Stephen King – The Gunslinger

“They made something decadent out of it,” the gunslinger said. “A play. A game.” In his voice was all the unconscious distaste of the ascetic. His face, had there been stronger light to illumine it, would have shown change —harshness and sorrow. But his essential force had not been cut or diluted. The lack of imagination that still remained in that face was remarkable.

“But the Ball,” the gunslinger said. “The Ball. . .“

The boy did not speak.

“There were five crystal chandeliers, heavy glass with electric lights. It was all light, it was an island of light.

“We had sneaked into one of the old balconies, the ones that were supposed to be unsafe. But we were still boys. We were above everything, and we could look down on it I don’t remember that any of us said anything.

We only looked, and we looked for hours.

“There was a great stone table where the gunslingers and their women sat, watching the dancers. A few of the gunslingers danced, but only a few. And they were the young ones. The other ones only sat, and it seemed to me they were half embarrassed in all that light, that civilized light. They were revered ones, the feared ones, the guardians, but they seemed like hostlers in that crowd of cavaliers with their soft women. . . .

“There were four circular tables loaded with food, and they turned all the time. The cooks’ boys never stopped coming and going from seven until three the next morning. The tables rotated like clocks, and we could smell roast pork, beef, lobster, chickens, baked apples. There were ices and candies. There were great flaming skewers of meat.

“And Marten sat next to my mother and father — I knew them even from so high above — and once she and Marten danced, slowly and revolvingly, and the others cleared the floor for them and clapped when it was over. The gunslingers did not clap, but my father stood slowly and held his hands out to her. And she went, smiling.

“It was a moment of passage, boy. A time such as must be at the Tower itself, when things come together and hold and make power in time. My father had taken control, had been acknowledged and singled out. Marten was the acknowledger; my father was the mover. And his wife my mother, went to him, the connection between them. Betrayer.

“My father was the last lord of light.”

The gunslinger looked down at his hands. The boy still said nothing. His face was only thoughtful.

“I remember how they danced,” the gunslinger said softly. “My mother and Marten the enchanter. I remember how they danced, revolving slowly together and apart, in the old steps of courtship.”

He looked at the boy, smiling. “But it meant nothing, you know. Because power had been passed in some way that none of them knew but all understood, and my mother was locked root and rind to the holder and wielder of that power. Was it not so? She went to him when the dance was over, didn’t she? And clasped his hand?

Did they applaud? Did the hall ring with it as those pansy­boys and their soft ladies applauded and lauded him? Did it? Did it?”

Bitter water dripped distantly in the darkness. The boy said nothing.

“I remember how they danced,” the gunslinger said softly. “I remember how they danced. . . . “He looked up at the unseeable stone roof and it seemed for a moment that he might scream at it, rail at it, challenge it blindly — those dumb tonnages of insensible granite that bore their tiny lives in its stone intestine.

“What hand could have held the knife that did my father to his death?”

“I’m tired,” the boy said wistfully.

The gunslinger lapsed into silence, and the boy laid over and put one hand between his cheek and the stone.

The little flame in front of them guttered. The gunslinger rolled a smoke. It seemed he could see the crystal light still, in the sardonic hall of his memory; hear the shout of accolade, empty in a husked land that stood even then hopeless against a gray ocean of time. The island of light hurt him bitterly, and he wished he had never held witness to it, or to his father’s cuckoldry.

He passed smoke between his mouth and nostrils, looking down at the boy. How we make large circles in earth for ourselves, he thought. How long before the daylight again?

He slept.

After the sound of his breathing had become long and steady and regular, the boy opened his eyes and looked at the gunslinger with an expression that was very much like love. The last light of the fire caught in one pupil for a moment and was drowned there. He went to sleep.

The gunslinger had lost most of his time sense in the desert, which was changeless; he lost the rest of it here in these chambers under the mountains, which were lightless. Neither of them had any means of telling time, and the concept of hours became meaningless. In a sense, they stood outside of time. A day might have been a week, or a week a day. They walked, they slept, they ate thinly. Their only companion was the steady thundering rush of the water, drilling its auger path through the stone. They followed it, drank from its flat, mineral­salted depth. At times the gunslinger thought he saw fugitive drifting lights like corpse­lamps beneath its surface, but supposed they were only projections of his brain, which had not forgotten the light.

Still, he cautioned the boy not to put his feet in the water.

The range finder in his head took them on steadily.

The path beside the river (for it was a path; smooth, sunken to a slight concavity) led always upward, toward the river’s head. At regular intervals they came to curved stone pylons with sunken ringbolts; perhaps once oxen or stage­horses had tethered there. At each was a steel flagon holding an electric torch, but these were all barren of life and light.

During the third period of rest­before­sleep, the boy wandered away a little. The gunslinger could hear small conversation of rattled pebbles as he moved cautiously.

“

“Careful,” he said. “You can’t see where you are.

“I’m crawling. It’s . . . say!”

“What is it?” The gunslinger half crouched, touching the haft of one gun.

There was a slight pause. The gunslinger strained his eyes uselessly.

“I think it’s a railroad,” the boy said dubiously.

The gunslinger got up and walked slowly toward the sound of Jake’s voice, leading with one foot lightly to test for pitfalls.

“Here.” A hand reached out and cat’s­pawed the gunslinger’s face. The boy was very good in the dark, better than the gunslinger himself. His eyes seemed to dilate until there was no color left in them: the gunslinger saw this as he struck a meager light. There was no fuel in this rock womb, and what they had brought with them was going rapidly to ash. At times the urge to strike a light was well­nigh insatiable.

The boy was standing beside a curved rock wall that was lined with parallel metal staves off into the darkness. Each carried black bulbs that might once have been conductors of electricity. And beside and below, set only inches off the stone floor, were tracks of bright metal. What might have run on those tracks at one time? The gunslinger could only imagine black electric bullets, flying through this forever night with affrighted searchlight eyes going before. He had never heard of such things. But there were skeletons in the world, just as there were demons. He had once come upon a hermit who had gained a quasi­religious power over a miserable flock of kine­keepers by possession of an ancient gasoline pump. The hermit crouched beside it, one arm wrapped possessively around it, and preached wild, guttering, sullen sermons. He occasionally placed the still­bright steel nozzle, which was attached to a rotted rubber hose, between his legs.

On the pump, in perfectly legible (although rust­clotted) letters, was a legend of unknown meaning: AMOCO. Lead Free. Amoco had become the totem of a thundergod, and they had worshipped Him with the half­mad slaughter of sheep.

Hulks, the gunslinger thought. Only meaningless hulks in sands that once were seas.

And now a railroad.

“We’ll follow it,” he said.

The boy said nothing.

The gunslinger extinguished the light and they slept. When the gunslinger awoke the boy was up before him, sitting on one of the rails and watching him sightlessly in the dark.

They followed the rails like blindmen, the gunslinger leading, the boy following. They slipped their feet along one rail always, also like blindmen. The steady rush of the river off to the right was their companion. They did not speak, and this went on for three periods of waking. The gunslinger felt no urge to think coherently, or to plan. His sleep was dreamless.