The Gunslinger Read online

  "Go back," Jake said, unsmiling. "You forgot to say 'May I?' "

  "Cry your pardon, but I think not."

  The crosstie the boy had stepped on had given way almost entirely and flopped downward lazily, swinging on a rotten rivet.

  Upward, still upward. It was a nightmare walk and so seemed to go on much longer than it did; the air itself seemed to thicken and become like taffy, and the gunslinger felt as if he might be swimming rather than walking. Again and again his mind tried to turn itself to thoughtful, lunatic consideration of the awful space between this trestle and the river below. His brain viewed it in spectacular detail, and how it would be: the scream of twisting, giving metal, the lurch as his body slid off to the side, the grabbing for nonexistent handholds with the fingers, the swift rattle of bootheels on treacherous, rotted steel--and then down, turning over and over, the warm spray in his crotch as his bladder let go, the rush of wind against his face, rippling his hair up in a caricature of fright, pulling his eyelids back, the dark water rushing to meet him, faster, outstripping even his own scream--

  Metal screamed beneath him and he stepped past it unhurriedly, shifting his weight, at that crucial moment not thinking of the drop, or of how far they had come, or of how far might be left. Not thinking that the boy was expendable and that the sale of his honor was now, at last, nearly negotiated. What a relief it would be when the deal was done!

  "Three ties out," the boy said coolly. "I'm gonna jump. Here! Right here! Geronimo!"

  The gunslinger saw him silhouetted for a moment against the daylight, an awkward, hunched spread-eagle, arms out as if, should all else fail, there was the possibility of flight. He landed and the whole edifice swayed drunkenly under his weight. Metal beneath them protested and something far below fell, first with a crash, then with a splash.

  "Are you over?" the gunslinger asked.

  "Yar," the boy said, "but it's very rotten. Like the ideas of certain people, maybe. I don't think it will hold you any further than where you are now. Me, but not you. Go back. Go back now and leave me alone."

  His voice was cold, but there was hysteria underneath, beating as his heart had beat when he jumped back onto the handcar and Roland had caught him.

  The gunslinger stepped over the break. One large step did it. One giant step. Mother, may I? Yes-you-may. The boy was shuddering helplessly. "Go back. I don't want you to kill me."

  "For love of the Man Jesus, walk," the gunslinger said roughly. "It's going to fall down for sure if we stand here palavering."

  The boy walked drunkenly now, his hands held out shudderingly before him, fingers splayed.

  They went up.

  Yes, it was much more rotten now. There were frequent breaks of one, two, even three ties, and the gunslinger expected again and again that they would find the long empty space between rails that would either force them back or make them walk on the rails themselves, balanced giddily over the chasm.

  He kept his eyes fixed on the daylight.

  The glow had taken on a color--blue--and as it came closer it became softer, paling the radiance of the fot-suls. Fifty yards or a hundred still to cover? He could not say.

  They walked, and now he looked at his feet, crossing from tie to tie. When he looked up again, the glow ahead had grown to a hole, and it was not just light but a way out. They were almost there.

  Thirty yards now. No more than that. Ninety short feet. It could be done. Perhaps they would have the man in black yet. Perhaps, in the bright sunlight the evil flowers in his mind would shrivel and anything would be possible.

  The sunlight was blocked out.

  He looked up, startled, peering like a mole from its hole, and saw a silhouette filling the light, eating it up, allowing only chinks of mocking blue around the outline of shoulders and the fork of crotch.

  "Hello, boys!"

  The man in black's voice echoed to them, amplified in this natural throat of stone, the sarcasm of his good cheer taking on mighty overtones. Blindly, the gunslinger sought the jawbone, but it was gone, lost somewhere, used up.

  He laughed above them and the sound crashed around them, reverberating like surf in a filling cave. The boy screamed and tottered, a windmill again, arms gyrating through the scant air.

  Metal ripped and sloughed beneath them; the rails canted through a slow and dreamy twisting. The boy plunged, and one hand flew up like a gull in the darkness, up, up, and then he hung over the pit; he dangled there, his dark eyes staring up at the gunslinger in final blind lost knowledge.

