The Gunslinger And The Darkman

   The man in black led him to an ancient killing ground to make palaver. The gunslinger knew it immediately; a Golgotha, place-of-the-skull. And bleached skulls stared blandly up at them – cattle, coyotes, deer, rabbits. Here the alabaster xylophone of a hen pheasant killed as she fed; there the tiny, delicate bones of a mole, perhaps killed for pleasure by a wild dog.
   The Golgotha was a bowl indented into the descending slope of the mountain, and below, in easier altitudes, the gunslinger could see Joshua trees and scrub firs. The sky overhead was a softer blue than he had seen for a twelve-month, and there was an indefinable something that spoke of the sea in the not-too-great distance.
   Jam in the West, Cuthbert, he thought wonderingly.
   And of course in each skull, in each rondure of vacated eye, he saw the boy’s face.
   The man in black sat on an ancient ironwood log. His boots were powdered white with dust and the uneasy bone-meal of this place. He had put his hood up again, but the gunslinger could see the square shape of his chin clearly, and the shading of his jaw.
   The shadowed lips twitched in a smile. “Gather wood, gunslinger. This side of the mountains is gentle, but at this altitude, the cold still may put a knife in one’s belly. And this is a place of death, eh?”
   “I’ll kill you,” the gunslinger said.
   “No you won’t You can’t. But you can gather wood to remember your Isaac.”
   The gunslinger had no understanding of the reference. He went wordlessly and gathered wood like a common cook’s boy. The pickings were slim. There was no devil-grass on this side and the ironwood would not burn. It had become stone. He returned finally with a large armload, powdered and dusted with disintegrated bone, as if dipped in flour. The sun had sunk beyond the highest Joshua trees and had taken on a reddish glow and peered at them with baleful indifference through the black, tortured branches.
   “Excellent,” the man in black said. “How exceptional you are! How methodical! I salute you!” He giggled, and the gunslinger dropped the wood at his feet with a crash that ballooned up bone dust.
   The man in black did not start or jump; he merely began laying the fire. The gunslinger watched, fascinated, as the idiogram (fresh, this time) took shape. When it was finished, it resembled a small and complex double chim ney about two feet high. The man in black lifted his hand skyward, shaking back the voluminous sleeve from a tapered, handsome hand, and brought it down rapidly, index and pinky fingers forked out in the traditional sign of the evil eye. There was a blue flash of flame, and their fire was lighted.
   “I have matches,” the man in black said jovially, “but I thought you might enjoy the magic. For a pretty, gunslinger. Now cook our dinner.”
   The folds of his robe shivered, and the plucked and gutted carcass of a plump rabbit fell on the dirt.
   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.”
   The man in black slipped his hood back.
   The gunslinger looked at him silently. In a way, the face of the man in black was an uneasy disappointment. It was handsome and regular, with none of the marks and twists which indicate a person who has been through awesome times and who has been privy to great and unknown 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.
   ‘‘
   He said finally, “I expected an older man.
   “Not necessary. I am nearly immortal. I could have taken a face that you more expected, of course, 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 a sullen furnace light.
   “You won’t see another sunrise for what may seem a very long time,” the man in black said softly.
   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.”
   The man in black shuffled the cards with flying, merging rapidity. The deck was huge, the design on the backs of the cards convoluted. “These are tarot cards,” the man in black was saying, “a mixture of the standard deck and a selection of my own development Watch closely gunslinger.”
   “Why?”
   “I’m going to tell your future, Roland. Seven cards must be turned, one at a time, and placed in conjunction with the others. I’ve not done this for over three hundred years. And I suspect I’ve never read one quite like yours.” The mocking note was creeping in again, like a Kuvian night-soldier with a killing knife gripped in one hand. “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, how close in time. Worlds turn about your head.”
   “Read my fortune then,” he 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 and not death. You, gunslinger, are the Hanged Man, plodding ever onward toward your goal over all the pits of Hades. You have already dropped one co-traveler into the pit, have you not?”
   He turned the second card. “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 ba boon 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 Shadows,” the man in black remarked. “Does she look two-faced to you, gunslinger? She is. A veritable Janus.”
   “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 unnamable. It made him feel like throwing up and dancing at the same time.
   “The Tower,” the man in black said softly.
   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.
   “God damn you!” No answer.
   “Then 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
   “The seventh 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,” the man in black said. “Or for me to know.” 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.”
   “I’m going to choke you dead,” the gunslinger said. His legs coiled with savage, splendid suddenness, and he flew across the fire at the other. The man in black, smiling, swelled in his vision and then retreated down a long and echoing corridor filled with obsidian pylons. The world filled with the sound of sardonic laughter, he was falling, dying, sleeping.
   He dreamed.
   The universe was void. Nothing moved. Nothing was.
   The gunslinger drifted, bemused.
   “Let us have light,” the voice of the man in black said nonchalantly, and there was light. The gunslinger thought in a detached way that the light was good.
   “Now darkness overhead with stars in it. Water down
   below.” It happened. He drifted over endless seas. Above, the stars twinkled endlessly.
   “Land,” the man in black invited. There was; it heaved itself out of the water in endless, galvanic convulsions. It was red, arid, cracked and glazed with sterility. Volcanoes 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 woofing and eating each other and getting stuck in bubbling, odiferous tarpits. Huge tropical rain-forests sprawled everywhere. Giant ferns waved at the sky with serated leaves, beetles with two heads crawled on some of them. All this the gunslinger saw. And yet he felt big.
   “Now 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 had curved, his teachers, they had claimed it had been proved long before the world had moved on. But this —Further and further. 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 that cried was no longer that of the man in black. It was gigantic, echoing. It filled space, and the spaces between spaces.
   “Light!”
   Falling, falling.
   The sun shrank. A red planet crossed with canals whirled past him, two moons circling it furiously. A whirling belt of stones. A gigantic planet that seethed with gasses, too huge to support itself, oblate in consequence. A ringed world that glittered with 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 twirling in dead darkness about a sun that glittered no brighter than a tarnished penny.
   Darkness.
   “No,” the gunslinger said, and his words were flat and echoless in the darkness. It was darker than dark. Beside it the darkest night of a man’s soul was noonday. The darkness under the mountains was 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 mindless smudges. The whole universe seemed to be drawing around him.
   “Jesus 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 save 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, flashing imperative:
   “NO! NEVER!”
   “THEN LET THERE BE LIGHT!”
   And there was light, crashing in on him like a hammer, a great and primordial light. In it, consciousness perished – but before it did, the gunslinger saw something of cosmic importance. He clutched it with agonized effort and sought himself.
   He fled the insanity the knowledge implied, and so came back to himself.
   It was still night – whether the same or another, he had no 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 the man in black 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 over the greasy remains of the rabbit.
   “You did fairly well,” the man in black said. “I never could have sent that vision to Marten. 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 glistened with unhealthy whiteness. The wind above the cup of the Golgotha whistled with keen unhappiness.
   “Universe,” the gunslinger said blankly.
   “You want the Tower,” the man in black said. It seemed to be a question.
   “Yes.”
   “But you shan’t have it,” the man in black said, and smiled with bright cruelty. “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 through Marten and took her. It was written, and it was. I am the furthest minion
   of the Dark Tower. Earth has been given into my hand.”
   “What did I see?” The gunslinger asked. “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.
   “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. Wonder.
   “You don’t know,” he said, and began to smile. “0 great sorcerer who brings the dead to life. You don’t know.”
   “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 every.’ thing. 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.”
   And so the man in black began to speak.
   The universe (he said) 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 single-handedly defeats the pragmatist and the cynic. 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 from the great stone pillar of reality. Even then, the false light of science (knowledge, if you like) shone in only a few developed countries. Yet, despite a tremendous increase in available facts,
   there were remarkably few insights. Gunslinger, our fathers conquered the-disease-which-rots, which we call cancer, almost conquered aging, went to the moon —(“I don’t believe that,” the gunslinger said flatly, to
   which the man in black merely smiled and answered, “You needn’t.”)
   – and 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 —(“What?” “Having babies from frozen mansperm. “
   “Bullshit.” “As you wish.., although not even the ancients could produce children from that material.”)
   – or to the car-which-moves. Few if any seemed to have grasped the 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 are surrounded by your own romantic aura, you lie cheek and jowl daily with the arcane. Yet now you approach the limits —not of belief, but of comprehension. You face reverse entropy of the soul.

