“Nnnnnnnnnn —He glared around at the mystic darkness of the willow grove, both guns out and ready. His eyes were red loopholes in the last glow from the fire.
“Nnnnnnnnn —Jake.
The gunslinger was up and on the run. A bitter circle of moon had risen and he could follow the boy’s track in the dew. He ducked under the first of the willows, splashed through the spring, and legged up the far bank, skidding in the dampness (even now his body could relish it).
Willow withes slapped at his face. The trees were thicker here, and the moon was blotted out Tree trunks rose in lurching shadows. The grass, now kneehigh, slapped against him. Half rotted dead branches reached for his shins, his cojones. He paused for a moment, lifting his head and scenting at the air. A ghost of a breeze helped him. The boy did not smell good, of course; neither of them did. The gunslinger’s nostrils flared like those of an ape. The odor of sweat was faint, oily, unmistakable. He crashed over a deadfall of grass and bramble and downed branches, sprinted down a tunnel of overhanging willow and sumac. Moss struck his shoulders. Some clung in sighing gray tendrils.
He clawed through a last barricade of willows and came to a clearing that looked up at the stars and the highest peak of the range, gleaming skullwhite at an impossible altitude.
There was a ring of tall, black stones which looked like some sort of surreal animaltrap in the moonlight In the center was a table of stone… an altar. Very old, rising out of the ground on a powerful arm of basalt The boy stood before it, trembling back and forth. His hands shook at his sides as if infused with static electricity. The gunslinger called his name sharply, and Jake responded with that inarticulate sound of negation. The faint smear of face, almost hidden by the boy’s left shoulder, looked both terrified and exalted.
And there was something else.
The gunslinger stepped inside the ring and Jake screamed, recoiling and throwing up his arms. Now his face could be seen clearly, and indexed. The gunslinger saw fear and terror warring with an almost excruciating grimace of pleasure.
The gunslinger felt it touch him — the spirit of the
oracle, the succubus. His loins were suddenly filled with rose light, a light that was soft yet hard. He felt his head twisting, his tongue thickening and becoming excruciatingly sensitive to even the spittle that coated it He did not think when he pulled the halfrotted jawbone from the pocket where he had carried it since he found it in the lair of the Speaking Demon at the way station. He did not think, but it did not frighten him to operate on pure instinct He held the jawbone’s frozen, prehistoric grin up in front of him, holding his other arm out stiffly, first and last fingers poked out in the ancient forked talisman, the ward against the evil eye.
The current of sensuality was whipped away from him like a drape.
Jake screamed again.
The gunslinger walked to him, and held the jawbone in front of Jake’s warring eyes. A wet sound of agony.
The boy tried to pull his gaze away, could not And suddenly both eyes rolled up to show the whites. Jake collapsed. His body struck the earth limply, one hand almost touching the altar. The gunslinger dropped to one knee and picked him up. He was amazingly light, as dehydrated as a November leaf from their long walk through the desert
Around him Roland could feel the presence that dwelt in the circle of stones, whirring with a jealous anger —
its prize had been taken from it When the gunslinger passed out of the circle, the sense of frustrated jealousy faded. He carried Jake back to their camp. By the time they got there, the boy’s twitching unconsciousness had become deep sleep. The gunslinger paused for a moment above the gray ruin of the fire. The moonlight on Jake’s face reminded him again of a church saint, alabaster purity all unknown. He suddenly hugged the boy, knowing that he loved him. And it seemed that he could almost feel the laughter from the man in black, someplace far above them.
Jake was calling him; that was how he awoke. He had tied the boy firmly to one of the tough bushes that grew nearby, and the boy was hungry and upset By the sun, it was almost ninethirty.
“Why’d you tie me up?” Jake asked indignantly as the gunslinger loosened the thick knots in the blanket “I wasn’t going to run away!”
“You did run away,” the gunslinger said, and the expression on Jake’s face made him smile. “I had to go out and get you. You were sleepwalking.”
“I was?” Jake looked at him suspiciously.
The gunslinger nodded and suddenly produced the jawbone. He held it in front of Jake’s face and Jake flinched away from it, raising his arm.
“See?”
Jake nodded, bewildered.
“I have to go off for a while now. I may be gone the whole day. So listen to me, boy. It’s important If sunset comes and I’m not back — “
Fear flashed on Jake’s face. “You’re leaving me!”
The gunslinger only looked at him.
“No,” Jake said after a moment “I guess you’re not.”
“I want you to stay right here while I’m gone. And if you feel strange — funny in any way — you pick up this bone and hold it in your hands.”
Hate and disgust crossed Jake’s face, mixed with bewilderment. “I couldn’t. I . . . I just couldn’t”
“You can. You may have to. Especially after midday. It’s important. Dig?”
“Why do you have to go away?” Jake burst out.
“I just do.”
The gunslinger caught another fascinating glimpse of the steel that lay under the boy’s surface, as enigmatic as the story he had told about coming from a city where the buildings were so tall they actually scraped the sky.
“All right,” Jake said.
The gunslinger laid the jawbone carefully on the ground next to the ruins of the fire, where it grinned up through the grass like some eroded fossil that has seen the light of day after a night of five thousand years.
Jake would not look at it His face was pale and miserable. The gunslinger wondered if it would profit them for him to put the boy to sleep and question him, but he decided there would be little gain. He knew well enough that the spirit of the stone circle was surely a demon, and very likely an oracle as well. A demon with
no shape, only a kind of unformed sexual glare with the eye of prophecy. He wondered sardonically if it might not be the soul of Sylvia Pittston, the giant woman whose religious huckstering had led to the final showdown in Tull… but knew it was not. The stones in the circle had been ancient, this particular demon’s territory staked out long before the earliest shade of prehistory. But the gunslinger knew the forms of speaking quite well and did not think the boy would have to use the jawbone mojo. The voice and mind of the oracle would be more than occupied with him. And the gunslinger needed to know things, in spite of the risk… and the risk was high. For both Jake and himself, he needed desperately to know.
The gunslinger opened his tobacco poke and pawed through it, pushing the dry strands of leaf aside until he came to a minuscule object wrapped in a fragment of white paper. He hefted it in his hand, looking absently up at the sky. Then he unwrapped it and held the contents — a tiny white pill with edges that had been much worn with traveling — in his hand.
Jake looked at it curiously. “What’s that?”
The gunslinger uttered a short laugh. “The philosopher’s stone,” he said. “The story that Cort used to tell us was that the Old Gods pissed over the desert and made mescaline.”
Jake only looked puzzled.
“A drug,” the gunslinger said. “But not one that puts you to sleep. One that wakes you up all the way for a little while.”
“Like LSD,” the boy agreed instantly and then looked puzzled.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” Jake said. “It just popped out I think it came from… you know, before.”
The gunslinger nodded, but he was doubtful. He had never heard of mescaline referred to as LSD, not even in Marten’s old books.
“Will it hurt you?” Jake asked.
“It never has,” the gunslinger said, conscious of the evasion.
“I don’t like it”
“Never mind.”
The gunslinger squatted in front of the waterskin, took a mouthful, and swallowed the pill. As always, he felt an immediate reaction in his mouth; it seemed overloaded with saliva. He sat down before the dead fire.