Legends: Stories By The Masters of Modern Fantasy Read online

  I. Full Earth. The Empty Town. The Bells. The Dead Boy. The Overturned Wagon. The Green Folk.

  On a day in Full Earth so hot that it seemed to suck the breath from his chest before his body could use it, Roland of Gilead came to the gates of a village in the Desatoya Mountains. He was traveling alone by then, and would soon be traveling afoot, as well. This whole last week he had been hoping for a horse doctor, but guessed such a fellow would do him no good now, even if this town had one. His mount, a two-year-old roan, was pretty well done for.

  The town gates, still decorated with flowers from some festival or other, stood open and welcoming, but the silence beyond them was all wrong. The gunslinger heard no clip-clop of horses, no rumble of wagon wheels, no merchants’ huckstering cries from the marketplace. The only sounds were the low hum of crickets (some sort of bug, at any rate; they were a bit more tuneful than crickets, at that), a queer wooden knocking sound, and the faint, dreamy tinkle of small bells.

  Also, the flowers twined through the wrought-iron staves of the ornamental gate were long dead.

  Between his knees, Topsy gave two great, hollow sneezes—K’chow! K’chow!—and staggered sideways. Roland dismounted, partly out of respect for the horse, partly out of respect for himself—he didn’t want to break a leg under Topsy if Topsy chose this moment to give up and canter into the clearing at the end of his path.

  The gunslinger stood in his dusty boots and faded jeans under the beating sun, stroking the roan’s matted neck, pausing every now and then to yank his fingers through the tangles of Topsy’s mane, and stopping once to shoo off the tiny flies clustering at the corners of Topsy’s eyes. Let them lay their eggs and hatch their maggots there after Topsy was dead, but not before.

  Roland thus honored his horse as best he could, listening to those distant, dreamy bells and the strange wooden tocking sound as he did. After a while he ceased his absent grooming and looked thoughtfully at the open gate.

  The cross above its center was a bit unusual, but otherwise the gate was a typical example of its type, a western commonplace which was not useful but traditional—all the little towns he had come to in the last tenmonth seemed to have one such where you came in (grand) and one more such where you went out (not so grand). None had been built to exclude visitors, certainly not this one. It stood between two walls of pink adobe that ran into the scree for a distance of about twenty feet on either side of the road and then simply stopped. Close the gate, lock it with many locks, and all that meant was a short walk around one bit of adobe wall or the other.

  Beyond the gate, Roland could see what looked in most respects like a perfectly ordinary High Street—an inn, two saloons (one of which was called The Bustling Pig; the sign over the other was too faded to read), a mercantile, a smithy, a Gathering Hall. There was also a small but rather lovely wooden building with a modest bell tower on top, a sturdy fieldstone foundation on the bottom, and a goldpainted cross on its double doors. The cross, like the one over the gate, marked this as a worshipping place for those who held to the Jesus-man. This wasn’t a common religion in Mid-World, but far from unknown; that same thing could have been said about most forms of worship in those days, including the worship of Baal, Asmodeus, and a hundred others. Faith, like everything else in the world these days, had moved on. As far as Roland was concerned, God o’ the Cross was just another religion which taught that love and murder were inextricably bound together—that in the end, God always drank blood.

  Meanwhile, there was the singing hum of insects that sounded almost like crickets. The dreamlike tinkle of the bells. And that queer wooden thumping, like a fist on a door. Or on a coffintop.

  Something here’s a long way from right, the gunslinger thought. ’Ware, Roland; this place has a reddish odor.

  He led Topsy through the gate with its adornments of dead flowers and down the High Street. On the porch of the mercantile, where the old men should have congregated to discuss crops, politics, and the follies of the younger generation, there stood only a line of empty rockers. Lying beneath one, as if dropped from a careless (and long-departed) hand, was a charred corncob pipe. The hitching rack in front of the Bustling Pig stood empty; the windows of the saloon itself were dark. One of the batwing doors had been yanked off and stood propped against the side of the building; the other hung ajar, its faded green slats splattered with maroon stuff that might have been paint but probably wasn’t.

