The Waste Lands (Page 13)

And even loves a child like me.”

Roland uttered a small, bemused laugh. “Hax taught that to me, singing it as he stirred the frosting for some cake and gave me little nips of the sweet from the edge of his spoon. Amazing what we remember, isn’t it? Anyway, as I grew older, I came to believe that the Guardians didn’t really exist—that they were symbols rather than substance. It seems that I was wrong.” “I called it a robot,” Eddie said, “but that’s not what it really was. Susannah’s right—the only thing robots bleed when you shoot them is Quaker State 10-40. I think it was what people of my world call a cyborg, Roland—a creature that’s part machine and part flesh and blood. There was a movie I saw . . . we told you about movies, didn’t we?” ‘

Smiling a little, Roland nodded.

“Well, this movie was called Robocop, and the guy in it wasn’t a lot different from the bear Susannah killed. How did you know where she should shoot it?” “That I remembered from the old tales as Hax told them,” he said. “If it had been up to my nursemaid, Eddie, you’d be in the belly of the bear now. Do they sometimes tell puzzled children in your world to put on their thinking caps?” “Yes,’ Susannah said. “They sure do.”

“It’s said here, as well, and the saying comes from the story of the Guardians. Each supposedly carried an extra brain on the outside of its head. In a hat.” He looked at them with his dreadfully haunted eyes and smiled again. “It didn t look much like a hat, did it?”

“No,” Eddie said, “but the story was close enough to save our bacon.” “I think now that I’ve been looking for one of the Guardians ever since I began my quest,” Roland said. “When we find the portal this Shardik guarded—and that should only be a matter of following its back-trail—we will finally have a course to follow. We must set the portal to our backs and then simply move straight ahead. At the center of the circle . . . the Tower.” Eddie opened his mouth to say. All right, let’s talk about this Tower. Finally, once and for all, let’s talk about it—what it is, what it means, and, most important of all, what happens to us when we get there. But no sound came out, and after a moment he closed his mouth again. This wasn’t the time—not now, with Roland in such obvious pain. Not now, with only the spark of their campfire to keep the night at bay.

“So now we come to the other part,” Roland said heavily. “I have finally found my course—after all the long years I have found my course—but at the same time I seem to be losing my sanity. I can feel it crumbling away beneath my feet, like a steep embankment which has been loosened by rain. This is my punishment for letting a boy who never existed fall to his death. And that is also ka.” “Who is this boy, Roland?” Susannah asked. Roland glanced at Eddie. “Do you know?”

Eddie shook his head.

“But I spoke of him,” Roland said. “In fact, I raved of him, when the infection was at its worst and I was near dying.” The gunslinger’s voice suddenly rose half an octave, and his imitation of Eddie’s voice was so good that Susannah felt a coil of superstitious fright. ” ‘If you don’t shut up about that goddam kid, Roland, I’ll gag you with your own shirt! I’m sick of hearing about him!’ Do you remember saying that, Eddie?”

Eddie thought it over carefully. Roland had spoken of a thousand things as the two of them made their tortuous way up the beach from the door marked THE PRISONER to the one marked THE LADY OF THE SHADOWS, and he had mentioned what seemed like a thousand names in his fever-heated monologues—Alain, Cort, Jamie de Curry, Cuthbert (this one more often than all the others), Hax, Martin (or per-haps it was Marten, like the animal), Walter, Susan, even a guy with the unlikely name of Zoltan. Eddie had gotten very tired of hearing about these people he had never met (and didn’t care to meet), but of course Eddie had had a few problems of his own at that time, heroin withdrawal and cosmic jet-lag being only two of them. And, if he was to be fair, he guessed Roland had gotten as tired of Eddie’s own Fractured Fairy Tales—the ones about how he and Henry had grown up together and turned into junkies together—as Eddie had of Roland’s.

But he couldn’t remember ever telling Roland he would gag him with his own shirt if he didn’t stop talking about some kid. “Nothing comes to you?” Roland asked. “Nothing at all?” Was there something? Some far-off tickle, like the feeling of deja vu he’d gotten when he saw the slingshot hiding inside the chunk of wood jutting out of the stump? Eddie tried to find that tickle, but it was gone. He decided it had never been there in the first place; he only wanted it to be there, because Roland was hurting so badly.

“No,” he said. “Sorry, man.”

“But I did tell you.” Roland’s tone was calm, but urgency ran and pulsed beneath it like a scarlet thread. “The boy’s name was Jake. I sacrificed him—killed him—in order that I might finally catch up with Walter and make him talk. I killed him under the mountains.”

On this point Eddie could be more positive. “Well, maybe that’s what happened, but it’s not what you said happened. You said you went under the mountains alone, on some land of crazy handcar. You talked about that a lot while we were coming up the beach, Roland. About how scary it was to be alone.” “I remember. But I also remember telling you about the boy, and how he fell from the trestle into the chasm. And it’s the distance between those two memories that is pulling my mind apart.”