The willow jungle was deeper than he had suspected, and confusing in the failing light. But he found a spring, richly guarded by frogs and peepers. He filled one of their waterskins... and paused. The sounds that filled the night awoke an uneasy sensuality in him, a feeling that not even Allie, the woman he had bedded with in Tull, had been able to bring out—too much of his time with Allie had been business. He chalked it up to the sudden blinding change from the desert. After all those miles of bleak hardpan, the softness of the dark seemed nearly decadent.
He returned to the camp and skinned the rabbit while water boiled over the fire. Mixed with the last of their canned veg, the rabbit made an excellent stew. He woke Jake and watched him as he ate, bleary but ravenous.
“We stay here tomorrow,” the gunslinger said.
“But that man you’re after... that priest...”
“He’s no priest. And don’t worry. He’ll keep.”
“How do you know that?”
The gunslinger could only shake his head. The intuition was strong in him... but it was not a good intuition.
After the meal, he rinsed the cans from which they had eaten (marveling again at his own water extravagance), and when he turned around, Jake was asleep again. The gunslinger felt the now-familiar rising and falling in his chest that he could only identify with Cuthbert. Cuthbert had been Roland’s own age, but he had seemed so much younger.
His cigarette drooped toward the grass, and he tossed it into the fire. He looked at it, the clear yellow burn so different, so much cleaner, from the way the devil-grass burned. The air was wonderfully cool, and he lay down with his back to the fire.
Far away, through the gash that led the way into the mountains, he heard the thick mouth of the perpetual thunder. He slept. And dreamed.
II
Susan Delgado, his beloved, was dying before his eyes.
He watched, his arms held by two villagers on each side, his neck dog-caught in a huge, rusty iron collar. This wasn’t the way it had happened—he hadn’t even been there—but dreams had their own logic, didn’t they?
She was dying. He could smell her burning hair, could hear their cries ofCharyou tree.And he could see the color of his own madness. Susan, lovely girl at the window, horseman’s daughter. How she had flown across the Drop, her shadow that of horse and girl merged, a fabulous creature out of an old story, something wild and free! How they had flown together in the corn! Now they were flinging cornhusks at her and the husks caught fire even before they caught in her hair.Charyou tree, charyou tree,they cried, these enemies of light and love, and somewhere the witch was cackling. Rhea, the witch’s name had been, and Susan was turning black in the flames, her skin cracking open, and—
And what was she calling?
“The boy!” she was screaming. “Roland, the boy!”
He whirled, pulling his captors with him. The collar ripped at his neck and he heard the hitching, strangled sounds that were coming from his own throat. There was a sickish-sweet smell of barbecuing meat on the air.
The boy was looking down at him from a window high above the funeral pyre, the same window where Susan, who had taught him to be a man, had once sat and sung the old songs: “Hey Jude” and “Ease on Down the Road” and “Careless Love.” He looked out from the window like the statue of an alabaster saint in a cathedral. His eyes were marble. A spike had been driven through Jake’s forehead.
The gunslinger felt the strangling, ripping scream that signaled the beginning of his lunacy pull up from the bottom of his belly.
“Nnnnnnnnnn—”
III
Roland grunted a cry as he felt the fire singe him. He sat bolt upright in the dark, still feeling the dream of Mejis around him, strangling him like the collar he’d worn. In his twistings and turnings he had thrown one hand against the dying coals of the fire. He put the hand to his face, feeling the dream flee, leaving only the stark picture of Jake, plaster-white, a saint for demons.
“Nnnnnnnnnn—”
He glared around at the mystic darkness of the willow grove, both guns out and ready. His eyes were red loopholes in the last glow from the fire.
“Nnnnnnnnnn—”
Jake.
The gunslinger was up and on the run. A bitter circle of moon had risen and he could follow the boy’s track in the dew. He ducked under the first of the willows, splashed through the spring, and legged up the far bank, skidding in the dampness (even now his body could relish it). Willow withes slapped at his face. The trees were thicker here, and the moon was blotted out. Tree-trunks rose in lurching shadows. The grass, now knee-high, caressed him, as if pleading with him to slow down, to enjoy the cool. To enjoy the life. Half-rotted dead branches reached for his shins, hiscojones. He paused for a moment, lifting his head and scenting at the air. A ghost of a breeze helped him. The boy did not smell good, of course; neither of them did. The gunslinger’s nostrils flared like those of an ape. The younger, lighter odor of the boy’s sweat was faint, oily, unmistakable. He crashed over a deadfall of grass and bramble and downed branches, sprinted through a tunnel of overhanging willow and sumac. Moss struck his shoulders like flabby corpse-hands. Some clung in sighing gray tendrils.
He clawed through a last barricade of willows and came to a clearing that looked up at the stars and the highest peak of the range, gleaming skull-white at an impossible altitude.
There was a ring of black standing stones which looked like some sort of surreal animal-trap in the moonlight. In the center was a table of stone... an altar. Very old, rising out of the ground on a thick arm of basalt.
The boy stood before it, trembling back and forth. His hands shook at his sides as if infused with static electricity. The gunslinger called his name sharply, and Jake responded with that inarticulate sound of negation. The faint smear of face, almost hidden by the boy’s left shoulder, looked both terrified and exalted. And there was something else.