  The shopfront of the livery stable stood intact, like the face of a ruined woman who has access to good cosmetics, but the double barn behind it was a charred skeleton. That fire must have happened on a rainy day, the gunslinger thought, or the whole damned town would have gone up in flames; a jolly spin and raree-show for anyone around to see it.

  To his right now, halfway up to where the street opened into the town square, was the church. There were grassy borders on both sides, one separating the church from the town’s Gathering Hall, the other from the little house set aside for the preacher and his family (if this was one of the Jesus-sects which allowed its shamans to have wives and families, that was; some of them, clearly administered by lunatics, demanded at least the appearance of celibacy). There were flowers in these grassy strips, and while they looked parched, most were still alive. So whatever had happened here to empty the place out had not happened long ago. A week, perhaps. Two at the outside, given the heat.

  Topsy sneezed again—K’chow!—and lowered his head wearily.

  The gunslinger saw the source of the tinkling. Above the cross on the church doors, a cord had been strung in a long, shallow arc. Hung from it were perhaps two dozen tiny silver bells. There was hardly any breeze today, but enough so these smalls were never quite still … and if a real wind should rise, Roland thought, the sound made by the tintinnabulation of the bells would probably be a good deal less pleasant; more like the strident parlay of gossips’ tongues.

  “Hello!” Roland called, looking across the street at what a large false-fronted sign proclaimed to be the Good Beds Hotel. “Hello, the town!”

  No answer but the bells, the tunesome insects, and that odd wooden clunking. No answer, no movement … but there were folk here. Folk or something. He was being watched. The tiny hairs on the nape of his neck had stiffened.

  Roland stepped onward, leading Topsy toward the center of town, puffing up the unlaid High Street dust with each step. Forty paces farther along, he stopped in front of a low building marked with a single curt word: LAW. The Sheriff’s office (if they had such this far from the Inners) looked remarkably similar to the church—wooden boards stained a rather forbidding shade of dark brown above a stone foundation.

  The bells behind him rustled and whispered.

  He left the roan standing in the middle of the street and mounted the steps to the LAW office. He was very aware of the bells, of the sun beating against his neck, and of the sweat trickling down his sides. The door was shut but unlocked. He opened it, then winced back, half-raising a hand as the heat trapped inside rushed out in a soundless gasp. If all the closed buildings were this hot inside, he mused, the livery barns would soon not be the only burned-out hulks. And with no rain to stop the flames (and certainly no volunteer fire department, not any more), the town would not be long for the face of the earth.

  He stepped inside, trying to sip at the stifling air rather than taking deep breaths. He immediately heard the low drone of flies.

  There was a single cell, commodious and empty, its barred door standing open. Filthy skin-shoes, one of the pair coming unsewn, lay beneath a bunk sodden with the same dried maroon stuff that had marked the Bustling Pig. Here was where the flies were, crawling over the stain, feeding from it.

  On the desk was a ledger. Roland turned it toward him and read what was embossed upon its red cover:

  REGISTRY OF MISDEEDS & REDRESS

  IN THE YEARS OF OUR LORD

  ELURIA

  So now he knew the name of the town, at least—Eluria. Pretty, yet somehow ominous, as we
ll. But any name would have seemed ominous, Roland supposed, given these circumstances. He turned to leave, and saw a closed door secured by a wooden bolt.

  He went to it, stood before it for a moment, then drew one of the big revolvers he carried low on his hips. He stood a moment longer, head down, thinking (Cuthbert, his old friend, liked to say that the wheels inside Roland’s head ground slow but exceedingly fine), and then retracted the bolt. He opened the door and immediately stood back, leveling his gun, expecting a body (Eluria’s Sheriff, mayhap) to come tumbling into the room with his throat cut and his eyes gouged out, victim of a MISDEED in need of REDRESS—

  Nothing.

