by Stephen King
Meanwhile, Roland was making the impatient little finger-twirling gesture with which Eddie had become so familiar. Come on, folks, it said, day’s wasting.
“No telling for sure what they are,” Overholser said. “They look like men, but they wear masks.”
“Wolf-masks,” Susannah said.
“Aye, lady, wolf-masks, gray as their horses.”
“Do you say all come on gray horses?” Roland asked.
The silence was briefer this time, but Eddie still felt that sense of khef and ka-tet, minds consulting via something so elemental it couldn’t even rightly be called telepathy; it was more elemental than telepathy.
“Yer-bugger!” Overholser said, a slang term that seemed to mean You bet your ass, don’t insult me by asking again. “All on gray horses. They wear gray pants that look like skin. Black boots with cruel big steel spurs. Green cloaks and hoods. And the masks. We know they’re masks because they’ve been found left behind. They look like steel but rot in the sun like flesh, buggerdly things.”
“Ah.”
Overholser gave him a rather insulting head-cocked-to-one side look, the sort that asked Are you foolish or just slow? Then Slightman said: “Their horses ride like the wind. Some have ta’en one babby before the saddle and another behind.”
“Do you say so?” Roland asked.
Slightman nodded emphatically. “Tell gods thankee.” He saw Callahan again make the sign of the cross in the air and sighed. “Beg pardon, Old Fella.”
Callahan shrugged. “You were here before I was. Call on all the gods you like, so long as you know I think they’re false.”
“And they come out of Thunderclap,” Roland said, ignoring this last.
“Aye,” Overholser said. “You can see where it lies over that way about a hundred wheels.” He pointed southeast. “For we come out of the woods on the last height of land before the Crescent. Ye can see all the Eastern Plain from there, and beyond it a great darkness, like a rain cloud on the horizon. ’Tis said, Roland, that in the far long ago, you could see mountains over there.”
“Like the Rockies from Nebraska,” Jake breathed.
Overholser glanced at him. “Beg pardon, Jake-soh?”
“Nothing,” Jake said, and gave the big farmer a small, embarrassed smile. Eddie, meanwhile, filed away what Overholser had called him. Not sai but soh. Just something else that was interesting.
“We’ve heard of Thunderclap,” Roland said. His voice was somehow terrifying in its lack of emotion, and when Eddie felt Susannah’s hand creep into his, he was glad of it.
“ ’Tis a land of vampires, boggarts, and taheen, so the stories say,” Zalia told them. Her voice was thin, on the verge of trembling. “Of course the stories are old—”
“The stories are true,” Callahan said. His own voice was harsh, but Eddie heard the fear in it. Heard it very well. “There are vampires—other things as well, very likely—and Thunderclap’s their nest. We might speak more of this another time, gunslinger, if it does ya. For now, only hear me, I beg: of vampires I know a good deal. I don’t know if the Wolves take the Calla’s children to them—I rather think not—but yes, there are vampires.”
“Why do you speak as if I doubt?” Roland asked.
Callahan’s eyes dropped. “Because many do. I did myself. I doubted much and…” His voice cracked. He cleared his throat, and when he finished, it was almost in a whisper. “…and it was my undoing.”
Roland sat quiet for several moments, hunkered on the soles of his ancient boots with his arms wrapped around his bony knees, rocking back and forth a little. Then, to Overholser: “What o’ the clock do they come?”
“When they took Welland, my brother, it was morning,” the farmer said. “Breakfast not far past. I remember, because Welland asked our Ma if he could take his cup of coffee into the cellar with him. But last time…the time they come and took Tian’s sister and Zalia’s brother and so many others…”
“I lost two nieces and a nephew,” Slightman the Elder said.
“That time wasn’t long after the noon-bell from the Gathering Hall. We know the day because Andy knows the day, and that much he tells us. Then we hear the thunder of their hooves as they come out of the east and see the rooster-tail of dust they raise—”
“So you know when they’re coming,” Roland said. “In fact, you know three ways: Andy, the sound of their hoofbeats, the rise of their dust.”