  "Help me."

  Booming, racketing: "No more games. Come now, gunslinger. Or catch me never."

  All the chips on the table. Every card up but one. The boy dangled, a living Tarot card, the Hanged Man, the Phoenician sailor, innocent lost and barely above the wave of a stygian sea.

  Wait then, wait awhile.

  "Do I go?"

  His voice is so loud, he makes it hard to think.

  "Help me. Help me, Roland."

  The trestle had begun to twist further, screaming, pulling loose from itself, giving--

  "Then I shall leave you."

  "No! You shall NOT!"

  The gunslinger's legs carried him in a sudden leap, breaking the paralysis that held him; he took a true giant's step above the dangling boy and landed in a skidding, plunging rush toward the light that offered the Tower frozen on his mind's eye in a black still life . . .

  Into sudden silence.

  The silhouette was gone, even the beat of his heart was gone as the trestle settled further, beginning its final slow dance to the depths, tearing loose, his hand finding the rocky, lighted lip of damnation; and behind him, in the dreadful silence, the boy spoke from too far beneath him.

  "Go then. There are other worlds than these."

  Then the trestle tore away, the whole weight of it; and as the gunslinger pulled himself up and through to the light and the breeze and the reality of a new ka, he twisted his head back, for a moment in his agony striving to be Janus--but there was nothing, only plummeting silence, for the boy made no cry as he fell.

  Then Roland was up, pulling himself onto the rocky escarpment that looked toward a grassy plain, toward where the man in black stood spread-legged, with arms crossed.

  The gunslinger stood drunkenly, pallid as a ghost, eyes huge and swimming beneath his forehead, shirt smeared with the white dust of his final, lunging crawl. It came to him that there would be further degradations of the spirit ahead that might make this one seem infinitesimal, and yet he would still flee it, down corridors and through cities, from bed to bed; he would flee the boy's face and try to bury it in cunts and killing, only to enter one final room and find it looking at him over a candle flame. He had become the boy; the boy had become him. He was become a werewolf of his own making. In deep dreams he would become the boy and speak the boy's strange city tongue.

  This is death. Is it? Is it?

  He walked slowly, drunkenly down the rocky hill toward where the man in black waited. Here the tracks had been worn away, under the sun of reason, and it was as if they had never been.

  The man in black pushed his hood away with the backs of both hands, laughing.

  "So!" he cried. "Not an end, but the end of the beginning, eh? You progress, gunslinger! You progress! Oh, how I admire you!"

  The gunslinger drew with blinding speed and fired twelve times. The gunflashes dimmed the sun itself, and the pounding of the explosions slammed back from the rock-faced escarpments behind them.

  "Now-now," the man in black said, laughing. "Oh, now-now- now. We make great magic together, you and I. You kill me no more than you kill yourself."

  He withdrew, walking backwards, facing the gunslinger, grinning and beckoning. "Come. Come. Come. Mother, may I? Yes-you-may."

  The gunslinger followed him in broken boots to the place of counseling.

  The

  GUNSLINGER AND

  THE MAN IN BLACK

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Gunslin
ger and the Man in Black

  I

  The man in black led him to an ancient killing ground to make palaver. The gunslinger knew it immediately: a golgotha, place-of-the-skull. And bleached skulls stared blandly up at them--cattle, coyotes, deer, rabbits, bumbler. Here the alabaster xylophone of a hen pheasant killed as she fed; there the tiny, delicate bones of a mole, perhaps killed for pleasure by a wild dog.

  The golgotha was a bowl indented into the descending slope of the mountain, and below, in easier altitudes, the gunslinger could see Joshua trees and scrub firs. The sky overhead was a softer blue than he had seen for a twelve-month, and there was an indefinable something that spoke of the sea in the not-too-great distance.

  I am in the West, Cuthbert, he thought wonderingly. If this is not Mid-World, it's close by.

  The man in black sat on an ancient ironwood log. His boots were powdered white with dust and the uneasy bonemeal of this place. He had put his hood up again, but the gunslinger could see the square shape of his chin clearly, and the shading of his jaw.

