“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.The boy was shuddering helplessly. “Go back. I don’t want you to kill me.”
“For love of the Man Jesus,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 space 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 thefot-suls.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 chinks of mocking blue around the outline of shoulders and the fork of crotch.
“Hello, 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 damnation; and behind him, in the dreadful silence, the boy spoke from too far beneath him.