   But to the more prosaic:
   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 hugh bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?
   Or one might take the point of a pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil point 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 gravitation. Shrunk to the correct 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 conclusions to things is one impossibility.
   If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through that shell, what great and torrential light might shine through your hole at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?
   Perhaps you saw what place our universe plays in the scheme of things – as an atom in a blade of grass. Could it be that everything we can perceive, from the infinitesimal virus to the distant Horsehead Nebula, is contained in one blade of grass. .. a blade that may have existed for only a day or two in an alien time-flow? What if that blade should
   be cut off by a scythe? When it began to die, would the rot seep into our own universe and our own lives, turning everything yellow and brown and desicated? Perhaps it’s already begun to happen. We say the world has moved on; maybe we really mean that it has begun to dry up.
   Think how small such a concept of things makes us, gunslinger! If a God watches over it all, does He actually mete out justice for a race of gnats among an infinitude of races of gnats? Does his eye see the sparrow fall when the sparrow is less than a speck of hydrogen floating disconnected in the depth of space? And if He does see… what must the nature of such a God be? Where does He live? How is it possible to live beyond infinity?
   Imagine the sand of the Mohaine Desert, which you crossed to find me, and imagine a trillion universes – not worlds but universes – encapsulated in each grain of that desert; and within each universe an infinity of others. We tower over these universes from our pitiful grass vantage point; with one swing of your boot you may knock a billion billion worlds flying off into darkness, in a chain never to be completed.
   Size, gunslinger… Size….
   Yet suppose further. Suppose that all worlds, all universes, met in a single nexus, a single pylon, a Tower. A stairway, perhaps, to the Godhead itself. Would you dare, gunslinger? Could it be that somewhere above all of endless reality, there exists a Room…?
   You dare not.
   You dare not.
   “Someone has dared,” the gunslinger said.
   “Who would that be?”
   “God,” the gunslinger said softly. His eyes gleamed. “God has dared. . . or is the room empty, seer?”
   “I don’t know.” Fear passed over the man in black’s
   bland face, as soft and dark as a buzzard’s wing. “And, furthermore, I don’t ask. It might be unwise.”
   “Afraid of being struck dead?” The gunslinger asked sardonically.
   “Perhaps afraid of an accounting,” the man in black replied, and there was silence for a while. The night was very long. The Milky Way sprawled above them in great splendor, yet terrifying in its emptiness. The gunslinger wondered what he would feel if that inky sky should split open and let in a torrent of light.
   “The fire,” he said. “I’m cold.”
   The gunslinger drowsed and awoke to see the man in black regarding him avidly, unhealthily.
   “What are you staring at?”
   “You, of course. “
   “Well, don’t” He poked up the fire, ruining the precision of the idiogram. “I don’t like it.” He looked to the east to see if there was the beginning of light, but this night went on and on.
   “You seek the light so soon?”
   “I was made for light”
   “Ah, so you were! And so impolite of me to forget the fact! Yet we have much to discuss yet, you and I. For so has it been told to me by my master.”
   “Who?”
   The man in black smiled. “Shall we tell the truth then, you and I? No more lies? No more glammer?”
   “Glammer? What does that mean?”
   But the man in black persisted: “Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as enemies and equals? There is an offer you will get rarely, Roland. Only enemies speak the truth. Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.”
   “Then we’ll speak the truth.” He had never spoken
   less on this night “Start by telling me what glammer is.”
   “Glammer is enchantment, gunslinger. My master’s enchantment has prolonged this night and will prolong it still.., until our business is done. “
   “How long will that be?”
   “Long. T can tell you no better. I do not know myself.” The man in black stood over the fire, and the glowing embers made patterns on his face. “Ask. I will tell you what I know. You have caught me. It is fair; I did not think you would. Yet your quest has only begun. Ask. It will lead us to business soon enough.”
   “Who is your master?”
   “I have never seen him, but you must. In order to reach the Tower you must reach this one first, the Ageless Stranger. “ The man in black smiled spitelessly. “You must slay him, gunslinger. Yet I think it is not what you wished to ask.”
   “If you’ve never seen him, how do you know him?”
   “He came to me once in a dream. As a stripling he came to me, when I lived in a far land. A thousand years ago, or five or ten. He came to me in days before the old ones had yet to cross the sea. In a land called England. A sheaf of centuries ago he imbued me with my duty, although there were errands in between my youth and my apotheosis. You are that, gunslinger.” He tittered. “You see, someone has taken you seriously.”
   “This Stranger has no name?”
   “0, he is named.”
   “And what is his name?”
   “Maerlyn,” the man in black said softly, and somewhere in the easterly darkness where the mountains lay a rockslide punctuated his words and a puma screamed like a woman. The gunslinger shivered and the man in black flinched. “Yet I do not think that is what you wished to ask, either. It is not your nature to think so far ahead.”
   The gunslinger knew the question; it had gnawed him all this night, and he thought, for years before. It trembled on his lips but he didn’t ask it… not yet.
   “This Stranger, this Maerlyn, is a minion of the Tower? Like yourself?”
   “Much greater than I. It has been given to him to live backward in time. He darkies. He tincts. He is in all times. Yet there is one greater than he.”
   “Who?”
   “The Beast,” the man in black whispered fearfully. “The keeper of the Tower. The originator of all glammer.
   “What is it? What does this Beast – “
   “Ask me no more!” The man in black cried. His voice aspired to sternness and crumbled into beseechment. “I know not! I do not wish to know. To speak of the Beast is to speak of the ruination of one’s own soul. Before It, Maerlyn is as Jam to him.”
   “And beyond the Beast is the Tower and whatever the Tower contains?”
   “Yes,” whispered the man in black. “But none of these things are what you wish to ask.”
   True.
   “All right,” the gunslinger said, and then asked the world’s oldest question. “Do I know you? Have I seen you somewhere before?”
   “Yes.”
   “Where?” The gunslinger leaned forward urgently. This was a question of his destiny.
   The man in black clapped his hands to his mouth and giggled through them like a small child. “I think you know. “
   “Where!” He was on his feet; his hands had dropped to the worn butts of his guns.
   “Not with those, gunslinger. Those do not open doors; those only close them forever. “
   “Where?” The gunslinger reiterated.
   “Must I give him a hint?” The man in black asked the darkness. “I believe I must “He looked at the gunslinger with eyes that burned. “There was a man who gave you advice,” he said. “Your teacher – “
   “Yes, Cort,” the gunslinger interrupted impatiently.
   “The advice was to wait. It was bad advice. For even then Marten’s plans against your father had proceeded. And when your father returned – “
   “He was killed,” the gunslinger said emptily.
   “And when you turned and looked, Marten was gone
   … gone west Yet there was a man in Marten’s entourage, a
   man who affected the dress of a monk and the shaven head
   of a penitent – “
   “Walter,” the gunslinger whispered. “You. .. you’re not Marten at all. You’re Walter!”
   The man in black tittered. “At your service. “
   “I ought to kill you now.”
   “That would hardly be fair. After all, it was I who delivered Marten into your hands three years later, when – “
   “Then you’ve controlled me.”
   “In some ways, yes. But no more, gunslinger. Now comes the time of sharing. Then, in the morning, I will cast the runes. Dreams will come to you. And then your real quest must begin.”
   “Walter,” the gunslinger repeated, stunned.
   “Sit,” the man in black invited. “I tell you my story. Yours, I think, will be much longer. “
   “I don’t talk of myself,” the gunslinger muttered.
   “Yet tonight you must So that we may understand.”
   “Understand what? My purpose? You know that To find the Tower is my purpose. I’m sworn.”
   “Not your purpose, gunslinger. Your mind. Your slow, plodding, tenacious mind. There has never been one quite like it, in all the history of the world. Perhaps in the history of creation.
   “This is the time of speaking. This is the time of histories.
   “Then speak.”
   The man in black shook the voluminous arm of his robe. A foil-wrapped package fell out and caught the dying embers in many reflective folds.
   “Tobacco, gunslinger. Would you smoke?”
   He had been able to resist the rabbit, but he could not resist this. He opened the foil with eager fingers. There was fine crumbled tobacco inside, and green leaves to wrap it in, amazingly moist. He had not seen such tobacco for ten years.
   He rolled two cigarettes and bit the ends of each to release flavor. He offered one to the man in black, who took it. Each of them took a burning twig from the fire.
   The gunslinger lit his cigarette and drew the aromatic smoke deep into his lungs, closing his eyes to concentrate the senses. He blew out with long, slow satisfaction.
   “Is it good?” the man in black enquired.
   “Yes. Very good.”
   “Enjoy it. It may be the last smoke for you in a very long time.”
   The gunslinger took this impassively.
   “Very well,” the man in black said. “To begin then:
   “You must understand that the Tower has always been, and there have always been boys who know of it and lust for it, more than power or riches or women.. “
   There was talk then, a night’s worth of talk and God alone knew how much more, but the Gunslinger remembered little of it later. . . and to his oddly practical mind, little of it seemed to matter. The man in black told him that he must go to the sea, which lay no more than twenty easy miles to the west, and there he would be invested with the power of drawing.
   “But that’s not exactly right, either,” the man in black said, pitching his cigarette into the remains of the campfire. “No one wants to invest you with a power of any kind, gunslinger; it is simply in you, and I am compelled to tell you, partly because of the sacrifice of the boy, and partly because it is the law; the natural law of things. Water must run downhill, and you must be told. You will draw three, I understand… but I don’t really care, and I don’t really want to know.”
   “The three,” the gunslinger murmured, thinking of the Oracle.
   “And then the fun begins. But, by then, I’ll be long gone. Good-bye, gunslinger. My part is done now. The chain is still in your hands. Beware it doesn’t wrap itself around your neck.”
   Compelled by something outside him, Roland said, “You have one more thing to say, don’t you?”
   “Yes,” the man in black said, and he smiled at the gunslinger with his depthless eyes and stretched one of his hands out toward him. “Let there be light.”
   And there was light.
   Roland awoke by the ruins of the campfire to find himself ten years older. His black hair had thinned at the temples and gone the gray of cobwebs at the end of autumn. The lines in his face were deeper, his skin rougher.
   The remains of the wood he had carried had turned to ironwood, and the man in black was a laughing skeleton in a rotting black robe, more bones in this place of bones, one more skull in Golgotha.
   The gunslinger stood up and looked around. He looked at the light and saw that the light was good.

