Stephen King – Wizard and Glass

There was an inner redoubt of dark blue glass—it was a color Jake as­sociated with the bottles fountain-pen ink came in—and a rust-hued wall-walk between the redoubt and the outer wall. That color made Susannah think of the bottles Hires root-beer had come in when she was a little girl.

The way in was blocked by a barred gate that was both huge and ethe­real: it looked like wrought iron which had been turned to glass. Each cunningly made stake was a different color, and these colors seemed to come from the inside, as if the bars were filled with some bright gas or liquid.

The travellers stopped before it. There was no sign of the turnpike be­yond it;

instead of roadway, there was a courtyard of silver glass—a huge flat mirror, in fact. Clouds floated serenely through its depths; so did the image of the occasional swooping bird. Sun reflected off this glass courtyard and ran across the green castle walls in ripples. Un the far side, the wall of the palace’s inner ward rose in a glimmery green cliff, broken by narrow loophole windows of jet-black glass.

There was also an arched entry in this wall that made Jake think of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

To the left of the main doorway was a sentry-box made of cream-colored glass shot through with hazy orange threads. Its door, painted with red stripes, stood open. The phone-booth-sized room inside was empty, although there was something on the floor which looked to Jake like a newspaper.

Above the entry, flanking its darkness, were two crouching, leering gargoyles of darkest violet glass. Their pointed tongues poked out like bruises.

The pennants atop the towers flapped like schoolyard flags.

Crows cawed over empty cornfields now a week past the Reap.

Distant, the thinny whined and warbled.

“Look at the bars of this gate,” Susannah said. She sounded breathless and awestruck. “Look very closely.”

Jake bent toward the yellow bar until his nose nearly touched it and a faint yellow stripe ran down the middle of his face. At first he saw noth­ing, and then he gasped. What he had taken for motes of some kind were creatures—living creatures—imprisoned inside the bar, swimming in tiny schools. They looked like fish in an aquarium, but they also (their heads, Jake told himself, I think it’s mostly their heads) looked oddly, disquietingly human. As if, Jake thought, he were looking into a vertical golden sea, all the ocean in a glass rod—and living myths no bigger than grains of dust swimming within it. A tiny woman with a fish’s tail and long blonde hair streaming out behind her swam to her side of the glass, seemed to peer out at the giant boy (her eyes were round, startled, and beautiful), and then flipped away again.

Jake felt suddenly dizzy and weak. He closed his eyes until the feel­ing of vertigo went away, then opened them again and looked around at the others. “Cripes! Are they all the same?”

“All different, I think,” said Eddie, who had already peered into two or three. He bent close to the purple rod, and his cheeks lit up as if in the glow of an old-

fashioned fluoroscope. “These guys here look like birds— little tiny birds.”

Jake looked and saw that Eddie was right: inside the gate’s purple up­right were flocks of birds no bigger than summer minges. They swooped giddily about in their eternal twilight, weaving over and under one an­other, their wings leaving tiny silver trails of bubbles.

“Are they really there?” Jake asked breathlessly. “Are they, Roland, or are we only imagining them?”

“I don’t know. But I know what this gate has been made to look like.”

“So do I,” Eddie said. He surveyed the shining posts, each with its own column of imprisoned light and life. Each of the gate’s wings con­sisted of six colored bars.

The one in the center—broad and flat instead of round, and made to split in two when the gate was opened—was the thir­teenth. This one was dead black, and in this one nothing moved.

Oh, maybe not that you can see, but there are things moving around in there, all right, Jake thought. There’s life in there, terrible life. And maybe there are roses, too. Drowned ones.

“It’s a Wizard’s Gate,” Eddie said. “Each bar has been made to look like one of the balls in Maerlyn’s Rainbow. Look, here’s the pink one.”

Jake leaned toward it, hands propped on his thighs. He knew what would be inside even before he saw them: horses, of courses. Tiny herds of them, galloping through that strange pink stuff that was neither light nor liquid. Horses running in search of a Drop they would never find, mayhap.

Eddie stretched his hands out to grasp the sides of the central post, the black one.

“Don’t!” Susannah called sharply.

Eddie ignored her, but Jake saw his chest stop for a moment and his lips tighten as he wrapped his hands around the black bar and waited for something—some force perhaps sent Special Delivery all the way from the Dark Tower itself—to change him, or even to strike him dead. When nothing happened, he breathed deep again, and risked a smile. “No elec­tricity, but . . .” He pulled; the gate held fast. “No give, either. I see where it splits down the middle, but I get nothing. Want to take a shot, Roland?”

Roland reached for the gate, but Jake put a hand on his arm and stopped him before the gunslinger could do more than give it a prelimi­nary shake. “Don’t bother. That’s not the way.”

“Then what is?”

Instead of answering, Jake sat down in front of the gate, near the place where this strange version of 1-70 ended, and began putting on the shoes which had been left for him. Eddie watched a moment, then sat down beside him. “I guess we ought to try it,” he said to Jake, “even though it’ll probably turn out to be just another bumhug.”

Jake laughed, shook his head, and began to tighten the laces of the blood-red Oxfords. He and Eddie both knew it was no bumhug. Not this time.

5

“Okay,” Jake said when they had all put on their red shoes (he thought they looked extraordinarily stupid, especially Eddie’s pair). “I’ll count to three, and we’ll click our heels together. Like this.” He clicked the Ox­fords together once, sharply . . .

and the gate shivered like a loosely fas­tened shutter blown by a strong wind.

Susannah cried out. There followed a low, sweet chiming sound from the Green Palace, as if the walls them­selves had vibrated.

“I guess this’ll do the trick, all right,” Eddie said. “I warn you, though, I’m not singing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’ That’s not in my contract.”

“The rainbow is here,” the gunslinger said softly, stretching his di­minished hand out to the gate.

It wiped the smile off Eddie’s face. “Yeah, I know. I’m a little scared, Roland.”

“So am I,” the gunslinger said, and indeed, Jake thought he looked pale and ill.

“Go on, sugar,” Susannah said. “Count before we all lose our nerve.” “One … two

… three.”

They clicked their heels together solemnly and in unison: tock, tock, tock. The gate shivered more violently this time, the colors in the uprights brightening perceptibly. The chime that followed was higher, sweeter— the sound of fine crystal tapped with the haft of a knife. It echoed in dreamy harmonics that made Jake shiver, half with pleasure and half with pain.

But the gate didn’t open.

“What—” Eddie began.

“I know,” Jake said. “We forgot Oy.”

“Oh Christ,” Eddie said. “I left the world I knew to watch a kid try to put booties

on a fucked-up weasel. Shoot me, Roland, before I breed.”

Roland ignored him, watching Jake closely as the boy sat down on the turnpike and called, “Oy! To me!”

The bumbler came willingly enough, and although he had surely been a wild creature before they had met him on the Path of the Beam, he al­lowed Jake to slip the red leather booties onto his paws without making trouble: in fact, once he got the idea, he stepped into the last two. When all four of the little red shoes were in place (they looked, in fact, the most like Dorothy’s ruby slippers), Oy sniffed at one of them, then looked at­tentively back at Jake.

Jake clicked his heels together three times, looking at the bumbler as he did so, ignoring the rattle of the gate and the soft chime from the walls of the Green Palace.

“You, Oy!”

“Oy!”

He rolled over on his back like a dog playing dead, then simply looked at his own feet with a kind of disgusted bewilderment. Looking at him, Jake had a sharp memory: trying to pat his stomach and rub his head at the same time, and his father making fun of him when he couldn’t do it right away.