The Waste Lands Read online

  Eddie looked down at the jawbone with widening eyes. Orange firelight danced on its ancient curves and hoodoo teeth. "Speaking Demon? Do you mean that thing?"

  "No," he said. "Yes. Both. Listen and you shall understand."

  He told them about the inhuman groans he'd heard coming from the earth beyond the cellar; how he had seen sand running from between two of the old blocks which made up the cellar walls. He told them of approaching the hole that was appearing there as Jake screamed for him to come up.

  He had commanded the demon to speak . . . and so the demon had, in the voice of Allie, the woman with the scar on her forehead, the woman who had kept the bar in Tull. Go slow past the Drawers, gunslinger. While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.

  "The Drawers?" Susannah asked, startled.

  "Yes." Roland looked at her closely. "That means something to you, doesn't it?"

  "Yes . . . and no."

  She spoke with great hesitation. Some of it, Roland divined, was simple reluctance to speak of things which were painful to her. He thought most of it, however, was a desire not to confuse issues which were already confused by saying more than she actually knew. He admired that. He admired her.

  "Say what you can be sure of," he said. "No more than that."

  "All right. The Drawers was a place Detta Walker knew about. A place Detta thought about. It's a slang term, one she picked up from listening to the grownups when they sat out on the porch and drank beer and talked about the old days. It means a place that's spoiled, or useless, or both. There was something in the Drawers--in the idea of the Drawers--that called to Detta. Don't ask me what; I might have known once, but I don't anymore. And don't want to.

  "Detta stole my Aunt Blue's china plate--the one my folks gave her for a wedding present--and took it to the Drawers--her Drawers--to break it. That place was a gravel-pit filled with trash. A dumping-ground. Later on, she sometimes picked up boys at roadhouses."

  Susannah dropped her head for a moment, her lips pressed tightly together. Then she looked up again and went on.

  "White boys. And when they took her back to their cars in the parking lot, she cock-teased them and then ran off. Those parking lots . . . they were the Drawers, too. It was a dangerous game, but she was young enough, quick enough, and mean enough to play it to the hilt and enjoy it. Later, in New York, she'd go on shoplifting expeditions . . . you know about that. Both of you. Always to the fancy stores--Macy's, Gimbel's, Bloomingdale's--and steal trinkets. And when she made up her mind to go on one of those sprees, she'd think: I'm goan to the Drawers today. Goan steal me some shit fum de white folks. Goan steal me sumpin forspecial and den break dat sumbitch."

  She paused, lips trembling, looking into the fire. When she looked around again, Roland and Eddie saw tears standing in her eyes.

  "I'm crying, but don't let that fool you. I remember doing those things, and I remember enjoying them. I guess I'm crying because I know I'd do it all again, if the circumstances were right."

  Roland seemed to have regained some of his old serenity, his weird equilibrium. "We have a proverb in my country, Susannah: 'The wise thief always prospers.' "

  "I don't see nothing wise about stealing a bunch of paste jewelry," she said sharply.

  "Were you ever caught?"

  "No--"

  He spread his hands as if to say, There you have it.

  "So for Detta Walker, the Drawers were bad places?" Eddie asked. "Is that right? Because it doesn't exactly feel right."

  "Bad and good at the same time. They were powerful places, places where she ... she reinvented herself, I suppose you could say . . . but they were lost places, too. And this is all off the subject of Roland's ghost-boy, isn't it?"

  "Maybe not," Roland said. "We had Drawers as well, you see, in my world. It was slang for us, too, and the meanings are very similar."

  "What did it mean to you and your friends?" Eddie asked.

  "That varied slightly from place to place and situation to situation. It might mean a trash-midden. It might mean a whorehouse or a place where men came to gamble or chew devil-weed. But the most common meaning that I know is also the simplest."

  He looked at them both.

  "The Drawers are places of desolation," he said. "The Drawers are the waste lands."

