Legends: Stories By The Masters of Modern Fantasy Page 3

  “Stop where you are!” Roland said. “‘Ware me, if you’d live to see day’s end! ’Ware me very well!”

  He spoke mostly to the one in the center, who wore ancient red suspenders over rags of shirt, and a filthy bowler hat. This gent had only one good eye, and it peered at the gunslinger with a greed as horrible as it was unmistakable. The one beside Bowler Hat (Roland believed this one might be a woman, with the dangling vestiges of breasts beneath the vest it wore) threw the chair leg it held. The arc was true, but the missile fell ten yards short.

  Roland thumbed back the trigger of his revolver and fired again. This time the dirt displaced by the slug kicked up on the tattered remains of Bowler Hat’s shoe instead of on a lame dog’s paw.

  The green folk didn’t run as the dog had, but they stopped, staring at him with their dull greed. Had the missing folk of Eluria finished up in these creatures’ stomachs? Roland couldn’t believe it … although he knew perfectly well that such as these held no scruple against cannibalism. (And perhaps it wasn’t cannibalism, not really; how could such things as these be considered human, whatever they might once have been?) They were too slow, too stupid. If they had dared come back into town after the Sheriff had run them out, they would have been burned or stoned to death.

  Without thinking about what he was doing, wanting only to free his other hand to draw his second gun if the apparitions didn’t see reason, Roland stuffed the medallion that he had taken from the dead boy into the pocket of his jeans, pushing the broken fine-link chain in after.

  They stood staring at him, their strangely twisted shadows drawn out behind them. What next? Tell them to go back where they’d come from? Roland didn’t know if they’d do it, and in any case had decided he liked them best where he could see them. And at least there was no question now about staying to bury the boy named James; that conundrum had been solved.

  “Stand steady,” he said in the low speech, beginning to retreat. “First fellow that moves—”

  Before he could finish, one of them—a thick-chested troll with a pouty toad’s mouth and what looked like gills on the sides of his wattled neck—lunged forward, gibbering in a high-pitched and peculiarly flabby voice. It might have been a species of laughter. He was waving what looked like a piano leg.

  Roland fired. Mr. Toad’s chest caved in like a bad piece of roofing. He ran backward several steps, trying to catch his balance and clawing at his chest with the hand not holding the piano leg. His feet, clad in dirty red velvet slippers with curled-up toes, tangled in each other and he fell over, making a queer and somehow lonely gargling sound. He let go of his club, rolled over on one side, tried to rise, and then fell back into the dust. The brutal sun glared into his open eyes, and as Roland watched, white tendrils of steam began to rise from his skin, which was rapidly losing its green undertint. There was also a hissing sound, like a gob of spit on top of a hot stove.

  Saves explaining, at least, Roland thought, and swept his eyes over the others. “All right; he was the first one to move. Who wants to be the second?”

  None did, it seemed. They only stood there, watching him, not coming at him … but not retreating, either. He thought (as he had about the crucifix-dog) that he should kill them as they stood there, just draw his other gun and mow them down. It would be the work of seconds only, and child’s play to his gifted hands, even if some ran. But he couldn’t. Not just cold, like that. He wasn’t that kind of killer … at least, not yet.

  Very slowly, he began to step backward, first bending his course around the watering trough, then putting it between him and them. When Bowler Hat took a step forward, Roland didn’t give the others in the line a chance to copy him; he put a bullet into the dust of High Street an inch in advance of the Bowler Hat’s foot.

  “That’s your last warning,” he said, still using the low speech. He had no idea if they understood it, didn’t really care. He guessed they caught this tune’s music well enough. “Next bullet I fire eats up someone’s heart. The way it works is, you stay and I go. You get this one chance. Follow me, and you all die. It’s too hot to play games and I’ve lost my—”

  “Booh!” cried a rough, liquidy voice from behind him. There was unmistakable glee in it. Roland saw a shadow grow from the shadow of the overturned freight wagon, which he had now almost reached, and had just time to understand that another of the green folk had been hiding beneath it.

