Stephen King – The Dark Tower

toward each other. Hume guards patrolling the outer run of the fence, he presumed. They

joined together into a single speck long enough for Jake to imagine a bit of their palaver,

and then the speck divided again. “No pimples, but my hip hurts like a son of a bitch. Feels

like someone opened it in the night and poured it full of broken glass.Hot glass. But this is far worse.” He touched the right side of his head. “It feels cracked.”

“You really think it’s Stephen King’s injuries you’re feeling?”

Instead of making a verbal reply, Roland laid the forefinger of his left hand across a circle made by the thumb and pinky of his right: that gesture which meantI tell you the truth .

“That’s a bummer,” Jake said. “For him as well as you.”

“Maybe; maybe not. Because, think you, Jake; think you well. Only living things feel pain.

What I’m feeling suggests that King won’t be killed instantly. And that means he might be

easier to save.”

Jake thought it might only mean King was going to lie beside the road in semi-conscious

agony for awhile before expiring, but didn’t like to say so. Let Roland believe what he

liked. But there was something else. Something that concerned Jake a lot more, and made

him uneasy.

“Roland, may I speak to you dan-dinh?”

The gunslinger nodded. “If you would.” A slight pause. A flick at the left corner of the

mouth that wasn’t quite a smile. “Ifthee would.”

Jake gathered his courage. “Why are you so angry now? What are you angryat ? Or

whom?” Now it was his turn to pause. “Is it me?”

Roland’s eyebrows rose, then he barked a laugh. “Not you, Jake. Not a bit. Never in life.”

Jake flushed with pleasure.

“I keep forgetting how strong the touch has become in you. You’d have made a fine

Breaker, no doubt.”

This wasn’t an answer, but Jake didn’t bother saying so. And the idea of being a Breaker

made him repress a shiver.

“Don’t you know?” Roland asked. “If thee knows I’m what Eddie calls royally pissed,

don’t you know why?”

“I could look, but it wouldn’t be polite.” But it was a lot more than that. Jake vaguely

remembered a Bible story about Noah getting loaded on the ark, while he and his sons were waiting out the flood. One of the sons had come upon his old man lying drunk on his bunk,

and had laughed at him. God had cursed him for it. To peek into Roland’s thoughts

wouldn’t be the same as looking—and laughing—while he was drunk, but it was close.

“Thee’s a fine boy,” Roland said. “Fine and good, aye.” And although the gunslinger

spoke almost absently, Jake could have died happily enough at that moment. From

somewhere beyond and above them came that resonantCLICK! sound, and all at once the

special-effects sunbeam speared down on the Devar-Toi. A moment later, faintly, they

heard the sound of music: “Hey Jude,” arranged for elevator and supermarket. Time to rise

and shine down below. Another day of Breaking had just begun. Although, Jake supposed,

down there the Breaking never really stopped.

“Let’s have a game, you and I,” Roland proposed. “You try to get into my head and see

who I’m angry at. I’ll try to keep you out.”

Jake shifted position slightly. “That doesn’t sound like a fun game to me, Roland.”

“Nevertheless, I’d play against you.”

“All right, if you want to.”

Jake closed his eyes and called up an image of Roland’s tired, stubbled face. His brilliant

blue eyes. He made a door between and slightly above those eyes—a little one, with a brass

knob—and tried to open it. For a moment the knob turned. Then it stopped. Jake applied

more pressure. The knob began to turn again, then stopped once again. Jake opened his

eyes and saw that fine beads of sweat had broken on Roland’s brow.

“This is stupid. I’m making your headache worse,” he said.

“Never mind. Do your best.”

My worst,Jake thought. But if they had to play this game, he wouldn’t draw it out. He

closed his eyes again and once again saw the little door between Roland’s tangled brows.

This time he applied more force, piling it on quickly. It felt a little like arm-wrestling. After a moment the knob turned and the door opened. Roland grunted, then uttered a painful

laugh. “That’s enough for me,” he said. “By the gods, thee’s strong!”

