The Waste Lands by Stephen King
Before time began, Roland said, Old Star and Old Mother had been young and passionate newlyweds. Then one day there had been a terrible argument. Old Mother (who in those long-ago days had been known by her real name, which was Lydia) had caught Old Star (whose real name was Apon) hanging about a beautiful young woman named Cassiopeia. They'd had a real bang-up fight, those two, a hair-pulling, eye-gouging, crockery-throwing fight. One of those thrown bits of crockery had become the earth; a smaller shard the moon; a coal from their kitchen stove had become the sun. In the end, the gods had stepped in so Apon and Lydia might not, in their anger, destroy the universe before it was fairly begun. Cassiopeia, the saucy jade who caused the trouble in the first place ("Yeah, right--it's always the woman," Susannah had said at this point), had been banished to a rocking-chair made of stars forever and ever. Yet not even this had solved the-problem. Lydia had been willing to try again, but Apon was stiffnecked and full of pride ("Yeah, always blame the man," Eddie had grunted at this point). So they had parted, and now they look at each other in mingled hatred and longing from across the star-strewn wreckage of their divorce. Apon and Lydia are three billion years gone, the gunslinger told them; they have become Old Star and Old Mother, the north and south, each pining for the other but both now too proud to beg for reconciliation . . . and Cassiopeia sits off to the side in her chair, rocking and laughing at them both.
Eddie was startled by a soft touch on his arm. It was Susannah. "Come on," she said. "We've got to make him talk."
Eddie carried her to the campfire and put her down carefully on Roland's right side. He sat on Roland's left. Roland looked first at Susannah, then at Eddie.
"How close you both sit to me," he remarked. "Like lovers ... or warders in a gaol."
"It's time for you to do some talking." Susannah's voice was low, clear, and musical. "If we're your companions, Roland--and it seems like we are, like it or not--it's time you started treating us as companions. Tell us what's wrong . . ."
". . . and what we can do about it," Eddie finished.
Roland sighed deeply. "I don't know how to begin," he said. "It's been so long since I've. had companions . . . or a tale to tell . . ."
"Start with the bear," Eddie said.
Susannah leaned forward and touched the jawbone Roland held in his hands. It frightened her, but she touched it anyway. "And finish with this."
"Yes." Roland lifted the bone to eye-level and looked at it for a moment before dropping it back into his lap. "We'll have to speak of this, won't we? It's the center of the thing."
But the bear came first.
12
"THIS IS THE STORY I was told when I was a child," Roland said. "When everything was new, the Great Old Ones-they weren't gods, but people who had almost the knowledge of gods-created Twelve Guardians to stand watch at the twelve portals which lead in and out of the world. Sometimes I heard that these portals were natural things, like the constellations we see in the sky or the bottomless crack in the earth we called Dragon's Grave, because of the great burst of steam they gave off every thirty or forty days. But other people--one I remember in particular, the head cook in my father's castle, a man named Hax--said they were not natural, that they had been created by the Great Old Ones themselves, in the days before they hanged themselves with pride like a noose and disappeared from the earth. Hax used to say that the creation of the Twelve Guardians was the last act of the Great Old Ones, their attempt to atone for the great wrongs they had done to each other, and to the earth itself."
"Portals," Eddie mused. "Doors, you mean. We're back to those again. Do these doors that lead in and out of the world open on the world Suze and I came from? Like the ones we found along the beach?"
"I don't know," Roland said. "For every thing I do know, there are a hundred things I don't. You--both of you--will have to reconcile yourselves to that fact. The world has moved on, we say. When it did, it went like a great receding wave, leaving only wreckage behind ... wreckage that sometimes looks like a map."
"Well, make a guess!" Eddie exclaimed, and the raw eagerness in his voice told the gunslinger that Eddie had not given up the idea of returning to his own world--and Susannah's--even now Not entirely.
"Leave him be, Eddie," Susannah said. "The man don't guess."
"Not true--sometimes the man does," Roland said, surprising them both. "When guessing's the only thing left, sometimes he does. The answer is no. I don't think--I don't guess--that these portals are much like the doors on the beach. I don't guess they go to a where or when that we would recognize. I think the doors on the beach--the ones that led into the world you both came from--were like the pivot at the center of a child's teeterboard. Do you know what that is?"
"Seesaw?" Susannah asked, and tipped her hand back and forth to demonstrate.
"Yes!" Roland agreed, looking pleased. "Just so. On one end of this sawsee--"
"Seesaw," Eddie said, smiling a little.
"Yes. On one end, my ka. On the other, that of the man in black--Walter. The doors were the center, creations of the tension between two opposing destinies. These other portals are things far greater than Walter, or me, or the little fellowship we three have made."
"Are you saying," Susannah asked hesitantly, "that the portals where these Guardians stand watch are outside ka? Beyond ka?"
"I'm saying that I believe so." He offered his own brief smile, a thin sickle in the firelight. "That I guess so."
He was silent a moment, then he picked up a stick of his own. He brushed away the carpet of pine needles and used the stick to draw in the dirt beneath:
"Here is the world as I was told it existed when I was a child. The Xs are the portals standing in a ring at its eternal edge. If one drew six lines, connecting these portals in pairs--so--"
He looked up. "Do you see where the lines cross in the center?"
Eddie felt gooseflesh crawl up his back and down his arms. His mouth was suddenly dry. "Is that it, Roland? Is that--?"
Roland nodded. His long, lined face was grave. "At this nexus lies the Great Portal, the so-called Thirteenth Gate which rules not just this world but all worlds."
He tapped the center of the circle.
"Here is the Dark Tower for which I've searched my whole life."
