by Stephen King
Jake does not know that he hates all the professional people, but he does. People have always bewildered him. He likes stairs and will not use the self-service elevator in his building His mother, who is scrawny in a sexy way, often goes to bed with sick friends.
Now he is on the street, Jake Chambers is on the street, he has “Hit the bricks.” He is clean and well-mannered, comely, sensitive. He has no friends; only acquaintances. He has never bothered to think about this, but it hurts him. He does not know or understand that a long association with professional people has caused him to take many of their traits. Mrs. Greta Shaw makes
hands folded in his lap, still breathing calmly. He had told his tale without much emotion, although his voice had trembled near the end, when he had come to the part about the “priest” and the “Act of Contrition.” He had not, of course, told the gunslinger about his family and his own sense of bewildered dichotomy, but that had seeped through anyway — enough had seeped through to make out its shape. The fact that there had never been such a city as the boy described (or, if so, it had only existed in the myth of prehistory) was not the most upsetting part of the story, but it was disturbing. It was all disturbing. The gunslinger was afraid of the implications.
“Jake?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Do you want to remember this when you wake up, or forget it?”
“Forget it,” the boy said promptly. “I bled.”
“All right You’re going to sleep, understand? Go ahead and lie over.”
Jake laid over, looking small and peaceful and harmless. The gunslinger did not believe he was harmless. There was a deadly feeling about him, and the stink of predestination. He didn’t like the feeling, but he liked the boy. He liked him a great deal.
“Jake?”
“Shhh. I want to sleep.”
“Yes. And when you wake up you won’t remember any of this.”
“Kay.”
The gunslinger watched him for a brief time, thinking of own boyhood, which usually seemed to have happened to another person — to a person who had jumped through some osmotic lens and become someone else —but which now seemed poignantly close. It was very hot in the stable of the way station, and he carefully drank some
more water. He got up and walked to the back of the building, pausing to look into one of the horse stalls. There was a small pile of white hay in the corner, and a neatly folded blanket, but there was no smell of horse. There was no smell of anything in the stable. The sun had bled away every smell and left nothing. The air was perfectly neutral.
At the back of the stable was a small, dark room with a stainless steel machine in the center. It was untouched by rust or rot. It looked like a butter churn. At the left, a chrome pipe jutted from it, terminating over a drain in the floor. The gunslinger had seen pumps like it in other dry places, but never one so big. He could not contemplate how deep they must have drilled before they struck water, secret and forever black under the desert
Why hadn’t they removed the pump when the way station had been abandoned?
Demons, perhaps.
He shuddered abruptly, an abrupt twisting of his back. Heatflesh poked out on his skin, then receded. He went to the control switch and pushed the ON button. The machine began to hum. After perhaps half a minute, a stream of cool, clear water belched from the pipe and went down the drain to be recirculated. Perhaps three gallons flowed out of the pipe before the pump shut itself down with a final click. It was a thing as alien to this place and time as true love, and yet as concrete as a Judgment, a silent reminder of the time when the world had not yet moved on. It probably ran on an atomic slug, as there was no electricity within a thousand miles of here and even dry batteries would have lost their charge long ago. The gunslinger didn’t like it
He went back and sat down beside the boy, who had put one hand under his cheek. Nice-looking boy. The gunslinger drank some more water and crossed his legs so he was sitting Indian fashion. The boy, like the squatter on the edge of the desert who kept the bird (Zoltan, the gunslinger
remembered abruptly, the bird’s name was Zoltan), had lost his sense of time, but the fact that the man in black was closer seemed beyond doubt Not for the first time, the gunslinger wondered if the man in black was letting him catch up for some reason of his own. Perhaps the gunslinger was playing into his hands. He tried to imagine what the confrontation might be like, and could not
He was very hot, but he no longer felt sick. The nursery rhyme occurred to him again, but this time instead of his mother, he thought of Cort — Cort, with his face hem-stitched with the scars of bricks and bullets and blunt instruments. The scars of war. He wondered if Cort had ever had a love to match those monumental scars. He doubted it He thought of Aileen, and of Marten, that incomplete enchanter.
The gunslinger was not a man to dwell on the past; only a shadowy conception of the future and of his own emotional make-up saved him from being a creature without imagination, a dullard. His present run of thought therefore rather amazed him. Each name called up others — Cuthbert, Paul, the old man Jonas; and Susan, the lovely girl at the window.
The piano player in Tull (also dead, all dead in Tull, and by his hand) had been fond of the old songs, and the gunslinger hummed one tunelessly under his breath:
Love o love o careless love
See what careless love has done.
The gunslinger laughed, bemused. Jam the last of that green and warm-hued world. And for all his nostalgia, he felt no self-pity. The world had moved on mercilessly, but his legs were still strong, and the man in black was closer. The gunslinger nodded out
When he woke up it was almost dark and the boy was gone. The gunslinger got up, hearing his joints pop, and went
to the stable door. There was a small flame dancing in darkness on the porch of the inn. He walked toward it, his shadow long and black and trailing in the ochre light of the sunset.