Jake paid no attention to that. He opened his eyes. “The writer? King? Why are you mad

athim? ”

Roland sighed and cast away the smoldering butt of his cigarette; Jake had already

finished with his. “Because we have two jobs to do where we should have only one. Having

to do the second one is sai King’s fault. He knew what he was supposed to do, and I think

that on some level he knew that doing it would keep him safe. But he wasafraid . He

wastired .” Roland’s upper lip curled. “Now his irons are in the fire, and we have to pull

them out. It’s going to cost us, and probably a-dearly.”

“You’re angry at him because he’s afraid? But…” Jake frowned. “But why wouldn’t he be

afraid? He’s only a writer. A tale-spinner, not a gunslinger.”

“I know that,” Roland said, “but I don’t think it was fear that stopped him, Jake, or notjust fear. He’s lazy, as well. I felt it when I met him, and I’m sure that Eddie did, too. He looked at the job he was made to do and it daunted him and he said to himself, ‘All right, I’ll find aneasier job, one that’s more to my liking and more to my abilities. And if there’s trouble,

they’ll take care of me. They’llhave to take care of me.’ And so we do.”

“You didn’t like him.”

“No,” Roland agreed, “I didn’t. Not a bit. Nor trusted him. I’ve met tale-spinners before,

Jake, and they’re all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they’re

afraid of life.”

“Do you say so?” Jake thought it was a dismal idea. He also thought it had the ring of truth.

“I do. But…” He shrugged.It is what it is, that shrug said.

Ka-shume,Jake thought. If their ka-tet broke, and it was King’s fault…

If it was King’s fault, what? Take revenge on him? It was a gunslinger’s thought; it was

also a stupid thought, like the idea of taking revenge on God.

“But we’re stuck with it,” Jake finished.

“Aye. That wouldn’t stop me from kicking his yellow, lazy ass if I got the chance,

though.”

Jake burst out laughing at that, and the gunslinger smiled. Then Roland got to his feet with

a grimace, both hands planted on the ball of his right hip.“Bugger, ” he growled.

“Hurts bad, huh?”

“Never mind my aches and mollies. Come with me. I’ll show you something more

interesting.”

Roland, limping slightly, led Jake to where the path curled around the flank of the lumpy

little mountain, presumably bound for the top. Here the gunslinger tried to hunker,

grimaced, and settled to one knee, instead. He pointed to the ground with his right hand.

“What do you see?”

Jake also dropped to one knee. The ground was littered with pebbles and fallen chunks of

rock. Some of this talus had been disturbed, leaving marks in the scree. Beyond the spot

where they knelt side by side, two branches of what Jake thought was a mesquite bush had been broken off. He bent forward and smelled the thin and acrid aroma of the sap. Then he

examined the marks in the scree again. There were several of them, narrow and not too

deep. If they were tracks, they certainly weren’thuman tracks. Or those of a desert-dog,

either.

“Do you know what made these?” Jake asked. “If you do, just say it—don’t make me

arm-rassle you for it.”

Roland gave him a brief grin. “Follow them a little. See what you find.”

Jake rose and walked slowly along the marks, bent over at the waist like a boy with a

stomach-ache. The scratches in the talus went around a boulder. There was dust on the

stone, and scratches in the dust—as if something bristly had brushed against the boulder on

its way by.

There were also a couple of stiff black hairs.

Jake picked one of these up, then immediately opened his fingers and blew it off his skin,

shivering with revulsion as he did it. Roland watched this keenly.

“You look like a goose just walked over your grave.”

“It’s awful!” Jake heard a faint stutter in his voice. “Oh God, what was it? What was

w-watching us?”

“The one Mia called Mordred.” Roland’s voice hadn’t changed, but Jake found he could

hardly bring himself to look into the gunslinger’s eyes; they were that bleak. “The chap she

says I fathered.”