  As he began to turn, a club crashed down on Roland’s shoulder, numbing his right arm all the way to the wrist. He held on to the gun and fired once, but the bullet went into one of the wagon wheels, smashing a wooden spoke and turning the wheel on its hub with a high screeing sound. Behind him, he heard the green folk in the street uttering hoarse, yapping cries as they charged forward.

  The thing which had been hiding beneath the overturned wagon was a monster with two heads growing out of his neck, one with the vestigial, slack face of a corpse. The other, although just as green, was more lively. Broad lips spread in a cheerful grin as he raised his club to strike again.

  Roland drew with his left hand—the one that wasn’t numbed and distant. He had time to put one bullet through the bushwhacker’s grin, flinging him backward in a spray of blood and teeth, the bludgeon flying out of his relaxing fingers. Then the others were on him, clubbing and drubbing.

  The gunslinger was able to slip the first couple of blows, and there was one moment when he thought he might be able to spin around to the rear of the overturned wagon, spin and turn and go to work with his guns. Surely he would be able to do that. Surely his quest for the Dark Tower wasn’t supposed to end on the sun-blasted street of a little far western town called Eluria, at the hands of half a dozen greenskinned slow mutants. Surely ka could not be so cruel.

  But Bowler Hat caught him with a vicious sidehand blow, and Roland crashed into the wagon’s slowly spinning rear wheel instead of skirting around it. As he went to his hands and knees, still scrambling and trying to turn, trying to evade the blows which rained down on him, he saw there were now many more than half a dozen. Coming up the street toward the town square were at least thirty green men and women. This wasn’t a clan but a damned tribe of them. And in broad, hot daylight! Slow mutants were, in his experience, creatures that loved the dark, almost like toadstools with brains, and he had never seen any such as these before. They—

  The one in the red vest was female. Her bare breasts swinging beneath the dirty red vest were the last things he saw clearly as they gathered around and above him, bashing away with their clubs. The one with the nails studded in it came down on his lower right calf, sinking its stupid rusty fangs in deep. He tried again to raise one of the big guns (his vision was fading, now, but that wouldn’t help them if he got to shooting; he had always been the most hellishly talented of them, Jamie DeCurry had once proclaimed that Roland could shoot blindfolded, because he had eyes in his fingers), and it was kicked out of his hand and into the dust. Although he could still feel the smooth sandalwood grip of the other, he thought it was nevertheless already gone.

  He could smell them—the rich, rotted smell of decaying meat. Or was that only his hands, as he raised them in a feeble and useless effort to protect his head? His hands, which had been in the polluted water where flecks and strips of the dead boy’s skin floated?

  The clubs slamming down on him, slamming down all over him, as if the green folk wanted not just to beat him to death but to tenderize him as they did so. And as he went down into the darkness of what he most certainly believed would be his death, he heard the bugs singing, the dog he had spared barking, and the bells hung on the church door ringing. These sounds merged together into strangely sweet music. Then that was gone, too; the darkness ate it all.

  II. Rising. Hanging Suspended. White Beauty. Two Others. The Medallion.

  The gunslinger’s return to the world wasn’t like coming back to consciousness after a blow, which he’d done several times before, and it wasn’t like waking from sleep, either. It was l
ike rising.

  I’m dead, he thought at some point during this process … when the power to think had been at least partially restored to him. Dead and rising into whatever afterlife there is. That’s what it must be. The singing I hear is the singing of dead souls.

  Total blackness gave way to the dark gray of rainclouds, then to the lighter gray of fog. This brightened to the uniform clarity of a heavy mist moments before the sun breaks through. And through it all was that sense of rising, as if he had been caught in some mild but powerful updraft.

  As the sense of rising began to diminish and the brightness behind his eyelids grew, Roland at last began to believe he was still alive. It was the singing that convinced him. Not dead souls, not the heavenly host of angels sometimes described by the Jesus-man preachers, but only those bugs. A little like crickets, but sweeter-voiced. The ones he had heard in Eluria.

  On this thought, he opened his eyes.

