Stephen King – Wizard and Glass

“GO!” thundered the voice from the pipes . .. except now Jake saw where it was really coming from. “COME BACK TOMORROW IF YOU LIKE, BUT GO

NOW! I WARN YOU!”

“It is Jonas, Roland must not have killed him after all,” Eddie whis­pered, but Jake knew better. He had recognized the voice. Even distorted by the amplification of the colored pipes, he had recognized the voice. How could he have ever believed it to be the voice of Blaine?

“I WARN YOU, IF YOU REFUSE—”

Oy barked, a sharp and somehow forbidding sound. The man in the equipment alcove began to turn.

Tell me, cully, Jake remembered this voice saying before its owner had discovered the dubious attractions of amplification. Tell me all you know about dipolar computers and transitive circuits. Tell me and I’ll give you a drink.

It wasn’t Jonas, and it wasn’t the Wizard of anything. It was David Quick’s grandson. It was the Tick-Tock Man.

7

Jake stared at him, horrified. The coiled, dangerous creature who had lived beneath Lud with his mates—Gasher and Hoots and Brandon and Tilly—was gone. This might have been that monster’s ruined father … or grandfather. His left eye—the one Oy had punctured with his claws— bulged white and misshapen, partly in its socket and partly on his un­shaven cheek. The right side of his head looked half-scalped, the skull showing through in a long, triangular strip. Jake had a distant, panic-darkened memory of a flap of skin falling over the side of Tick-Tock’s face, but he had been on the edge of hysteria by that point… and was again

now.

Oy had also recognized the man who had tried to kill him and was barking hysterically, head down, teeth bared, back bowed. Tick-Tock stared at him with wide, stunned eyes.

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” said a voice from behind them, and then tittered. “My friend Andrew is having another in a long series of bad days. Poor boy. I suppose I was wrong to bring him out of Lud, but he just looked so lost…” The owner of the voice tittered again.

Jake swung around and saw that there was now a man sitting in the middle of the great throne, with his legs casually crossed in front of him. He was wearing jeans, a dark jacket that belted at the waist, and old, run­down cowboy boots. On his jacket was a button that showed a pig’s head with a bullethole between the eyes. In his lap this newcomer held a draw­string bag. He rose, standing in the seat of the throne like a child in daddy’s chair, and the smile dropped away from his face like loose skin. Now his eyes blazed, and his lips parted over vast, hungry teeth.

“Get them, Andrew! Get them! Kill them! Every sister-fucking one of them!”

“My life for you!” the man in the alcove screamed, and for the first time Jake saw the machine-gun propped in the comer. Tick-Tock sprang for it and snatched it up.

“My life for you!”

He turned, and Oy was on him once again, leaping forward and up­ward, sinking his teeth deep into Tick-Tock’s left thigh, just below the crotch.

Eddie and Susannah drew in unison, each raising one of Roland’s big guns. They fired in concert, not even the smallest overlap in the sound of their shots. One of them tore off the top of Tick-Tock’s miserable head, buried itself in the equipment, and created a loud but mercifully brief snarl of feedback. The other took him in the throat.

He staggered forward one step, then two. Oy dropped to the floor and backed away from him, snarling. A third step took Tick-Tock out into the throneroom proper. He raised his arms toward Jake, and the boy could read Ticky’s hatred in his remaining green eye; the boy thought he could hear the man’s last, hateful thought: Oh, you fucking little squint—

Then Tick-Tock collapsed forward, as he had collapsed in the Cradle of the Grays

. . . only this time he would rise no more.

“Thus fell Lord Perth, and the earth did shake with that thunder,” said the man on

the throne.

Except he’s not a man, Jake thought. Not a man at all. We’ve found the Wizard at last, I think. And I’m pretty sure I know what’s in the bag he has.

“Marten,” Roland said. He held out his left hand, the one which was still whole.

“Marten Broadcloak. After all these years. After all these centuries.”

“Want this, Roland?”

Eddie put the gun he had used to kill the Tick-Tock Man in Roland’s hand. A tendril of blue smoke was still rising from the barrel. Roland looked at the old revolver as if he had never seen it before, then slowly lifted it and pointed it at the grinning, rosy-cheeked figure sitting cross-legged on the Green Palace’s throne.

“Finally,” Roland breathed, thumbing back the trigger. “Finally in my sights.”

8

“That six-shooter will do you no good, as I think you know,” the man on the throne said. “Not against me. Only misfires against me, Roland, old fellow. How’s the family, by the way? I seem to have lost touch with them over the years. I was always such a lousy correspondent. Someone ought to take a hosswhip to me, aye, so they should!”

He threw back his head and laughed. Roland pulled the trigger of the gun in his hand. When the hammer fell there was only a dull click.

“Toadjer,” the man on the throne said. “I think you must have gotten some of those wet slugs in there by accident, don’t you? The ones with the flat powder? Good for blocking the sound of the thinny, but not so good for shooting old wizards, are they? Too bad. And your hand, Roland, look at your hand! Short a couple of fingers, by the look. My, this has been hard on you, hasn’t it? Things could get easier, though. You and your friends could have a fine, fruitful life—and, as Jake would say, that is the truth. No more lobstrosities, no more mad trains, no more disquiet­ing—not to mention dangerous—trips to other worlds. All you have to do is give over this stupid and hopeless quest for the Tower.”

“No,” Eddie said.

“No,” Susannah said.

“No,” Jake said.

“No!” Oy said, and added a bark.

The dark man on the green throne continued to smile, unperturbed. “Roland?” he asked. “What about you?” Slowly, he raised the drawstring bag. It looked dusty and old. It hung from the wizard’s fist like a teardrop, and now the thing in its pouch began to pulse with pink light. “Cry off, and they need never see what’s inside this—they need never see the last scene of that sad long-ago play. Cry off.

Turn from the Tower and go your way.”

“No,” Roland said. He began to smile, and as his smile broadened, that of the man sitting on the throne began to falter. “You can enchant my guns, those of this world, I reckon,” he said.

“Roland, I don’t know what you’re thinking of, laddie, but I warn you not to—”

“Not to cross Oz the Great? Oz the Powerful? But I think I will, Marten … or Maerlyn … or whoever you call yourself now…”

“Flagg, actually,” the man on the throne said. “And we’ve met be­fore.” He smiled.

Instead of broadening his face, as smiles usually did, it contracted Flagg’s features into a narrow and spiteful grimace. “In the wreck of Gilead. You and your surviving pals—that laughing donkey Cuthbert Allgood made one of your party, I remember, and DeCurry, the fellow with the birthmark, made another—were on your way west, to seek the Tower. Or, in the parlance of Jake’s world, you were off to see the Wizard. I know you saw me, but I doubt you knew until now that I saw you, as well.”

“And will again, I reckon,” Roland said. “Unless, that is, I kill you now and put an end to your interference.”

Still holding his own gun out in his left hand, he went for the one tucked in the waistband of his jeans—Jake’s Ruger, a gun from another world and perhaps immune to this creature’s enchantments—with his right. And he was fast as he had always been fast, his speed blinding.

The man on the throne shrieked and cringed back. The bag fell from his lap, and the glass ball—once held by Rhea, once held by Jonas, once held by Roland himself—slipped out of its mouth. Smoke, green this time instead of red, billowed from the slots in the arms of the throne. It rose in obscuring fumes. Yet Roland still might have shot the figure disappearing into the smoke if he had made a clean draw. He didn’t, however; the Ruger slid in the grip of his reduced hand, then twisted. The front sight caught on his belt-buckle. It took only an extra quarter-second for him to free the snag, but that was the quarter-second he had needed. He