Stephen King – The Waste Lands

Susannah makes me look slow and he makes Susannah look like a turtle trying to walk

uphill on a piece of glass—

Something passed just over his head, something that squealed at him in mechanical rage and pulled out a tuft of his hair. Then the gunslinger was shooting from the hip, three fast

shots like thunder-cracks, and the squealing stopped. A creature which looked to Eddie like

a large mechan- ical bat thudded to earth between the place where Eddie now lay and the

one where Susannah knelt beside Roland. One of its jointed, rust-speckled wings thumped

the ground once, weakly, as if angry at the missed chance, and then became still.

Roland crossed to Eddie, walking easy in his old sprung boots. He extended a hand. Eddie

took it and let Roland help him to his feet. The wind had been knocked out of him and he

found he couldn’t talk. Proba- bly just as well . . . seems like every time I open my mouth I

stick my goddam foot into it.

“Eddie! You all right?” Susannah was crossing the clearing to where he stood with his

head bent and his hands planted on his upper thighs, trying to breathe.

“Yeah.” The word came out in a croak. He straightened up with an effort. “Just got a little haircut.”

“It was in a tree,” Roland said mildly. “1 didn’t see it myself, at first. The light gets tricky this time of day. He paused and then went on in that same mild voice: “She was never in

any danger, Eddie.”

Eddie nodded his head. Roland, he now realized, could almost have eaten a hamburger and

drunk a milkshake before beginning his draw. He was that fast.

“All right. Let’s just say I disapprove of your teaching techniques, okay? I’m not going to apologize, though, so if you’re waiting for one, you can stop now.”

Roland bent, picked Susannah up, and began to brush her off. He did this with a kind of

impartial affection, like a mother brushing off her toddler after she has taken one of her

necessary tumbles in the dust of the back yard. “Your apology is not expected or

necessary,” he said. “Susannah and I had a conversation similar to this one two days ago.

Didn’t we, Susannah?”

She nodded. “Roland’s of the opinion that apprentice gunslingers who won’t bite the hand

that feeds them from time to time need a good lack in the slats.”

Eddie looked around at the wreckage and slowly began to beat the bone-dust out of his

pants and shirt. “What if I told you I don’t want to be a gunslinger, Roland old buddy?”

“I’d say that what you want doesn’t much matter.” Roland was look- ing at the metal kiosk which stood against the rock wall, and seemed to have lost interest in the conversation.

Eddie had seen this before. When the conversation turned to questions of should-be,

could-be, or oughtta-be, Roland almost always lost interest.

“Ka?” Eddie asked, with a trace of his old bitterness.

“That’s right. Ka.” Roland walked over to the kiosk and passed a hand along the yellow and black stripes which ran down its front. “We have found one of the twelve portals which

ring the edge of the world . . . one of the six paths to the Dark Tower.

“And that is also ka.”

27

EDDIE WENT BACK FOR Susannah’s wheelchair. No one had to ask him to do this; he

wanted some time alone, to get himself back under control. Now that the shooting was over,

every muscle in his body seemed to have picked up its own little thrumming tremor. He did

not want either of them to see him this way—not because they might misread it as fear, but

because one or both might know it for what it really was: excitement overload. He had

liked it. Even when you added in the bat which had almost scalped him, he had liked it.

That’s bullshit, buddy. And you know it.

The trouble was, he didn’t know it. He had come face to face with something Susannah had

found out for herself after shooting the bear: he could talk about how he didn’t want to be a

gunslinger, how he didn’t want to be tramping around this crazy world where the three of

them seemed to be the only human life, that what he really wanted more than anything else

was to be standing on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, popping his fingers,

munching a chili-dog, and listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival blast out of his

Walkman earphones as he watched the girls go by, those ultimately sexy New York girls

with their pouty go-to-hell mouths and their long legs in short skirts. He could talk about

those things until he was blue in the face, but his heart knew other things. It knew that he

had enjoyed blowing the electronic menag- erie back to glory, at least while the game was

on and Roland’s gun was his own private hand-held thunderstorm. He had enjoyed kicking

the robot rat, even though it had hurt his foot and even though he had been scared shitless.

In some weird way, that part—the being scared part— actually seemed to add to the

enjoyment.

All that was bad enough, but his heart knew something even worse: that if a door leading

back to New York appeared in front of him right now, he might not walk through it. Not, at

least, until he had seen the Dark Tower for himself. He was beginning to believe that

Roland’s illness was a communicable disease.

As he wrestled Susannah’s chair through the tangle of junk-alders, cursing the branches

that whipped at his face and tried to poke his eyes out, Eddie found himself able to admit at

least some of these things, and the admission cooled his blood a little. / want to see if it

looks the way it did in my dream, he thought. To see something like that. . . that would be

really fantastic.

And another voice spoke up inside. I’ll bet his other friends—the ones with the names that

sound like they came straight from the Round Table in King Arthur’s court—I’ll bet they

felt the same way, Eddie. And they’re all dead. Every one of them.

He recognized that voice, like it or not. It belonged to Henry, and that made it a hard voice

not to hear.

28

ROLAND, WITH SUSANNAH BALANCED on his right hip, was standing in front of

the metal box that looked like a subway entrance closed for the night. Eddie left the

wheelchair at the edge of the clearing and walked over. As he did, the steady humming

noise and the vibration under his feet became louder. The machinery making the noise, he

realized, was either inside the box or under it. It seemed that he heard it not with his ears

but somewhere deep inside his head, and in the hollows of his gut.

“So this is one of the twelve portals. Where does it go, Roland? Disney World?”

Roland shook his head. “I don’t know where it goes. Maybe nowhere … or everywhere.

There’s a lot about my world I don’t know—surely you both have realized that. And there

are things I used to know which have changed.”

“Because the world has moved on?”

“Yes.” Roland glanced at him. “Here, that is not a figure of speech. The world really is moving on, and it goes ever faster. At the same time, things are wearing out . . . falling

apart . . .” He kicked die mechanical corpse of the walking box to illustrate his point.

Eddie thought of the rough diagram of the portals which Roland had drawn in the dirt. “Is

this the edge of the world?” he asked, almost timidly. “I mean, it doesn’t look much

different than anyplace else.” He laughed a little. “If there’s a drop-off, I don’t see it.”

Roland shook his head. “It’s not that kind of edge. It’s the place where one of the Beams

starts. Or so I was taught.”

“Beams?” Susannah asked. “What Beams?”

“The Great Old Ones didn’t make the world, but they did re-make it. Some tale-tellers say

the Beams saved it; others say they are the seeds of the world’s destruction. The Great Old

Ones created the Beams. They are lines of some sort… lines which bind . . . and hold . . .”

“Are you talking about magnetism?” Susannah asked cautiously.

His whole face lit up, transforming its harsh planes and furrows into something new and

amazing, and for a moment Eddie knew how Roland would look if he actually did reach his

Tower.

“Yes! Not just magnetism, but that is a part of it … and gravity . . . and the proper

alignment of space, size, and dimension. The Beams are the forces which bind these things

together.”

“Welcome to physics in the nuthouse,” Eddie said in a low voice.