“That I remembered from the old tales as Hax told them,” he said. “If it had been up to my nursemaid, Eddie, you’d be in the belly of the bear now. Do they sometimes tell puzzled
children in your world to put on their thinking caps?”
“Yes,’ Susannah said. “They sure do.”
“It’s said here, as well, and the saying comes from the story of the Guardians. Each
supposedly carried an extra brain on the outside of its head. In a hat.” He looked at them
with his dreadfully haunted eyes and smiled again. “It didn t look much like a hat, did it?”
“No,” Eddie said, “but the story was close enough to save our bacon.”
“I think now that I’ve been looking for one of the Guardians ever since I began my quest,”
Roland said. “When we find the portal this Shardik guarded—and that should only be a
matter of following its back-trail—we will finally have a course to follow. We must set the
portal to our backs and then simply move straight ahead. At the center of the circle . . . the
Tower.”
Eddie opened his mouth to say. All right, let’s talk about this Tower. Finally, once and for
all, let’s talk about it—what it is, what it means, and, most important of all, what happens to
us when we get there. But no sound came out, and after a moment he closed his mouth
again. This wasn’t the time—not now, with Roland in such obvious pain. Not now, with
only the spark of their campfire to keep the night at bay.
“So now we come to the other part,” Roland said heavily. “I have finally found my course—after all the long years I have found my course—but at the same time I seem to be
losing my sanity. I can feel it crumbling away beneath my feet, like a steep embankment
which has been loosened by rain. This is my punishment for letting a boy who never
existed fall to his death. And that is also ka.”
“Who is this boy, Roland?” Susannah asked.
Roland glanced at Eddie. “Do you know?”
Eddie shook his head.
“But I spoke of him,” Roland said. “In fact, I raved of him, when the infection was at its worst and I was near dying.” The gunslinger’s voice suddenly rose half an octave, and his
imitation of Eddie’s voice was so good that Susannah felt a coil of superstitious fright. ” ‘If you don’t shut up about that goddam kid, Roland, I’ll gag you with your own shirt! I’m sick
of hearing about him!’ Do you remember saying that, Eddie?”
Eddie thought it over carefully. Roland had spoken of a thousand things as the two of them
made their tortuous way up the beach from the door marked THE PRISONER to the one
marked THE LADY OF THE SHADOWS, and he had mentioned what seemed like a
thousand names in his fever-heated monologues—Alain, Cort, Jamie de Curry, Cuthbert
(this one more often than all the others), Hax, Martin (or per- haps it was Marten, like the
animal), Walter, Susan, even a guy with the unlikely name of Zoltan. Eddie had gotten very
tired of hearing about these people he had never met (and didn’t care to meet), but of course
Eddie had had a few problems of his own at that time, heroin withdrawal and cosmic jet-lag
being only two of them. And, if he was to be fair, he guessed Roland had gotten as tired of
Eddie’s own Fractured Fairy Tales—the ones about how he and Henry had grown up
together and turned into junkies together—as Eddie had of Roland’s.
But he couldn’t remember ever telling Roland he would gag him with his own shirt if he
didn’t stop talking about some kid.
“Nothing comes to you?” Roland asked. “Nothing at all?”
Was there something? Some far-off tickle, like the feeling of deja vu he’d gotten when he
saw the slingshot hiding inside the chunk of wood jutting out of the stump? Eddie tried to
find that tickle, but it was gone. He decided it had never been there in the first place; he
only wanted it to be there, because Roland was hurting so badly.
“No,” he said. “Sorry, man.”
“But I did tell you.” Roland’s tone was calm, but urgency ran and pulsed beneath it like a scarlet thread. “The boy’s name was Jake. I sacrificed him—killed him—in order that I
might finally catch up with Walter and make him talk. I killed him under the mountains.”
On this point Eddie could be more positive. “Well, maybe that’s what happened, but it’s not what you said happened. You said you went under the mountains alone, on some land of
crazy handcar. You talked about that a lot while we were coming up the beach, Roland.
About how scary it was to be alone.”
“I remember. But I also remember telling you about the boy, and how he fell from the
trestle into the chasm. And it’s the distance between those two memories that is pulling my
mind apart.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” Susannah said worriedly.
“I think,” Roland said, “that I’m just beginning to.”
He threw more wood on the fire, sending thick sheaves of red sparks spiralling up into the
dark sky, and then settled back between them. “I’ll tell you a story that’s true,” he said, “and then I’ll tell you a story that isn’t true . . . but should be.
“I bought a mule in Pricetown, and when I finally got to lull, the last town before the desert, it was still fresh . . .”
14
So THE GUNSLINGER EMBARKED on the most recent part of his long tale. Eddie had
heard isolated fragments of the story, but he listened in utter fascination, as did Susannah,
for whom it was completely new. He told them about the bar with the endless game of
Watch Me going on in the corner, the piano player named Sheb, the woman named Allie
with the scar on her forehead . . . and about Nort, the weed-eater who had died and then
been brought back to some sort of tenebrous life by the man in black. He told them about
Sylvia Pittston, that avatar of religious insanity, and about the final apocalyptic slaughter,
in which he, Roland the Gunslinger, had killed every man, woman, and child in town.
“Holy crispy crap!” Eddie said in a low, shaky voice. “Now I know why you were so low on shells, Roland.”
“Be quiet!” Susannah snapped. “Let him finish!”
Roland went on, telling his story as stolidly as he had crossed the desert after passing the
hut of the last Dweller, a young man whose wild, strawberry-colored hair had reached
almost to his waist. He told them about how his mule had finally died. He even told them
about how the Dweller’s pet bird, Zoltan, had eaten the mule’s eyes.
He told them about the long desert days and the short desert nights which had come next,
and how he had followed the cool remains of Walter’s campfires, and how he had come at
last, reeling and dying of dehydration, to the way station.
“It was empty. It had been empty, I think, since the days when yonder great bear was still a newly made thing. I stayed a night and pushed on. That’s what happened . . . but now I’ll tell
you another story.”
“The one that isn’t true but should be?” Susannah asked.
Roland nodded. “In this made-up story—this fable—a gunslinger named Roland met a
boy named Jake at the way station. This boy was from your world, from your city of New
York, and from a when some- place between Eddie’s 1987 and Odetta Holmes’s 1963.”
Eddie was leaning forward eagerly. “Is there a door in this story, Roland? A door marked
THE BOY, or something like that?”
Roland shook his head. “The boy’s doorway was death. He was on his way to school when
a man—a man I believed to be Walter—pushed him into the street, where he was run over
by a car. He heard this man say something like ‘Get out of the way, let me through, I’m a
priest.’ Jake saw this man—just for an instant—and then he was in my world.”
The gunslinger paused, looking into the fire.
“Now I want to leave this story of the boy who was never there and go back to what really
happened for a minute. All right?”
Eddie and Susannah exchanged a puzzled glance and then Eddie made an “after you, my
dear Alphonse” gesture with his hand.
“As I have said, the way station was deserted. There was, however, a pump that still
worked. It was at the back of the stable where the coach-horses were kept. I followed my
ears to it, but I would have found it even if it had been completely silent. I swelled the water, you see. After enough time in the desert, when you are on the edge of dying from thirst, you