Stephen King – The Waste Lands

hair—hanging, not good, but he was up, and that was a start.

“Look at me.”

Susannah stirred uneasily, but this time she said nothing.

Slowly, Eddie raised his head and brushed the hair out of his eyes with a trembling hand.

“This is for you. I was wrong to take it at all, no matter how deep my pain.” Roland curled his hand around the rawhide strip and yanked, snapping it. He held the key out to Eddie.

Eddie reached for it like a man in a dream, but Roland did not immediately open his hand.

“Will you try to do what needs to be done?”

“Yes.” His voice was almost inaudible.

“Do you have something to tell me?”

“I’m sorry I’m afraid.” There was something terrible in Eddie’s voice, something which hurt Roland’s heart, and he supposed, he knew what it was: here was the last of Eddie’s

childhood, expiring painfully among the three of them. It could not be seen, but Roland could hear its weakening cries. He tried to make himself deaf to them.

Something else I’ve done in the name of the Tower. My score grows ever longer, and the

day when it will all have to be totted up, like a long- time drunkard’s bill in an alehouse,

draws ever nearer. How will I ever pay?

“I don’t want your apology, least of all for being afraid,” he said.

“Without fear, what would we be? Mad dogs with foam on our muzzles and shit drying on

our hocks.”

“What do you want, then?” Eddie cried. “You’ve taken everything else — everything I have to give! No, not even that, because in the end, I gave it to you! So what else do you

want from me?”

Roland held the key which was their half of Jake Chambers’s salva- tion locked in his fist

and said nothing. His eyes held Eddie’s, and the sun shone on the green expanse of plain

and the blue-gray reach of the Send River, and somewhere in the distance the crow hailed

again across the golden leagues of this fading summer afternoon.

After a while, understanding began to dawn in Eddie Dean’s eyes.

Roland nodded.

“I have forgotten the face . . .” Eddie paused. Dipped his head. Swallowed. Looked up at the gunslinger once more. The thing which had been dying among them had moved on now

— Roland knew it. That thing was gone. Just like that. Here, on this sunny wind-swept

ridge at the edge of everything, it had gone forever. “I have forgotten the face of my father, gunslinger . . . and I cry your pardon.”

Roland opened his hand and returned the small burden of the key to him who ka had

decreed must carry it. “Speak not so, gunslinger,” he said in the High Speech. “Your father sees you very well . . . loves you very well . . . and so do I.”

Eddie closed his own hand over the key and turned away with his tears still drying on his

face. “Let’s go,” he said, and they began to move down the long hill toward the plain which stretched beyond.

16

JAKE WALKED SLOWLY ALONG Castle Avenue, past pizza shops and bars and

bodegas where old women with suspicious faces poked the potatoes and squeezed the tomatoes. The straps of his pack had chafed the skin beneath his arms, and his feet hurt. He

passed beneath a digital ther- mometer which announced it was eighty-five. It felt more like

a hundred and five to Jake.

Up ahead, a police car turned onto the Avenue. Jake at once became extremely interested

in a display of gardening supplies in the window of a hardware store. He watched the

reflection of the blue-and-white pass in the window and didn’t move until it was gone.

Hey, Jake, old buddy—where, exactly, are you going?

He hadn’t the slightest idea. He felt positive that the boy he was looking for—the boy in

the green bandanna and the yellow T-shirt that said NEVER A DULL MOMENT IN

MID-WORLD—was somewhere close by, but so what? To Jake he was still nothing but a

needle hiding in the haystack which was Brooklyn.

He passed an alley which had been decorated with a tangle of spray-painted graffiti.

Mostly they were names—EL TIANTE 91, SPEEDY GONZALES, MOTORVAN

MIKE—but a few mottos and words to the wise had been dropped in here and there, and

Jake’s eyes fixed on two of these.

A ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE

had been written across the bricks in spray-paint which had weathered to the same

dusky-pink shade of the rose which grew in the vacant lot where Tom and Gerry’s Artistic

Deli had once stood. Below it, in a blue so dark it was almost black, someone had

spray-painted this oddity:

I CRY YOUR PARDON.

What does that mean? Jake wondered. He didn’t know—something from the Bible,

maybe—but it held like the eye of a snake is reputed to hold a bird. At last he walked on,

slowly and thoughtfully. It was almost two-thirty, and his shadow was beginning to grow

longer.

Just ahead, he saw an old man walking down the street, keeping to the shade as much as

possible and leaning on a gnarled cane. Behind the thick glasses he wore, his brown eyes

swam like oversized eggs.

“I cry your pardon, sir,” Jake said without thinking or even really hearing himself.

The old man turned to look at him, blinking in surprise and fear. “Liff me alone, boy,” he said. He raised his walking-stick and brandished it clumsily in Jake’s direction.

“Would you know if there’s a place called Markey Academy anyplace around here, sir?”

This was utter desperation, but it was the only thing he could think to ask.

The old man slowly lowered his stick—it was the sir that had done it. He looked at Jake

with the slightly lunatic interest of the old and almost senile. “How come you not in school, boy?”

Jake smiled wearily. This one was getting very old. “Finals Week. I came down here to

look up an old friend of mine who goes to Markey Academy, that’s all. Sorry to have

bothered you.”

He stepped around the old man (hoping he wouldn’t decide to whop him one across the ass

with his cane just for good luck) and was almost down to the corner when the old man

yelled: “Boy! Boyyyyy!”

Jake turned around.

“There is no Markey Akidimy down here,” the old man said. “Twen- ty-two years I’m living here, so I should know. Markey Avenue, yes, but no Markey Akidimy.”

Jake’s stomach cramped with sudden excitement. He took a step back toward the old, man,

who at once raised his cane into a defensive position again. Jake stopped at once, leaving a

twenty-foot safety zone between them. “Where’s Markey Avenue, sir? Can you tell me

that?”

“Of gorse,” the old man said. “Didn’t I just say I’m livink here twenty-two years? Two blogs down. Turn left at the Majestic Theatre. But I’m tellink you now, there iss no Markey

Akidimy.”

“Thank you, sir! Thank you!”

Jake turned around and looked up Castle Avenue. Yes—he could see the unmistakable

shape of a movie marquee jutting out over the sidewalk a couple of blocks up. He started to

run toward it, then decided that might attract attention and slowed down to a fast walk.

The old man watched him go. “Sir!” he said to himself in a tone of mild amazement. “Sir, yet!”

He chuckled rustily and moved on.

17

ROLAND’S BAND STOPPED AT dusk. The gunslinger dug a shallow pit and lit a fire.

They didn’t need it for cooking purposes, but they needed it, nonetheless. Eddie needed it.

If he was going to finish his carving, he would need light to work by.

The gunslinger looked around and saw Susannah, a dark silhouette against the fading

aquamarine sky, but he didn’t see Eddie.

“Where is he?” he asked.

“Down the road apiece. You leave him alone now, Roland—you’ve done enough.”

Roland nodded, bent over the firepit, and struck at a piece of flint with a worn steel bar.

Soon the kindling he had gathered was blazing. He added small sticks, one by one, and

waited for Eddie to return.

18

HALF A MILE BACK the way they had come, Eddie sat cross-legged in the middle of the

Great Road with his unfinished key in one hand, watching the sky. He glanced down the

road, saw the spark of the fire, and knew exactly what Roland was doing . . . and why. Then

he turned his gaze to the sky again. He had never felt so lonely or so afraid.

The sky was huge—he could not remember ever seeing so much uninterrupted space, so

much pure emptiness. It made him feel very small, and he supposed there was nothing at all

wrong with that. In the scheme of things, he was very small.