  His belief that he was still alive was severely tried, for Roland found himself hanging suspended in a world of white beauty—his first bewildered thought was that he was in the sky, floating within a fairweather cloud. All around him was the reedy singing of the bugs. Now he could hear the tinkling of bells, too.

  He tried to turn his head and swayed in some sort of harness. He could hear it creaking. The soft singing of the bugs, like crickets in the grass at the end of day back home in Gilead, hesitated and broke rhythm. When it did, what felt like a tree of pain grew up Roland’s back. He had no idea what its burning branches might be, but the trunk was surely his spine. A far deadlier pain sank into one of his lower legs—in his confusion, the gunslinger could not tell which one. That’s where the club with the nails in it got me, he thought. And more pain in his head. His skull felt like a badly cracked egg. He cried out, and could hardly believe that the harsh crow’s caw he heard came from his own throat. He thought he could also hear, very faintly, the barking of the cross-dog, but surely that was his imagination.

  Am I dying? Have I awakened once more at the very end?

  A hand stroked his brow. He could feel it but not see it—fingers trailing across his skin, pausing here and there to massage a knot or a line. Delicious, like a drink of cool water on a hot day. He began to close his eyes, and then a horrible idea came to him: suppose that hand were green, its owner wearing a tattered red vest over her hanging dugs?

  What if it is? What could you do?

  “Hush, man,” a young woman’s voice said … or perhaps it was the voice of a girl. Certainly the first person Roland thought of was Susan, the girl from Mejis, she who had spoken to him as thee.

  “Where … where …”

  “Hush, stir not. ’Tis far too soon.”

  The pain in his back was subsiding now, but the image of the pain as a tree remained, for his very skin seemed to be moving like leaves in a light breeze. How could that be?

  He let the question go—let all questions go—and concentrated on the small, cool hand stroking his brow.

  “Hush, pretty man, God’s love be upon ye. Yet it’s sore hurt ye are. Be still. Heal.”

  The dog had hushed its barking (if it had ever been there in the first place), and Roland became aware of that low creaking sound again. It reminded him of horse tethers, or something

  (hangropes)

  he didn’t like to think of. Now he believed he could feel pressure beneath his thighs, his buttocks, and perhaps … yes … his shoulders.

  I’m not in a bed at all. I think I’m above a bed. Can that be?

  He supposed he could be in a sling. He seemed to remember once, as a boy, that some fellow had been suspended that way in the horse doctor’s room behind the Great Hall. A stablehand who had been burned too badly by kerosene to be laid in a bed. The man had died, but not soon enough; for two nights, his shrieks had filled the sweet summer air of the Gathering Fields.

  Am I burned, then, nothing but a cinder with legs, hanging in a sling?

  The fingers touched the center of his brow, rubbing away the frown forming there. And it was as if the voice which went with the hand had read his thoughts, picking them up with the tips of her clever, soothing fingers.

  “Ye’ll be fine if God wills, sai,” the voice which went with the hand said. “But time belongs to God, not to you.”

  No, he would have said, if he had been able. Time belongs to the Tower.

  Then he slipped down again, descending as smoothly as he had risen, going away from the hand and the dreamlike sounds of the singing insects and chiming bells. There was an interval that might have been sleep, or perhaps unconsciousness, but he never went all the way back down.

  At one point he thought he heard the girl’s voice, although he couldn’t be sure, because this time it was raised in fury, or fear, or both. “No!” she cried. “Ye can’t have it off him and ye know it! Go your course and stop talking of it, do!”

  When he rose back to consciousness the second time, he was no stronger in body, but a little more himself in mind. What he saw when he opened his eyes wasn’t the inside of a cloud, but at first that same phrase—white beauty—recurred to him. It was in some ways the most beautiful place Roland had ever been in his life … partially because he still had a life, of course, but mostly because it was so fey and peaceful.

  It was a huge room, high and long. When Roland at last turned his head—cautiously, so cautiously—to take its measure as well as he could, he thought it must run at least two hundred yards from end to end. It was built narrow, but its height gave the place a feeling of tremendous airiness.

