14

SO THE GUNSLINGER EMBARKED on the most recent part of his long tale. Eddie had heard isolated fragments of the story, but he listened in utter fascination, as did Susannah, for whom it was completely new. He told them about the bar with the endless game of Watch Me going on in the corner, the piano player named Sheb, the woman named Allie with the scar on her forehead... and about Nort, the weed-eater who had died and then been brought back to some sort of tenebrous life by the man in black. He told them about Sylvia Pittston, that avatar of religious insanity, and about the final apocalyptic slaughter, in which he, Roland the Gunslinger, had killed every man, woman, and child in town.

"Holy crispy crap!" Eddie said in a low, shaky voice. "Now I know why you were so low on shells, Roland."

"Be quiet!" Susannah snapped. "Let him finish!"

Roland went on, telling his story as stolidly as he had crossed the desert after passing the hut of the last Dweller, a young man whose wild, strawberry-colored hair had reached almost to his waist. He told them about how his mule had finally died. He even told them about how the Dweller's pet bird, Zoltan, had eaten the mule's eyes.

He told them about the long desert days and the short desert nights which had come next, and how he had followed the cool remains of Walter's campfires, and how he had come at last, reeling and dying of dehydration, to the way station.

"It was empty. It had been empty, I think, since the days when yonder great bear was still a newly made thing. I stayed a night and pushed on. That's what happened... but now I'll tell you another story."

"The one that isn't true but should be?" Susannah asked.

Roland nodded. "In this made-up story - this fable - a gunslinger named Roland met a boy named Jake at the way station. This boy was from your world, from your city of New York, and from a when some-place between Eddie's 1987 and Odetta Holmes's 1963."

Eddie was leaning forward eagerly. "Is there a door in this story, Roland? A door marked THE BOY, or something like that?"

Roland shook his head. "The boy's doorway was death. He was on his way to school when a man - a man I believed to be Walter - pushed him into the street, where he was run over by a car. He heard this man say something like 'Get out of the way, let me through, I'm a priest.' Jake saw this man - just for an instant - and then he was in my world."

The gunslinger paused, looking into the fire.

"Now I want to leave this story of the boy who was never there and go back to what really happened for a minute. All right?"

Eddie and Susannah exchanged a puzzled glance and then Eddie made an "after you, my dear Alphonse" gesture with his hand.

"As I have said, the way station was deserted. There was, however, a pump that still worked. It was at the back of the stable where the coach-horses were kept. I followed my ears to it, but I would have found it even if it had been completely silent. I swelled the water, you see. After enough time in the desert, when you are on the edge of dying from thirst, you can really do that. I drank and then slept. When I woke, I drank again. I wanted to push on at once - the need to do that was like a fever. The medicine you brought me from your world - the astin - is wonderful stuff, Eddie, but there are fevers beyond the power of any medicine to cure, and this was one of them. I knew my body needed rest, but it still took every ounce of my willpower to stay there even one night. In the morning I felt rested, and so I refilled my waterskins and pushed on. I took nothing from that place but water. That's the most important part of what really happened."

Susannah spoke in her most reasonable, pleasant, and Odetta Holmes - like voice. "All right, that's what really happened. You refilled your waterskins and went on. Now tell us the rest of what didn't happen, Roland."

The gunslinger put the jawbone in his lap for a moment, curled his hands into fists, and rubbed his eyes with them - a curiously childlike gesture. Then he grasped the jawbone again, as if for courage, and went on.

"I hypnotized the boy who wasn't there," he said. "I did it with one of my shells. It's a trick I've known for years, and I learned it from a very unlikely source - Marten, my father's court magician. The boy was a good subject. While he was tranced, he told me the circumstances of his death, as I've told them to you. When I'd gotten as much of his story as I felt I could without upsetting or actually hurting him, I gave him a command that he should not remember anything about his dying when he woke up again."

"Who'd want to?" Eddie muttered.

Roland nodded. "Who, indeed? The boy passed from his trance directly into a natural sleep. I also slept. When we woke, I told the boy that I meant to catch the man in black. He knew who I meant; Walter had also stopped at the way station. Jake was afraid and hid from him. I'm sure Walter knew he was there, but it suited his purpose to pretend he didn't. He left the boy behind like a set trap.

"I asked him if there was anything to eat there. It seemed to me there must be. He looked healthy enough, and the desert climate is wonderful when it comes to preserving things. He had a little dried meat, and he said there was a cellar. He hadn't explored that, because he was afraid." The gunslinger looked at them grimly. "He was right to be afraid. I found food... and I also found a Speaking Demon."

Eddie looked down at the jawbone with widening eyes. Orange fire-light 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, gun-slinger. 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 Draw-ers - 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 shitfum de white folks. Goan steal me sumpin forspecial and den break dot 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... hut 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 protec-tion - 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 remem-ber 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.' "