Darktower 1 - The Gunslinger Read online

  The gunslinger’s face was wooden.

  “Please?” The boy’s face was drawn, and his jawline shook with suppressed agony. Through the heavy blanket of stone they still heard thunder, as steady as machines in the earth. The slice of sky they could see had itself assumed a turbulent, gothic gray above them as warm and cold currents met and warred.

  “Please, please!” The boy raised a fist, as if to strike the gunslinger’s chest.

  “No.”

  The boy’s face took on wonder. “You’re going to kill me. He killed me the first time and you are going to kill me now.”

  The gunslinger felt the lie on his lips. He spoke it:

  “You’ll be all right” And a greater lie. “I’ll take care. “

  Jake’s face went gray, and he said no more. He put an unwilling hand out, and he and the gunslinger went around the elbow-bend. They came face to face with that final rising wall and the man in black.

  He stood no more than twenty feet above them, just to the right of the waterfall that crashed and spilled from a huge ragged hole in the rock. Unseen wind rippled and tugged at his hooded robe. He held a staff in one hand. The other hand he held out to them in a mocking gesture of wel­come. He seemed a prophet, and below that rushing sky, mounted on a ledge of rock, a prophet of doom, his voice the voice of Jeremiah.

  “Gunslinger! How well you fulfill the prophecies of old! Good day and good day and good day!” He laughed, the sound echoing ever over the bellow of the falling water.

  Without a thought and seemingly without a click of motor relays, the gunslinger had drawn his pistols. The boy cowered to his right and behind, a small shadow.

  Roland fired three times before he could gain control of his traitor hands — the echoes bounced their bronze tones against the rock valley that rose around them, over the sound of the wind and water.

  A spray of granite puffed over the head of the man in black; a second to the left of his hood; a third to the right. He had missed cleanly all three times.

  The man in black laughed — a full, hearty laugh that seemed to challenge the receding echo of gunshots. “Would you kill all your answers so easily, gunslinger?”

  “Come down,” the gunslinger said. “Answers all around.”

  Again that huge, derisive laugh. “It’s not your bullets I fear, Roland. It’s your idea of answers that scares me. “

  “Come down.”

  “The other side, I think,” the man in black said. “On the other side we will hold much council.”

  His eyes flicked to Jake and he added:

  “Just the two of us.”

  Jake flinched away from him with a small, whining cry, and the man in black turned, his robe swirling in the gray air like a batwing. He disappeared into the cleft in the rock from which the water spewed at full force. The gunslinger exercised grim will and did not send a bullet after him — would you kill all your answers so easily, gunslinger?

  There was only the sound of wind and water, sounds that had been in this place of desolation for a thousand years. Yet the man in black had been here. After these twelve years, Roland had seen him close-up, spoken to him. And the man in black had laughed at him.

  On the other side we will hold much council.

  The boy looked up at him with dumbly submissive sheep’s eyes, his body trembling. For a moment the gunslinger saw the face of Alice, the girl from Tull, superimposed over Jake’s, the scar standing out on her forehead like a mute accusation, and felt brute loathing for them both (it would not occur to him until much later that both the scar on Alice’s forehead and the nail he saw spiked through Jake’s forehead in his dreams were in the same place). Jake seemed to catch a whiff of his thought and a moan was dragged from his throat. But it was short; he twisted his lips shut over it. He held the makings of a fine man, perhaps a gunslinger in his own right if given time.

  Just the two of us.

  The gunslinger felt a great and unholy thirst in some deep unknown pit of his body, a thirst no wine could touch. Worlds trembled, almost within reach of his fingers, and

  in some instinctual way he strove not to be corrupted, knowing in his colder mind that such strife was vain and always would be.

  It was noon. He looked up, letting the cloudy, unsettled daylight shine for the last time on the all-too-vulnerable sun of his own righteousness. No one ever really pays for it in silver, he thought. The price of any evil — necessary or otherwise — comes due in flesh.

  “Come with me or stay,” the gunslinger said.