13
THE GUNSLINGER RESUMED: "At each of the twelve lesser portals the Great Old Ones set a Guardian. In my childhood I could have named them all in the rimes my nursemaid-and Hax the cook-taught to me ... but my childhood was long ago. There was the Bear, of course, and the Fish ... the Lion ... the Bat. And the Turtle--he was an important one ..."
The gunslinger looked up into the starry sky, his brow creased in deep thought. Then an amazingly sunny smile broke across his features and he recited: "See the TURTLE of enormous girth!
On his shell he holds the earth.
His thought is slow but always kind;
He holds us all within-his mind.
On his back all vows are made;
He sees the truth but mayn't aid.
He loves the land and loves the sea,
And even loves a child like me."
Roland uttered a small, bemused laugh. "Hax taught that to me, singing it as he stirred the frosting for some cake and gave me little nips of the sweet from the edge of his spoon. Amazing what we remember, isn't it? Anyway, as I grew older, I came to believe that the Guardians didn't really exist--that they were symbols rather than substance. It seems that I was wrong."
"I called it a robot," Eddie said, "but that's not what it really was. Susannah's right--the only thing robots bleed when you shoot them is Quaker State 10-40. I think it was what people of my world call a cyborg, Roland--a creature that's part machine and part flesh and blood. There was a movie I saw ... we told you about movies, didn't we?"
Smiling a little, Roland nodded.
"Well, this movie was called Robocop, and the guy in it wasn't a lot different from the bear Susannah killed. How did you know where she should shoot it?"
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"Yes," Susannah said. "They sure do."
"It's said here, as well, and the saying comes from the story of the Guardians. Each supposedly carried an extra brain on the outside of its head. In a hat." He looked at them with his dreadfully haunted eyes and smiled again. "It didn't look much like a hat, did it?"
"No," Eddie said, "but the story was close enough to save our bacon."
"I think now that I've been looking for one of the Guardians ever since I began my quest," Roland said. "When we find the portal this Shardik guarded--and that should only be a matter of following its backtrail--we will finally have a course to follow. We must set the portal to our backs and then simply move straight ahead. At the center of the circle ... the Tower."
Eddie opened his mouth to say, All right, let's talk about this Tower. Finally, once and for all, let's talk about it--what it is, what it means, and, most important of all, what happens to us when we get there. But no sound came out, and after a moment he closed his mouth again. This wasn't the time--not now, with Roland in such obvious pain. Not now, with only the spark of their campfire to keep the night at bay.
"So now we come to the other part," Roland said heavily. "I have finally found my course--after all the long years I have found my course--but at the same time I seem to be losing my sanity. I can feel it crumbling away beneath my feet, like a steep embankment which has been loosened by rain. This is my punishment for letting a boy who never existed fall to his death. And that is also ka."
"Who is this boy, Roland?" Susannah asked.
Roland glanced at Eddie. "Do you know?"
Eddie shook his head.
"But I spoke of him," Roland said. "In fact, I raved of him, when the infection was at its worst and I was near dying." The gunslinger's voice suddenly rose half an octave, and his imitation of Eddie's voice was so good that Susannah felt a coil of superstitious fright. "'If you don't shut up about that goddam kid, Roland, I'll gag you with your own shirt! I'm sick of hearing about him!' Do you remember saying that, Eddie?"
Eddie thought it over carefully. Roland had spoken of a thousand things as the two of them made their tortuous way up the beach from the door marked THE PRISONER to the one marked THE LADY OF THE SHADOWS, and he had mentioned what seemed like a thousand names in his fever-heated monologues--Alain, Cort, Jamie de Curry, Cuthbert (this one more often than all the others), Hax, Martin (or perhaps it was Marten, like the animal), Walter, Susan, even a guy with the unlikely name of Zoltan. Eddie had gotten very tired of hearing about these people he had never met (and didn't care to meet), but of course Eddie had had a few problems of his own at that time, heroin withdrawal and cosmic jet-lag being only two of them. And, if he was to be fair, he guessed Roland had gotten as tired of Eddie's own Fractured Fairy Tales--the ones about how he and Henry had grown up together and turned into junkies together--as Eddie had of Roland's.
But he couldn't remember ever telling Roland he would gag him with his own shirt if he didn't stop talking about some kid.
"Nothing comes to you?" Roland asked. "Nothing at all?"
Was there something? Some far-off tickle, like the feeling of deja vu he'd gotten when he saw the slingshot hiding inside the chunk of wood jutting out of the stump? Eddie tried to find that tickle, but it was gone. He decided it had never been there in the first place; he only wanted it to be there, because Roland was hurting so badly.
"No," he said. "Sorry, man."
"But I did tell you." Roland's tone was calm, but urgency ran and pulsed beneath it like a scarlet thread. "The boy's name was Jake. I sacrificed him--killed him--in order that I might finally catch up with Walter and make him talk. I killed him under the mountains"
On this point Eddie could be more positive. "Well, maybe that's what happened, but it's not what you said happened. You said you went under the mountains alone, on some kind of crazy handcar. You talked about that a lot while we were coming up the beach, Roland. About how scary it was to be alone."
"I remember. But I also remember telling you about the boy, and how he fell from the trestle into the chasm. And it's the distance between those two memories that is pulling my mind apart."
"I don't understand any of this," Susannah said worriedly.
"I think," Roland said, "that I'm just beginning to."
He threw more wood on the fire, sending thick sheaves of red sparks spiralling up into the dark sky, and then settled back between them. "I'll tell you (a story that's true," he said, "and then I'll tell you a story that isn't true . . . but should be.
"I bought a mule in Pricetown, and when I finally got to Tull, the last town before the desert, it was still fresh . . ."
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 someplace 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 smelled 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 brough
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."