Jake was sitting by a kerosene lamp. “The oil was in a drum,” he said, “but I was scared to burn it in the house. Everything’s so dry —“
“You did just right.” The gunslinger sat down, seeing but not thinking about the dust of years that puffed up around his rump. The flame from the lamp shadowed the boy’s face with delicate tones. The gunslinger produced his poke and rolled a cigarette.
“We have to talk,” he said.
Jake nodded.
“I guess you know I’m on the prod for that man you saw.”
“Are you going to kill him?”
“I don’t know. I have to make him tell me something. I may have to make him take me someplace.”
“Where?”
“To find a tower,” the gunslinger said. He held his cigarette over the chimney of the lamp and drew on it; the smoke drifted away on the rising night breeze. Jake watched it. His face showed neither fear nor curiosity, certainly not enthusiasm.
“So I’m going on tomorrow,” the gunslinger said. “You’ll have to come with me. How much of that meat is left?”
“Only a handful.”
“Corn?”
“A little.”
The gunslinger nodded. “Is there a cellar?”
“Yes.” Jake looked at him. The pupils of his eyes had grown to a huge, fragile size. “You pull up on a ring in the floor, but I didn’t go down. I was afraid the ladder would
break and I wouldn’t be able to get up again. And it smells bad. It’s the only thing around here that smells at all.”
“We’ll get up early and see if there’s anything down there worth taking. Then we’ll bug out”
“All right” The boy paused and then said, “I’m glad I didn’t kill you when you were sleeping. I had a pitchfork and I thought about doing it. But I didn’t, and now I won’t have to be afraid to go to sleep.”
“What would you be afraid of?”
The book looked at him ominously. “Spooks. Of him coming back.”
“The man in black,” the gunslinger said. Not a question.
>
“Yes. Is he a bad man?”
“That depends on where you’re standing,” the gunslinger said absently. He got up and pitched his cigarette out onto the hardpan. “I’m going to sleep.”
The boy looked at him timidly. “Can I sleep in the stable with you?”
“Of course.”
The gunslinger stood on the steps, looking up, and the boy joined him. Polaris was up there, and Mars. It seemed to the gunslinger that, if he closed his eyes he would be able to hear the croaking of the first spring peepers, smell the green and almost-summer smell of the court lawns after their first cutting (and hear, perhaps, the indolent click of croquet balls as the ladies of the East Wing, attired only in their shifts as dusk glimmered toward dark, played at Points), could almost see Aileen as she came through the break in the hedges —It was not like him to think so much of the past.
He turned back and picked up the lamp. “Let’s go to sleep,” he said.
They crossed to the stable together.
The next morning he explored the cellar.
Jake was right; it smelled bad. It had a wet, swampy smell that made the gunslinger feel nauseous and a little lightheaded after the antiseptic odorlessness of the desert and the stable. The cellar smelled of cabbages and turnips and potatoes with long, sightless eyes gone to everlasting rot The ladder, however, seemed quite sturdy, and he climbed down.
The floor was earthen, and his head almost touched the overhead beams. Down here spiders still lived, disturbingly big ones with mottled gray bodies. Many of them had mutated. Some had eyes on stalks, some had what might have been as many as sixteen legs.
The gunslinger peered around and waited for his nighteyes.
“You all right?” Jake called down nervously.
“Yes. He focused on the corner. “There are cans. Wait”
He went carefully to the corner, ducking his head. There was an old box with one side folded down. The cans were vegetables — green beans, yellow beans… and three cans of corned beef.
He scooped up an armload and went back to the ladder. He climbed halfway up and handed them to Jake, who knelt to receive them. He went back for more.
It was on the third trip that he heard the groaning in the foundations.
He turned, looked, and felt a kind of dreamy terror wash over him, a feeling both languid and repellent, like sex in the water — one drowning within another.
The foundation was composed of huge sandstone blocks that had probably been evenly cornered when the way station was new, but which were now at every zigzag, drunken angle. It made the wall look as if it were inscribed with strange, meandering hierogliphics. And from the joining of two of these abstruse cracks, a thin spill of sand was running, as if something on the other side was digging
itself through with slobbering, agonized intensity.
The groaning rose and fell, becoming louder, until the whole cellar was full of the sound, an abstract noise of ripping pain and dreadful effort.
“Come up!” Jake screamed. “0 Jesus, mister, come up!”
“Go away,” the gunslinger said calmly.
“Come up!” Jake screamed again.
The gunslinger did not answer. He pulled leather with his right hand.
There was a hole in the wall now, a hole as big as a coin. He could hear, through the curtain of his own terror, Jake’s pattering feet as the boy ran. Then the spill of sand stopped. The groaning ceased, but there was a sound of steady, labored breathing.
“Who are you?” The gunslinger asked.
No answer.
And in the High Speech, his voice filling with the old thunder of command, Roland demanded: “Who are you, Demon? Speak, if you would speak. My time is short; my hands lose patience.”
