seashell biting against the edge of his jaw almost deep enough to draw blood. He managed
to drink from the waterskin, and then he crawled back to the place where he had awakened.
There was a Joshua tree twenty yards up the slope—it was stunted, but it would offer at
least some shade.
To Roland the twenty yards looked like twenty miles.
Nonetheless, he laboriously pushed what remained of his possessions into that little
puddle of shade. He lay there with his head in the grass, already fading toward what could
be sleep or unconsciousness or death. He looked into the sky and tried to judge the time.
Not noon, but the size of the puddle of shade in which he rested said noon was close. He
held on a moment longer, turning his right arm over and bringing it close to his eyes,
looking for the telltale red lines of infection, of some poison seeping steadily toward the
middle of him.
The palm of his hand was a dull red. Not a good sign.
I jerk off left-handed, he thought, at least that’s some- thing.
Then darkness took him, and he slept for the next sixteen hours with the sound of I he
Western Sea pounding ceaselessly in his dreaming ears.
3
When the gunslinger awoke again the sea was dark but there was faint light in the sky to
the east. Morning was on its way. He sat up and waves of dizziness almost overcame him.
He bent his head and waited.
When the faintness had passed, he looked at his hand. It was infected, all right—a tell-tale
red swelling that spread up the palm and to the wrist. It stopped there, but already he could
see the faint beginnings of other red lines, which would lead eventually to his heart and kill
him. He felt hot, feverish.
I need medicine,he thought. But there is no medicine here.
Had he come this far just to die, then? He would not. And if he were to die in spite of his
determination, he would die on his way to the Tower.
How remarkable you are, gunslinger!the man in black tittered inside his head. How
indomitable! How romantic in your stupid obsession!
“Fuck you,” he croaked, and drank. Not much water left, either. There was a whole sea in
front of him, for all the good it could do him; water, water everywhere, but not a drop to
drink. Never mind.
He buckled on his gunbelts, tied them—this was a process which took so long that before
he was done the first faint light of dawn had brightened to the day’s actual prologue—and
then tried to stand up. He was not convinced he could do it until it was done.
Holding to the Joshua tree with his left hand, he scooped up the not-quite-empty waterskin
with his right arm and slung it over his shoulder. Then his purse. When he straightened the
faintness washed over him again and he put his head down, waiting, willing.
The faintness passed.
Walking with the weaving, wavering steps of a man in the last stages of ambulatory
drunkenness, the gunslinger made his way back down to the strand. He stood, looking at an
ocean as dark as mulberry wine, and then took the last of his jerky from his purse. He ate
half, and this time both mouth and stomach accepted a little more willingly. He turned and
ate the other half as he watched the sun come up over the mountains where Jake had
died—first seeming to catch on the cruel and treeless teeth of those peaks, then rising
above them.
Roland held his face to the sun, closed his eyes, and smiled. He ate the rest of his jerky.
He thought: Very well. I am now a man with no food, with two less fingers and one less toe
than I was born with; I am a gunslinger with shells which may not fire; I am sicken- ing
from a monster’s bite and have no medicine; I have a day’s water if I’m lucky; I may be able
to walk perhaps a dozen miles if I press myself to the last extremity. I am, in short, a man on the edge of everything.
Which way should he walk? He had come from the east; he could not walk west without
the powers of a saint or a savior. That left north and south.
North.
That was the answer his heart told. There was no ques- tion in it.
North.
The gunslinger began to walk.
4
He walked for three hours. He fell twice, and the second time he did not believe he would
be able to get up again. Then a wave came toward him, close enough to make him
remember his guns, and he was up before he knew it, standing on legs that quivered like
stilts.
He thought he had managed about four miles in those three hours. Now the sun was
growing hot, but not hot enough to explain the way his head pounded or the sweat pouring
down his face; nor was the breeze from the sea strong enough to explain the sudden fits of
shuddering which some- times gripped him, making his body lump into gooseflesh and his
teeth chatter.
Fever, gunslinger,the man in black tittered. What’s left inside you has been touched afire.
The red lines of inlet lion were more pronounced now; they had marched upward from his
right wrist halfway to his elbow.
He made another mile and drained his waterbag dry. He tied it around his waist with the
other. The landscape was monotonous and unpleasing. The sea to his right, the moun- tains
to his left, the gray, shell-littered sand under the feet of his cut-down boots. The waves
came and went. He looked for the lobstrosities and saw none. He walked out of nowhere toward nowhere, a man from another time who, it seemed, had reached a point of pointless
ending.
Shortly before noon he fell again and knew he could not get up. This was the place, then.
Here. This was the end, after all.
On his hands and knees, he raised his head like a groggy fighter . . . and some distance
ahead, perhaps a mile, perhaps three (it was difficult to judge distances along the
unchanging reach of the strand with the fever working inside him, making his eyeballs
pulse in and out), he saw something new. Some- thing which stood upright on the beach.
What was it?
(three)
Didn’t matter.
(three is the number of your fate)
The gunslinger managed to get to his feet again. He croaked something, some plea which
only the circling sea-birds heard (and how happy they would be to gobble my eyes from my
head, he thought, how happy to have such a tasty bit!), and walked on, weaving more seriously now, leaving tracks behind him that were weird loops and swoops.
He kept his eyes on whatever it was that stood on the strand ahead. When his hair fell in his
eyes he brushed it aside. It seemed to grow no closer. The sun reached the roof of the sky,
where it seemed to remain far too long. Roland imagined he was in the desert again,
somewhere between the last out-lander’s hut
(the musical fruit the more you eat the more you toot)
and the way-station where the boy
(your Isaac)
had awaited his coming.
His knees buckled, straightened, buckled, straightened again. When his hair fell in his eyes
once more he did not bother to push it back; did not have the strength to push it back. He
looked at the object, which now cast a narrow shadow back toward the upland, and kept
walking.
He could make it out now, fever or no fever.
It was a door.
Less than a quarter of a mile from it, Roland’s knees buckled again and this time he could not stiffen their hinges. He fell, his right hand dragged across gritty sand and shells, the
stumps of his fingers screamed as fresh scabs were scored away. The stumps began to
bleed again.
So he crawled. Crawled with the steady rush, roar, and retreat of the Western Sea in his
ears. He used his elbows and his knees, digging grooves in the sand above the twist of dirty
green kelp which marked the high-tide line. He supposed the wind was still blowing—it
must be, for the chills continued to whip through his body—but the only wind he could
hear was the harsh gale which gusted in and out of his own lungs.
The door grew closer.
Closer.
At last, around three o’clock of that long delirious day, with his shadow beginning to grow
long on his left, he reached it. He sat back on his haunches and regarded it wearily.
It stood six and a half feet high and appeared to be made of solid ironwood, although the
nearest ironwood tree must grow seven hundred miles or more from here. The doorknob