Part 20 (1/2)
”A trifle upsetting, isn't he?” the man in black said, and seemed on the verge of sn.i.g.g.e.ring.
He turned the fourth card. A woman with a shawl over her head sat spinning at a wheel. To the gunslinger's dazed eyes, she appeared to be smiling craftily and sobbing at the same time.
”The Lady of the Shadows,” the man in black remarked. ”Does she look two-faced to you, gunslinger? She is. Two faces at least. She broke the blue plate!”
”What do you mean?”
”I don't know.” And-in this case, at least-the gunslinger thought his adversary was telling the truth.
”Why are you showing me these?”
”Don't ask!” the man in black said sharply, yet he smiled. ”Don't ask. Merely watch. Consider this only pointless ritual if it eases you and cools you to do so. Like church.”
He t.i.ttered and turned the fifth card.
A grinning reaper clutched a scythe with bony fingers. ”Death,” the man in black said simply. ”Yet not for you.”
The sixth card.
The gunslinger looked at it and felt a strange, crawling antic.i.p.ation in his guts. The feeling was mixed with horror and joy, and the whole of the emotion was unnameable. It made him feel like throwing up and dancing at the same time.
”The Tower,” the man in black said softly. ”Here is the Tower.”
The gunslinger's card occupied the center of the pattern; each of the following four stood at one corner, like satellites circling a star.
”Where does that one go?” the gunslinger asked.
The man in black placed the Tower over the Hanged Man, covering it completely.
”What does that mean?” the gunslinger asked.
The man in black did not answer.
”What does that mean?” he asked raggedly.
The man in black did not answer.
”G.o.dd.a.m.n you!”
No answer.
”Then be d.a.m.ned to you. What's the seventh card?”
The man in black turned the seventh. A sun rose in a luminously blue sky. Cupids and sprites sported around it. Below the sun was a great red field upon which it shone. Roses or blood? The gunslinger could not tell. Perhaps, Perhaps, he thought, he thought, it's both. it's both.
”The seventh card is Life,” the man in black said softly. ”But not for you.”
”Where does it fit the pattern?”
”That is not for you to know now,” the man in black said. ”Or for me to know. I'm not the great one you seek, Roland. I am merely his emissary.” He flipped the card carelessly into the dying fire. It charred, curled, and flashed to flame. The gunslinger felt his heart quail and turn icy in his chest.
”Sleep now,” the man in black said carelessly. ”Perchance to dream and that sort of thing.”
”What my bullets won't do, mayhap my hands will,” the gunslinger said. His legs coiled with savage, splendid suddenness, and he flew across the fire at the other, arms outstretched. The man in black, smiling, swelled in his vision and then retreated down a long and echoing corridor. The world filled with the sound of sardonic laughter, he was falling, dying, sleeping.
He dreamed.
III.
The universe was void. Nothing moved. Nothing was.
The gunslinger drifted, bemused.
”Let's have a little light,” the voice of the man in black said nonchalantly, and there was light. The gunslinger thought in a detached way that light was pretty good.
”Now darkness overhead with stars in it. Water down below.”
It happened. He drifted over endless seas. Above, the stars twinkled endlessly, yet he saw none of the constellations which had guided him across his long life.
”Land,” the man in black invited, and there was; it heaved itself out of the water in endless, galvanic convulsions. It was red, arid, cracked and glazed with sterility. Volcanoes blurted endless magma like giant pimples on some ugly adolescent's baseball head.
”Okay,” the man in black was saying. ”That's a start. Let's have some plants. Trees. Gra.s.s and fields.”
There was. Dinosaurs rambled here and there, growling and whoofing and eating each other and getting stuck in bubbling, odiferous tarpits. Huge tropical rain-forests sprawled everywhere. Giant ferns waved at the sky with serrated leaves. Beetles with two heads crawled on some of them. All this the gunslinger saw. And yet he felt big.
”Now bring man,” the man in black said softly, but the gunslinger was falling... falling up. The horizon of this vast and fecund earth began to curve. Yes, they had all said it curved, his teacher Vannay had claimed it had been proved long before the world had moved on. But this- Further and further, higher and higher. Continents took shape before his amazed eyes, and were obscured with clocksprings of clouds. The world's atmosphere held it in a placental sac. And the sun, rising beyond the earth's shoulder- He cried out and threw an arm before his eyes.
”Let there be light!”
The voice no longer belonged to the man in black. It was gigantic, echoing. It filled s.p.a.ce, and the s.p.a.ces between s.p.a.ce.
”Light!”
Falling, falling.
The sun shrank. A red planet stamped with ca.n.a.ls whirled past him, two moons circling it furiously. Beyond this was a whirling belt of stones and a gigantic planet that seethed with gases, too huge to support itself, oblate in consequence. Further out was a ringed world that glittered like a precious gem within its engirdlement of icy spicules.
”Light! Let there be-”
Other worlds, one, two, three. Far beyond the last, one lonely ball of ice and rock twirled in dead darkness about a sun that glittered no brighter than a tarnished penny.
Beyond this, darkness.
”No,” the gunslinger said, and his word on it was flat and echoless in the black. It was darker than dark, blacker than black. Beside this, the darkest night of a man's soul was as noonday, the darkness under the mountains a mere smudge on the face of Light. ”No more. Please, no more now. No more-”
”LIGHT!”
”No more. No more, please-”
The stars themselves began to shrink. Whole nebulae drew together and became glowing smudges. The whole universe seemed to be drawing around him.