“It’s a sad duty to stop such a pretty elopement, but stop it I must.”
Sister Mary came from the shadows. Her fine white habit with its bright red rose had reverted to what it really was: the shroud of a corpse. Caught, hooded in its grimy folds, was a wrinkled, sagging face from which two black eyes stared. They looked like rotted dates. Below them, exposed by the thing’s smile, four great incisors gleamed.
Upon the stretched skin of Sister Mary’s forehead, bells tinkled
. . . but not the Dark Bells, Roland thought. There was that.
“Stand clear,” Jenna said. “Or I’ll bring the can tam on ye.”
“No,” Sister Mary said, stepping closer, “ye won’t. They’ll not stray so far from the others. Shake your head and ring those damned bells until the clappers fall out, and still they’ll never come.”
Jenna did as bid, shaking her head furiously from side to side. The Dark Bells rang piercingly, but without that extra, almost psychic tone-quality that had gone through Roland’s head like a spike. And the doctor-bugs—what Jenna had called the can tam—did not come.
Smiling ever more broadly (Roland had an idea Mary herself hadn’t been completely sure they wouldn’t come until the experiment was made), the corpse-woman closed in on them, seeming to float above 202
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the ground. Her eyes flicked toward him. “And put that away,” she said.
Roland looked down and saw that one of his guns was in his hand. He had no memory of drawing it.
“Unless ’tis been blessed or dipped in some sect’s holy wet—
blood, water, semen—it can’t harm such as me, gunslinger. For I am more shade than substance . . . yet still the equal to such as yerself, for all that.”
She thought he would try shooting her, anyway; he saw it in her eyes. Those shooters are all ye have, her eyes said. Without em, you might as well be back in the tent we dreamed around ye, caught up in our slings and awaiting our pleasure.
Instead of shooting, he dropped the revolver back into its holster and launched himself at her with his hands out. Sister Mary uttered a scream that was mostly surprise, but it was not a long one; Roland’s fingers clamped down on her throat and choked the sound off before it was fairly started.
The touch of her flesh was obscene—it seemed not just alive but various beneath his hands, as if it was trying to crawl away from him.
He could feel it running like liquid, flowing, and the sensation was horrible beyond description. Yet he clamped down harder, determined to choke the life out of her.
Then there came a blue flash (not in the air, he would think later; that flash happened inside his head, a single stroke of lightning as she touched off some brief but powerful brainstorm), and his hands flew away from her neck. For one moment his dazzled eyes saw great wet gouges in her gray flesh—gouges in the shapes of his hands. Then he was flung backward, hitting the scree on his back and sliding, hitting his head on a jutting rock hard enough to provoke a second, lesser, flash of light.
“Nay, my pretty man,” she said, grimacing at him, laughing with those terrible dull eyes of hers. “Ye don’t choke such as me, and I’ll take ye slow for’ee impertinence—cut ye shallow in a hundred places to refresh my thirst! First, though, I’ll have this vowless girl . . . and I’ll have those damned bells off her, in the bargain.”
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“Come and see if you can!” Jenna cried in a trembling voice, and shook her head from side to side. The Dark Bells rang mockingly, pro-vokingly.
Mary’s grimace of a smile fell away. “Oh, I can,” she breathed. Her mouth yawned. In the moonlight, her fangs gleamed in her gums like bone needles poked through a red pillow. “I can and I—”
There was a growl from above them. It rose, then splintered into a volley of snarling barks. Mary turned to her left, and in the moment before the snarling thing left the rock on which it was standing, Roland could clearly read the startled bewilderment on Big Sister’s face.
It launched itself at her, only a dark shape against the stars, legs outstretched so it looked like some sort of weird bat, but even before it crashed into the woman, striking her in the chest above her half-raised arms and fastening its own teeth on her throat, Roland knew exactly what it was.
As the shape bore her over onto her back, Sister Mary uttered a gibbering shriek that went through Roland’s head like the Dark Bells themselves. He scrambled to his feet, gasping. The shadowy thing tore at her, forepaws on either side of her head, rear paws planted on the grave-shroud above her chest, where the rose had been.
Roland grabbed Jenna, who was looking down at the fallen Sister with a kind of frozen fascination.
“Come on!” he shouted. “Before it decides it wants a bite of you, too!”
The dog took no notice of them as Roland pulled Jenna past. It had torn Sister Mary’s head mostly off.
Her flesh seemed to be changing, somehow—decomposing, very likely—but whatever was happening, Roland did not want to see it.
He didn’t want Jenna to see it, either.
They half-walked, half-ran to the top of the ridge, and when they got there paused for breath in the moonlight, heads down, hands linked, both of them gasping harshly.
The growling and snarling below them had faded, but was still faintly audible when Sister Jenna raised her head and asked him, 204
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“What was it? You know—I saw it in your face. And how could it attack her? We all have power over animals, but she has—had—the most.”
“Not over that one.” Roland found himself recalling the unfortunate boy in the next bed. Norman hadn’t known why the medallions kept the Sisters at arm’s length—whether it was the gold or the God.
Now Roland knew the answer. “It was a dog. Just a town-dog. I saw it in the square, before the green folk knocked me out and took me to the Sisters. I suppose the other animals that could run away did run away, but not that one. It had nothing to fear from the Little Sisters of Eluria, and somehow it knew it didn’t. It bears the sign of the Jesus Man on its chest. Black fur on white. Just an accident of its birth, I imagine. In any case, it’s done for her now. I knew it was lurking around. I heard it barking two or three times.”
“Why?” Jenna whispered. “Why would it come? Why would it stay? And why would it take on her as it did?”
Roland of Gilead responded as he ever had and ever would when such useless, mystifying questions were raised: “Ka. Come on. Let’s get as far as we can from this place before we hide up for the day.”
As far as they could turned out to be eight miles at most . . . and probably, Roland thought as the two of them sank down in a patch of sweet-smelling sage beneath an overhang of rock, a good deal less.
Five, perhaps. It was him slowing them down; or rather, it was the residue of the poison in the soup. When it was clear to him that he could not go farther without help, he asked her for one of the reeds.
She refused, saying that the stuff in it might combine with the unaccustomed exercise to burst his heart.
“Besides,” she said as they lay back against the embankment of the little nook they had found, “they’ll not follow. Those that are left—
Michela, Louise, Tamra—will be packing up to move on. They know to leave when the time comes; that’s why the Sisters have survived as long as they have. As we have. We’re strong in some ways, but weak in many more. Sister Mary forgot that. It was her arrogance that did for her as much as the cross-dog, I think.”
She had cached not just his boots and clothes beyond the top of the 205
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ridge, but the smaller of his two purses, as well. When she began to apologize for not bringing his bedroll and the larger purse (she’d tried, she said, but they were simply too heavy), Roland hushed her with a finger to her lips. He thought it a miracle to have as much as he did.
And besides (this he did not say, but perhaps she knew it, anyway), the guns were the only things that really mattered. The guns of his father, and his father before him, all the way back to the days of Arthur Eld, when dreams and dragons had still walked the earth.
“Will you be all right?” he asked her as they settled down. The moon had set, but dawn was still at least three hours away. They were surrounded by the sweet smell of the sage. A purple smell, he thought it then . . . and ever after. Already he could feel it forming a kind of magic carpet under him, which would soon float him away to sleep. He thought he had never been so tired.