With a sudden quick gesture he reached toward the remains of his companion of the night before.., a night that had somehow lasted ten years. He broke off Walter’s jawbone and jammed it carelessly into the left hip pocket of his jeans – a fitting enough replacement for the one lost under the mountains.
   The Tower. Somewhere ahead, it waited for him – the nexus of Time, the nexus of Size.
   He began west again, his back set against the sunrise, heading toward the ocean, realizing that a great passage of his life had come and gone. “I loved you, Jake,” he said aloud.
   The stiffness wore out of his body and he began to walk more rapidly. By that evening he had come to the end of the land. He sat on a beach which stretched left and right forever, deserted. The waves beat endlessly against the shore, pounding and pounding. The setting sun painted the water in a wide strip of fool’s gold.
   There the gunslinger sat, his face turned up into the fading light. He dreamed his dreams and watched as the stars came out; his purpose did not flag, nor did his heart falter; his hair, finer now and gray, blew around his head, and the sandalwood-inlaid guns of his father lay smooth and deadly against his hips, and he was lonely but did not find loneliness in any way a bad or ignoble thing. The dark came down on the world and the world moved on. The gunslinger waited for the time of the drawing and dreamed his long dreams of the Dark Tower, to which he would some day come at dusk and approach, winding his horn, to do some unimaginable final battle.

