Stephen King – The Waste Lands

neck and gripped like hoops of steel.

“I’ll never leave you again,” Roland said, and now his own tears came. “I swear to you on the names of all my fathers: I’ll never leave you again.”

Yet his heart, that silent, watchful, lifelong prisoner of ka, received the words of this

promise not just with wonder but with doubt.

BOOK TWO

LUD

A HEAP OF BROKEN IMAGES

IV-TOWN AND KA-TET

IV

TOWN AND KA-TET

1

FOUR DAYS AFTER EDDIE had yanked him through the doorway between worlds,

minus his original pair of pants and his sneakers but still in possession of his pack and his

life, Jake awoke with something warm and wet nuzzling at his face.

If he had come around to such a sensation on any of the three previous mornings, he

undoubtedly would have wakened his companions with his screams, for he had been

feverish and his sleep had been haunted by nightmares of the plaster-man. In these dreams

his pants did not slide free, the doorkeeper kept its grip, and it tucked him into its

unspeakable mouth, where its teeth came down like the bars guarding a castle keep. Jake awoke from these dreams shuddering and moaning helplessly.

The fever had been caused by the spider-bite on the back of his neck. When Roland

examined it on the second day and found it worse instead of better, he had conferred briefly

with Eddie and had then given Jake a pink pill. “You’ll want to take four of these every day for at least a week,” he said.

Jake had gazed at it doubtfully. “What is it?”

“Cheflet,” Roland said, then looked disgustedly at Eddie. “You tell him. I still can’t say it.”

“Keflex. You can trust it, Jake; it came from a government-approved pharmacy in good

old New York. Roland swallowed a bunch of it, and he’s as healthy as a horse. Looks a little

like one, too, as you can see.”

Jake was astonished. “How did you get medicine in New York?”

“That’s a long story,” the gunslinger said. “You’ll hear all of it in time, but for now just take the pill.”

Jake did. The response was both quick and satisfying. The angry red swelling around the

bite began to fade in twenty-four hours, and now the fever was gone as well.

The warm thing nuzzled again and Jake sat up with a jerk, his eyes flying open.

The creature which had been licking his cheek took two hasty steps backward. It was a

billy-bumbler, but Jake didn’t know that; he had never seen one before now. It was skinnier

than the ones Roland’s party had seen earlier, and its black- and gray-striped fur was matted

and mangy. There was a clot of old dried blood on one flank. Its gold-ringed black eyes

looked at Jake anxiously; its hindquarters switched hopefully back and forth. Jake relaxed.

He supposed there were exceptions to the rule, but he had an idea that something wagging

its tail—or trying to—was probably not too dangerous.

It was just past first light, probably around five-thirty in the morning. Jake could peg it no

closer than that because his digital Seiko no longer worked … or rather, was working in an

extremely eccentric way. When he had first glanced at it after coming through, the Seiko

claimed it was 98:71:65, a time which did not, so far as Jake knew, exist. A longer look

showed him that the watch was now running backward. If it had been doing this at a steady

rate, he supposed it might still have been of some use, but it wasn’t. It would unwind its

numbers at what seemed like the right speed for awhile (Jake verified this by saying the

word “Mississippi” between each number), and then the readout would either stop entirely for ten or twenty seconds—making him think the watch had finally given up the ghost—or

a bunch of numbers would blur by all at once.

He had mentioned this odd behavior to Roland and had shown him the watch, thinking it

would amaze him, but Roland examined it closely for only a moment or two before

nodding in a dismissive way and telling Jake it was an interesting clock, but as a rule no

timepiece did very good work these days. So the Seiko was useless, but Jake still found

himself loath to throw it away . . . because, he supposed, it was a piece of his old life, and

there were only a few of those left.

Right now the Seiko claimed it was sixty-two minutes past forty on a Wednesday,

Thursday, and Saturday in both December and March.

The morning was extremely foggy; beyond a radius of fifty or sixty feet, the world simply

disappeared. If this day was like the previous three, the sun would show up as a faint white

circle in another two hours or so, and by nine-thirty the day would be clear and hot. Jake

looked around and saw his travelling companions (he didn’t quite dare call them friends, at

least not yet) asleep beneath their hide blankets—Roland close by, Eddie and Susannah a

larger hump on the far side of the dead campfire.

He once more turned his attention to the animal which had awak- ened him. It looked like a

combination raccoon and woodchuck, with a dash of dachshund thrown in for good

measure.

“How you doin, boy?” he asked softly.

“Oy!” the billy-bumbler replied at once, still looking at him anx- iously. Its voice was low and deep, almost a bark; the voice of an English footballer with a bad cold in his throat.

Jake recoiled, surprised. The billy-bumbler, startled by the quick movement, took several

further steps backward, seemed about to flee, and then held its ground. Its hindquarters

wagged back and forth more strenuously than ever, and its gold-black eyes continued to

regard Jake nervously. The whiskers on its snout trembled.

“This one remembers men,” a voice remarked at Jake’s shoulder. He looked around and

saw Roland squatting just behind him with his forearms resting on his thighs and his long

hands dangling between his knees. He was looking at the animal with a great deal more

interest than he had shown in Jake’s watch.

“What is it?” Jake asked softly. He did not want to startle it away; he was enchanted. “Its eyes are beautiful!”

“Billy-bumbler,” Roland said.

“Umber!” the creature ejaculated, and retreated another step.

“It talks!”

“Not really. Bumblers just repeat what they hear—or used to. I haven’t heard one do it in

years. This fellow looks almost starved. Proba- bly came to forage.”

“He was licking my face. Can I feed it?”

“We’ll never get rid of it if you do,” Roland said, then smiled a little and snapped his fingers. “Hey! Billy!”

The creature mimicked the sound of the snapping fingers somehow; it sounded as if it

were clucking its tongue against the roof of its mouth. “Ay!” it called in its hoarse voice.

“Ay, Illy!” Now its ragged hindquarters were positively gagging back and forth.

“Go ahead and give it a bite. I knew an old groom once who said a good bumbler is good

luck. This looks like a good one.”

“Yes,” Jake agreed. “It does.”

“Once they were tame, and every barony had half a dozen roaming around the castle or

manor-house. They weren’t good for much except amusing the children and keeping the rat

population down. They can be quite faithful—or were in the old days—although I never

heard of one that would remain as loyal as a good dog. The wild ones are scavengers. Not

dangerous, but a pain in the ass.”

“Ass!” cried the bumbler. Its anxious eyes continued to flick back and forth between Jake and the gunslinger.

Jake reached into his pack, slowly, afraid to startle the creature, and drew out the remains

of a gunslinger burrito. He tossed it toward the billy-bumbler. The bumbler flinched back

and then turned with a small, childlike cry, exposing its furry corkscrew tail. Jake felt sure

it would run, but it stopped, looking doubtfully back over its shoulder.

“Come on,” Jake said. “Eat it, boy.”

“Oy,” the bumbler muttered, but it didn’t move.

“Give it time,” Roland said. “It’ll come, I think.”

The bumbler stretched forward, revealing a long and surprisingly graceful neck. Its

slender black nose twitched as it sniffed the food. At last it trotted forward, and Jake

noticed it was limping a little. The bum- bler sniffed the burrito, then used one paw to

separate the chunk of deermeat from the leaf. It carried out this operation with a delicacy

that was oddly solemn. Once the meat was clear of the leaf, the bumbler wolfed it in a

single bite, then looked up at Jake. “Oy!” it said, and when Jake laughed, it shrank away again.

“That’s a skinny one,” Eddie said sleepily from behind them. At the sound of his voice, the bumbler immediately turned and was gone into the mist.