“Tell me what you can remember,” he told Jake.
“It’s only a little. It doesn’t seem to make any sense any more.”
“Tell me. Maybe I can pick up the sense.
“There was a place… the one before this one. A high
place with lots of rooms and a patio where you could look at tall buildings and water. There was a statue that stood in the water.”
“A statue in the water?”
“Yes. A lady with a crown and a torch.”
“Are you making this up?”
“I guess I must be,” the boy said hopelessly. “There were things to ride in on the streets. Big ones and little ones. Yellow ones. A lot of yellow ones. I walked to school. There were cement paths beside the streets.
Windows to look in and more statues wearing clothes. The statues sold the clothes. I know it sounds crazy, but the statues sold the clothes.”
The gunslinger shook his head and looked for a lie on the boy’s face. He saw none.
“I walked to school,” the boy repeated fixedly. “And I had a — “His eyes tilted closed and his lips moved gropingly.” — a brown… book… bag. I carried a lunch. And I wore — “the groping again, agonized groping”
— a tie.”
“A what?”
“I don’t know.” The boy’s fingers made a slow, unconscious clinching motion at his throat — a gesture the gunslinger associated with hanging. “I don’t know. It’s just all gone.” And he looked away.
“May I put you to sleep?” The gunslinger asked. “I’m not sleepy.”
“I can make you sleepy, and I can make you remember.”
Doubtfully, Jake asked, “How could you do that?”
“With this.”
The gunslinger removed one of the shells from his gunbelt and twirled it in his fingers. The movement was dexterous, as flowing as oil. The shell cartwheeled effortlessly from thumb and index and index and second, to second and ring, to ring and pinky. It popped out of sight and reappeared; seemed to float briefly, and then reversed. The shell walked across the gunslinger’s fingers. The fingers themselves moved like a beaded curtain in a breeze. The boy watched, his initial doubt replaced with plain delight, then by raptness, then by a dawning mute blankness. The eyes slipped shut The shell danced back and forth. Jake’s eyes opened again, caught the steady, limpid dance between the gunslinger’s fingers for a while longer, and then his eyes closed once more. The gunslinger continued, but Jake’s eyes did not open again. The boy breathed with steady, bovine calmness. Was this part of it? Yes. There was a certain beauty, a logic, like the lacy frettings that fringe hard blue icepacks. He seemed to hear the sound of windchimes. Not for the first time the gunslinger tasted the smooth, loden taste of soulsickness. The shell in his fingers, manipulated with such unknown grace, was suddenly undead, horrific, the spoor of a monster. He dropped it into his palm and closed it into a fist with painful force. There were such things as rape in the world. Rape and murder and unspeakable practices, and all of them were for the good, the bloody good, for the myth, for the grail, for the Tower. Ah,
the Tower stood somewhere, rearing its black bulk to the sky, and in his desertscoured ears, the gunslinger heard the faint sweet sound of windchimes.
“Where are you?” he asked.
Jake Chambers is going downstairs with his book bag There is Earth Science, there is Economic Geography, there is a notepad, a pencil, a lunch his mother’s cook, Mrs. Greta Shaw, has made for him in the chromeandformica kitchen where a fan whirrs eternally, sucking up alien odors. In his lunch sack he has a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a bologna, lettuce, and onion sandwich, and four Oreo cookies. His parents do not hate him, but they seem to have overlooked him. They have abdicated and left him to Mrs. Greta Shaw, to nannies, to a tutor in the summer and The School (which is Private and Nice, and most of all, White) the rest of the time. None of these people have ever pretended to be more than what they are — professional people, the best in their fields. None have folded him to a particularly warm bosom as usually happens in the historical novels his mother reads and which fake has dipped into, looking for the “hot parts. “Hysterical novels, his fat her sometimes calls them, and sometimes, “bodicerippers.” You should talk, his mother says with infinite scorn from behind some closed door where Jake listens. His father works for The Network, and Jake could pick him out of a lineup. Probably.
Jake does not know that he hates all the professional people, but he does. People have always bewildered him.
He likes stairs and will not use the selfservice elevator in his building His mother, who is scrawny in a sexy way, often goes to bed with sick friends.
Now he is on the street, Jake Chambers is on the street, he has “Hit the bricks.” He is clean and wellmannered, comely, sensitive. He has no friends; only acquaintances. He has never bothered to think about this, but it hurts him. He does not know or understand that a long association with professional people has caused him to take many of their traits. Mrs. Greta Shaw makes hands folded in his lap, still breathing calmly. He had told his tale without much emotion, although his voice had trembled near the end, when he had come to the part about the “priest” and the “Act of Contrition.” He had not, of course, told the gunslinger about his family and his own sense of bewildered dichotomy, but that had seeped through anyway — enough had seeped through to make out its shape. The fact that there had never been such a city as the boy described (or, if so, it had only existed in the myth of prehistory) was not the most upsetting part of the story, but it was disturbing. It was all disturbing. The gunslinger was afraid of the implications.
“Jake?”
“Uhhuh?”
“Do you want to remember this when you wake up, or forget it?”
“Forget it,” the boy said promptly. “I bled.”
“All right You’re going to sleep, understand? Go ahead and lie over.”
Jake laid over, looking small and peaceful and harmless. The gunslinger did not believe he was harmless.
There was a deadly feeling about him, and the stink of predestination. He didn’t like the feeling, but he liked the boy. He liked him a great deal.
“Jake?”
“Shhh. I want to sleep.”
“Yes. And when you wake up you won’t remember any of this.”
“Kay.”
The gunslinger watched him for a brief time, thinking of own boyhood, which usually seemed to have happened to another person — to a person who had jumped through some osmotic lens and become someone else —but which now seemed poignantly close. It was very hot in the stable of the way station, and he carefully drank some
more water. He got up and walked to the back of the building, pausing to look into one of the horse stalls.
There was a small pile of white hay in the corner, and a neatly folded blanket, but there was no smell of horse. There was no smell of anything in the stable. The sun had bled away every smell and left nothing. The air was perfectly neutral.
At the back of the stable was a small, dark room with a stainless steel machine in the center. It was untouched by rust or rot. It looked like a butter churn. At the left, a chrome pipe jutted from it, terminating over a drain in the floor. The gunslinger had seen pumps like it in other dry places, but never one so big. He could not contemplate how deep they must have drilled before they struck water, secret and forever black under the desert
Why hadn’t they removed the pump when the way station had been abandoned?
Demons, perhaps.
He shuddered abruptly, an abrupt twisting of his back. Heatflesh poked out on his skin, then receded. He went to the control switch and pushed the ON button. The machine began to hum. After perhaps half a minute, a stream of cool, clear water belched from the pipe and went down the drain to be recirculated.
Perhaps three gallons flowed out of the pipe before the pump shut itself down with a final click. It was a thing as alien to this place and time as true love, and yet as concrete as a Judgment, a silent reminder of the time when the world had not yet moved on. It probably ran on an atomic slug, as there was no electricity within a thousand miles of here and even dry batteries would have lost their charge long ago. The gunslinger didn’t like it
He went back and sat down beside the boy, who had put one hand under his cheek. Nicelooking boy. The gunslinger drank some more water and crossed his legs so he was sitting Indian fashion. The boy, like the squatter on the edge of the desert who kept the bird (Zoltan, the gunslinger