Overholser, taking Roland’s implication, had flushed a dull brick color up the slopes of his plump cheeks and down his neck. “They come armed, Roland, do ya. With guns—rifles as well as the revolvers yer own tet carries, grenados, too—and other weapons, as well. Fearsome weapons of the Old People. Light-sticks that kill at a touch, flying metal buzz-balls called drones or sneetches. The sticks burn the skin black and stop the heart—electrical, maybe, or maybe—”
Eddie heard Overholser’s next word as ant-NOMIC. At first he thought the man was trying to say “anatomy.” A moment later he realized it was probably “atomic.”
“Once the drones smell you, they follow no matter how fast you run,” Slightman’s boy said eagerly, “or how much you twist and turn. Right, Da’?”
“Yer-bugger,” Slightman the Elder said. “Then sprout blades that whirl around so fast you can’t see em and they cut you apart.”
“All on gray horses,” Roland mused. “Every one of em the same color. What else?”
Nothing, it seemed. It was all told. They came out of the east on the day Andy foretold, and for a terrible hour—perhaps longer—the Calla was filled with the thunderous hoofbeats of those gray horses and the screams of desolated parents. Green cloaks swirled. Wolf-masks that looked like metal and rotted in the sun like skin snarled. The children were taken. Sometimes a few pair were overlooked and left whole, suggesting that the Wolves’ prescience wasn’t perfect. Still, it must have been pretty goddam good, Eddie thought, because if the kids were moved (as they often were) or hidden at home (as they almost always were), the Wolves found them anyway, and in short order. Even at the bottom of sharproot piles or haystacks they were found. Those of the Calla who tried to stand against them were shot, fried by the light-sticks—lasers of some kind?—or cut to pieces by the flying drones. When trying to imagine these latter, he kept recalling a bloody little film Henry had dragged him to. Phantasm, it had been called. Down at the old Majestic. Corner of Brooklyn and Markey Avenue. Like too much of his old life, the Majestic had smelled of piss and popcorn and the kind of wine that came in brown bags. Sometimes there were needles in the aisles. Not good, maybe, and yet sometimes—usually at night, when sleep was long in coming—a deep part of him still cried for the old life of which the Majestic had been a part. Cried for it as a stolen child might cry for his mother.
The children were taken, the hoofbeats receded the way they had come, and that was the end of it.
“No, can’t be,” Jake said. “They must bring them back, don’t they?”
“No,” Overholser said. “The roont ones come back on the train, hear me, there’s a great junkpile of em I could show’ee, and—What? What’s wrong?” Jake’s mouth had fallen open, and he’d lost most of his color.
“We had a bad experience on a train not so very long ago,” Susannah said. “The trains that bring your children back, are they monos?”
They weren’t. Overholser, the Jaffords, and the Slightmans had no idea what a mono was, in fact. (Callahan, who had been to Disneyland as a teenager, did.) The trains which brought the children back were hauled by plain old locomotives (hopefully none of them named Charlie, Eddie thought), driverless and attached to one or perhaps two open flatcars. The children were huddled on these. When they arrived they were usually crying with fear (from sunburns as well, if the weather west of Thunderclap was hot and clear), covered with food and their own drying shit, and dehydrated into the bargain. There was no station at the railhead, although Overholser opined there might have been, centu
ries before. Once the children had been offloaded, teams of horses were used to pull the short trains from the rusty railhead. It occurred to Eddie that they could figure out the number of times the Wolves had come by counting the number of junked engines, sort of like figuring out the age of a tree by counting the rings on the stump.
“How long a trip for them, would you guess?” Roland asked. “Judging from their condition when they arrive?”
Overholser looked at Slightman, then at Tian and Zalia. “Two days? Three?”
They shrugged and nodded.
“Two or three days,” Overholser said to Roland, speaking with more confidence than was perhaps warranted, judging from the looks of the others. “Long enough for sunburns, and to eat most of the rations they’re left—”
“Or paint themselves with em,” Slightman grunted.