Afterword

   The foregoing tale, which is almost (but not quite!) complete in itself, is the first stanza in a much longer work called The Dark Tower. Some of the work beyond this segment has been completed, but there is much more to be done
   – my brief synopsis of the action to follow suggests a length approaching 3000 pages, perhaps more. That probably sounds as if my plans for the story have passed beyond mere ambition and into the land of lunacy… but ask your favorite English teacher sometime to tell you about the plans Chaucer had for The Canterbury Tales – now Chaucer might have been crazy.
   At the speed which the work entire has progressed so far, I would have to live approximately 300 years to complete the tale of the Tower; this segment, “The Gunslinger and the Dark Tower,” was written over a period of twelve years. It is by far the longest I’ve taken with any work… and it might be more honest to put it another way: it is the longest that any of my unfinished works has remained alive and viable in my own mind, and if a book is not alive in the writer's mind, it is as dead as year-old horse shit even if words continue to march across the page.
   The Dark Tower began, I think, because I inherited a ream of paper in the spring semester of my senior year in college. It wasn’t a ream of your ordinary garden-variety
   bond paper, not even a ream of those colorful “second sheets” that many struggling writers use because those reams of colored sheets (often with large chunks of undissolved wood floating in them) are three or four dollars cheaper.
   The ream of paper I inherited was bright green, nearly as thick as cardboard, and of an extremely eccentric size– about seven inches wide by about ten inches long, as I recall. I was working at the University of Maine library at the time, and several reams of this stuff, in various hues, turned up one day, totally unexplained and unaccounted for. My wife-to-be, the then Tabitha Spruce, took one of these reams of paper (robin’s egg blue) home with her; the fellow she was then going with took home another (Roadrunner yellow). I got the green stuff.
   As it happened, all three of us turned out to be real writers—a coincidence almost too large to be termed mere coincidence in a society where literally tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of college students aspire to the writer’s trade and where bare hundreds actually break through. I’ve gone on to publish half a dozen novels or so, my wife has published one (Small World) and is hard at work on an even better one, and the fellow she was going with back then, David Lyons, has developed into a fine poet and the founder of Lynx Press in Massachusetts.
   Maybe it was the paper, folks. Maybe it was magic paper. You know, like in a Stephen King novel.
   Anyway, all of you out there reading this may not understand how fraught with possibility those five hundred sheets of blank paper seemed to be, although I’d guess there are plenty of you who are nodding in perfect understanding right now. Publishing writers can, of course, have all the blank paper they want; it is their stock-in-trade. It’s even tax deductible. They can have so much, in fact, that all of those blank sheets can actually begin to cast a malign spell
   –better writers than I have talked about the mute challenge
   of all that white space, and God knows some of them have been intimidated into silence by it.
   The other side of the coin, particularly to a young writer, is almost unholy exhilaration all that blank paper can bring on; you feel like an alcoholic contemplating a fifth of whiskey with the seal unbroken.
   I was at that time living in a scuzzy riverside cabin not far from the University, and I was living all by myself —the first third of the foregoing tale was written in a ghastly, unbroken silence which I now, with a houseful of rioting children, two secretaries, and a housekeeper who always thinks I look ill, find hard to remember. The three roommates with whom I had begun the year had all flunked out By March, when the ice went out of the river, I felt like the last of Agatha Christie’s ten little Indians.
   Those two factors, the challenge of that blank green paper, and the utter silence (except for the trickle of the melting snow as it ran downhill and into the Stillwater), were more responsible than anything else for the opening lay of The Dark Tower. There was a third factor, but without the first two, I don’t believe the story ever would have been written.
   That third element was a poem I’d been assigned two years earlier, in a sophomore course covering the earlier romantic poets (and what better time to study romantic poetry than in one’s sophomore year?). Most of the other poems had fallen out of my consciousness in the period between, but that one, gorgeous and rich and inexplicable, remained.., and it remains still. That poem was “Childe Roland,” by Robert Browning.
   I had played with the idea of trying a long romantic novel embodying the feel, if not the exact sense, of the Browning poem. Play was as far as things had gone because I had too many other things to write – poems of my own, short stories, newspaper columns, God knows what.
   But during that spring semester, a sort of hush fell over my previously busy creative life– not a writer’s block, but a sense that it was time to stop goofing around with a pick and shovel and get behind the controls of one big great God a' mighty steam shovel, a sense that it was time to try and dig something big out of the sand, even if the effort turned out to be an abysmal failure.
   And so, one night in March of 1970, I found myself sitting at my old office-model Underwood with the chipped ‘m’ and the flying capital ‘0’ and writing the words that begin this story: The man in black/led across the desert and the gun-slinger followed.
   In the years since I typed that sentence, with Johnny Winter on the stereo not quite masking the sound of melting snow running downhill outside, I have started to go gray, I have begotten children, I have buried my mother, I have gone on drugs and gone off them, and I’ve learned a few things about myself – some of them rueful, some of them unpleasant, most of them just plain funny. As the gunslinger himself would probably point out, the world has moved on.
   But I’ve never completely left the gunslinger’s world in all that time. The thick green paper got lost somewhere along the way, but I still have the original forty or so pages of typescript, comprising the sections titled “The Gunslinger” and “The Way Station.” It was replaced by a more legitimate-looking paper, but I remember those funny green sheets with more affection than I could ever convey in words. I came back to the gunslinger’s world when Salem’s Lot was going badly (“The Oracle and the Mountains”) and wrote of the boy Jake’s sad ending not long after I had seen another boy, Danny Torrance, escape another bad place in The Shining In fact, the only time when my thoughts did not turn at least occasionally to the gunslinger’s dry and yet somehow gorgeous world (at least it has always
   seemed gorgeous to me) was when I was inhabiting another that seemed every bit as real – the post-apocalypse world of The Stand. The final segment presented here, “The Gunslinger and the Man in Black,” was written less than eighteen months ago, in western Maine.
   I believe that I probably owe readers who have come this far with me some sort of synopsis (“the argument,” those great old romantic poets would have called it) of what is to come, since I’ll almost surely die before completing the entire novel.., or epic… or whatever you’d call it. The sad fact is that I can’t really do that. People who know me understand that I am not an intellectual ball of fire, and people who have read my work with some critical approval (there are a few; I bribe them) would probably agree that the best of my stuff has come more from the heart than from the head… or from the gut, which is the place from which the strongest emotional writing originates.
   All of which is just a way of saying that I’m never completely sure where I’m going, and in this story that is even more true than usual. I know from Roland’s vision near the end that his world is indeed moving on because Roland's universe exists within a single molecule of a weed dying in some cosmic vacant lot (I think I probably got this idea from Clifford D. Simak’s Ring Around the Sun; please don’t sue me, Cliff!), and I know that the drawing involves calling three people from our own world (as Jake himself was called by the man in black) who will join Roland in his quest for the Dark Tower– I know that because segments of the second cycle of stories (called “The Drawing of the Three”) have already been written.
   But what of the gunslinger’s murky past? God, I know so little. The revolution that topples the gunslinger’s “world of light”? I don’t know. Roland’s final confrontation with Marten, who seduces his mother and kills his father? Don’t know. The deaths of Roland’s compatriots, Cuthbert and Jamie, or his adventures during the years between his
   coming of age and his first appearance to us in the desert?
   I don’t know that, either. And there’s this girl, Susan. Who
   is she? Don’t know.
   Except somewhere inside, I do. Somewhere inside I know all of those things, and there is no need of an argument, or a synopsis, or an outline (outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters’ theses). When it’s time, those things– and their relevance to the gunslinger’s quest—will roll out as naturally as tears or laughter. And if they never get around to rolling out, well, as Confucius once said, five hundred million Red Chinese don’t give a shit.
   I do know this: at some point, at some magic time, there will be a purple evening (an evening made for romance!) when Roland will come to his dark tower, and approach it, winding his horn.., and if I should ever get there, you’ll be the first to know.
   Stephen King
   Bangor, Maine