  The shadowed lips twitched in a smile. "Gather wood, gunslinger. This side of the mountains is gentle, but at this altitude, the cold still may put a knife in one's belly. And this is a place of death, eh?"

  "I'll kill you," the gunslinger said.

  "No you won't. You can't. But you can gather wood to remember your Isaac."

  The gunslinger had no understanding of the reference. He went wordlessly and gathered wood like a common cook's boy. The pickings were slim. There was no devil-grass on this side and the ironwood would not burn. It had become stone. He returned finally with a large armload of likely sticks, powdered and dusted with disintegrated bone, as if dipped in flour. The sun had sunk beyond the highest Joshua trees and had taken on a reddish glow. It peered at them with baleful indifference.

  "Excellent," the man in black said. "How exceptional you are! How methodical! How resourceful! I salute you!" He giggled, and the gunslinger dropped the wood at his feet with a crash that ballooned up bone dust.

  The man in black did not start or jump; he merely began laying the fire. The gunslinger watched, fascinated, as the ideogram (fresh, this time) took shape. When it was finished, it resembled a small and complex double chimney about two feet high. The man in black lifted his hand skyward, shaking back the voluminous sleeve from a tapered, handsome hand, and brought it down rapidly, index and pinky fingers forked out in the traditional sign of the evil eye. There was a blue flash of flame, and their fire was lighted.

  "I have matches," the man in black said jovially, "but I thought you might enjoy the magic. For a pretty, gunslinger. Now cook our dinner."

  The folds of his robe shivered, and the plucked and gutted carcass of a plump rabbit fell on the dirt.

  The gunslinger spitted the rabbit wordlessly and roasted it. A savory smell drifted up as the sun went down. Purple shadows drifted hungrily over the bowl where the man in black had chosen to finally face him. The gunslinger felt hunger begin to rumble endlessly in his belly as the rabbit browned; but when the meat was cooked and its juices sealed in, he handed the entire skewer wordlessly to the man in black, rummaged in his own nearly flat knapsack, and withdrew the last of his jerky. It was salty, painful to his mouth, and tasted like tears.

  "That's a worthless gesture," the man in black said, managing to sound angry and amused at the same time.

  "Nevertheless," the gunslinger said. There were tiny sores in his mouth, the result of vitamin deprivation, and the salt taste made him grin bitterly.

  "Are you afraid of enchanted meat?"

  "Yes indeed."

  The man in black slipped his hood back.

  The gunslinger looked at him silently. In a way, the face that the hood had hidden was an uneasy disappointment. It was handsome and regular, with none of the marks and twists which indicate a man who has been through awesome times and has been privy to great secrets. His hair was black and of a ragged, matted length. His forehead was high, his eyes dark and brilliant. His nose was nondescript. The lips were full and sensual. His complexion was pallid, as was the gunslinger's own.

  The gunslinger said finally, "I expected an older man."

  "Why? I am nearly immortal, as are you, Roland--for now, at least. I could have taken a face with which you would have been more familiar, but I elected to show you the one I was--ah--born with. See, gunslinger, the sunset."

  The sun had departed already, and the western sky was filled with sullen furnace light.

  "You won't see another sunrise for what may seem a very long time," the man in black said.

  The gunslinger remembered the pit under the mountains and then looked at the sky, where the constellations sprawled in clockspring profusion.

  "It doesn't matter," he said softly, "now."

  II

  The man in black shuffled the cards with flying hands. The deck was huge, the designs on the back convoluted. "These are Tarot cards, gunslinger--of a sort. A mixture of the standard deck to which have been added a selection of my own development. Now watch carefully."

  "What will I watch?"

  "I'm going to tell your future. Seven cards must be turned, one at a time, and placed in conjunction with the others. I've not done this since the days when Gilead stood and the ladies played at Points on the west lawn. And I suspect I've never read a tale such as yours." Mockery was creeping into his voice again. "You are the world's last adventurer. The last crusader. How that must please you, Roland! Yet you have no idea how close you stand to the Tower now, as you resume your quest. Worlds turn about your head."

