Knowing will drive you mad.
But sooner or later you will ask.
You won’t be able to help yourself.
Have a nice day!
Walter o’ Dim
P.S. The word is NINETEEN.
You will try to forget but sooner or later it will come out of your mouth like vomit.
NINETEEN.
And oh dear God, she knew that she would. Already it trembled on her lips.Nineteen,she would say—Nort, listen: Nineteen.And the secrets of Death and the land beyond would be opened to her.
Sooner or later you will ask.
The next day things were almost normal, although none of the children followed Nort. The day after that, the catcalls resumed. Life had gotten back on its own sweet keel. The uprooted corn was gathered together by the children, and a week after Nort’s resurrection, they burned it in the middle of the street. The fire was momentarily bright and most of the barflies stepped or staggered out to watch. They looked primitive. Their faces seemed to float between the flames and the ice-chip brilliance of the sky. Allie watched them and felt a pang of fleeting despair for the sad times of this world. The loss. Things had stretched apart. There was no glue at the center anymore. Somewhere something was tottering, and when it fell, all would end. She had never seen the ocean, never would.
“If I hadguts,” she murmured. “If I had guts, guts,guts...”
Nort raised his head at the sound of her voice and smiled emptily at her from hell. She had no guts. Only a bar and a scar. And a word. It struggled behind her closed lips. Suppose she were to call him over now and draw him close despite his stink? Suppose she said the word into the waxy buggerlug he called an ear? His eyes would change. They would turn intohiseyes—those of the man in the robe. And then Nort would tell what he’d seen in the Land of Death, what lay beyond the earth and the worms.
I’ll never say that word to him.
But the man who had brought Nort back to life and left her a note—left her a word like a cocked pistol she would someday put to her temple—had known better.
Nineteen would open the secret.
Nineteenwasthe secret.
She caught herself writing it in a puddle on the bar—NINETEEN—and skidded it to nothingness when she saw Nort watching her.
The fire burned down rapidly and her customers came back in. She began to dose herself with the Star Whiskey, and by midnight she was blackly drunk.
VIII
She ceased her narrative, and when he made no immediate comment, she thought at first that the story had put him to sleep. She began to drowse herself when he asked: “That’s all?”
“Yes. That’s all. It’s very late.”
“Um.” He was rolling another cigarette.
“Don’t go getting your tobacco dandruff in my bed,” she told him, more sharply than she had intended.
“No.”
Silence again. The tip of his cigarette winked off and on.
“You’ll be leaving in the morning,” she said dully.
“I should. I think he’s left a trap for me here. Just like he left one for you.”
“Do you really think that number would—”
“If you like your sanity, you don’t ever want to say that word to Nort,” the gunslinger said. “Put it out of your head. If you can, teach yourself that the number after eighteen is twenty. That half of thirty-eight is seventeen. The man who signed himself Walter o’ Dim is a lot of things, but a liar isn’t one of them.”