The Drawing of the Three

Стивен Кинг


Dark Tower

ARGUMENT
–PROLOGUE:
PRISONER
CHAPTER 1
1
2
3
4
5
6
CHAPTER 2
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
CHAPTER 3
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
CHAPTER 4
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
CHAPTER 5
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
SHUFFLE
THE LADY OF SHADOWS
CHAPTER 1
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
CHAPTER 2
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
CHAPTER 3
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
CHAPTER 4
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
RE-SHUFFLE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
THE PUSHER
CHAPTER 1
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
CHAPTER 2
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
CHAPTER 3
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
CHAPTER 4
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
FINAL SHUFFLE
1
2
3
4
5
-AFTERWORD

ARGUMENT

   To Don Grant, who's taken a chance on these novels, one by one.



   The Drawing of the Three is the second volume of a long tale called The Dark Tower, a tale inspired by and to some degree dependent upon Robert Browning's narrative poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (which in its turn owes a debt to King Lear).
   The first volume, The Gunslinger, tells how Roland, the last gunslinger of a world which has "moved on," finally catches up with the man in black … a sorcerer he has chased for a very long time―just how long we do not yet know. The man in black turns out to be a fellow named Walter, who falsely claimed the friendship of Roland's father in those days before the world moved on.
   Roland's goal is not this half-human creature but the Dark Tower ; the man in black―and, more specifically, what the man in black knows― is his first step on his road to that mysterious place.
   Who, exactly, is Roland? What was his world like before it "moved on?" What is the Tower, and why does he pursue it? We have only fragmentary answers. Roland is a gunslinger, a kind of knight, one of those charged with holding a world Roland remembers as being "filled with love and light" as it is; to keep it from moving on.
   We know that Roland was forced to an early trial of manhood after discovering that his mother had become the mistress of Marten, a much greater sorcerer than Walter (who, unknown to Roland's father, is Marten's ally); we know Marten has planned Roland's discovery, expecting Roland to fail and to be "sent West"; we know that Roland triumphs in his test.
   What else do we know? That the gunslinger's world is not completely unlike our own. Artifacts such as gasoline pumps and certain songs ("Hey Jude," for instance, or the bit of doggerel that begins "Beans, beans, the musical fruit …") have survived; so have customs and rituals oddly like those from our own romanticized view of the American west.
   And there is an umbilicus which somehow connects our world to the world of the gunslinger. At a way-station on a long-deserted coach-road in a great and sterile desert, Roland meets a boy named Jake who died in our world. A boy who was, in fact, pushed from a street-corner by the ubiquitous (and iniquitous) man in black. The last thing Jake, who was on his way to school with his book-bag in one hand and his lunch-box in the other, remembers of his world―our world―is being crushed beneath the wheels of a Cadillac … and dying.
   Before reaching the man in black, Jake dies again… this time because the gunslinger, faced with the second-most agonizing choice of his life, elects to sacrifice this symbolic son. Given a choice between the Tower and child, possibly between damnation and salvation, Roland chooses the Tower.
   "Go, then," Jake tells him before plunging into the abyss. "There are other worlds than these."
   The final confrontation between Roland and Walter occurs in a dusty golgotha of decaying bones. The dark man tells Roland's future with a deck of Tarot cards. These cards, showing a man called The Prisoner, a woman called The Lady of Shadows, and a darker shape that is simply Death ("but not for you, gunslinger," the man in black tells him), are prophecies which become the subject of this volume … and Roland's second step on the long and difficult path to the Dark Tower.
   The Gunslinger ends with Roland sitting upon the beach of the Western Sea , watching the sunset. The man in black is dead, the gunslinger's own future course unclear; The Drawing of the Three begins on that same beach, less than seven hours later.

