The thin man smoked the cigarette all the way down to the filter.
He turned toward Carlo, staggering a little, as if he was not used to smoking and the cigarette had made him dizzy.
“A nice night,” the man said.
Carlo nodded. It was. It was a nice night. “We’re lucky to be alive,” Carlo said.
The man nodded. “All of us. All of the time.”
He walked to the curb, where there was a litter basket. He dropped the pack of cigarettes, full save one, into the litter basket. “All of us,” he said. “All of the time.” He walked away. Carlo watched him go and thought that maybe he was pazzo after all. Or maybe not.
Crazy was a hard state to define.
This is a slightly Kafka-esque story about an interrogation room in the South American version of Hell. In such stories, the fellow being interrogated usually ends up spilling everything and then being killed (or losing his mind). I wanted to write one with a happier ending, however unreal that might be. And here it is.
144
The Little Sisters
of Eluria
If there’s a magnum opus in my life, it’s probably the yet unfinished seven-volume series about Roland Deschain of Gilead and his search for the Dark Tower which serves as the hub of existence. In 1996 or 1997, Ralph Vicinanza (my sometime agent and foreign rights man of business) asked me if I’d like to contribute a story about Roland’s younger years for a whopper fantasy anthology Robert Silverberg was putting together. I tentatively agreed.
Nothing came, though, and nothing came. I was about to give up when I woke one morning thinking about The Talisman, and the great pavilion where Jack Sawyer first glimpses the Queen of the Territories. In the shower (where I invariably do my best imagining—I think it’s a womb thing), I started to visualize that tent in ruins . . . but still filled with whispering women. Ghosts. Maybe vampires. Little Sisters. Nurses of death instead of life. Composing a story from that central image was amazingly difficult. I had lots of space to move around in—Silverberg wanted short novels, not short stories—but it was still hard. These days, everything about Roland and his friends wants to be not just long but sort of epic . One thing this story has going for it is that you don’t need to have read the Dark Tower novels to enjoy it. And by the way, for you Tower junkies, DT 5 is now finished, all nine hundred pages of it. It’s called Wolves of the Calla.
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STEPHEN KING
[Author’s Note: The Dark Tower books begin with Roland of Gilead, the last gunslinger in an exhausted world that has “moved on,” pursuing a magician in a black robe. Roland has been chasing Walter for a very long time. In the first book of the cycle, he finally catches up.
This story, however, takes place while Roland is still casting about for Walter’s trail. S. K.]
I. FULL EARTH. THE EMPTY TOWN. THE BELLS.
THE DEAD BOY. THE OVERTURNED WAGON.
THE GREEN FOLK.
On a day in Full Earth so hot that it seemed to suck the breath from his chest before his body could use it, Roland of Gilead came to the gates of a village in the Desatoya Mountains. He was travelling alone by then, and would soon be travelling afoot, as well. This whole last week he had been hoping for a horse doctor, but guessed such a fellow would do him no good now, even if this town had one. His mount, a two-year-old roan, was pretty well done for.
The town gates, still decorated with flowers from some festival or other, stood open and welcoming, but the silence beyond them was all wrong. The gunslinger heard no clip-clop of horses, no rumble of wagon wheels, no merchants’ huckstering cries from the marketplace.
The only sounds were the low hum of crickets (some sort of bug, at any rate; they were a bit more tuneful than crickets, at that), a queer wooden knocking sound, and the faint, dreamy tinkle of small bells.
Also, the flowers twined through the wrought-iron staves of the ornamental gate were long dead.
Between his knees, Topsy gave two great, hollow sneezes— K’chow!
K’chow! —and staggered sideways. Roland dismounted, partly out of respect for the horse, partly out of respect for himself—he didn’t want to break a leg under Topsy if Topsy chose this moment to give up and canter into the clearing at the end of his path.
The gunslinger stood in his dusty boots and faded jeans under the 146
EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
beating sun, stroking the roan’s matted neck, pausing every now and then to yank his fingers through the tangles of Topsy’s mane, and stopping once to shoo off the tiny flies clustering at the corners of Topsy’s eyes. Let them lay their eggs and hatch their maggots there after Topsy was dead, but not before.
Roland thus honored his horse as best he could, listening to those distant, dreamy bells and the strange wooden tocking sound as he did.
After awhile he ceased his absent grooming and looked thoughtfully at the open gate.
The cross above its center was a bit unusual, but otherwise the gate was a typical example of its type, a western commonplace which was not useful but traditional—all the little towns he had come to in the last tenmonth seemed to have one such where you came in (grand) and one more such where you went out (not so grand). None had been built to exclude visitors, certainly not this one. It stood between two walls of pink adobe that ran into the scree for a distance of about twenty feet on either side of the road and then simply stopped.
Close the gate, lock it with many locks, and all that meant was a short walk around one bit of adobe wall or the other.
Beyond the gate, Roland could see what looked in most respects like a perfectly ordinary High Street—an inn, two saloons (one of which was called The Bustling Pig; the sign over the other was too faded to read), a mercantile, a smithy, a Gathering Hall. There was also a small but rather lovely wooden building with a modest bell tower on top, a sturdy fieldstone foundation on the bottom, and a gold-painted cross on its double doors. The cross, like the one over the gate, marked this as a worshipping place for those who held to the Jesus Man. This wasn’t a common religion in Mid-World, but far from unknown; that same thing could have been said about most forms of worship in those days, including the worship of Baal, Asmodeus, and a hundred others. Faith, like everything else in the world these days, had moved on. As far as Roland was concerned, God o’ the Cross was just another religion which taught that love and murder were inex-tricably bound together—that in the end, God always drank blood.
Meanwhile, there was the singing hum of insects that sounded 147
STEPHEN KING
almost like crickets. The dreamlike tinkle of the bells. And that queer wooden thumping, like a fist on a door. Or on a coffintop.
Something here’s a long way from right, the gunslinger thought.
’Ware, Roland; this place has a reddish odor.
He led Topsy through the gate with its adornments of dead flowers and down the High Street. On the porch of the mercantile, where the old men should have congregated to discuss crops, politics, and the follies of the younger generation, there stood only a line of empty rockers. Lying beneath one, as if dropped from a careless (and long-departed) hand, was a charred corncob pipe. The hitching rack in front of The Bustling Pig stood empty; the windows of the saloon itself were dark. One of the batwing doors had been yanked off and stood propped against the side of the building; the other hung ajar, its faded green slats spattered with maroon stuff that might have been paint but probably wasn’t.
The shopfront of the livery stable stood intact, like the face of a ruined woman who has access to good cosmetics, but the double barn behind it was a charred skeleton. That fire must have happened on a rainy day, the gunslinger thought, or the whole damned town would have gone up in flames; a jolly spin and raree-show for anyone around to see it.
To his right now, halfway up to where the street opened into the town square, was the church. There were grassy borders on both sides, one separating the church from the town’s Gathering Hall, the other from the little house set aside for the preacher and his family (if this was one of the Jesus-sects which allowed its shamans to have wives and families, that was; some of them, clearly administered by lunatics, demanded at least the appearance of celibacy). There were flowers in these grassy strips, and while they looked parched, most were still alive. So whatever had happened here to empty the place out had not happened long ago. A week, perhaps. Two at the outside, given the heat.