyond this was a whirling belt of stones and a gigantic planet that seethed with gases, too huge to support itself, oblate in consequence. Further out was a ringed world that glittered like a precious gem within its engirdlement of icy spicules.

  “Light! Let there be—”

  Other worlds, one, two, three. Far beyond the last, one lonely ball of ice and rock twirled in dead darkness about a sun that glittered no brighter than a tarnished penny.

  Beyond this, darkness.

  “No,” the gunslinger said, and his word on it was flat and echoless in the black. It was darker than dark, blacker than black. Beside this, the darkest night of a man’s soul was as noonday, the darkness under the mountains a mere smudge on the face of Light. “No more. Please, no more now. No more—”

  “LIGHT!”

  “No more. No more, please—”

  The stars themselves began to shrink. Whole nebulae drew together and became glowing smudges. The whole universe seemed to be drawing around him.

  “Please no more no more no more—”

  The voice of the man in black whispered silkily in his ear: “Then renege. Cast away all thoughts of the Tower. Go your way, gunslinger, and begin the long job of saving your soul.”

  He gathered himself. Shaken and alone, enwrapt in the darkness, terrified of an ultimate meaning rushing at him, he gathered himself and uttered the final answer on that subject:

  “NEVER!”

  “THEN LET THERE BE LIGHT!”

  And there was light, crashing in on him like a hammer, a great and primordial light. Consciousness had no chance of survival in that great glare, but before it perished, the gunslinger saw something clearly, something he believed to be of cosmic importance. He clutched it with agonized effort and then went deep, seeking refuge in himself before that light should blind his eyes and blast his sanity.

  He fled the light and the knowledge the light implied, and so came back to himself. Even so do the rest of us; even so the best of us.

  IV

  It was still night—whether the same or another, he had no immediate way of knowing. He pushed himself up from where his demon spring at the man in black had carried him and looked at the ironwood where Walter o’ Dim (as some along Roland’s way had named him) had been sitting. He was gone.

  A great sense of despair flooded him—God, all that to do over again—and then the man in black said from behind him: “Over here, gunslinger. I don’t like you so close. You talk in your sleep.” He tittered.

  The gunslinger got groggily to his knees and turned around. The fire had burned down to red embers and gray ashes, leaving the familiar decayed pattern of exhausted fuel. The man in black was seated next to it, smacking his lips with unlovely enthusiasm over the greasy remains of the rabbit.

  “You did fairly well,” the man in black said. “I never could have sent that vision to your father. He would have come back drooling.”

  “What was it?” the gunslinger asked. His words were blurred and shaky. He felt that if he tried to rise, his legs would buckle.

  “The universe,” the man in black said carelessly. He burped and threw the bones into the fire where they first glistened and then blackened. The wind above the cup of the golgotha keened and moaned.

  “Universe?” the gunslinger said blankly. It was a word with which he was unfamiliar. His first thought was that the other was speaking poetry.

  “You want the Tower,” the man in black said. It seemed to be a question.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you shan’t have it,” the man in black said, and smiled with bright cruelty. “No one cares in the counsels of the great if you pawn your soul or sell it outright, Roland. I have an idea of how close to the edge that last pushed you. The Tower will kill you half a world away.”

  “You know nothing of me,” the gunslinger said quietly, and the smile faded from the other’s lips.

  “I made your father and I broke him,” the man in black said grimly. “I came to your mother as Marten—there’s a truth you always suspected, is it not?—and took her. She bent beneath me like a willow . . . although (this may comfort you) she never broke. In any case it was written, and it was. I am the furthest minion of he who now rules the Dark Tower, and Earth has been given into that king’s red hand.”

  “Red? Why do you say red?”

  “Never mind. We’ll not speak of him, although you’ll learn more than you cared to if you press on. What hurt you once will hurt you twice. This is not the beginning but the beginning’s end. You’d do well to remember that . . . but you never do.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No. You don’t. You never did. You never will. You have no imagination. You’re blind that way.”

  “What did I see?” the gunslinger asked. “What did I see at the end? What was it?”

  “What did it seem to be?”

  The gunslinger was silent, thoughtful. He felt for his tobacco, but there was none. The man in black did not offer to refill his poke by either black magic or white. Later he might find more in his grow-bag, but later seemed very far away now.

  “There was light,” the gunslinger said finally. “Great white light. And then—” He broke off and stared at the man in black. He was leaning forward, and an alien emotion was stamped on his face, writ too large for lies or denial. It was awe or wonder. Perhaps they were the same.

  “You don’t know,” he said, and began to smile. “O great sorcerer who brings the dead to life. You don’t know. You’re a fake!”

  “I know,” the man in black said. “But I don’t know . . . what.”

  “White light,” the gunslinger repeated. “And then—a blade of grass. One single blade of grass that filled everything. And I was tiny. Infinitesimal.”

  “Grass.” The man in black closed his eyes. His face looked drawn and haggard. “A blade of grass. Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” The gunslinger frowned. “But it was purple.”

  “Hear me now, Roland, son of Steven. Would you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  And so the man in black began to speak.

  V

  The universe (he said) is the Great All, and offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a nonliving brain—although it may think it can—the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.

  The prosaic fact of the universe’s existence alone defeats both the pragmatist and the romantic. There was a time, yet a hundred generations before the world moved on, when mankind had achieved enough technical and scientific prowess to chip a few splinters fr
om the great stone pillar of reality. Even so, the false light of science (knowledge, if you like) shone in only a few developed countries. One company (or cabal) led the way in this regard; North Central Positronics, it called itself. Yet, despite a tremendous increase in available facts, there were remarkably few insights.

  “Gunslinger, our many-times-great grandfathers conquered the-disease-which-rots, which they called cancer, almost conquered aging, walked on the moon—”

  “I don’t believe that,” the gunslinger said flatly.

  To this the man in black merely smiled and answered, “You needn’t. Yet it was so. They made or discovered a hundred other marvelous baubles. But this wealth of information produced little or no insight. There were no great odes written to the wonders of artificial insemination—having babies from frozen mansperm—or to the cars that ran on power from the sun. Few if any seemed to have grasped the truest principle of reality: new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search. Do you see? Of course you don’t. You’ve reached the limits of your ability to comprehend. But never mind—that’s beside the point.”

  “What is the point, then?”

  “The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size. The child, who is most at home with wonder, says: Daddy, what is above the sky? And the father says: The darkness of space. The child: What is beyond space? The father: The galaxy. The child: Beyond the galaxy? The father: Another galaxy. The child: Beyond the other galaxies? The father: No one knows.

  “You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?

  “Or one might take the tip of a pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil-tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become leagues, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.