“—but not long enough to die of exposure,” Overholser finished. “If ye’d judge from that how far they were taken from the Calla, all I can say is I wish’ee joy of the riddle, for no one knows what speed the train draws when it’s crossing the plains. It comes slow and stately enough to the far side of the river, but that means little.”
“No,” Roland agreed, “it doesn’t.” He considered. “Twenty-seven days left?”
“Twenty-six now,” Callahan said quietly.
“One thing, Roland,” Overholser said. He spoke apologetically, but his jaw was jutting. Eddie thought he’d backslid to the kind of guy you could dislike on sight. If you had a problem with authority figures, that was, and Eddie always had.
Roland raised his eyebrows in silent question.
“We haven’t said yes.” Overholser glanced at Slightman the Elder, as if for support, and Slightman nodded agreement.
“Ye must ken we have no way of knowing y’are who you say y’are,” Slightman said, rather apologetically. “My family had no books growing up, and there’s none out at the ranch—I’m foreman of Eisenhart’s Rocking B—except for the stockline books, but growing up I heard as many tales of Gilead and gunslingers and Arthur Eld as any other boy…heard of Jericho Hill and such blood-and-thunder tales of pretend…but I never heard of a gunslinger missing two of his fingers, or a brown-skinned woman gunslinger, or one who won’t be old enough to shave for years yet.”
His son looked shocked, and in an agony of embarrassment as well. Slightman looked rather embarrassed himself, but pushed on.
“I cry your pardon if what I say offends, indeed I do—”
“Hear him, hear him well,” Overholser rumbled. Eddie was starting to think that if the man’s jaw jutted out much further, it would snap clean off.
“—but any decision we make will have long echoes. Ye must see it’s so. If we make the wrong one, it could mean the death of our town, and all in it.”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing!” Tian Jaffords cried indignantly. “Do you think ’ese’re a fraud? Good gods, man, have’ee not looked at him? Do’ee not have—”
His wife grasped his arm hard enough to pinch white marks into his farmer’s tan with the tips of her fingers. Tian looked at her and fell quiet, though his lips were pressed together tightly.
Somewhere in the distance, a crow called and a rustie answered in its slightly shriller voice. Then all was silent. One by one they turned to Roland of Gilead to see how he would reply.
Five
It was always the same, and it made him tired. They wanted help, but they also wanted references. A parade of witnesses, if they could get them. They wanted rescue without risk, just to close their eyes and be saved.
Roland rocked slowly back and forth with his arms wrapped around his knees. Then he nodded to himself and raised his head. “Jake,” he said. “Come to me.”
Jake glanced at Benny, his new friend, then got up and walked across to Roland. Oy walked at his heel, as always.
“Andy,” Roland said.
“Sai?”
“Bring me four of the plates we ate from.” As Andy did this, Roland spoke to Overholser: “You’re going to lose some crockery. When gunslingers come to town, sai, things get broken. It’s a simple fact of life.”
“Roland, I don’t think we need—”
“Hush now,” Roland said, and although his voice was gentle, Overholser hushed at once. “You’ve told your tale; now we tell ours.”
Andy’s shadow fell over Roland. The gunslinger looked up and took the plates, which hadn’t been rinsed and still gleamed with grease. Then he turned to Jake, where a remarkable change had taken place. Sitting with Benny the Kid, watching Oy do his small clever tricks and grinning with pride, Jake had looked like any other boy of twelve—carefree and full of the old Dick, likely as not. Now the smile had fallen away and it was hard to tell just what his age might have been. His blue eyes looked into Roland’s, which were of almost the same shade. Beneath his shoulder, the Ruger Jake had taken from his father’s desk in another life hung in its docker’s clutch. The trigger was secured with a rawhide loop which Jake now loosened without looking. It took only a single tug.
“Say your lesson, Jake, son of Elmer, and be true.”