  "What do you mean, resume? I never left off."

  At this the man in black laughed heartily, but would not say what he found so funny. "Read my fortune then," Roland said harshly.

  The first card was turned.

  "The Hanged Man," the man in black said. The darkness had given him back his hood. "Yet here, in conjunction with nothing else, it signifies strength, not death. You, gunslinger, are the Hanged Man, plodding ever onward toward your goal over the pits of Na'ar. You've already dropped one co-traveler into that pit, have you not?"

  The gunslinger said nothing, and the second card was turned.

  "The Sailor! Note the clear brow, the hairless cheeks, the wounded eyes. He drowns, gunslinger, and no one throws out the line. The boy Jake."

  The gunslinger winced, said nothing.

  The third card was turned. A baboon stood grinningly astride a young man's shoulder. The young man's face was turned up, a grimace of stylized dread and horror on his features. Looking more closely, the gunslinger saw the baboon held a whip.

  "The Prisoner," the man in black said. The fire cast uneasy, flickering shadows over the face of the ridden man, making it seem to move and writhe in wordless terror. The gunslinger flicked his eyes away.

  "A trifle upsetting, isn't he?" the man in black said, and seemed on the verge of sniggering.

  He turned the fourth card. A woman with a shawl over her head sat spinning at a wheel. To the gunslinger's dazed eyes, she appeared to be smiling craftily and sobbing at the same time.

  "The Lady of the Shadows," the man in black remarked. "Does she look two-faced to you, gunslinger? She is. Two faces at least. She broke the blue plate!"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I don't know." And--in this case, at least--the gunslinger thought his adversary was telling the truth.

  "Why are you showing me these?"

  "Don't ask!" the man in black said sharply, yet he smiled. "Don't ask. Merely watch. Consider this only pointless ritual if it eases you and cools you to do so. Like church."

  He tittered and turned the fifth card.

  A grinning reaper clutched a scythe with bony fingers. "Death," the man in black said simply. "Yet not for you."

  The sixth card.

  The gunslinger looked at it and felt a strange, crawling anticipation in his guts. The feeling was mixed with horror and joy, and the whole of the emotion was unnameable. It made him feel li
ke throwing up and dancing at the same time.

  "The Tower," the man in black said softly. "Here is the Tower."

  The gunslinger's card occupied the center of the pattern; each of the following four stood at one corner, like satellites circling a star.

  "Where does that one go?" the gunslinger asked.

  The man in black placed the Tower over the Hanged Man, covering it completely.

  "What does that mean?" the gunslinger asked.

  The man in black did not answer.

  "What does that mean?" he asked raggedly.

  The man in black did not answer.

  "Goddamn you!"

  No answer.

  "Then be damned to you. What's the seventh card?"

  The man in black turned the seventh. A sun rose in a luminously blue sky. Cupids and sprites sported around it. Below the sun was a great red field upon which it shone. Roses or blood? The gunslinger could not tell. Perhaps, he thought, it's both.

  "The seventh card is Life," the man in black said softly. "But not for you."

  "Where does it fit the pattern?"

  "That is not for you to know now," the man in black said. "Or for me to know. I'm not the great one you seek, Roland. I am merely his emissary." He flipped the card carelessly into the dying fire. It charred, curled, and flashed to flame. The gunslinger felt his heart quail and turn icy in his chest.

  "Sleep now," the man in black said carelessly. "Perchance to dream and that sort of thing."

  "What my bullets won't do, mayhap my hands will," the gunslinger said. His legs coiled with savage, splendid suddenness, and he flew across the fire at the other, arms outstretched. The man in black, smiling, swelled in his vision and then retreated down a long and echoing corridor. The world filled with the sound of sardonic laughter, he was falling, dying, sleeping.

  He dreamed.

  III

  The universe was void. Nothing moved. Nothing was.

  The gunslinger drifted, bemused.

  "Let's have a little light," the voice of the man in black said nonchalantly, and there was light. The gunslinger thought in a detached way that light was pretty good.

  "Now darkness overhead with stars in it. Water down below."