Gunslinger Read online

  How easily you bluff this young boy, the gunslinger told himself. Again and again his wonderful intuition—his touch—has led him to this point, and again and again you have led him on past it. And how difficult could it be—after all, he has no friends but you.

  In a sudden, simple thought (almost a vision) it came to him that all he had to do was give it over, turn around, take the boy with him, and make him the center of a new force. The Tower did not have to be obtained in this humiliating, nose-rubbing way, did it? Let his quest resume after the boy had a growth of years, when the two of them could cast the man in black aside like a cheap wind-up toy.

  Surely, he thought cynically. Surely.

  He knew with sudden coldness that turning backward would mean death for both of them—death or worse: entombment with the Slow Muties behind them. Decay of all the faculties. With, perhaps, the guns of his father living long after both of them, kept in rotten splendor as totems not unlike the unforgotten gas pump.

  Show some guts, he told himself falsely.

  He reached for the handle and began to pump it. The handcar moved away from the stone piers.

  The boy screamed: “Wait!” And began running on the diagonal, toward where the handcar would emerge nearer the darkness ahead. The gunslinger had an impulse to speed up, to leave the boy alone yet at least with an uncertainty.

  Instead, he caught him as he leaped. The heart beneath the thin shirt thrummed and fluttered as Jake clung to him.

  The end was very close now.

  XIII

  The sound of the river had become very loud, filling even their dreams with its thunder. The gunslinger, more as a whim than anything else, let the boy pump them ahead while he shot a number of the bad arrows, tethered by fine white lengths of thread, into the dark.

  The bow was also very bad, incredibly preserved but with a terrible pull and aim despite that, and the gunslinger knew nothing would improve it. Even re-stringing would not help the tired wood. The arrows would not fly far into the dark, but the last one he sent out came back wet and slick. The gunslinger only shrugged when the boy asked him how far to the water, but privately he didn’t think the arrow could have traveled more than sixty yards from the rotted bow—and lucky to get that far.

  And still the river’s thunder grew louder, closer.

  During the third waking period after the station, a spectral radiance began to grow again. They had entered a long tunnel of some weird phosphorescent rock, and the wet walls glittered and twinkled with thousands of minute starbursts. The boy called them fot-suls. They saw things in a kind of eerie, horror-house surreality.

  The brute sound of the river was channeled to them by the confining rock, magnified in its own natural amplifier. Yet the sound remained oddly constant, even as they approached the crossing point the gunslinger was sure lay ahead, because the walls were widening, drawing back. The angle of their ascent became more pronounced.

  The tracks arrowed through the new light. To the gunslinger the clumps of fot-suls looked like the captive tubes of swamp gas sometimes sold for a pretty at the Feast of Reaptide fair; to the boy they looked like endless streamers of neon tubing. But in its glow they could both see that the rock that had enclosed them so long ended up ahead in ragged twin peninsulas that pointed toward a gulf of darkness—the chasm over the river.

  The tracks continued out and over that unknowable drop, supported by a trestle aeons old. And beyond, what seemed an incredible distance, was a tiny pinprick of light, not phosphorescence or fluorescence, but the hard, true light of day. It was as tiny as a needle-prick in a dark cloth, yet weighted with frightful meaning.

  “Stop,” the boy said. “Stop for a minute. Please.”

  Unquestioning, the gunslinger let the handcar coast to a stop. The sound of the river was a steady, booming roar, coming from beneath and ahead. The artificial glow from the wet rock was suddenly hateful. For the first time he felt a claustrophobic hand touch him, and the urge to get out, to get free of this living burial, was strong and nearly undeniable.

  “We’ll go on,” the boy said. “Is that what he wants? For us to drive the handcar out over . . . that . . . and fall down?”

  The gunslinger knew it was not but said: “I don’t know what he wants.”

  They got down and approached the lip of the drop carefully. The stone beneath their feet continued to rise until, with a sudden, angling drop, the floor fell away from the tracks and the tracks continued alone, across blackness.

  The gunslinger dropped to his knees and peered down. He could dimly make out a complex, nearly incredible webwork of steel girders and struts, disappearing down toward the roar of the river, all in support of the graceful arch of the tracks across the void.

  In his mind’s eye he could imagine the work of time and water on the steel, in deadly tandem. How much support was left? Little? Hardly any? None? He suddenly saw the face of the mummy again, and the way the flesh, seemingly solid, had crumbled to powder at the effortless touch of his finger.

  “We’ll walk now,” the gunslinger said.

  He half expected the boy to balk again, but he preceded the gunslinger out onto the rails, crossing on the welded steel slats calmly, with sure feet. The gunslinger followed him out over the chasm, ready to catch him if Jake should put a foot wrong.

  The gunslinger felt a fine slick of sweat cover his skin. The trestle was rotten, very rotten. It thrummed beneath his feet with the heady motion of the river far beneath, swaying a little on unseen guy wires. We’re acrobats, he thought. Look, Mother, no net. I’m flying.

  He knelt once and examined the crossties they were walking on. They were caked and pitted with rust (he could feel the reason on his face—fresh air, the friend of corruption; they must be very close to the surface now), and a strong blow of the fist made the metal quiver sickly. Once he heard a warning groan beneath his feet and felt the steel settle preparatory to giving way, but he had already moved on.

  The boy, of course, was over a hundred pounds lighter and safe enough, unless the going became progressively worse.

  Behind them, the handcar had melted into the general gloom. The stone pier on the left extended out perhaps twenty yards. It jutted further than the one on the right, but this was also left behind and then they were alone over the gulf.

  At first it seemed that the tiny prick of daylight remained mockingly constant (perhaps even drawing away from them at the exact pace they approached it—that would be a fine bit of magic indeed), but gradually the gunslinger realized that it was widening, becoming more defined. They were still below it, but the tracks were rising to meet it.

  The boy gave a surprised grunt and suddenly lurched to the side, arms pinwheeling in slow, wide revolutions. It seemed that he tottered on the brink for a very long time indeed before stepping forward again.

  “It almost went on me,” he said softly, without emotion. “There’s a hole. Step over if you don’t want to take a quick trip to the bottom. Simon says take one giant step.”

  That was a game the gunslinger knew as Mother Says, remembered well from childhood games with Cuthbert, Jamie, and Alain, but he said nothing, only stepped over.

  “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 st
eel—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 5

  * * *

  The Gunslinger 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, Cu
thbert, 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 bone-meal 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 devilgrass 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.