Stephen King – The Waste Lands

can really do that. I drank and then slept. When I woke, I drank again. I wanted to push on

at once—the need to do that was like a fever. The medicine you brought me from your

world—the astin—is wonderful stuff, Eddie, but there are fevers beyond the power of any

medicine to cure, and this was one of them. I knew my body needed rest, but it still took

every ounce of my willpower to stay there even one night. In the morning I felt rested, and

so I refilled my waterskins and pushed on. I took nothing from that place but water. That’s

the most important part of what really happened.”

Susannah spoke in her most reasonable, pleasant, and Odetta Holmes—like voice. “All

right, that’s what really happened. You refilled your waterskins and went on. Now tell us

the rest of what didn’t happen, Roland.”

The gunslinger put the jawbone in his lap for a moment, curled his hands into fists, and

rubbed his eyes with them—a curiously childlike gesture. Then he grasped the jawbone

again, as if for courage, and went on.

“I hypnotized the boy who wasn’t there,” he said. “I did it with one of my shells. It’s a trick I’ve known for years, and I learned it from a very unlikely source—Marten, my father’s

court magician. The boy was a good subject. While he was tranced, he told me the

circumstances of his death, as I’ve told them to you. When I’d gotten as much of his story as

I felt I could without upsetting or actually hurting him, I gave him a command that he

should not remember anything about his dying when he woke up again.”

“Who’d want to?” Eddie muttered.

Roland nodded. “Who, indeed? The boy passed from his trance directly into a natural

sleep. I also slept. When we woke, I told the boy that I meant to catch the man in black. He

knew who I meant; Walter had also stopped at the way station. Jake was afraid and hid

from him. I’m sure Walter knew he was there, but it suited his purpose to pretend he didn’t.

He left the boy behind like a set trap.

“I asked him if there was anything to eat there. It seemed to me there must be. He looked

healthy enough, and the desert climate is wonderful when it comes to preserving things. He

had a little dried meat, and he said there was a cellar. He hadn’t explored that, because he was afraid.” The gunslinger looked at them grimly. “He was right to be afraid. I found food . . . and I also found a Speaking Demon.”

Eddie looked down at the jawbone with widening eyes. Orange fire- light danced on its

ancient curves and hoodoo teeth. “Speaking Demon? Do you mean that thing?”

“No,” he said. “Yes. Both. Listen and you shall understand.”

He told them about the inhuman groans he’d heard coming from the earth beyond the cellar;

how he had seen sand running from between two of the old blocks which made up the

cellar walls. He told them of approaching the hole that was appearing there as Jake

screamed for him to come up.

He had commanded the demon to speak . . . and so the demon had, in the voice of Allie, the

woman with the scar on her forehead, the woman who had kept the bar in Tull. Go slow

past the Drawers, gun- slinger. While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with

your soul in his pocket.

“The Drawers?” Susannah asked, startled.

“Yes.” Roland looked at her closely. “That means something to you, doesn’t it?”

“Yes . . . and no.”

She spoke with great hesitation. Some of it, Roland divined, was simple reluctance to

speak of things which were painful to her. He thought most of it, however, was a desire not

to confuse issues which were already confused by saying more than she actually knew. He

admired that. He admired her.

“Say what you can be sure of,” he said. “No more than that.”

“All right. The Drawers was a place Detta Walker knew about. A place Detta thought

about. It’s a slang term, one she picked up from listening to the grownups when they sat out

on the porch and drank beer and talked about the old days. It means a place that’s spoiled,

or useless, or both. There was something in the Drawers—in the idea of the Draw-ers—that

called to Detta. Don’t ask me what; I might have known once, but I don’t anymore. And

don’t want to.

“Detta stole my Aunt Blue’s china plate—the one my folks gave her for a wedding

present—and took it to the Drawers—her Drawers—to break it. That place was a gravel-pit

filled with trash. A dumping-ground. Later on, she sometimes picked up boys at

roadhouses.”

Susannah dropped her head for a moment, her lips pressed tightly together. Then she

looked up again and went on.

“White boys. And when they took her back to their cars in the parking lot, she cock-teased them and then ran off. Those parking lots . . . they were the Drawers, too. It was a

dangerous game, but she was young enough, quick enough, and mean enough to play it to

the hilt and enjoy it. Later, in New York, she’d go on shoplifting expeditions . . . you know

about that. Both of you. Always to the fancy stores—Macy’s, Gimbel’s,

Bloomingdale’s—and steal trinkets. And when she made up her mind to go on one of those

sprees, she’d think: I’m goan to the Drawers today. Goan steal me some shitfum de white

folks. Goan steal me sumpin forspecial and den break dot sumbitch.”

She paused, lips trembling, looking into the fire. When she looked around again, Roland

and Eddie saw tears standing in her eyes.

“I’m crying, but don’t let that fool you. I remember doing those things, and I remember

enjoying them. I guess I’m crying because I know I’d do it all again, if the circumstances

were right.”

Roland seemed to have regained some of his old serenity, his weird equilibrium. “We have

a proverb in my country, Susannah: ‘The wise thief always prospers.'”

“I don’t see nothing wise about stealing a bunch of paste jewelry,” she said sharply.

“Were you ever caught?”

“No—”

He spread his hands as if to say, there you have it.

“So for Detta Walker, the Drawers were bad places?” Eddie asked. “Is that right? Because it doesn’t exactly feel right.”

“Bad and good at the same time. They were powerful places, places where she . . . she

reinvented herself; I suppose you could say . . . hut they were lost places, too. And this is all off the subject of Roland’s ghost-boy, isn’t it?”

“Maybe not,” Roland said. “We had Drawers as well, you see, in my world. It was slang for us, too, and the meanings are very similar.”

“What did it mean to you and your friends?” Eddie asked.

“That varied slightly from place to place and situation to situation. It might mean a

trash-midden. It might mean a whorehouse or a place where men came to gamble or chew

devil-weed. But the most common’ meaning that I know is also the simplest.”

He looked at them both.

“The Drawers are places of desolation,” he said. “The Drawers are the waste lands.”

15

THIS TIME SUSANNAH THREW more wood on the fire. In the south, Old Mother

blazed on brilliantly, not flickering. She knew from her school studies what that meant: it

was a planet, not a star. Venus? She wondered. Or is the solar system of which this world is

a part as different as everything else?

Again that feeling of unreality—the feeling that all this must surely be a dream—washed

over her.

“Go on,” she said. “What happened after the voice warned you about the Drawers and the little boy?”

“I punched my hand into the hole the sand had come from, as I was taught to do if such a

thing ever happened to me. What I plucked forth was a jawbone . . . but not this one. The

jawbone I took from the wall of the way station was much larger; from one of the Great Old

Ones, I have almost no doubt.”

“What happened to it?” Susannah asked quietly.

“One night I gave it to the boy,” Roland said. The fire painted his cheeks with hot orange highlights and dancing shadows. “As a protec- tion—a kind of talisman. Later I felt it had

served its purpose and threw it away.”

“So whose jawbone you got there, Roland?” Eddie asked.

Roland held it up, looked at it long and thoughtfully, and let it drop back. “Later, after

Jake . . . after he died … I caught up with the men I had been chasing.”

“With Walter,” Susannah said.

“Yes. We held palaver; he and I … long palaver. I fell asleep at some point, and when I