  The boy only looked at him mutely. And to the gunslinger, in that final and vital moment of uncoupling from a moral principle, he ceased to be Jake and became only the boy, an impersonality to be moved and used.

  Something screamed in the windy stillness; he and the boy both heard.

  The gunslinger began, and after a moment Jake came after. Together they climbed the tumbled rock beside the steely-cold falls, and stood where the man in black had stood before them. And together they entered in where he had disappeared. The darkness swallowed them.

  THE SLOW MUTANTS

  The gunslinger spoke slowly to Jake in the rising and falling inflections of a dream:

  “There were three of us: Cuthbert, Jamie, and I. We weren’t supposed to be there, because none of us had passed from the time of children. If we had been caught, Cort would have striped us. But we weren’t. I don’t think any of the ones that went before us were caught, either. Boys must put on their fathers’ pants in private, strut them in front of the mirror, and then sneak them back on their hangers; it was like that. The father pretends he doesn’t notice the new way they are hung up, or the traces of boot-polish mustaches still under their noses. Do you see?”

  The boy said nothing. He had said nothing since they had relinquished the daylight. The gunslinger had talked hectically, feverishly, to fill his silence. He had not looked back at the lights as they passed into the lightlessness beneath the mountains, but the boy had. The gunslinger had read the failing of day in the soft mirror of Jake’s cheek:

  Now faint rose; now milk-glass; now pallid silver; now the last dusk-glow touch of evening; now nothing. The gunslinger had struck a false light and they had gone on.

  Now they were camped. No echo from the man in black returned to them. Perhaps he had stopped to rest, too. Or perhaps he floated onward and without running-lights, through nighted chambers.

  “It was held once a year in the Great Hall,” the gunslinger went on. “We called it The Hall of Grandfathers. But it was only the Great Hall.”

  The sound of dripping water came to their ears.

  “A courting rite.” The gunslinger laughed deprecatingly, and the insensate walls made the sound into a loon-like wheeze. “In the old days, the books say, it was the welcoming of spring. But civilization, you know….

  He trailed off, unable to describe the change inherent

  in that mechanized noun, the death of the romantic and its sterile, carnal revenant, living only a forced respiration of glitter and ceremony; the geometric steps of courtship during the Easter-night dance at the Great Hall which had replaced the mad scribble of love which he could only intuit dimly — hollow grandeur in the place of mean and sweeping passions which might once have erased souls.

  “They made something decadent out of it,” the gunslinger said. “A play. A game.” In his voice was all the unconscious distaste of the ascetic. His face, had there been stronger light to illumine it, would have shown change —harshness and sorrow. But his essential force had not been cut or diluted. The lack of imagination that still remained in that face was remarkable.

  “But the Ball,” the gunslinger said. “The Ball…“

  The boy did not speak.

  “There were five crystal chandeliers, heavy glass with electric lights. It was all light, it was an island of light.

  “We had sneaked into one of the old balconies, the ones that were supposed to be unsafe. But we were still boys. We were above everything, and we
could look down on it I don’t remember that any of us said anything. We only looked, and we looked for hours.

  “There was a great stone table where the gunslingers and their women sat, watching the dancers. A few of the gunslingers danced, but only a few. And they were the young ones. The other ones only sat, and it seemed to me they were half embarrassed in all that light, that civilized light. They were revered ones, the feared ones, the guardians, but they seemed like hostlers in that crowd of cavaliers with their soft women… .

  “There were four circular tables loaded with food, and they turned all the time. The cooks’ boys never stopped coming and going from seven until three the next morning. The tables rotated like clocks, and we could smell roast pork, beef, lobster, chickens, baked apples. There were ices and candies. There were great flaming skewers of meat.

  “And Marten sat next to my mother and father — I knew them even from so high above — and once she and Marten danced, slowly and revolvingly, and the others cleared the floor for them and clapped when it was over. The gunslingers did not clap, but my father stood slowly and held his hands out to her. And she went, smiling.