“Go slow,” a dragging, clotted voice said from within the wall. And the gunslinger felt the dreamlike terror deepen and grow almost solid. It was the voice of Alice, the woman he had stayed with in the town of Tull. But she was dead; he had seen her go down himself, a bullet hole between her eyes. Fathoms seemed to swim by his eyes, descending. “Go slow past the Drawers, gunslinger. While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.”
“What do you mean? Speak on!”
But the breathing was gone.
The gunslinger stood for a moment, frozen, and then one of the huge spiders dropped on his arm and scrambled frantically up to his shoulder. With an involuntary grunt he brushed it away and got his feet moving. He did not want
To do it, but custom was strict, inviolable. The dead from the dead, as the old proverb has it; only a corpse may speak. He went to the hole and punched at it. The sandstone crumbled easily at the edges, and with a bare stiffening of muscles, he thrust his hand through the wall.
And touched something solid, with raised and fretted knobs. He drew it out. He held a jawbone, rotted at the far hinge. The teeth leaned this way and that.
“All right,” he said softly. He thrust it rudely into his back pocket and went back up the ladder, carrying the last cans awkwardly. He left the trapdoor open. The sun would get in and kill the spiders.
Jake was halfway across the stable yard, cowering on the cracked, rubbly hardpan. He screamed when he saw the gunslinger, backed away a step or two, and then ran to him, crying.
“I thought it got you, that it got you, I thought —“
“It didn’t.” He held the boy to him, feeling his face, hot against his chest, and his hands, dry against his ribcage. It occurred to him later that this was when he began to love the boy — which was, of course, what the man in black must have planned all along.
“Was it a demon?” The voice was muffled.
“Yes. A speaking-demon. We don’t have to go back there anymore. Come on.”
They went to the stable, and the gunslinger made a rough pack from the blanket he had slept under — it was hot and prickly, but there was nothing else. That done, he filled the waterbags from the pump.
“You carry one of the waterbags,” the gunslinger said. “Wear it around your shoulders — like a fakir carries his snake. See?”
“Yes.” The boy looked up at him worshipfully. He slung one of the bags.
“Is it too heavy?”
“No. It’s fine.”
“Tell me the truth, now. I can’t carry you if you get a sunstroke.”
“I won’t have a sunstroke. I’ll be okay.”
The gunslinger nodded.
“We’re going to the mountains, aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
They walked out into the steady smash of the sun. Jake, his head as high as the swing of the gunslinger’s elbows, walked to his right and a little ahead, the rawhide-wrapped ends of the waterbag hanging nearly to his shins. The gunslinger had crisscrossed two more waterbags across his shoulders and carried the sling of food in his armpit, his left arm holding it against his body.
They passed through the far gate of the way station and found the blurred ruts of the stage track again. They had walked perhaps fifteen minutes when Jake turned around and waved at the two buildings. They seemed to huddle in the titanic space of the desert.
“Goodbye!” Jake cried. “Goodbye!”
They walked. The stage track breasted a frozen sand drumlin, and when. the gunslinger looked around, the way station was gone. Once again there was the desert, and that only.
They were three days out of the way station; the mountains were deceptively clear now. They could see the rise of the desert into foothills, the first naked slopes, the bedrock bursting through the skin of the earth in sullen, eroded triumph. Further up, the land gentled off briefly again, and for the first time in months or years the gunslinger could see green — real, living green. Grass, dwarf spruces, perhaps even willows, all fed by snow runoff from further up.
Beyond that the rock took over again, rising in cyclopean, tumbled splendor to the blinding snowcaps. Off to the left, a huge slash showed the way to the smaller, eroded sandstone cliffs and mesas and buttes
on the far side. This draw was obscured in the almost continual gray membrane of showers. At night, Jake would sit fascinated for the few minutes before he fell into sleep, watching the brilliant swordplay of the far-off lightning, white and purple, startling in the clarity of the night air.
The boy was fine on the trail. He was tough, but more than that, he seemed to fight exhaustion with a calm and professional reservoir of will which the gunslinger fully appreciated. He did not talk much and he did not ask questions, not even about the jawbone, which the gunslinger turned over and over in his hands during his evening smoke. He caught a sense that the boy felt highly flattered by the gunslinger’s companionship — perhaps even exalted by it — and this disturbed him. The boy had been placed in his path — While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket — and the fact that Jake was not slowing him down only opened the way to more sinister possibilities.
They passed the symmetrical campfire leavings of the man in black at regular intervals, and it seemed to the gunslinger that these leavings were much fresher now. On the third night, the gunslinger was sure that he could see the distant spark of another campfire, somewhere in the first rising swell of the foothills.
Near two o’clock on the fourth day out from the way station, Jake reeled and almost fell.
“Here, sit down,” the gunslinger said.
“No, I’m okay.”
“Sit down.”
The boy sat obediently. The gunslinger squatted close by, so Jake would be in his shadow.
“Drink.”
“I’m not supposed to until — “
“Drink.”
The boy drank, three swallows. The gunslinger wet the tail of the blanket, which was lighter now, and applied the damp fabric to the boy’s wrists and forehead, which were fever-dry.
“From now on we rest every afternoon at this time. Fifteen minutes. Do you want to sleep?”