  15

  THIS TIME SUSANNAH THREW more wood on the fire. In the south, Old Mother blazed on brilliantly, not flickering. She knew from her school studies what that meant: it was a planet, not a star. Venus? she wondered. Or is the solar system of which this world is a part as different as everything else?

  Again that feeling of unreality--the feeling that all this must surely be a dream--washed over her.

  "Go on," she said. "What happened after the voice warned you about the Drawers and the little boy?"

  "I punched my hand into the hole the sand had come from, as I was taught to do if such a thing ever happened to me. What I plucked forth was a jawbone . . . but not this one. The jawbone I took from the wall of the way station was much larger; from one of the Great Old Ones, I have almost no doubt." "What happened to it?" Susannah asked quietly.

  "One night I gave it to the boy," Roland said. The fire painted his cheeks with hot orange highlights and dancing shadows. "As a protection--a kind of talisman. Later I felt it had served its purpose and threw it away"

  "So whose jawbone you got there, Roland?" Eddie asked.

  Roland held it up, looked at it long and thoughtfully, and let it drop back. "Later, after Jake . . . after he died . . . I caught up with the men I had been chasing."

  "With Walter," Susannah said.

  "Yes. We held palaver, he and I ... long palaver. I fell asleep at some point, and when I woke up, Walter was dead. A hundred years dead at least, and probably more. There was nothing left of him but bones, which was fitting enough, since we were in a place of bones."

  "Yeah, it must have been a pretty long palaver, all right," Eddie said dryly.

  Susannah frowned slightly at this, but Roland only nodded. "Long and long," he said, looking into the fire.

  "You came to in the morning and reached the Western Sea that very evening," Eddie said. "That night the lobstrosities came, right?"

  Roland nodded again. "Yes. But before I left the place where Walter and I had spoken . . . or dreamed . . . or whatever it was we did . . . I took this from the skull of his skeleton." He lifted the bone and the orange light again skated off the teeth.

  Walter's jawbone, Eddie thought, and felt a little chill work through him: The jawbone of the man in black. Remember this, Eddie my boy, the next time you get to thinking Roland's maybe just another one of the guys. He's been carrying it around with him all this time like some kind of a . . . a cannibal's trophy. Jee-sus.

  "I remember what I thought when I took it," Roland said. "I remember very well; it is the only memory I have of that time which hasn't doubled on me. I thought, 'It was bad luck to throw away what I found when I found the boy. This will replace it.' Only then I heard Walter's laughter--his mean, tittery laughter. I heard his voice, too."

  "What did he say?" Susannah asked.

  "'Too late, gunslinger,' " Roland said. "That's what he said. 'Too late--your luck will be bad from now until the end of eternity--that is your ka.' "

  16

  "ALL RIGHT," EDDIE SAID at last. "I understand the basic paradox. Your memory is divided--"

  "Not divided. Doubled."

  "All right; it's almost the same thing, isn't it?" Eddie grasped a twig and made his own little drawing in the sand:

  He tapped the line on the left. "This is your memory of the time before you got to the way station--a a single track."

  "Yes."

  He tapped the line on the right. "And after you came out on the far side of the mountains in the place of bones . . . the place where Walter was waiting for you. Also a single track."

  "Yes."

  Now Eddie first indicated the middle area and then drew
a rough circle around it.

  "That's what you've got to do, Roland-close this double track off. Build a stockade around it in your mind and then forget it. Because it doesn't mean anything, it doesn't change anything, it's gone, it's done--"

  "But it isn't." Roland held up the bone. "If my memories of the boy Jake are false--and I know they are--how can I have this? I took it to replace the one I threw away . . . but the one I threw away came from the cellar of the way station, and along the track I know is true, I never went down cellar! I never spoke with the demon! I moved on alone, with fresh water and nothing else!"

  "Roland, listen to me," Eddie said earnestly. "If that jawbone you're holding was the one from the way station, that would be one thing. But isn't it possible that if you hallucinated that whole thing--the way station, the kid, the Speaking Demon--then maybe you took Walter's jawbone because--"

  "It was no hallucination," Roland said. He looked at them both with his faded blue bombardier's eyes and then did something neither expected . . . something Eddie would have sworn Roland did not know he meant to do himself.