  “It was a moment of passage, boy. A time such as must be at the Tower itself, when things come together and hold and make power in time. My father had taken control, had been acknowledged and singled out. Marten was the acknowledger; my father was the mover. And his wife my mother, went to him, the connection between them. Betrayer.

  “My father was the last lord of light.”

  The gunslinger looked down at his hands. The boy still said nothing. His face was only thoughtful.

  “I remember how they danced,” the gunslinger said softly. “My mother and Marten the enchanter. I remember how they danced, revolving slowly together and apart, in the old steps of courtship.”

  He looked at the boy, smiling. “But it meant nothing, you know. Because power had been passed in some way that none of them knew but all understood, and my mother was locked root and rind to the holder and wielder of that power. Was it not so? She went to him when the dance was over, didn’t she? And clasped his hand? Did they applaud? Did the hall ring with it as those pansy-boys and their soft ladies applauded and lauded him? Did it? Did it?”

  Bitter water dripped distantly in the darkness. The boy said nothing.

  “I remember how they danced,” the gunslinger said softly. “I remember how they danced… . “He looked up at the unseeable stone roof and it seemed for a moment that he might scream at it, rail at it, challenge it blindly — those dumb tonnages of insensible granite that bore their tiny lives in its stone intestine.

  “What hand could have held the knife that did my father to his death?”

  “I’m tired,” the boy said wistfully.

  The gunslinger lapsed into silence, and the boy laid over and put one hand between his cheek and the stone. The little flame in front of them guttered. The gunslinger rolled a smoke. It seemed he could see the crystal light still, in the sardonic hall of his memory; hear the shout of accolade, empty in a husked land that stood even then hopeless against a gray ocean of time. The island of light hurt him bitterly, and he wished he had never held witness to it, or to his father’s cuckoldry.

  He passed smoke between his mouth and nostrils, looking down at the boy. How we make large circles in earth for ourselves, he thought. How long before the daylight again?

  He slept.

  After the sound of his breathing had become long and steady and regular, the boy opened his eyes and looked at the gunslinger with an expression that was very much like love. The last light of the fire caught in one pupil for a moment and was drowned there. He went to sleep.

  The gunslinger had lost most of his time sense in the desert, which was changeless; he lost the rest of it here in these chambers under the mountains, which were lightless. Neither of them had any means of telling time, and the concept of hours became meaningless. In a sense, they stood outside of time. A day might have been a week, or a week a day. They walked, they slept, they ate thinly. Their only companion was the steady thundering rush of the water, drilling its auger path through the stone. They followed it, drank from its flat, mineral-salted depth. At times the gunslinger thought he saw fugitive drifting lights like corpse-lamps beneath its surface, but supposed they were only projections of his brain, which had not forgotten the light. Still, he cautioned the boy not to put his feet in the water.

  The range finder in his head took them on steadily.

  The path beside the river (for it was a path; smooth, sunken to a slight concavity) led always upward, toward the river’s head. At regular intervals they came to curved stone pylons with sunken ringbolts; perhaps once oxen or stage-horses had tethered there. At each was a steel flagon holding an electric torch, but these were all barren of life and light.

  During the third period of rest-before-sleep, the boy wandered away a little. The gunslinger could hear small conversation of rattled pebbles as he moved cautiously.

  “

  “Careful,” he said. “You can’t see where you are.

  “I’m crawling. It’s … say!”

  “What is it?” The gunslinger half crouched, touching the haft of one gun.

  There was a slight pause. The gunslinger strained his eyes uselessly.

  “I think it’s a railroad,” the boy said dubiously.

  The gunslinger got up and walked slowly toward the sound of Jake’s voice, leading with one foot lightly to test for pitfalls.

  “Here.” A hand reached out and cat’s-pawed the gunslinger’s face. The boy was very good in the dark, better than the gunslinger himself. His eyes seemed to dilate until there was no color left in them: the gunslinger saw this as he struck a meager light. There was no fuel in this rock womb, and what they had brought with them was going rapidly to ash. At times the urge to strike a light was well-nigh insatiable.

