ahead.”
“On the outskirts of town we’ve left you a light aluminum sledge,” Fimalo said. “You can
throw it in the back of your little cart and then use it to carry the lady and your gunna, once you reach the snowlands.”
“You no doubt wonder why we do all this, since we disapprove of your journey,” said
Feemalo. “The fact is, we’re grateful for our survival—”
“We really did think we were done for,” Fumalo broke in. “ ‘The quarterback is toast,’
Eddie might have said.”
And this, too, hurt her…but not as much as looking at all that food. Not as much as
imagining how it would feel to slip one of those bulky sweaters over her head and let the
hem fall all the way to the middle of her thighs.
“My decision was to try and talk you out of going if I could,” said Fimalo—the only one
who spoke of himself in the first-person singular, Susannah had noticed. “And if I couldn’t,
I’d give you the supplies you’d need to go on with.”
“You can’t kill him!” Fumalo burst out. “Don’t you see that, you wooden-headed killing
machine, don’t yousee ? All you can do is get overeager and play into his dead hands! How can you be sostu —”
“Hush,” Fimalo said mildly, and Fumalo hushed at once. “He’s taken his decision.”
“What will you do?” Roland asked. “Once we’ve pushed on, that is?”
The three of them shrugged in perfect mirror unison, but it was Fimalo—the so-called
uffi’s superego—who answered. “Wait here,” he said. “See if the matrix of creation lives
or dies. In the meanwhile, try to refurbish Le Casse and bring it to some of its previous
glory. It was a beautiful place once. It can be beautiful again. And now I think our palaver’s done. Take your gifts with our thanks and good wishes.”
“Grudginggood wishes,” said Fumalo, and actually smiled. Coming from him, that smile
was both dazzling and unexpected.
Susannah almost started forward. Hungry as she was for fresh food (for freshmeat ), it was
the sweaters and the thermal underwear that she really craved. Although supplies were
getting thin (and would surely run out before they were past the place the uffi called
Empathica), there were still cans of beans and tuna and corned beef hash rolling around in
the back of Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi, and their bellies were currently full. It was the cold that was killing her. That was what it felt like, at least; cold working its way inward toward her heart, one painful inch at a time.
Two things stopped her. One was the realization that a single step forward was all it would
take to destroy what little remained of her will; she’d run to the center of the bridge and fall on her knees before that deep basket of clothes and go grubbing through it like a predatory
housewife at the annual Filene’s white-sale. Once she took that first step, nothing would
stop her. And losing her will wouldn’t be the worst of it; she would also lose the
self-respect Odetta Holmes had labored all her life to win, despite the barely suspected
saboteur lurking in her mind.
Yet even that wouldn’t have been enough to hold her back. What did was a memory of the
day they’d seen the crow with the green stuff in its beak, the crow that had been goingCroo,
croo! instead ofCaw, caw! Only devilgrass, true, but green stuff, all the same. Living stuff.
That was the day Roland had told her to hold her tongue, had told her—what was it?Before
victory comes temptation. She never would have suspected that her life’s greatest
temptation would be a cable-knit fisherman’s sweater, but—
She suddenly understood what the gunslinger must have known, if not from the first then
from soon after the three Stephen Kings appeared: this whole thing was a shuck. She didn’t
know what, exactly, was in those wicker baskets, but she doubted like hell that it was food
and clothes.
She settled within herself.
“Well?” Fimalo asked patiently. “Will you come and take the presents I’d give you? You must come, if you’d have them, for halfway across the bridge is as far as I can go myself.
Just beyond Feemalo and Fumalo is the King’s dead-line. You and she may pass both ways.
We may not.”
Roland said, “We thank you for your kindness, sai, but we’re going to refuse. We have
food, and clothing is waiting for us up ahead, still on the hoof. Besides, it’s really not that cold.”
“No,” Susannah agreed, smiling into the three identical—and identically
dumbfounded—faces. “It’s really not.”
“We’ll be pushing on,” Roland said, and made another bow over his cocked leg.
“Say thankya, say may ya do well,” Susannah put in, and once more spread her invisible
skirts.
She and Roland began to turn away. And that was when Feemalo and Fumalo, still down
on their knees, reached inside the open baskets before them.
Susannah needed no instruction from Roland, not so much as a shouted word. She drew
the revolver from her belt and shot down the one on her left—Fumalo—just as he swung a
long-barreled silver gun out of the basket. What looked like a scarf was hanging from it.
Roland drew from his holster, as blindingly fast as ever, and fired a single shot. Above
them the rooks took wing, cawing affrightedly, turning the blue sky momentarily black.
Feemalo, also holding one of the silver guns, collapsed slowly forward across his basket of
food with a dying expression of surprise on his face and a bullet-hole dead center in his
forehead.
Five
Fimalo stood where he was, on the far side of the bridge. His hands were still clasped in
front of him, but he no longer looked like Stephen King. He now wore the long,
yellow-complexioned face of an old man who is dying slowly and not well. What hair he
had was a dirty gray rather than luxuriant black. His skull was a peeling garden of eczema.
His cheeks, chin, and forehead were lumped with pimples and open sores, some
pustulating and some bleeding.
“What are you, really?” Roland asked him.
“A hume, just as you are,” said Fimalo, resignedly. “Rando Thoughtful was my name
during my years as the Crimson King’s Minister of State. Once upon a time, however, I
was plain old Austin Cornwell, from upstate New York. Not the Keystone World, I regret
to say, but another. I ran the Niagara Mall at one time, and before that I had a successful
career in advertising. You might be interested to know I worked on accounts for both
Nozz-A-La and the Takuro Spirit.”
Susannah ignored this bizarre and unexpected résumé. “So hedidn’t have his top boy beheaded, after all,” she said. “What about the three Stephen Kings?”
“Just a glammer,” said the old man. “Are you going to kill me? Go ahead. All I ask is that
you make quick work of it. I’m not well, as you must see.”
“Was any of what you told us true?” Susannah asked.
His old eyes looked at her with watery amazement.“All of it was,” he said, and advanced
onto the bridge, where two other old men—his assistants, once upon a time, she had no
doubt—lay sprawled. “All of it, anyway, save for one lie…and this.” He kicked the baskets
over so that the contents spilled out.
Susannah gave an involuntary shout of horror. Oy was up in a flash, standing protectively
in front of her with his short legs spread and his head lowered.
“It’s all right,” she said, but her voice was still trembling. “I was just…startled.”
The wicker basket which had seemed to contain all sorts of freshly cooked roasts was
actually filled with decaying human limbs—long pork, after all, and in bad shape even
considering what it was. The flesh was mostly blue-black and a-teem with maggots.
And there were no clothes in the other basket. What Fimalo had spilled out of it was
actually a shiny knot of dying snakes. Their beady eyes were dull; their forked tongues
flickered listlessly in and out; several had already ceased to move.
“You would have refreshed them wonderfully, if you’d pressed them against your skin,”
Fimalo said regretfully.
“You didn’t really expect that to happen, did you?” Roland asked.
“No,” the old man admitted. He sat on the bridge with a weary sigh. One of the snakes
attempted to crawl into his lap and he pushed it away with a gesture that was both absent
and impatient. “But I had my orders, so I did.”
Susannah was looking at the corpses of the other two with horrified fascination. Feemalo
and Fumalo, now just a couple of dead old men, were rotting with unnatural rapidity, their
parchment skins deflating toward the bone and oozing slack rivulets of pus. As she
watched, the sockets of Feemalo’s skull surfaced like twin periscopes, giving the corpse a