  Well, half a dozen stained jumpers which longer-term prisoners were probably required to wear, two bows, a quiver of arrows, an old, dusty motor, a rifle that had probably last been fired a hundred years ago, and a mop … but in the gunslinger’s mind, all that came down to nothing. Just a storage closet.

  He went back to the desk, opened the register, and leafed through it. Even the pages were warm, as if the book had been baked. In a way, he supposed it had been. If the High Street layout had been different, he might have expected a large number of religious offenses to be recorded, but he wasn’t surprised to find none here—if the Jesus-man church had coexisted with a couple of saloons, the churchfolk must have been fairly reasonable.

  What Roland found was the usual petty offenses, and a few not so petty—a murder, a horse-thieving, the Distressal of a Lady (which probably meant rape). The murderer had been removed to a place called Lexingworth to be hanged. Roland had never heard of it. One note toward the end read Green folk sent hence. It meant nothing to Roland. The most recent entry was this:

  12/Fe/99. Chas. Freeborn, cattle-theef to be tryed.

  Roland wasn’t familiar with the notation 12/Fe/99, but as this was a long stretch from February, he supposed Fe might stand for Full Earth. In any case, the ink looked about as fresh as the blood on the bunk in the cell, and the gunslinger had a good idea that Chas. Freeborn, cattle-theef, had reached the clearing at the end of his path.

  He went out into the heat and the lacy sound of bells. Topsy looked at Roland dully, then lowered his head again, as if there were something in the dust of the High Street which could be cropped. As if he would ever want to crop again, for that matter.

  The gunslinger gathered up the reins, slapped the dust off them against the faded no-color of his jeans, and continued on up the street. The wooden knocking sound grew steadily louder as he walked (he had not holstered his gun when leaving LAW, nor cared to holster it now), and as he neared the town square, which must have housed the Eluria market in more normal times, Roland at last saw movement.

  On the far side of the square was a long watering trough, made of ironwood from the look (what some called “seequoiah” out here), apparently fed in happier times from a rusty steel pipe which now jutted waterless above the trough’s south end. Lolling over one side of this municipal oasis, about halfway down its length, was a leg clad in faded gray pants and terminating in a well-chewed cowboy boot.

  The chewer was a large dog, perhaps two shades grayer than the corduroy pants. Under other circumstances, Roland supposed the mutt would have had the boot off long since, but perhaps the foot and lower calf inside it had swelled. In any case, the dog was well on its way to simply chewing the obstacle away. It would seize the boot and shake it back and forth. Every now and then the boot’s heel would collide with the wooden side of the trough, producing another hollow knock. The gunslinger hadn’t been so wrong to think of coffintops after all, it seemed.

  Why doesn’t it just back off a few steps, jump into the trough, and have at him? Roland wondered. No water coming out of the pipe, so it can’t be afraid of drowning.

  Topsy uttered another of his hollow, tired sneezes, and when the dog lurched around in response, Roland understood why it was doing things the hard way. One of its front legs had been badly broken and crookedly mended. Walking would be a chore for it, jumping out of the question. On its chest was a patch of dirty white fur. Growing out of this patch was black fur in a roughly cruciform shape. A Jesus-dog, mayhap, hoping for a spot of afternoon communion.

  There was nothing very religious about the snarl which began to wind out of its chest, however, or the roll of its rheumy eyes. It lifted its upper lip in a trembling sneer, revealing a goodish set of teeth.

  “Light out,” Roland said. “While you can.”

  The dog backed up until its hindquarters were pressed against the chewed boot. It regarded the oncoming man fearfully, but clearly meant to stand its ground. The revolver in Roland’s hand held no significance for it. The gunslinger wasn’t surprised—he guessed the dog had never seen one, had no idea it was anything other than a club of some kind, which could only be thrown once.

  “Hie on with you, now,” Roland said, but still the dog wouldn’t move.

