The Waste Lands (Page 26)

“It was in a tree,” Roland said mildly. “1 didn’t see it myself, at first. The light gets tricky this time of day. He paused and then went on in that same mild voice: “She was never in any danger, Eddie.” Eddie nodded his head. Roland, he now realized, could almost have eaten a hamburger and drunk a milkshake before beginning his draw. He was that fast. “All right. Let’s just say I disapprove of your teaching techniques, okay? I’m not going to apologize, though, so if you’re waiting for one, you can stop now.” Roland bent, picked Susannah up, and began to brush her off. He did this with a kind of impartial affection, like a mother brushing off her toddler after she has taken one of her necessary tumbles in the dust of the back yard. “Your apology is not expected or necessary,” he said. “Susannah and I had a conversation similar to this one two days ago. Didn’t we, Susannah?” She nodded. “Roland’s of the opinion that apprentice gunslingers who won’t bite the hand that feeds them from time to time need a good lack in the slats.” Eddie looked around at the wreckage and slowly began to beat the bone-dust out of his pants and shirt. “What if I told you I don’t want to be a gunslinger, Roland old buddy?”

“I’d say that what you want doesn’t much matter.” Roland was look-ing at the metal kiosk which stood against the rock wall, and seemed to have lost interest in the conversation. Eddie had seen this before. When the conversation turned to questions of should-be, could-be, or oughtta-be, Roland almost always lost interest.

“Ka?” Eddie asked, with a trace of his old bitterness. “That’s right. Ka.” Roland walked over to the kiosk and passed a hand along the yellow and black stripes which ran down its front. “We have found one of the twelve portals which ring the edge of the world . . . one of the six paths to the Dark Tower.

“And that is also ka.”

EDDIE WENT BACK FOR Susannah’s wheelchair. No one had to ask him to do this; he wanted some time alone, to get himself back under control. Now that the shooting was over, every muscle in his body seemed to have picked up its own little thrumming tremor. He did not want either of them to see him this way—not because they might misread it as fear, but because one or both might know it for what it really was: excitement overload. He had liked it. Even when you added in the bat which had almost scalped him, he had liked it. That’s bullshit, buddy. And you know it. The trouble was, he didn’t know it. He had come face to face with something Susannah had found out for herself after shooting the bear: he could talk about how he didn’t want to be a gunslinger, how he didn’t want to be tramping around this crazy world where the three of them seemed to be the only human life, that what he really wanted more than anything else was to be standing on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, popping his fingers, munching a chili-dog, and listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival blast out of his Walkman earphones as he watched the girls go by, those ultimately sexy New York girls with their pouty go-to-hell mouths and their long legs in short skirts. He could talk about those things until he was blue in the face, but his heart knew other things. It knew that he had enjoyed blowing the electronic menag-erie back to glory, at least while the game was on and Roland’s gun was his own private hand-held thunderstorm. He had enjoyed kicking the robot rat, even though it had hurt his foot and even though he had been scared shitless. In some weird way, that part—the being scared part— actually seemed to add to the enjoyment. All that was bad enough, but his heart knew something even worse: that if a door leading back to New York appeared in front of him right now, he might not walk through it. Not, at least, until he had seen the Dark Tower for himself. He was beginning to believe that Roland’s illness was a communicable disease. As he wrestled Susannah’s chair through the tangle of junk-alders, cursing the branches that whipped at his face and tried to poke his eyes out, Eddie found himself able to admit at least some of these things, and the admission cooled his blood a little. / want to see if it looks the way it did in my dream, he thought. To see something like that. . . that would be really fantastic. And another voice spoke up inside. I’ll bet his other friends—the ones with the names that sound like they came straight from the Round Table in King Arthur’s court—I’ll bet they felt the same way, Eddie. And they’re all dead. Every one of them.

He recognized that voice, like it or not. It belonged to Henry, and that made it a hard voice not to hear.

ROLAND, WITH SUSANNAH BALANCED on his right hip, was standing in front of the metal box that looked like a subway entrance closed for the night. Eddie left the wheelchair at the edge of the clearing and walked over. As he did, the steady humming noise and the vibration under his feet became louder. The machinery making the noise, he realized, was either inside the box or under it. It seemed that he heard it not with his ears but somewhere deep inside his head, and in the hollows of his gut.

“So this is one of the twelve portals. Where does it go, Roland? Disney World?” Roland shook his head. “I don’t know where it goes. Maybe nowhere … or everywhere. There’s a lot about my world I don’t know—surely you both have realized that. And there are things I used to know which have changed.” “Because the world has moved on?”

“Yes.” Roland glanced at him. “Here, that is not a figure of speech. The world really is moving on, and it goes ever faster. At the same time, things are wearing out . . . falling apart . . .” He kicked die mechanical corpse of the walking box to illustrate his point.