Stephen King – The Waste Lands

he could—across to where Eddie crouched. “Let it go when I tell you, Susannah!” Roland shouted. “Do you understand? When I tell you!”

Eddie saw and heard none of this. He heard only Jake, screaming faintly on the other side

of the door.

The time had come to use the key.

He pulled it out of his shirt and slid it into the keyhole he had drawn. He tried to turn it.

The key would not turn. Not so much as a millimeter. Eddie lifted his face to the pelting

hail, oblivious to the iceballs which struck his forehead and cheeks and lips, leaving welts

and red blotches.

“NO!” he howled. “OH GOD, PLEASE! NO!”

But there was no answer from God; only another crash of thunder and a streak of lightning

across a sky now filled with racing clouds.

36

JAKE LUNGED UPWARD, CRABBED the chain of the lamp which hung above him,

and ripped free of the doorkeeper’s clutching fingers. He swung backward, used the packed

earth in the doorway to push off, and then swung forward again like Tarzan on a vine. He

raised his legs and kicked out at the clutching fingers as he closed on them. Plaster

exploded in chunks, revealing a crudely jointed skeleton of lathing beneath. The

plaster-man roared, a sound of intermingled hunger and rage. Beneath that cry, Jake could

hear the whole house collapsing, like the one in that story of Edgar Allan Poe.

He pendulumed back on the chain, struck the wall of packed earth which blocked the

doorway, then swung forward again. The hand reached up for him and he kicked at it

wildly, legs scissoring. He felt a stab of pain in his foot as those wooden fingers clutched.

When he swung back again, he was minus a sneaker.

He tried for a higher grip on the chain, found it, and began to shinny up toward the ceiling.

There was a muffled, creaking thud above him. Fine plaster dust had begun to sift down on

his upturned, sweating face. The ceiling had begun to sag; the lamp-chain was pulling out

of it a link at a time. There was a thick crunching sound from the end of the hallway as the

plaster-man finally pushed its hungry face through the opening.

Jake swung helplessly back toward that face, screaming.

37

EDDIE’S TERROR AND PANIC suddenly fell away. The cloak of coldness dropped over

him—a cloak Roland of Gilead had worn many times. It was the only armor the true

gunslinger possessed . . . and all such a one needed. At the same moment, a voice spoke in

his mind. He had been haunted by such voices over the last three months; his mother’s

voice, Roland’s voice, and, of course, Henry’s. But this one, he recognized with relief, was

his own, and it was at last calm and rational and courageous.

You saw the shape of the key in the fire, you saw it again in the wood, and both times you

saw it perfectly. Later on, you put a blindfold of fear over your eyes. Take it off. Take it off and look again. It may not be too late, even now.

He was faintly aware that the gunslinger was staring at him grimly; faintly aware that

Susannah was shrieking at the demon in a fading but still defiant voice; faintly aware that, on the other side of the door, Jake was screaming in terror—or was it now agony?

Eddie ignored them all. He pulled the wooden key out of the key-hole he had drawn, out of

the door which was now real, and looked at it fixedly, trying to recapture the innocent

delight he had sometimes known as a child—the delight of seeing a coherent shape hidden

in senselessness. And there it was, the place he’d gone wrong, so clearly visible he couldn’t

understand how he’d missed it in the first place. I really must have been wearing a blindfold,

he thought. It was the s-shape at the end of the key, of course. The second curve was a bit

too fat. Just a tiny bit.

“Knife,” he said, and held out his hand like a surgeon in an operating room. Roland

slapped it into his palm without a word.

Eddie gripped the top of the blade between the thumb and first finger of his right hand. He

bent over the key, unmindful of the hail which pelted his unprotected neck, and the shape in

the wood stood out more clearly—stood out with its own lovely and undeniable reality.

He scraped.

Once.

Delicately.

A single sliver of ash, so thin it was almost transparent, curled up from the belly of the

s-shape at the end of the key.

On the other side of the door, Jake Chambers shrieked again.

38

THE CHAIN LET GO with a rattling crash and Jake fell heavily, landing on his knees.

The doorkeeper roared in triumph. The plaster hand seized Jake about his hips and began to

drag him down the hall. He stuck his legs out in front of him and planted his feet, but it did

no good. He felt splinters and rust-blunted nails digging into his skin as the hand tightened

its grip and continued to drag him forward.

The face appeared to be stuck just inside the entrance to the hallway like a cork in a bottle.

The pressure it had exerted to get in that far had squeezed the rudimentary features into a

new shape, that of some mon- strous, malformed troll. The mouth yawned open to receive

him. Jake groped madly for the key, wanting to use it as some last-ditch talisman, but of

course he had left it in the door.

‘”You son of a bitch!” he screamed, and threw himself backward with all his strength, bowing his back like an Olympic diver, unmindful of the broken boards which dug into

him like a belt of nails. He felt his jeans slide down on his hips, and the grip of the hand

slipped momentarily.

Jake lunged again. The hand clenched brutally, but Jake’s jeans slid down to his knees and

his back slammed to the floor, with the pack to cushion the blow. The hand loosened,

perhaps wanting to secure a firmer grip upon its prey. Jake was able to draw his knees up a

little, and when the hand tightened again, Jake drove his legs forward. The hand yanked

backward at the same time, and what Jake had hoped for happened: his jeans (and his

remaining sneaker) were peeled from his body, leaving him free again, at least for the

moment. He saw the hand rotate on his wrist of boards and disintegrating plaster and jam

his dungarees into his mouth. Then he was crawling back toward the blocked doorway on

his hands and knees, oblivious of the glass fragments from the fallen lamp, wanting only to

get his key again.

He had almost reached the door when the hand closed over his naked legs and began to

pull him back once more.

39

THE SHAPE WAS THERE now, finally all there.

Eddie put the key back into the keyhole and applied pressure. For a moment there was

resistance . . . and then it revolved beneath his hand. He heard the locking mechanism turn,

heard the bar pull back, felt the key crack in two the moment it had served its purpose. He

grasped the dark, polished knob with both hands and pulled. There was a sense of great

weight wheeling on an unseen pivot. A feeling that his arm had been gifted with boundless

strength. And a clear knowledge that two worlds had suddenly come in contact, and a way

had been opened between them.

He felt a moment of dizziness and disorientation, and as he looked through the doorway he

realized why: although he was looking down—vertically—he was seeing horizontally. It

was like a strange optical illusion created with prisms and mirrors. Then he saw Jake being

pulled backward down the glass- and plaster-littered hallway, elbows dragging, calves

pinned-together by a giant hand. And he saw the monstrous mouth which awaited him,

fuming some white fog that might have been either smoke or dust.

“Roland!” Eddie shouted. “Roland, it’s got h—”

Then he was knocked aside.

40

SUSANNAH WAS AWARE OF being hauled up and whirled around. The world was a

carousel blur: standing stones, gray sky, hailstone-littered ground… and a rectangular hole

that looked like a trapdoor in the ground. Screams drifted up from it. Within her, the demon

raved and struggled, wanting only to escape but helpless to do so until she allowed it.

“Now!” Roland was shouting. “Let it go now, Susannah! For your father’s sake, let it go NOW!”

And she did.

She had (with Detta’s help) constructed* a trap for it in her mind, something like a net of

woven rushes, and now she cut them. She felt the demon fly back from her at once, and