Stephen King – The Waste Lands

“Ay,” she agreed quickly. “You’ll keep your own counsel. Best that such as us not know.”

“What of the city?” Roland prompted. “What do you know of Lud?”

“Little now, but what we know, ye shall hear.” And she poured herself another cup of

coffee.

9

IT WAS THE TWINS, Bill and Till, who actually did most of the talking, one taking up

the tale smoothly whenever the other left off. Every now and then Aunt Talitha would add

something or correct something, and the twins would wait respectfully until they were sure

she was done. Si didn’t speak at all—merely sat with his untouched coffee in front of him,

plucking at the pieces of straw which bristled up from the wide brim of his sombrero.

They knew little, indeed, Roland realized quickly, even about the history of their own

town (nor did this surprise him; in these latter days, memories faded rapidly and all but the

most recent past seemed not to exist), but what they did know was disturbing. Roland was

not surprised by this, either.

In the days of their great-great-grandparents, River Crossing had been much the town

Susannah had imagined: a trade-stop at the Great Road, modestly prosperous, a place

where goods were sometimes sold but more often exchanged. It had been at least nominally

part of River Barony, although even then such things as Baronies and Estates o’ Land had

been passing.

There had been buffalo-hunters in those days, although the trade had been dying out; the

herds were small and badly mutated. The meat of these mutant beasts was not poison, but it

had been rank and bitter. Yet River Crossing, located between a place they simply called

The Land- ing and the village of Jimtown, had been a place of some note. It was on the

Great Road and only six days travel from the city by land and three by barge. “Unless the

river were low,” one of the twins said. “Then it took longer, and my gran’da said there was

times when there was barges grounded all the way upriver to Tom’s Neck.”

The old people knew nothing of the city’s original residents, of course, or the technologies

they had used to build the towers and turrets; these were the Great Old Ones, and their

history had been lost in the furthest reaches of the past even when Aunt Talitha’s

great-great-grandfa- ther had been a boy.

“The buildings are still standing,” Eddie said. “I wonder if the machines the Great Golden Oldies used to build them still run.”

“Mayhap,” one of the twins said. “If so, young fella, there don’t be ary man or woman that lives there now who’d still know how to run em … or so I believe, so I do.”

“Nay,” his brother said argumentatively, “I doubt the old ways are entirely lost to the Grays ‘n Pubes, even now.” He looked at Eddie. “Our da’ said there was once electric

candles in the city. There are those who say they mought still burn.”

“Imagine that,” Eddie replied wonderingly, and Susannah pinched his leg, hard, under the table.

“Yes,” the other twin said. He spoke seriously, unaware of Eddie’s sarcasm. “You pushed a button and they came on—bright, heatless can- dles with ary wicks or reservoirs for oil.

And I’ve heard it said that once, in the old days, Quick, the outlaw prince, actually Hew up

into the sky in a mechanical bird. But one of its wings broke and he died in a great fall, like

Icarus.”

Susannah’s mouth dropped open. “You know the story of Icarus?”

“Ay, lady,” he said, clearly surprised she should find this strange. “He of the beeswax wings.”

“Children’s stories, both of them,” Aunt Talitha said with a sniff. “I know the story of the endless lights is true, for I saw them with my own eyes when I was but a green girl, and

they may still glow from time to time, ay; there are those I trust who say they’ve seen diem

on clear nights, although it’s been long years since I have myself. But no man ever flew, not

even the Great Old Ones.”

Nonetheless, there were strange machines in the city, built to do peculiar and sometimes

dangerous things. Many of them might still run, but the elderly twins reckoned that none

now in the city knew how to start them up, for they hadn’t been heard in years.

Maybe that could change, though, Eddie thought, his eyes gleaming. If, that is, an

enterprising, travel-minded young man with a little knowl- edge of strange machinery and

endless lights came along. It could be just a matter of finding the ON switches. I mean, it

really could be that simple. Or maybe they just blew a bunch of fuses—think of that,

friends and neighbors! Just replace half a dozen 400-amp Busses and light the whole place

up like a Reno Saturday night!

Susannah elbowed him and asked, in a low voice, what was so funny. Eddie shook his

head and put a finger to his lips, earning an irritated look from the love of his life. The

albinos, meanwhile, were continuing their story, handing its thread back and forth with the

unconscious ease which probably nothing but lifetime twinship can provide.

Four or five generations ago, they said, the city had still been quite heavily populated and

reasonably civilized, although the residents drove wagons and buckboards along the wide

boulevards the Great Old Ones had constructed for their fabulous horseless vehicles. The

city-dwellers were artisans and what the twins called “manufactories,” and trade both on the river and over it had been brisk.

“Over it?” Roland asked.

“The bridge over the Send still stands,” Aunt Talitha said, “or did twenty year ago.”

“Ay, old Bill Muffin and his boy saw it not ten year agone,” Si agreed, making his first contribution to the conversation.

“What sort of bridge?” the gunslinger asked.

“A great thing of steel cables,” one of the twins said. “It stands in the sky like the web of some great spider.” He added shyly: “I should like to see it again before I die.”

“Probably fallen in by now,” Aunt Talitha said dismissively, “and good riddance. Devil’s work.” She turned to the twins. “Tell them what’s happened since, and why the city’s so dangerous now—apart from any haunts that may den there, that is, and I’ll warrant there’s a

power of em. These folks want to get on, and the sun’s on the wester.”

10

THE REST OF THE story was but another version of a tale Roland of Gilead had heard

many times and had, in some measure, lived through himself. It was fragmentary and

incomplete, undoubtedly shot through with myth and misinformation, its linear progress

distorted by the odd changes—both temporal and directional—which were now taking

place in the world, and it could be summed up in a single compound sentence: Once there

was a world we knew, but that world has moved on.

These old people of River Crossing knew of Gilead no more than Roland knew of the

River Barony, and the name of John Parson, the man who had brought ruin and anarchy on

Roland’s land, meant nothing to them, but all stories of the old world’s passing were

similar . . . too similar, Roland thought, to be coincidence.

A great civil war—perhaps in Garlan, perhaps in a more distant land called Porla—had

erupted three, perhaps even four hundred years ago. Its ripples had spread slowly outward,

pushing anarchy and dissension ahead of them. Few if any kingdoms had been able to stand

against those slow waves, and anarchy had come to this part of the world as surely as night

follows sunset. At one time, whole armies had been on the roads, sometimes in advance,

sometimes in retreat, always confused and without long-term goals. As time passed, they

crumbled into smaller groups, and these degenerated into roving bands of harriers. Trade

faltered, then broke down entirely. Travel went from a matter of inconvenience to one of

danger. In the end, it became almost impossible. Communication with the city thinned

steadily and had all but ceased a hundred and twenty years ago.

Like a hundred other towns Roland had ridden through—first with Cuthbert and the other

gunslingers cast out of Gilead, then alone, in pursuit of the man in black—River Crossing

had been cut off and thrown on its own resources.

At this point Si roused himself, and his voice captured the travellers at once. He spoke in

the hoarse, cadenced tones of a lifelong teller of tales—one of those divine fools born to

merge memory and mendacity into dreams as airily gorgeous as cobwebs strung with drops

of dew.

“We last sent tribute to the Barony castle in the time of my greatgran’da,” he said.

“Twenty-six men went with a wagon of hides—there was no hard coin anymore by then, o’

course, and ’twas the best they could do. It was a long and dangerous journey of almost