Roland half-expected either Eddie or Susannah to interfere, but neither did. He looked at them. Their faces were as cold and grave as Jake’s. Good.
Jake’s voice was also without expression, but the words came out hard and sure.
“I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I aim with my eye. I do not shoot with my hand—”
“I don’t see what this—” Overholser began.
“Shut up,” Susannah said, and pointed a finger at him.
Jake seemed not to have heard. His eyes never left Roland’s. The boy’s right hand lay on his upper chest, the fingers spread. “He who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I shoot with my mind. I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father.”
Jake paused. Drew in breath. And let it out speaking.
“I kill with my heart.”
“Kill these,” Roland remarked, and with no more warning than that, slung all four of the plates high into the air. They rose, spinning and separating, black shapes against the white sky.
Jake’s hand, the one resting on his chest, became a blur. It pulled the Ruger from the docker’s clutch, swung it up, and began pulling the trigger while Roland’s hand was still in the air. The plates did not seem to explode one after the other but rather all at once. The pieces rained down on the clearing. A few fell into the fire, puffing up ash and sparks. One or two clanged off Andy’s steel head.
Roland snatched upward, open hands moving in a blur. Although he had given them no command, Eddie and Susannah did the same, did it even while the visitors from Calla Bryn Sturgis cringed, shocked by the loudness of the gunfire. And the speed of the shots.
“Look here at us, do ya, and say thankee,” Roland said. He held out his hands. Eddie and Susannah did the same. Eddie had caught three pottery shards. Susannah had five (and a shallow cut on the pad of one finger). Roland had snatched a full dozen pieces of falling shrapnel. It looked like almost enough to make a whole plate, were the pieces glued back together.
The six from the Calla stared, unbelieving. Benny the Kid still had his hands over his ears; now he lowered them slowly. He was looking at Jake as one might look at a ghost or an apparition from the sky.
“My…God,” Callahan said. “It’s like a trick in some old Wild West show.”
“It’s no trick,” Roland said, “never think it. It’s the Way of the Eld. We are of that an-tet, khef and ka, watch and warrant. Gunslingers, do ya. And now I’ll tell you what we will do.” His eyes sought Overholser’s. “What we will do, I say, for no man bids us. Yet I think nothing I say will discomfort you too badly. If mayhap it does—” Roland shrugged. If it does, too bad, that shrug said.
He dropped the pottery shards between his boots and dusted his hands.
&nbs
p; “If those had been Wolves,” he said, “there would have been fifty-six left to trouble you instead of sixty. Four of them lying dead on the ground before you could draw a breath. Killed by a boy.” He gazed at Jake. “What you would call a boy, mayhap.” Roland paused. “We’re used to long odds.”
“The young fella’s a breathtaking shot, I’d grant ye,” said Slightman the Elder. “But there’s a difference between clay dishes and Wolves on horseback.”
“For you, sai, perhaps. Not for us. Not once the shooting starts. When the shooting starts, we kill what moves. Isn’t that why you sought us?”
“Suppose they can’t be shot?” Overholser asked. “Can’t be laid low by even the hardest of hard calibers?”
“Why do you waste time when time is short?” Roland asked evenly. “You know they can be killed or you never would have come out here to us in the first place. I didn’t ask, because the answer is self-evident.”
Overholser had once more flushed dark red. “Cry your pardon,” he said.
Benny, meanwhile, continued to stare at Jake with wide eyes, and Roland felt a minor pang of regret for both boys. They might still manage some sort of friendship, but what had just happened would change it in fundamental ways, turn it into something quite unlike the usual lighthearted khef boys shared. Which was a shame, because when Jake wasn’t being called upon to be a gunslinger, he was still only a child. Close to the age Roland himself had been when the test of manhood had been thrust on him. But he would not be young much longer, very likely. And it was a shame.
“Listen to me now,” Roland said, “and hear me very well. We leave you shortly to go back to our own camp and take our own counsel. Tomorrow, when we come to your town, we’ll put up with one of you—”