  He threw the jawbone into the fire.

  17

  FOR A MOMENT IT only lay there, a white relic bent in a ghostly half-grin. Then it suddenly blazed red, washing the clearing with dazzling scarlet light. Eddie and Susannah cried out and threw their hands up to shield their eyes from that burning shape.

  The bone began to change. Not to melt, but to change. The teeth which leaned out of it like gravestones began to draw together in clumps. The mild curve of the upper arc straightened, then snubbed down at the tip.

  Eddie's hands fell into his lap and he stared at the bone which was no longer a bone with gape-jawed wonder. It was now the color of burning steel. The teeth had become three inverted V's, the middle one larger than those on the ends. And suddenly Eddie saw what it wanted to become, just as he had seen the slingshot in the wood of the stump.

  He thought it was a key.

  You must remember the shape, he thought feverishly. You must, you must.

  His eyes traced it desperately--three V's, the one in the center larger and deeper than the two on the end. Three notches . . . and the one closest the end had a squiggle, the shallow shape of a lower-case s . . .

  Then the shape in the flames changed again. The bone which had become something like a key drew inward, concentrating itself into bright, overlapping petals and folds as dark and velvety as a moonless summer midnight. For a moment Eddie saw a rose--a triumphant rose that might have bloomed in the dawn of this world's first day, a thing of depthless, timeless beauty. His eye saw, and his heart was opened. It was as if all love and life had suddenly risen from Roland's dead artifact; it was there in the fire, burning out in triumph and some wonderful, inchoate defiance, declaring that despair was a mirage and death a dream.

  The rose! he thought incoherently. First the key, then the rose! Behold! Behold the opening of the way to the Tower!

  There was a thick cough from the fire. A fan of sparks twisted outwards. Susannah screamed and rolled away, beating at the orange flecks on her dress as the flames gushed upward toward the starry sky. Eddie didn't move. He sat transfixed in his vision, held in a cradle of wonder which was both gorgeous and terrible, unmindful of the sparks which danced across his skin. Then the flames sank back.

  The bone was gone.

  The key was gone.

  The rose was gone.

  Remember, he thought. Remember the rose . . . and remember the Shape of the key.

  Susannah was sobbing with shock and terror, but he ignored her for the moment and found the stick with which he and Roland had both drawn. And in the dirt he made this shape with a shaking hand:

  18

  "WHY DID YOU DO it?" Susannah asked at last. "Why, for God's sake--and what was it?"

  Fifteen minutes had gone by. The fire had been allowed to burn low; the scattered embers had either been stamped out or had gone out on their own. Eddie sat with his arms about his wife: Susannah sat before him, with her back against his chest. Roland was off to one side, knees hugged to his chest, looking moodily into the orange-red coals. So far as Eddie could tell, neither of them had seen the bone change. They had both seen it glowing superhot, and Roland had seen it explode (or had it imploded? to Eddie that seemed closer to what he had seen), but that was all. Or so he believed; Roland, however, sometimes kept his own counsel, and when he decided to play his cards close to the vest, he played them very close indeed, Eddie knew that from bitter experience. He thought of telling them what he had seen--or thought he had seen--and decided to play his own cards tight and close-up, at least for the time being.

  Of the jawbone itself there was no sign--not even a splinter.

  "I did it because a voice spoke in my mind and told me I must," Roland said. "It was the voice of my father; of all my fathers. When one hears such a voice, not to obey--and at once--is unthinkable. So I was taught. As to what it was, I can't say ... not now, at least. I only know that the bone has spoken its final word. I have carried it all this way to hear it."

  Or to see it, Eddie thought, and again: Remember. Remember the rose. And remember the shape of the key.

  "It almost flash-fried us!" She sounded both tired and exasperated.

  Roland shook his head. "I think it was more like the sort of firework the barons used to sometimes shoot into the sky at their year-end parties. Bright and startling, but not dangerous."