  The boy was standing beside a curved rock wall that was lined with parallel metal staves off into the darkness. Each carried black bulbs that might once have been conductors of electricity. And beside and below, set only inches off the stone floor, were tracks of bright metal. What might have run on those tracks at one time? The gunslinger could only imagine black electric bullets, flying through this forever night with affrighted searchlight eyes going before. He had never heard of such things. But there were skeletons in the world, just as there were demons. He had once come upon a hermit who had gained a quasi-religious power over a miserable flock of kine-keepers by possession of an ancient gasoline pump. The hermit crouched beside it, one arm wrapped possessively around it, and preached wild, guttering, sullen sermons. He occasionally placed the still-bright steel nozzle, which was attached to a rotted rubber hose, between his legs. On the pump, in perfectly legible (although rust-clotted) letters, was a legend of unknown meaning: AMOCO. Lead Free. Amoco had become the totem of a thundergod, and they had worshipped Him with the half-mad slaughter of sheep.

  Hulks, the gunslinger thought. Only meaningless hulks in sands that once were seas.

  And now a railroad.

  “We’ll follow it,” he said.

  The boy said nothing.

  The gunslinger extinguished the light and they slept. When the gunslinger awoke the boy was up before him, sitting on one of the rails and watching him sightlessly in the dark.

  They followed the rails like blindmen, the gunslinger leading, the boy following. They slipped their feet along one rail always, also like blindmen. The steady rush of the river off to the right was their companion. They did not speak, and this went on for three periods of waking. The gunslinger felt no urge to think coherently, or to plan. His sleep was dreamless.

  During the fourth period of waking and walking, they literally stumbled on a handcar.

  The gunslinger ran into it chest-high, and the boy, walking on the other side, struck his forehead and went down with a cry.

  The gunslinger made a light immediately. “Are you all right?” The words sounded sharp, almost waspish, an
d he winced at them.

  “Yes.” The boy was holding his head gingerly. He shook it once to make sure he had told the truth. They turned to look at what they had run into.

  It was a flat square of metal that sat mutely on the tracks. There was a see-saw handle in the center of the square. The gunslinger had no immediate sense of it, but the boy knew immediately.

  “It’s a handcar.”

  “What?”

  “Handcar,” the boy said impatiently, “like in the old movies. Look.”

  He pulled himself up and went to the handle. He managed to push it down, but it was necessary to hang all his

  weight on the handle. He grunted briefly. The handcar moved a foot, with silent timelessness, on the rails.

  “It works a little hard,” the boy said, as if apologizing for it.

  The gunslinger pulled himself up and pushed the handle down. The handcar moved forward obediently, then stopped. he could feel a drive-shaft turn beneath his feet. The operation pleased him — it was the first old machine other than the pump at the way station that he had seen in years which still worked well, but it disquieted him, too. It would take them to their destination that much quicker. The curse-kiss again, he thought, and knew the man in black had meant them to find this, too.

  “Neat, huh?” The boy said, and his voice was full of loathing.

  “What are movies?” The gunslinger asked again.

  Jake still did not answer and they stood in a black silence, like in a tomb where life had fled. The gunslinger could hear his organs at work inside his body and the boy’s respiration. That was all.

  “You stand on one side. I stand on the other side,” Jake said. “You’ll have to push by yourself until it gets rolling good. Then I can help. First you push, then I push. We’ll go right along. Get it?”

  “I get it,” the gunslinger said. His hands were in helpless, despairing fists.

  “But you’ll have to push by yourself until it gets rolling good,” the boy repeated, looking at him.

  The gunslinger had a sudden vivid picture of the Great Hall a year after the spring Ball, in the shattered, hulked shards of revolt, civil strife, and invasion. It was followed with the memory of Allie, the woman from Tull with the scar, pushed and pulled by the bullets that were killing her in reflex. It was followed by Jamie’s face, blue in death, by