–PROLOGUE:
THE SAILOR

   The gunslinger came awake from a confused dream which seemed to consist of a single image: that of the Sailor in the Tarot deck from which the man in black had dealt (or purported to deal) the gunslinger's own moaning future.
   He drowns, gunslinger, the man in black was saying, and no one throws out the line. The boy Jake.
   But this was no nightmare. It was a good dream. It was good because he was the one drowning, and that meant he was not Roland at all but Jake, and he found this a relief because it would be far better to drown as Jake than to live as himself, a man who had, for a cold dream, betrayed a child who had trusted him.
   Good, all right, I'll drown, he thought, listening to the roar of the sea. Let me drown. But this was not the sound of the open deeps; it was the grating sound of water with a throatful of stones. Was he the Sailor? If so, why was land so close? And, in fact, was he not on the land? It felt as if―
   Freezing cold water doused his boots and ran up his legs to his crotch. His eyes flew open then, and what snapped him out of the dream wasn't his freezing balls, which had suddenly shrunk to what felt like the size of walnuts, nor even the horror to his right, but the thought of his guns … his guns, and even more important, his shells. Wet guns could be quickly disassembled, wiped dry, oiled, wiped dry again, oiled again, and reassembled; wet shells, like wet matches, might or might not ever be usable again.
   The horror was a crawling thing which must have been cast up by a previous wave. It dragged a wet, gleaming body laboriously along the sand. It was about four feet long and about four yards to the right. It regarded Roland with bleak eyes on stalks. Its long serrated beak dropped open and it began to make a noise that was weirdly like human speech: plaintive, even desperate questions in an alien tongue. "Did-a-chick? Dum-a-chum? Dad-a-cham? Ded-a-check?"
   The gunslinger had seen lobsters. This wasn't one, although lobsters were the only things he had ever seen which this creature even vaguely resembled. It didn't seem afraid of him at all. The gunslinger didn't know if it was dangerous or not. He didn't care about his own mental confusion―his temporary inability to remember where he was or how he had gotten there, if he had actually caught the man in black or if all that had only been a dream. He only knew he had to get away from the water before it could drown his shells.
   He heard the grinding, swelling roar of water and looked from the creature (it had stopped and was holding up the claws with which it had been pulling itself along, looking absurdly like a boxer assuming his opening stance, which, Cort had taught them, was called The Honor Stance) to the incoming breaker with its curdle of foam.
   It hears the wave, the gunslinger thought. Whatever it is, it's got ears. He tried to get up, but his legs, too numb to feel, buckled under him.
   I'm still dreaming, he thought, but even in his current confused state this was a belief much too tempting to really be believed. He tried to get up again, almost made it, then fell back. The wave was breaking. There was no time again. He had to settle for moving in much the same way the creature on his right seemed to move: he dug in with both hands and dragged his butt up the stony shingle, away from the wave.
   He didn't progress enough to avoid the wave entirely, but he got far enough for his purposes. The wave buried nothing but his boots. It reached almost to his knees and then retreated. Perhaps the first one didn't go as far as I thought. Perhaps―
   There was a half-moon in the sky. A caul of mist covered it, but it shed enough light for him to see that the holsters were too dark. The guns, at least, had suffered a wetting. It was impossible to tell how bad it had been, or if either the shells currently in the cylinders or those in the crossed gunbelts had also been wetted. Before checking, he had to get away from the water. Had to―
   "Dod-a-chock?" This was much closer. In his worry over the water he had forgotten the creature the water had cast up. He looked around and saw it was now only four feet away. Its claws were buried in the stone– and shell-littered sand of the shingle, pulling its body along. It lifted its meaty, serrated body, making it momentarily resemble a scorpion, but Roland could see no stinger at the end of its body.
   Another grinding roar, this one much louder. The creature immediately stopped and raised its claws into its own peculiar version of the Honor Stance again.
   This wave was bigger. Roland began to drag himself up the slope of the strand again, and when he put out his hands, the clawed creature moved with a speed of which its previous movements had not even hinted.
   The gunslinger felt a bright flare of pain in his right hand, but there was no time to think about that now. He pushed with the heels of his soggy boots, clawed with his hands, and managed to get away from the wave.
   "Did-a-chick?" the monstrosity enquired in its plaintive Won't you help me? Can't you see I am desperate? voice, and Roland saw the stumps of the first and second fingers of his right hand disappearing into the creature's jagged beak. It lunged again and Roland lifted his dripping right hand just in time to save his remaining two fingers.
   "Dum-a-chum? Dad-a-cham?"
   The gunslinger staggered to his feet. The thing tore open his dripping jeans, tore through a boot whose old leather was soft but as tough as iron, and took a chunk of meat from Roland's lower calf.
   He drew with his right hand, and realized two of the fingers needed to perform this ancient killing operation were gone only when the revolver thumped to the sand.
   The monstrosity snapped at it greedily.
   "No, bastard!" Roland snarled, and kicked it. It was like kicking a block of rock … one that bit. It tore away the end of Roland's right boot, tore away most of his great toe, tore the boot itself from his foot.
   The gunslinger bent, picked up his revolver, dropped it, cursed, and finally managed. What had once been a thing so easy it didn't even bear thinking about had suddenly become a trick akin to juggling.
   The creature was crouched on the gunslinger's boot, tearing at it as it asked its garbled questions. A wave rolled toward the beach, the foam which curdled its top looking pallid and dead in the netted light of the half-moon. The lobstrosity stopped working on the boot and raised its claws in that boxer's pose.