  There were no walls or ceilings such as those he was familiar with, although it was a little like being in a vast tent. Above him, the sun struck and diffused its light across billowy panels of thin white silk, turning them into the bright swags that he had first mistaken for clouds. Beneath this silk canopy, the room was as gray as twilight. The walls, also silk, rippled like sails in a faint breeze. Hanging from each wall panel was a curved rope bearing small bells. These lay against the fabric and rang in low and charming unison, like wind chimes, when the walls rippled.

  An aisle ran down the center of the long room; on either side of it were scores of beds, each made up with clean white sheets and headed with crisp white pillows. There were perhaps forty on the far side of the aisle, all empty, and another forty on Roland’s side. There were two other occupied beds here, one next to Roland on his right. This fellow—

  It’s the boy. The one who was in the trough.

  The idea ran goose bumps up Roland’s arms and gave him a nasty, superstitious start. He peered more closely at the sleeping boy.

  Can’t be. You’re just dazed, that’s all; it can’t be.

  Yet closer scrutiny refused to dispel the idea. It certainly seemed to be the boy from the trough, probably ill (why else would he be in a place like this?) but far from dead; Roland could see the slow rise and fall of his chest, and the occasional twitch of the fingers that dangled over the side of the bed.

  You didn’t get a good enough look at him to be sure of anything, and after a few days in that trough, his own mother couldn’t have said for sure who it was.

  But Roland, who’d had a mother, knew better than that. He also knew that he’d seen the gold medallion around the boy’s neck. Just before the attack of the green folk, he had taken it from this lad’s corpse and put it in his pocket. Now someone—the proprietors of this place, most likely, them who had sorcerously restored the lad named James to his interrupted life—had taken it back from Roland and put it around the boy’s neck again.

  Had the girl with the wonderfully cool hand done that? Did she in consequence think Roland a ghoul who would steal from the dead? He didn’t like to think so. In fact, the notion made him more uncomfortable than the idea that the young cowboy’s bloated body had been somehow returned to its normal size and then reanimated.

  Farther down the aisle on this side, perhaps a dozen empty beds away from the boy and Roland Deschain, the gunslinger saw a third inmate
of this queer infirmary. This fellow looked at least four times the age of the lad, twice the age of the gunslinger. He had a long beard, more gray than black, that hung to his upper chest in two straggly forks. The face above it was sun-darkened, heavily lined, and pouched beneath the eyes. Running from his left cheek and across the bridge of his nose was a thick dark mark which Roland took to be a scar. The bearded man was either asleep or unconscious—Roland could hear him snoring—and was suspended three feet above his bed, held up by a complex series of white belts that glimmered in the dim air. These crisscrossed each other, making a series of figure eights all the way around the man’s body. He looked like a bug in some exotic spider’s web. He wore a gauzy white bed-dress. One of the belts ran beneath his buttocks, elevating his crotch in a way that seemed to offer the bulge of his privates to the gray and dreaming air. Farther down his body, Roland could see the dark shadow-shapes of his legs. They appeared to be twisted like ancient dead trees. Roland didn’t like to think in how many places they must have been broken to look like that. And yet they appeared to be moving. How could they be, if the bearded man was unconscious? It was a trick of the light, perhaps, or of the shadows … perhaps the gauzy singlet the man was wearing was stirring in a light breeze, or …

  Roland looked away, up at the billowy silk panels high above, trying to control the accelerating beat of his heart. What he saw hadn’t been caused by the wind, or a shadow, or anything else. The man’s legs were somehow moving without moving … as Roland had seemed to feel his own back moving without moving. He didn’t know what could cause such a phenomenon, and didn’t want to know, at least not yet.

  “I’m not ready,” he whispered. His lips felt very dry. He closed his eyes again, wanting to sleep, wanting not to think about what the bearded man’s twisted legs might indicate about his own condition. But—

  But you’d better get ready.

  That was the voice that always seemed to come when he tried to slack off, to scamp a job or take the easy way around an obstacle. It was the voice of Cort, his old teacher. The man whose stick they had all feared, as boys. They hadn’t feared his stick as much as his mouth, however. His jeers when they were weak, his contempt when they complained or tried whining about their lot.