He turned the second card. “The Sailor. Note the clear brow, the hairless cheeks, the wounded eyes. He drowns, gunslinger, and no one throws out the line. The boy Jake.”
The gunslinger winced, said nothing.
The third card was turned. A baboon stood grinningly
astride a young man’s shoulder. The young man’s face was turned up, a grimace of stylized dread and horror on his features. Looking more closely, the gunslinger saw the baboon held a whip.
“The Prisoner,” the man in black said. The fire cast uneasy, flickering shadows over the face of the ridden man, making it seem to move and writhe in wordless terror. The gunslinger flicked his eyes away.
“A trifle upsetting, isn’t he?” The man in black said, and seemed on the verge of sniggering.
He turned the fourth card. A woman with a shawl over her head sat spinning at a wheel. To the gunslinger’s dazed eyes, she appeared to be smiling craftily and sobbing at the same time.
“The Lady of Shadows,” the man in black remarked. “Does she look twofaced to you, gunslinger? She is. A veritable Janus.”
“Why are you showing me these?”
“Don’t ask!” The man in black said sharply, yet he smiled. “Don’t ask. Merely watch. Consider this only pointless ritual if it eases you and cools you to do so. Like church.”
He tittered and turned the fifth card.
A grinning reaper clutched a scythe with bony fingers.
“
“Death,” the man in black said simply. “Yet not for you.
The sixth card.
The gunslinger looked at it and felt a strange, crawling anticipation in his guts. The feeling was mixed with horror and joy, and the whole of the emotion was unnamable. It made him feel like throwing up and dancing at the same time.
“The Tower,” the man in black said softly.
The gunslinger’s card occupied the center of the pattern; each of the following four stood at one corner, like satellites circling a star.
“Where does that one go?” The gunslinger asked.
The man in black placed the Tower over the Hanged Man, covering it completely.
“What does that mean?” The gunslinger asked. The man in black did not answer.
“What does that mean?” He asked raggedly. The man in black did not answer.
“God damn you!” No answer.
“Then what’s the seventh card?”
The man in black turned the seventh. A sun rose in a luminously blue sky. Cupids and sprites sported around it
“The seventh is Life,” the man in black said softly. “But not for you. “
“Where does it fit the pattern?”
“That is not for you to know,” the man in black said. “Or for me to know.” He flipped the card carelessly into the dying fire. It charred, curled and flashed to flame. The gunslinger felt his heart quail and turn icy in his chest.
“Sleep now,” the man in black said carelessly. “Perchance to dream and that sort of thing.”
“I’m going to choke you dead,” the gunslinger said. His legs coiled with savage, splendid suddenness, and he flew across the fire at the other. The man in black, smiling, swelled in his vision and then retreated down a long and echoing corridor filled with obsidian pylons. The world filled with the sound of sardonic laughter, he was falling, dying, sleeping.
He dreamed.
The universe was void. Nothing moved. Nothing was.
The gunslinger drifted, bemused.
“Let us have light,” the voice of the man in black said nonchalantly, and there was light. The gunslinger thought in a detached way that the light was good.
“Now darkness overhead with stars in it. Water down
below.” It happened. He drifted over endless seas. Above, the stars twinkled endlessly.
“Land,” the man in black invited. There was; it heaved itself out of the water in endless, galvanic convulsions.
It was red, arid, cracked and glazed with sterility. Volcanoes blurted endless magma like giant pimples on some ugly adolescent’s baseball head.
“Okay,” the man in black was saying. “That’s a start. Let’s have some plants. Trees. Grass and fields.”
There was. Dinosaurs rambled here and there, growling and woofing and eating each other and getting stuck in bubbling, odiferous tarpits. Huge tropical rainforests sprawled everywhere. Giant ferns waved at the sky with serated leaves, beetles with two heads crawled on some of them. All this the gunslinger saw. And yet he felt big.
“Now man,” the man in black said softly, but the gunslinger was falling.., falling up. The horizon of this vast and fecund earth began to curve. Yes, they had all said it had curved, his teachers, they had claimed it had been proved long before the world had moved on. But this —Further and further. Continents took shape before his
amazed eyes, and were obscured with clocksprings of clouds. The world’s atmosphere held it in a placental sac. And the sun, rising beyond the earth’s shoulder —He cried out and threw an arm before his eyes.
“Let there be light!” The voice that cried was no longer that of the man in black. It was gigantic, echoing. It filled space, and the spaces between spaces.
“Light!”
Falling, falling.
The sun shrank. A red planet crossed with canals whirled past him, two moons circling it furiously. A whirling belt of stones. A gigantic planet that seethed with gasses, too huge to support itself, oblate in consequence. A ringed world that glittered with its engirdlement of icy spicules.
“Light! Let there be —Other worlds, one, two three. Far beyond the last, one lonely ball of ice and rock twirling in dead darkness about a sun that glittered no brighter than a tarnished penny.
Darkness.
“No,” the gunslinger said, and his words were flat and echoless in the darkness. It was darker than dark.
Beside it the darkest night of a man’s soul was noonday. The darkness under the mountains was a mere smudge on the face of Light. “No more, please, no more now. No more —“LIGHT!”
“No more. No more, please —The stars themselves began to shrink. Whole nebulae drew together and became mindless smudges. The whole universe seemed to be drawing around him.
“Jesus no more no more no more —The voice of the man in black whispered silkily in his ear: “Then renege. Cast away all thoughts of the Tower. Go your way, gunslinger, and save your soul.”
He gathered himself. Shaken and alone, enwrapt in the darkness, terrified of an ultimate meaning rushing at him, he gathered himself and uttered the final, flashing imperative:
“NO! NEVER!”
“THEN LET THERE BE LIGHT!”
And there was light, crashing in on him like a hammer, a great and primordial light. In it, consciousness perished — but before it did, the gunslinger saw something of cosmic importance. He clutched it with agonized effort and sought himself.
He fled the insanity the knowledge implied, and so came back to himself.
It was still night — whether the same or another, he had no way of knowing. He pushed himself up from where
his demon spring at the man in black had carried him and looked at the ironwood where the man in black had been sitting. He was gone.
A great sense of despair flooded him — God, all that to do over again — and then the man in black said from behind him: “Over here, gunslinger. I don’t like you so close. You talk in your sleep.” He tittered.
The gunslinger got groggily to his knees and turned around. The fire had burned down to red embers and gray ashes, leaving the familiar decayed pattern of exhausted fuel. The man in black was seated next to it, smacking his lips over the greasy remains of the rabbit.
“You did fairly well,” the man in black said. “I never could have sent that vision to Marten. He would have come back drooling.”
“What was it?” The gunslinger asked. His words were blurred and shaky. He felt that if he tried to rise, his legs would buckle.
“The universe,” the man in black said carelessly. He burped and threw the bones into the fire where they glistened with unhealthy whiteness. The wind above the cup of the Golgotha whistled with keen unhappiness.
“Universe,” the gunslinger said blankly.
“You want the Tower,” the man in black said. It seemed to be a question.
“Yes.”
“But you shan’t have it,” the man in black said, and smiled with bright cruelty. “I have an idea of how close to the edge that last pushed you. The Tower will kill you half a world away.”
“You know nothing of me,” the gunslinger said quietly, and the smile faded from the other’s lips.
“I made your father and I broke him,” the man in black said grimly. “I came to your mother through Marten and took her. It was written, and it was. I am the furthest minion of the Dark Tower. Earth has been given into my hand.”
“What did I see?” The gunslinger asked. “At the end? What was it?”