He waited until he heard Miguel’s dusty snores, then led Capi into the courtyard, wincing at every clop of the mule’s hooves. Miguel never stirred, however.
Sheemie tied Capi to the end of the hitching rail (wincing again as Caprichoso brayed a tuneless greeting to the horses tied there), then walked quickly across to the main door, through which he had never in his life expected to pass. He put his hand on the great iron latch, looked back once more at the old man sleeping against the wall, then opened the door and tiptoed in.
He stood for a moment in the oblong of sun the open door admitted, his shoulders hunched all the way up to his ears, expecting a hand to settle on the scruff of his
neck (which bad-natured folk always seemed able to find, no matter how high you hunched your shoulders) at any moment; an angry voice would follow, asking what he thought he was doing here.
The foyer stood empty and silent. On the far wall was a tapestry depicting vaqueros herding horses along the Drop; against it leaned a guitar with a broken string. Sheemie’s feet sent back echoes no matter how lightly he walked. He shivered. This was a house of murder now, a bad place. There were likely ghosts.
Still, Susan was here. Somewhere.
He passed through the double doors on the far side of the foyer and entered the reception hall. Beneath its high ceiling, his footfalls echoed more loudly than ever.
Long-dead mayors looked down at him from the walls; most had spooky eyes that seemed to follow him as he walked, marking him as an intruder. He knew their eyes were only paint, but still . . .
One in particular troubled him: a fat man with clouds of red hair, a bulldog mouth, and a mean glare in his eye, as if he wanted to ask what some halfwit inn-boy was doing in the Great Hall at Mayor’s House.
“Quit looking at me that way, you big old sonuvabitch,” Sheemie whispered, and felt a little better. For the moment, at least.
Next came the dining hall, also empty, with the long trestle tables pushed back against the wall. There was the remains of a meal on one—a single plate of cold chicken and sliced bread, half a mug of ale. Looking at those few bits of food on a table that had served dozens at various fairs and festivals—that should have served dozens this very day—brought the enormity of what had happened home to Sheemie. And the sadness of it, too. Things had changed in Hambry, and would likely never be the same again.
These long thoughts did not keep him from gobbling the leftover chicken and bread, or from chasing it with what remained in the alepot. It had been a long, foodless day.
He belched, clapped both hands over his mouth, eyes making quick and guilty side-to-side darts above his dirty fingers, and then walked on.
The door at the far end of the room was latched but unlocked. Sheemie opened it and poked his head out into the corridor which ran the length of Mayor’s House.
The way was lit with gas chandeliers, and was as broad as an avenue. It was empty—at least for the moment—but he could hear whispering voices from other
rooms, and perhaps other floors, as well. He supposed they belonged to the maids and any other servants that might be about this afternoon, but they sounded very ghostly to him, just the same. Perhaps one belonged to Mayor Thorin, wandering the corridor right in front of him (if Sheemie could but see him . . . which he was glad he couldn’t). Mayor Thorin wandering and wondering what had happened to him, what this cold jellylike stuff soaking into his nightshirt might be, who—
A hand gripped Sheemie’s arm just above the elbow. He almost shrieked.
“Don’t!” a woman whispered. “For your father’s sake!”
Sheemie somehow managed to keep the scream in. He turned. And there, wearing jeans and a plain checked ranch-shirt, her hair tied back, her pale face set, her dark eyes blazing, stood the Mayor’s widow.
“S-S-Sai Thorin … I… I… I…”
There was nothing else he could think of to say. Now she’ll call for the guards o’
the watch, if there be any left, he thought. In a way, it would be a relief
“Have ye come for the girl? The Delgado girl?”
Grief had been good to Olive, in a terrible way—had made her face seem less plump, and oddly young. Her dark eyes never left his, and forbade any attempt at a lie. Sheemie nodded.
“Good. I can use your help, boy. She’s down below, in the pantry, and she’s guarded.”
Sheemie gaped, not believing what he was hearing.
“Do you think I believe she had anything to do with Hart’s murder?” Olive asked, as if Sheemie had objected to her idea. “I may be fat and not so speedy on my pins anymore, but I’m not a complete idiot. Come on, now. Seafront’s not a good place for sai Delgado just now—too many people from town know where she is.”
5
“Roland.”
He will hear this voice in uneasy dreams for the rest of his life, never quite remembering what he has dreamed, only knowing that the dreams leave him feeling ill somehow—walking restlessly, straightening pictures in loveless rooms, listening to the call to muzzein in alien town squares.
“Roland of Gilead.”
This voice, which he almost recognizes; a voice so like his own that a psychiatrist from Eddie’s or Susannah’s or Jake’s when-and-where would say it is his voice, the voice of his subconscious, but Roland knows better; Roland knows that often the voices that sound the most like our own when they speak in our heads are those of the most terrible outsiders, the most dangerous intruders.
“Roland, son of Steven.”
The ball has taken him first to Hambry and to Mayor’s House, and he would see more of what is happening there, but then it takes him away— calls him away in that strangely familiar voice, and he has to go. There is no choice because, unlike Rhea or Jonas, he is not watching the ball and the creatures who speak soundlessly within it; he is inside the ball, a part of its endless pink storm.
“Roland, come. Roland, see.”
And so the storm whirls him first up and then away. He flies across the Drop, rising and rising through stacks of air first warm and then cold, and he is not alone in the pink storm which bears him west along the Path of the Beam. Sheb flies past him, his hat cocked back on his head; he is singing “Hey Jude ” at the top of his lungs as his nicotine-stained fingers plink keys that are not there—transported by his tune, Sheb doesn’t seem to realize that the storm has ripped his piano away.
“Roland, come,”
the voice says—the voice of the storm, the voice of the glass—and Roland comes.
The Romp flies by him, glassy eyes blazing with pink light. A scrawny man in farmer’s overalls goes flying past, his long red hair streaming out behind him.
“Life for you, and for your crop, ” he says—something like that, anyway—and then he’s gone. Next, spinning like a weird windmill, comes an iron chair (to Roland it looks like a torture device) equipped with wheels, and the boy gunslinger thinks The Lady of Shadows without knowing why he thinks it, or what it means.
Now the pink storm is carrying him over blasted mountains, now over a fertile green delta where a broad river runs its oxbow squiggles like a vein, reflecting a placid blue sky that turns to the pink of wild roses as the storm passes above.
Ahead, Roland sees an uprushing column of darkness and his heart quails, but this is where the pink storm is taking him, and this is where he must go.
I want to get out, he thinks, but he’s not stupid, he realizes the truth: he may never get out. The wizard’s glass has swallowed him. He may remain in its stormy,
muddled eye forever.
I’ll shoot my way out, if I have to, he thinks, but no—he has no guns. He is naked in the storm, rushing bareass toward that virulent blue-black infection that has buried all the landscape beneath it.
And yet he hears singing.
Faint but beautiful— a sweet harmonic sound that makes him shiver and think of Susan: bird and bear and hare and fish.
Suddenly Sheemie’s mule (Caprichoso, Roland thinks, a beautiful name) goes past, galloping on thin air with his eyes as bright as firedims in the storm’s lumbre fuego. Following him, wearing a sombrera and riding a broom festooned with fluttering reap-charms, comes Rhea of the Coos. “I’ll get you, my pretty!” she screams at the fleeing mule, and then, cackling, she is gone, zooming and brooming.