   Roland drew with his left hand and pulled the trigger three times. Click, click, click.
   Now he knew about the shells in the chambers, at least.
   He holstered the left gun. To holster the right he had to turn its barrel downward with his left hand and then let it drop into its place. Blood slimed the worn ironwood handgrips; blood spotted the holster and the old jeans to which the holster was thong-tied. It poured from the stumps where his fingers used to be.
   His mangled right foot was still too numb to hurt, but his right hand was a bellowing fire. The ghosts of talented and long-trained fingers which were already decomposing in the digestive juices of that thing's guts screamed that they were still there, that they were burning.
   Isee serious problems ahead, the gunslinger thought remotely.
   The wave retreated. The monstrosity lowered its claws, tore a fresh hole in the gunslinger's boot, and then decided the wearer had been a good deal more tasty than this bit of skin it had somehow sloughed off.
   "Dud-a-chum?" it asked, and scurried toward him with ghastly speed. The gunslinger retreated on legs he could barely feel, realizing that the creature must have some intelligence; it had approached him cautiously, perhaps from a long way down the strand, not sure what he was or of what he might be capable. If the dousing wave hadn't wakened him, the thing would have torn off his face while he was still deep in his dream. Now it had decided he was not only tasty but vulnerable; easy prey.
   It was almost upon him, a thing four feet long and a foot high, a creature which might weigh as much as seventy pounds and which was as single-mindedly carnivorous as David, the hawk he had had as a boy―but without David's dim vestige of loyalty.
   The gunslinger's left bootheel struck a rock jutting from the sand and he tottered on the edge of falling.
   "Dod-a-chock?" the thing asked, solicitously it seemed, and peered at the gunslinger from its stalky, waving eyes as its claws reached … and then a wave came, and the claws went up again in the Honor Stance. Yet now they wavered the slightest bit, and the gunslinger realized that it responded to the sound of the wave, and now the sound was―for it, at least―fading a bit.
   He stepped backward over the rock, then bent down as the wave broke upon the shingle with its grinding roar. His head was inches from the insectile face of the creature. One of its claws might easily have slashed the eyes from his face, but its trembling claws, so like clenched fists, remained raised to either side of its parrotlike beak.
   The gunslinger reached for the stone over which he had nearly fallen. It was large, half-buried in the sand, and his mutilated right hand howled as bits of dirt and sharp edges of pebble ground into the open bleeding flesh, but he yanked the rock free and raised it, his lips pulled away from his teeth.
   "Dad-a―" the monstrosity began, its claws lowering and opening as the wave broke and its sound receded, and the gunslinger swept the rock down upon it with all his strength.
   There was a crunching noise as the creature's segmented back broke. It lashed wildly beneath the rock, its rear half lifting and thudding, lifting and thudding. Its interrogatives became buzzing exclamations of pain. Its claws opened and shut upon nothing. Its maw of a beak gnashed up clots of sand and pebbles.
   And yet, as another wave broke, it tried to raise its claws again, and when it did the gunslinger stepped on its head with his remaining boot. There was a sound like many small dry twigs being broken. Thick fluid burst from beneath the heel of Roland's boot, splashing in two directions. It looked black. The thing arched and wriggled in a frenzy. The gunslinger planted his boot harder.
   A wave came.
   The monstrosity's claws rose an inch … two inches … trembled and then fell, twitching open and shut.
   The gunslinger removed his boot. The thing's serrated beak, which had separated two fingers and one toe from his living body, slowly opened and closed. One antenna lay broken on the sand. The other trembled meaninglessly.
   The gunslinger stamped down again. And again.
   He kicked the rock aside with a grunt of effort and marched along the right side of the monstrosity's body, stamping methodically with his left boot, smashing its shell, squeezing its pale guts out onto dark gray sand. It was dead, but he meant to have his way with it all the same; he had never, in all his long strange time, been so fundamentally hurt, and it had all been so unexpected.
   He kept on until he saw the tip of one of his own fingers in the dead thing's sour mash, saw the white dust beneath the nail from the golgotha where he and the man in black had held their long palaver, and then he looked aside and vomited.
   The gunslinger walked back toward the water like a drunken man, holding his wounded hand against his shirt, looking back from time to time to make sure the thing wasn't still alive, like some tenacious wasp you swat again and again and still twitches, stunned but not dead; to make sure it wasn't following, asking its alien questions in its deadly despairing voice.
   Halfway down the shingle he stood swaying, looking at the place where he had been, remembering. He had fallen asleep, apparently, just below the high tide line. He grabbed his purse and his torn boot.
   In the moon's glabrous light he saw other creatures of the same type, and in the caesura between one wave and the next, heard their questioning voices.
   The gunslinger retreated a step at a time, retreated until he reached the grassy edge of the shingle. There he sat down, and did all he knew to do: he sprinkled the stumps of fingers and toe with the last of his tobacco to stop the bleeding, sprinkled it thick in spite of the new stinging (his missing great toe had joined the chorus), and then he only sat, sweating in the chill, wondering about infection, wondering how he would make his way in this world with two fingers on his right hand gone (when it came to the guns both hands had been equal, but in all other things his right had ruled), wondering if the thing had some poison in its bite which might already be working its way into him, wondering if morning would ever come.

