Part 19 (1/2)

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 s.p.a.ce 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 rus.h.i.+ng to meet him, faster, outstripping even his own scream- Metal screamed beneath him and he stepped past it unhurriedly, s.h.i.+fting 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! 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. Mother, may I? Yes-you-may. The boy was shuddering helplessly. ”Go back. I don't want you to kill me.” The boy was shuddering helplessly. ”Go back. I don't want you to kill me.”

”For love of the Man Jesus, walk, 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 s.p.a.ce 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. fot-suls. Fifty yards or a hundred still to cover? He could not say. 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 c.h.i.n.ks of mocking blue around the outline of shoulders and the fork of crotch.

”h.e.l.lo, 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 d.a.m.nation; 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 Ja.n.u.s-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 gra.s.sy 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, s.h.i.+rt 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 c.u.n.ts 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.