  Eddie had an idea. "The doubling in your mind, Roland--is it gone? Did it leave when the bone exploded, or whatever it did?"

  He was almost convinced that it had; in the movies he'd seen, such rough shock-therapy almost always worked. But Roland shook his head.

  Susannah shifted in Eddie's arms. "You said you were beginning to understand."

  Roland nodded. "I think so, yes. If I'm right, I fear for Jake. Wherever he is, whenever he is, I fear for him."

  "What do you mean?" Eddie asked.

  Roland got up, went to his roll of hides, and began to spread them out. "Enough stories and excitement for one night. It's time to sleep. In the morning we'll follow the bear's backtrail and see if we can find the portal he was set to guard. I'll tell you what I know and what I believe has happened--what I believe is happening still--along the way."

  With that he wrapped himself in an old blanket and a new deerskin, rolled away from the fire, and would say no more.

  Eddie and Susannah lay down together. When they were sure the gunslinger must be asleep, they made love. Roland heard them going about it as he lay wakeful and heard their quiet after-love talk. Most of it was about him. He lay quietly, open eyes looking into the darkness long after their talk had ceased and their breathing had evened out into a single easy note.

  It was, he thought, fine to be young and in love. Even in the graveyard which this world had become, it was fine.

  Enjoy it while you can, he thought, because there is more death ahead. We have come to a stream of blood. That it will lead us to a river of the same stuff, I have no doubt. And, further along, to an ocean. In this world the graves yawn and none of the dead rest easy.

  As dawn began to come up in the east, he closed his eyes. Slept briefly. And dreamed of Jake.

  19

  EDDIE ALSO DREAMED--DREAMED he was back in New York, walking along Second Avenue with a book in his hand.

  In this dream it was spring. The air was warm, the city was blooming, and homesickness sobbed within him like a muscle with a fishhook caught. deep within it. Enjoy this dream, and make it go on as long as you can, he thought. Savor it ... because this is as close to New York as you're going to get. You can't go home, Eddie. That part's done.

  He looked down at the book and was utterly unsurprised to find it was You Can't Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe. Stamped into the dark red cover were three shapes; key, rose, and door. He stopped for a moment, flipped the book open, and read the first line. The man in black fled across the desert, Wolfe had written, and the gunslinger followed.


  Eddie closed it and walked on. It was about nine in the morning, he judged, maybe nine-thirty, and traffic on Second Avenue was light. Taxis honked and wove their way from lane to lane with spring sunshine twinkling off their windshields and bright yellow paintjobs. A bum on the corner of Second and Fifty-second asked him for a handout and Eddie tossed the book with the red cover into his lap. He observed (also without surprise) that the bum was Enrico Balazar. He was sitting cross-legged in front of a magic shop. HOUSE OF CARDS, the sign in the window read, and the display inside showed a tower which had been built of Tarot cards. Standing on top was a model of King Kong. There was a tiny radar-dish growing out of the great ape's head.

  Eddie walked on, lazing his way downtown, the street-signs floating past him. He knew where he was going as soon as he saw it: a small shop on the corner of Second and Forty-sixth.

  Yeah, he thought. A feeling of great relief swept through him. This is the place. The very place. The window was full of hanging meats and cheeses. TOM AND GERRY'S ARTISTIC DELI, the sign read. PARTY PLATTERS OUR SPECIALTY!

  As he stood looking in, someone else he knew came around the corner. It was Jack Andolini, wearing a three-piece suit the color of vanilla ice cream and carrying a black cane in his left hand. Half of his face was gone, lopped off by the claws of the lobstrosities.

  Go on in, Eddie, Jack said as he passed. After all, there are other worlds than these and that fuckin train rolls through all of them.

  I can't, Eddie replied. The door is locked. He didn't know how he knew this, but he did; knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  Dad-a-chum, dud-a-chee, not to worry, you've got the key, Jack said, not looking back. Eddie looked down and saw he did have a key; a primitive-looking thing with three notches like inverted V's.