  He should have shot it—it was no good to itself, and a dog that had acquired a taste for human flesh could be no good to anyone else—but he somehow didn’t like to. Killing the only thing still living in this town (other than the singing bugs, that was) seemed like an invitation to bad luck.

  He fired into the dust near the dog’s good forepaw, the sound crashing into the hot day and temporarily silencing the insects. The dog could run, it seemed, although at a lurching trot that hurt Roland’s eyes … and his heart, a little, too. It stopped at the far side of the square, by an overturned flatbed wagon (there looked to be more dried blood splashed on the freighter’s side), and glanced back. It uttered a forlorn howl that raised the hairs on the nape of Roland’s neck even further. Then it turned, skirted the wrecked wagon, and limped down a lane which opened between two of the stalls. This way toward Eluria’s back gate, Roland guessed.

  Still leading his dying horse, the gunslinger crossed the square to the ironwood trough and looked in.

  The owner of the chewed boot wasn’t a man but a boy who had just been beginning to get his man’s growth—and that would have been quite a large growth, indeed, Roland judged, even setting aside the bloating effects which had resulted from being immersed for some unknown length of time in nine inches of water simmering under a summer sun.

  The boy’s eyes, now just milky balls, stared blindly up at the gunslinger like the eyes of a statue. His hair appeared to be the white of old age, although that was the effect of the water; he had likely been a towhead. His clothes were those of a cowboy, although he couldn’t have been much more than fourteen or sixteen. Around his neck, gleaming blearily in water that was slowly turning into a skin stew under the summer sun, was a gold medallion.

  Roland reached into the water, not liking to but feeling a certain obligation. He wrapped his fingers around the medallion and pulled. The chain parted, and he lifted the thing, dripping, into the air.

  He rather expected a Jesus-man sigul—what was called the crucifix or the rood—but a small rectangle hung from the chain, instead. The object looked like pure gold. Engraved into it was this legend:

  James

  Loved of family, Loved of GOD

  Roland, who had been almost too revolted to reach into the polluted water (as a younger man, he could never have brought himself to that), was now glad he’d done it. He might never run into any of those who had loved this boy, but he knew enough of ka to think it might be so. In any case, it was the right thing. So was giving the kid a decent burial … assuming, that was, he could get the body out of the trough without having it break apart inside the clothes.

  Roland was considering this, trying to balance what might be his duty in this circumstance against his growing desire to get out of this town, when Topsy finally fell dead.

  The roan went over with a creak of gear and a last whuffling groan as it hit the ground. Roland turned and saw eight people in the street, walking toward him in a line, like beaters who hope to flush out birds or drive small game. Their skin was waxy green. Folk wearing such skin would likely glow in the dark like g
hosts. It was hard to tell their sex, and what could it matter—to them or anyone else? They were slow mutants, walking with the hunched deliberation of corpses reanimated by some arcane magic.

  The dust had muffled their feet like carpet. With the dog banished, they might well have gotten within attacking distance if Topsy hadn’t done Roland the favor of dying at such an opportune moment. No guns that Roland could see; they were armed with clubs. These were chair legs and table legs, for the most part, but Roland saw one that looked made rather than seized—it had a bristle of rusty nails sticking out of it, and he suspected it had once been the property of a saloon bouncer, possibly the one who kept school in the Bustling Pig.

  Roland raised his pistol, aiming at the fellow in the center of the line. Now he could hear the shuffle of their feet, and the wet snuffle of their breathing. As if they all had bad chest colds.

  Came out of the mines, most likely, Roland thought. There are radium mines somewhere about. That would account for the skin. I wonder that the sun doesn’t kill them.

  Then, as he watched, the one on the end—a creature with a face like melted candle wax—did die … or collapsed, at any rate. He (Roland was quite sure it was a male) went to his knees with a low, gobbling cry, groping for the hand of the thing walking next to it—something with a lumpy bald head and red sores sizzling on its neck. This creature took no notice of its fallen companion, but kept its dim eyes on Roland, lurching along in rough step with its remaining companions.