Stephen King – The Waste Lands

“We have company,” Roland said quietly, and pointed toward the building Susannah

thought of as the county courthouse. A man and a woman had emerged from it and were

descending the stone steps. You win the kewpie doll, Roland, Susannah thought. They’re

older n God, the both of em.

The man was wearing bib overalls and a huge straw sombrero. The woman walked with

one hand clamped on his naked sunburned shoulder. She wore homespun and a poke

bonnet, and as they drew closer to the marker, Susannah saw she was blind, and that the

accident which had taken her sight must have been exceedingly horrible. Where her eyes

had been there were now only two shallow sockets filled with scar-tissue. She looked both

terrified and confused.

“Be they harriers, Si?” she cried in a cracked, quavering voice. “You’ll have us killed yet, I’ll warrant!”

“Shut up, Mercy,” he replied. Like the woman, he spoke with a thick accent Susannah

could barely understand. “They ain’t harriers, not these. There’s a Pube with em, I told you that—ain’t no harrier ever been travellin• with a Pube.”

Blind or not, she tried to pull away from him. He cursed and caught her arm. “Quit it,

Mercy! Quit it, I say! You’ll fall down and do y’self evil, dammit!”

“We mean you no harm,” the gunslinger called. He used the High Speech, and at the sound of it the man’s eyes lit up with incredulity. The woman turned back, swinging her blind face

in their direction.

“A gunslinger!” the man cried. His voice cracked and wavered with excitement. ” ‘Fore God! I knew it were! I knew!”

He began to run across the square toward them, pulling the woman after. She stumbled

along helplessly, and Susannah waited for the inevita- ble moment when she must fall. But

the man fell first, going heavily to his knees, and she sprawled painfully beside him on the

cobbles of the Great Road.

5

JAKE FELT SOMETHING FURRY against his ankle and looked down. Oy was crouched

beside him, looking more anxious than ever. Jake reached down and cautiously stroked his

head, as much to receive comfort as to give it. Its fur was silky, incredibly soft. For a

moment he thought the bumbler was going to run, but it only looked up at him, licked his

hand, and then looked back at the two new people. The man was trying to help the woman

to her feet and not succeeding very well. Her head craned this way and that in avid

confusion.

The man named Si had cut his palms on the cobblestones, but he took no notice. He gave

up trying to help the woman, swept off his sombrero, and held it over his chest. To Jake the

hat looked as big as a bushel basket. “We bid ye welcome, gunslinger!” he cried.

“Welcome indeed! I thought all your land had perished from the earth, so I did!”

“I thank you for your welcome,” Roland said in the High Speech. He put his hands gently on the blind woman’s upper arms. She cringed for a moment, then relaxed and allowed him

to help her up. “Put on your hat, old-timer. The sun is hot.”

He did, then just stood there, looking at Roland with shining eyes. After a moment or two,

Jake realized what that shine was. Si was crying.

“A gunslinger! I told you, Mercy! I seen the shooting-iron and told you!”

“No harriers?” she asked, as if unable to believe it. “Are you sure they ain’t harriers, Si?”

Roland turned to Eddie. “Make sure of the safety and then give her Jake’s gun.”

Eddie pulled the Ruger from his waistband, checked the safety, and then put it gingerly in

the blind woman’s hands. She gasped, almost dropped it, then ran her hands over it

wonderingly. She turned the empty sockets where her eyes had been up to the man. “A

gun!” she whispered. “My sainted hat!”

“Ay, some kind,” the old man replied dismissively, taking it from her and giving it back to Eddie, “but the gunslinger’s got a real one, and there’s a woman got another. She’s got a

brown skin, too, like my da’ said the people of Garlan had.”

Oy gave his shrill, whistling bark. Jake turned and saw more people coming up the

street—five or six in all. Like Si and Mercy, they were all old, and one of them, a woman

hobbling over a cane like a witch in a fairy-tale, looked positively ancient. As they neared,

Jake realized that two of the men were identical twins. Long white hair spilled over the

shoulders of their patched homespun shirts. Their skin was as white as fine linen, and their

eyes were pink. Albinos, he thought.

The crone appeared to be their leader. She hobbled toward Roland’s party on her cane,

staring at them with gimlet eyes as green as emeralds. Her toothless mouth was tucked

deeply into itself. The hem of the old shawl she wore fluttered in the prairie breeze. Her

eyes settled upon Roland.

“Hail, gunslinger! Well met!” She spoke the High Speech herself, and, like Eddie and

Susannah, Jake understood the words perfectly, although he guessed they would have been

gibberish to him in his own world. “Welcome to River Crossing!”

The gunslinger had removed his own hat, and now he bowed to her, tapping his throat

three times, rapidly, with his diminished right hand. “Thankee-sai, Old Mother.”

She cackled freely at this and Eddie suddenly realized Roland had at the same time made a

joke and paid a compliment. The thought which had already occurred to Susannah now

came to him: This is how he was . . . and this is what he did. Part of it, anyway.

“Gunslinger ye may be, but below your clothes you’re but another foolish man,” she said, lapsing into low speech.

Roland bowed again. “Beauty has always made me foolish, mother.”

This time she positively cawed laughter. Oy shrank against Jake’s leg. One of the albino

twins rushed forward to catch the ancient as she rocked backward within her dusty cracked

shoes. She caught her balance on her own, however, and made an imperious shooing

gesture with one hand. The albino retreated.

“Be ye on a quest, gunslinger?” Her green eyes gleamed shrewdly at him; the puckered pocket of her mouth worked in and out.

“Ay,” Roland said. “We go in search of the Dark Tower.”

The others only looked puzzled, but the old woman recoiled and forked the sign of the evil

eye—not at them, Jake realized, but to the southeast, along the path of the Beam.

“I’m sorry to hear it!” she cried. “For no one who ever went in search of that black dog ever came back! So said my grandfather, and his grandfather before him! Not ary one!”

“Ka,” the gunslinger said patiently, as if this explained everything . . . and, Jake was coming to realize, to Roland it did.

“Ay,” she agreed, “black dog ka! Well-a-well; ye’ll do as ye’re called, and live along your path, and die when it comes to the clearing in the trees. Will ye break bread with us before

you push on, gunslinger? You and your band of knights?”

Roland bowed again. “It has been long and long since we have broken bread in company

other than our own, Old Mother. We cannot stay long, but yes—we’ll eat your food with

thanks and pleasure.”

The old woman turned to the others. She spoke in a cracked and ringing voice—yet it was

the words she spoke and not the tone in which they were spoken that sent chills racing

down Jake’s back: “Behold ye, the return of the White! After evil ways and evil days, the

White comes again! Be of good heart and hold up your heads, for ye have lived to see the

wheel of ka begin to turn once more!”

6

THE OLD WOMAN, WHOSE name was Aunt Talitha, led them through the town square

and to the church with the leaning spire—it was The Church of the Blood Everlasting,

according to the faded board on the run-to-riot lawn. Written over the words, in green paint

that had faded to a ghost, was another message: DEATH TO GRAYS.

She led them through the ruined church, hobbling rapidly along the center aisle past the

splintered and overturned pews, down a short flight of stairs, and into a kitchen so different

from the ruin above that Susan- nah blinked in surprise. Here everything was neat as a pin.

The wooden floor was very old, but it had been faithfully oiled and glowed with its own

serene inner light. The black cookstove took up one whole corner. It was immaculate, and

the wood stacked in the brick alcove next to it looked both well-chosen and well-seasoned.

Their party had been joined by three more senior citizens, two women and a man who limped along on a crutch and a wooden leg. Two of the women went to the cupboards and