PRISONER

CHAPTER 1
THE DOOR

1

   Three. This is the number of your fate.
   Three?
   Yes, three is mystic. Three stands at the heart of the mantra.
   Which three?
   The first is dark-haired. He stands on the brink of robbery and murder. A demon has infested him. The name of the demon is HEROIN.
   Which demon is that? I know it not, even from nursery stories.
   He tried to speak but his voice was gone, the voice of the oracle, Star-Slut, Whore of the Winds, both were gone; he saw a card fluttering down from nowhere to nowhere, turning and turning in the lazy dark. On it a baboon grinned from over the shoulder of a young man with dark hair; its disturbingly human fingers were buried so deeply in the young man's neck that their tips had disappeared in flesh. Looking more closely, the gunslinger saw the baboon held a whip in one of those clutching, strangling hands. The face of the ridden man seemed to writhe in wordless terror.
   The Prisoner, the man in black (who had once been a man the gunslinger trusted, a man named Walter) whispered chummily. A trifle upsetting, isn't he? A trifle upsetting…a trifle upsetting…a trifle―

2

   The gunslinger snapped awake, waving at something with his mutilated hand, sure that in a moment one of the monstrous shelled things from the Western Sea would drop on him, desperately enquiring in its foreign tongue as it pulled his face off his skull.
   Instead a sea-bird, attracted by the glister of the morning sun on the buttons of his shirt, wheeled away with a frightened squawk.
   Roland sat up.
   His hand throbbed wretchedly, endlessly. His right foot did the same. Both fingers and toe continued to insist they were there. The bottom half of his shirt was gone; what was left resembled a ragged vest. He had used one piece to bind his hand, the other to bind his foot.
   Go away, he told the absent parts of his body. You are ghosts now. Go away.
   It helped a little. Not much, but a little. They were ghosts, all right, but lively ghosts.
   The gunslinger ate jerky. His mouth wanted it little, his stomach less, but he insisted. When it was inside him, he felt a little stronger. There was not much left, though; he was nearly up against it.
   Yet things needed to be done.
   He rose unsteadily to his feet and looked about. Birds swooped and dived, but the world seemed to belong to only him and them. The monstrosities were gone. Perhaps they were nocturnal; perhaps tidal. At the moment it seemed to make no difference.
   The sea was enormous, meeting the horizon at a misty blue point that was impossible to determine. For a long moment the gunslinger forgot his agony in its contemplation. He had never seen such a body of water. Had heard of it in children's stories, of course, had even been assured by his teachers―some, at least―that it existed―but to actually see it, this immensity, this amazement of water after years of arid land, was difficult to accept … difficult to even see.
   He looked at it for a long time, enrapt, making himself see it, temporarily forgetting his pain in wonder.
   But it was morning, and there were still things to be done.
   He felt for the jawbone in his back pocket, careful to lead with the palm of his right hand, not wanting the stubs of his fingers to encounter it if it was still there, changing that hand's ceaseless sobbing to screams.
   It was.
   All right.
   Next.
   He clumsily unbuckled his gunbelts and laid them on a sunny rock. He removed the guns, swung the chambers out, and removed the useless shells. He threw them away. A bird settled on the bright gleam tossed back by one of them, picked it up in its beak, then dropped it and flew away.
   The guns themselves must be tended to, should have been tended to before this, but since no gun in this world or any other was more than a club without ammunition, he laid the gunbelts themselves over his lap before doing anything else and carefully ran his left hand over the leather.
   Each of them was damp from buckle and clasp to the point where the belts would cross his hips; from that point they seemed dry. He carefully removed each shell from the dry portions of the belts. His right hand kept trying to do this job, insisted on forgetting its reduction in spite of the pain, and he found himself returning it to his knee again and again, like a dog too stupid or fractious to heel. In his distracted pain he came close to swatting it once or twice.
   I see serious problems ahead, he thought again.
   He put these shells, hopefully still good, in a pile that was dishearteningly small. Twenty. Of those, a few would almost certainly misfire. He could depend on none of them. He removed the rest and put them in another pile. Thirty-seven.
   Well, you weren't heavy loaded, anyway, he thought, but he recognized the difference between fifty-seven live rounds and what might be twenty. Or ten. Or five. Or one. Or none.
   He put the dubious shells in a second pile.
   He still had his purse. That was one thing. He put it in his lap and then slowly disassembled his guns and performed the ritual of cleaning. By the time he was finished, two hours had passed and his pain was so intense his head reeled with it; conscious thought had become difficult. He wanted to sleep. He had never wanted that more in his life. But in the service of duty there was never any acceptable reason for denial.
   "Cort," he said in a voice that he couldn't recognize, and laughed dryly.
   Slowly, slowly, he reassembled his revolvers and loaded them with the shells he presumed to be dry. When the job was done, he held the one made for his left hand, cocked it … and then slowly lowered the hammer again. He wanted to know, yes. Wanted to know if there would be a satisfying report when he squeezed the trigger or only another of those useless clicks. But a click would mean nothing, and a report would only reduce twenty to nineteen … or nine … or three … or none.
   He tore away another piece of his shirt, put the other shells―the ones which had been wetted―in it, and tied it, using his left hand and his teeth. He put them in his purse.
   Sleep, his body demanded. Sleep, you must sleep, now, before dark, there's nothing left, you're used up―
   He tottered to his feet and looked up and down the deserted strand. It was the color of an undergarment which has gone a long time without washing, littered with sea-shells which had no color. Here and there large rocks protruded from the gross-grained sand, and these were covered with guano, the older layers the yellow of ancient teeth, the fresher splotches white.
   The high-tide line was marked with drying kelp. He could see pieces of his right boot and his waterskins lying near that line. He thought it almost a miracle that the skins hadn't been washed out to sea by high-surging waves. Walking slowly, limping exquisitely, the gunslinger made his way to where they were. He picked up one of them and shook it by his ear. The other was empty. This one still had a little water left in it. Most would not have been able to tell the difference between the two, but the gunslinger knew each just as well as a mother knows which of her identical twins is which. He had been travelling with these waterskins for a long, long time. Water sloshed inside. That was good―a gift. Either the creature which had attacked him or any of the others could have torn this or the other open with one casual bite or slice of claw, but none had and the tide had spared it. Of the creature itself there was no sign, although the two of them had finished far above the tide-line. Perhaps other predators had taken it; perhaps its own kind had given it a burial at sea, as the elaphaunts, giant creatures of whom he had heard in childhood stories, were reputed to bury their own dead.
   He lifted the waterskin with his left elbow, drank deeply, and felt some strength come back into him. The right boot was of course ruined … but then he felt a spark of hope. The foot itself was intact―scarred but intact―and it might be possible to cut the other down to match it, to make something which would last at least awhile.…
   Faintness stole over him. He fought it but his knees unhinged and he sat down, stupidly biting his tongue.
   You won't fall unconscious, he told himself grimly. Not here, not where another of those things can come back tonight and finish the job.
   So he got to his feet and tied the empty skin about his waist, but he had only gone twenty yards back toward the place where he had left his guns and purse when he fell down again, half-fainting. He lay there awhile, one cheek pressed against the sand, the edge of a seashell biting against the edge of his jaw almost deep enough to draw blood. He managed to drink from the waterskin, and then he crawled back to the place where he had awakened. There was a Joshua tree twenty yards up the slope―it was stunted, but it would offer at least some shade.
   To Roland the twenty yards looked like twenty miles.
   Nonetheless, he laboriously pushed what remained of his possessions into that little puddle of shade. He lay there with his head in the grass, already fading toward what could be sleep or unconsciousness or death. He looked into the sky and tried to judge the time. Not noon , but the size of the puddle of shade in which he rested said noon was close. He held on a moment longer, turning his right arm over and bringing it close to his eyes, looking for the telltale red lines of infection, of some poison seeping steadily toward the middle of him.
   The palm of his hand was a dull red. Not a good sign.
   Ijerk off left-handed, he thought, at least that's something.
   Then darkness took him, and he slept for the next sixteen hours with the sound of the Western Sea pounding ceaselessly in his dreaming ears.

3

   When the gunslinger awoke again the sea was dark but there was faint light in the sky to the east. Morning was on its way. He sat up and waves of dizziness almost overcame him.
   He bent his head and waited.
   When the faintness had passed, he looked at his hand. It was infected, all right—a tell-tale red swelling that spread up the palm and to the wrist. It stopped there, but already he could see the faint beginnings of other red lines, which would lead eventually to his heart and kill him. He felt hot, feverish.
   I need medicine, he thought. But there is no medicine here.
   Had he come this far just to die, then? He would not. And if he were to die in spite of his determination, he would die on his way to the Tower.
   How remarkable you are, gunslinger! the man in black tittered inside his head. How indomitable! How romantic in your stupid obsession!
   "Fuck you,'' he croaked, and drank. Not much water left, either. There was a whole sea in front of him, for all the good it could do him; water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. Never mind.
   He buckled on his gunbelts, tied them―this was a process which took so long that before he was done the first faint light of dawn had brightened to the day's actual prologue―and then tried to stand up. He was not convinced he could do it until it was done.
   Holding to the Joshua tree with his left hand, he scooped up the not-quite-empty waterskin with his right arm and slung it over his shoulder. Then his purse. When he straightened the faintness washed over him again and he put his head down, waiting, willing.
   The faintness passed.
   Walking with the weaving, wavering steps of a man in the last stages of ambulatory drunkenness, the gunslinger made his way back down to the strand. He stood, looking at an ocean as dark as mulberry wine, and then took the last of his jerky from his purse. He ate half, and this time both mouth and stomach accepted a little more willingly. He turned and ate the other half as he watched the sun come up over the mountains where Jake had died―first seeming to catch on the cruel and treeless teeth of those peaks, then rising above them.
   Roland held his face to the sun, closed his eyes, and smiled. He ate the rest of his jerky.
   He thought: Very well. I am now a man with no food, with two less fingers and one less toe than I was born with; I am a gunslinger with shells which may not fire; I am sickening from a monster's bite and have no medicine; I have a day's water if I'm lucky; I may be able to walk perhaps a dozen miles if I press myself to the last extremity. I am, in short, a man on the edge of everything.
   Which way should he walk? He had come from the east; he could not walk west without the powers of a saint or a savior. That left north and south.
   North.
   That was the answer his heart told. There was no question in it.
   North.
   The gunslinger began to walk.