“Go then. There are other worlds than these.”
Then the trestle tore away, the whole weight of it; and as the gunslinger pulled himself up and through to the light and the breeze and the reality of a new ka, he twisted his head back, for a moment in his agony striving to be Janus—but there was nothing, only plummeting silence, for the boy made no cry as he fell.
Then Roland was up, pulling himself onto the rocky escarpment that looked toward a grassy plain, toward where the man in black stood spread-legged, with arms crossed.
The gunslinger stood drunkenly, pallid as a ghost, eyes huge and swimming beneath his forehead, shirt smeared with the white dust of his final, lunging crawl. It came to him that there would be further degradations of the spirit ahead that might make this one seem infinitesimal, and yet he would still flee it, down corridors and through cities, from bed to bed; he would flee the boy’s face and try to bury it in cunts and killing, only to enter one final room and find it looking at him over a candle flame. He had become the boy; the boy had become him. He was become a werewolf of his own making. In deep dreams he would become the boy and speak the boy’s strange city tongue.
This is death. Is it? Is it?
He walked slowly, drunkenly down the rocky hill toward where the man in black waited. Here the tracks had been worn away, under the sun of reason, and it was as if they had never been.
The man in black pushed his hood away with the backs of both hands, laughing.
“So!” he cried. “Not an end, but the end of the beginning, eh? You progress, gunslinger! You progress! Oh, how I admire you!”
The gunslinger drew with blinding speed and fired twelve times. The gunflashes dimmed the sun itself, and the pounding of the explosions slammed back from the rock-faced escarpments behind them.
“Now-now,” the man in black said, laughing. “Oh, now-now-now. We make great magic together, you and I. You kill me no more than you kill yourself.”
He withdrew, walking backwards, facing the gunslinger, grinning and beckoning. “Come. Come. Come. Mother, may I? Yes-you-may.”
The gunslinger followed him in broken boots to the place of counseling.
THE GUNSLINGER AND THE MAN IN BLACK
CHAPTER 5
The Gunslinger and the Man in Black
I
The man in black led him to an ancient killing ground to make palaver. The gunslinger knew it immediately: a golgotha, place-of-the-skull. And bleached skulls stared blandly up at them—cattle, coyotes, deer, rabbits, bumbler. Here the alabaster xylophone of a hen pheasant killed as she fed; there the tiny, delicate bones of a mole, perhaps killed for pleasure by a wild dog.
The golgotha was a bowl indented into the descending slope of the mountain, and below, in easier altitudes, the gunslinger could see Joshua trees and scrub firs. The sky overhead was a softer blue than he had seen for a twelve-month, and there was an indefinable something that spoke of the sea in the not-too-great distance.
I am in the West, Cuthbert,he thought wonderingly.If this is not Mid-World, it’s close by.
The man in black sat on an ancient ironwood log. His boots were powdered white with dust and the uneasy bone-meal of this place. He had put his hood up again, but the gunslinger could see the square shape of his chin clearly, and the shading of his jaw.
The shadowed lips twitched in a smile. “Gather wood, gunslinger. This side of the mountains is gentle, but at this altitude, the cold still may put a knife in one’s belly. And this is a place of death, eh?”
“I’ll kill you,” the gunslinger said.
“No you won’t. You can’t. But you can gather wood to remember your Isaac.”
The gunslinger had no understanding of the reference. He went wordlessly and gathered wood like a common cook’s boy. The pickings were slim. There was no devilgrass on this side and the ironwood would not burn. It had become stone. He returned finally with a large armload of likely sticks, powdered and dusted with disintegrated bone, as if dipped in flour. The sun had sunk beyond the highest Joshua trees and had taken on a reddish glow. It peered at them with baleful indifference.
“Excellent,” the man in black said. “How exceptional you are! How methodical! How resourceful! I salute you!” He giggled, and the gunslinger dropped the wood at his feet with a crash that ballooned up bone dust.
The man in black did not start or jump; he merely began laying the fire. The gunslinger watched, fascinated, as the ideogram (fresh, this time) took shape. When it was finished, it resembled a small and complex double chimney about two feet high. The man in black lifted his hand skyward, shaking back the voluminous sleeve from a tapered, handsome hand, and brought it down rapidly, index and pinky fingers forked out in the traditional sign of the evil eye. There was a blue flash of flame, and their fire was lighted.
“I have matches,” the man in black said jovially, “but I thought you might enjoy the magic. For a pretty, gunslinger. Now cook our dinner.”
The folds of his robe shivered, and the plucked and gutted carcass of a plump rabbit fell on the dirt.
The gunslinger spitted the rabbit wordlessly and roasted it. A savory smell drifted up as the sun went down. Purple shadows drifted hungrily over the bowl where the man in black had chosen to finally face him. The gunslinger felt hunger begin to rumble endlessly in his belly as the rabbit browned; but when the meat was cooked and its juices sealed in, he handed the entire skewer wordlessly to the man in black, rummaged in his own nearly flat knapsack, and withdrew the last of his jerky. It was salty, painful to his mouth, and tasted like tears.
“That’s a worthless gesture,” the man in black said, managing to sound angry and amused at the same time.
