Stephen King – The Waste Lands

“It’s all right. I had a friend who was the same way.”

“Cuthbert?”

Roland nodded. He looked at his diminished right hand for a long moment, then clenched it into a painful fist, sighed, and looked up at them again. Somewhere, deeper in the forest,

a lark sang sweetly.

“Here is what I believe. If I had not entered Jack Mort when I did, he still wouldn’t have

pushed Jake that day. Not then. Why not? Ka-tet. Simply that. For the first time since the

last of the friends with whom I set forth on this quest died, I have found myself once again

at the center of ka-tet.”

“Quartet?” Eddie asked doubtfully.

The gunslinger shook his head. “Ka—the word you think of as ‘des- tiny,’ Eddie, although

the actual meaning is much more complex and hard to define, as is almost always the case

with words of the High Speech. And tet, which means a group of people with the same

interests and goals. We three are a tet, for instance. Ka-tet, is the place where many lives

are joined by fate.”

“Like in The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” Susannah murmured.

“What’s that?” Roland asked.

“A story about some people who die together when the bridge they•re crossing collapses.

It’s famous in our world.”

Roland nodded his understanding. “In this case, ka-tet bound Jake, Walter, Jack Mort, and

me. There was no trap, as I first suspected when I realized who Jack Mort meant to be his

next victim, because ka-tet cannot be changed or bent to the will of any one person. But

ka-tet can be seen, known, and understood. Walter saw, and Walter knew.” The gunslinger

struck his thigh with his fist and exclaimed bitterly, “How he must have been laughing

inside when I finally caught up to him!”

“Let’s go back to what would have happened if you hadn’t messed up Jack Mort’s plans on

the day he was following Jake,” Eddie said. “You’re saying that if you hadn’t stopped Mort, someone or something else would have. Is that right?”

“Yes—because it wasn’t the right day for Jake to die. It was close to the right day, but not the right day. I felt that, too. Perhaps, just before he did it, Mort would have seen someone

watching him. Or a perfect stranger would have intervened. Or—”

“Or a cop,” Susannah said. “He might have seen a cop in the wrong place and at the wrong time.”

“Yes. The exact reason—the agent of ka-tet—doesn’t matter. I know from firsthand

experience that Mort was as wily as an old fox. If he sensed any slightest thing wrong, he

would have called it off and waited for another day.

“I know something else, as well. He hunted in disguise. On the day he dropped the brick on Detta Holmes’s head, he was wearing a knitted cap and an old sweater several sizes too big

for him. He wanted to look like a winebibber, because he pushed the brick from a building

where a large number of sots kept their dens. You see?”

They nodded.

“On the day, years later, when he pushed you in front of the train, Susannah, he was

dressed as a construction worker. He was wearing a big yellow helmet he thought of as a

‘hardhat’ and a fake moustache. On the day when he actually would have pushed Jake into

traffic, causing his death, he would have been dressed as a priest.”

“Jesus,” Susannah nearly whispered. “The man who pushed him in New York was Jack

Mort, and the man he saw at the way station was this fella you were chasing—Walter.”

“Yes.”

“And the little boy thought they were the same man because they were both wearing the

same kind of black robe?”

Roland nodded. “There was even a physical resemblance between Walter land Jack Mort.

Not as if they were brothers, I don’t mean that, but both were tall men with dark hair and

very pale complexions. And given the fact that Jake was dying when he got his only good

look at Mort and was in a strange place and scared almost witless when he got his only

good look at Walter, I think his mistake was both understandable and forgivable. If there’s

a horse’s ass in this picture, it’s me, for not realizing the truth sooner.”

“Would Mort have known he was being used?” Eddie asked. Think- ing back to his own

experiences and wild thoughts when Roland had invaded his mind, he didn’t see how Mort

could not know . . . but Roland was shaking his head.

“Walter would have been extremely subtle. Mort would have thought the priest disguise

his own idea … or so I believe. He would not have recognized the voice of an intruder—of

Walter—whispering deep within his mind, telling him what to do.”

“Jack Mort,” Eddie marvelled. “It was Jack Mort all the time.”

“Yes . . . with assistance from Walter. And so I ended up saving Jake’s life after all. When I made Mort jump from the subway platform in front of the train, I changed everything.”

Susannah asked, “If this Walter was able to enter our world— through his own private

door, maybe—whenever he wanted, couldn’t he have used someone else to push your little

boy? If he could sug- gest to Mort that he dress up like a priest, then he could make

somebody else do it … What, Eddie? Why are you shaking your head?”

“Because I don’t think Walter would want that to happen. What Walter wanted is what is happening … for Roland to be losing his mind, bit by bit. Isn’t that right?”

The gunslinger nodded.

“Walter couldn’t have done it that way even if he had wanted to,” Eddie added, “because he was dead long before Roland found the doors on the beach. When Roland went through

that last one and into Jack Mort’s head, ole Walt’s messin-around days were done.”

Susannah thought about this, then nodded her head. “I see … I think. This time-travel

business is some confusing shit, isn’t it?”

Roland began to pick up his goods and strap them back into place. “Time we were moving

on.”

Eddie stood up and shrugged into his pack. “You can take comfort from one thing, at

least,” he told Roland. “You—or this ka-tet business— were able to save the kid after all.”

Roland had been knotting the harness-strings at his chest. Now he looked up, and the

blazing clarity of his eyes made Eddie flinch backward. “Have I?” he asked harshly. “Have I really? I’m going insane an inch at a time, trying to live with two versions of the same

reality. I had hoped at first that one or the other would begin to fade away, but that’s not

happening. In fact, the exact opposite is happening: those two realities are growing louder

and louder in my head, clamoring at each other like opposing factions which must soon go

to war. So tell me this, Eddie: How do you suppose Jake feels? How do you suppose it feels

to know you are dead in one world and alive in another?”

The lark sang again, but none of them noticed. Eddie stared into the faded blue eyes

blazing out of Roland’s pale face and could not think of a thing to say.

24

THEY CAMPED ABOUT FIFTEEN miles due east of the dead bear that night, slept the

sleep of the completely exhausted (even Roland slept the night through, although his

dreams were nightmare carnival-rides), and were up the next morning at sunrise. Eddie

kindled a small fire without speaking, and glanced at Susannah as a pistol-shot rang out in

the woods nearby.

“Breakfast,” she said.

Roland returned three minutes later with a hide slung over one shoulder. On it lay the

freshly gutted corpse of a rabbit. Susannah cooked it. They ate and moved on.

Eddie kept trying to imagine what it would be like to have a memory of your own death.

On that one he kept coming up short.

25

SHORTLY AFTER NOON THEY entered an area where most of the trees had been

pulled over and the bushes mashed flat—it looked as though a cyclone had touched down

here many years before, creating a wide and dismal alley of destruction.

“We’re close to the place we want to find,” Roland said. “He pulled down everything to clear the sightlines. Our friend the bear wanted no surprises. He was big, but not

complacent.”

“Has it left us any surprises?” Eddie asked.

“He may have done so.” Roland smiled a little and touched Eddie on the shoulder. “But there’s this—they’ll be old surprises.”

Their progress through this zone of destruction was slow. Most of the fallen trees were

very old—many had almost rejoined the soil from which they had sprung—but they still

made enough of a tangle to create a formidable obstacle course. It would have been

difficult enough if all three of them had been able-bodied; with Susannah strapped to the