Gunslinger
Page 21
“If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through that shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?
“Perhaps you saw what place our universe plays in the scheme of things—as no more than an atom in a blade of grass. Could it be that everything we can perceive, from the microscopic virus to the distant Horsehead Nebula, is contained in one blade of grass that may have existed for only a single season in an alien time-flow? What if that blade should be cut off by a scythe? When it begins to die, would the rot seep into our own universe and our own lives, turning everything yellow and brown and desiccated? Perhaps it’s already begun to happen. We say the world has moved on; maybe we really mean that it has begun to dry up.
“Think how small such a concept of things makes us, gunslinger! If a God watches over it all, does He actually mete out justice for a race of gnats among an infinitude of races of gnats? Does His eye see the sparrow fall when the sparrow is less than a speck of hydrogen floating disconnected in the depth of space? And if He does see . . . what must the nature of such a God be? Where does He live? How is it possible to live beyond infinity?
“Imagine the sand of the Mohaine Desert, which you crossed to find me, and imagine a trillion universes—not worlds but universes—encapsulated in each grain of that desert; and within each universe an infinity of others. We tower over these universes from our pitiful grass vantage point; with one swing of your boot you may knock a billion billion worlds flying off into darkness, in a chain never to be completed.
“Size, gunslinger . . . size . . .
“Yet suppose further. Suppose that all worlds, all universes, met in a single nexus, a single pylon, a Tower. And within it, a stairway, perhaps rising to the Godhead itself. Would you dare climb to the top, gunslinger? Could it be that somewhere above all of endless reality, there exists a Room? . . .
“You dare not.”
And in the gunslinger’s mind, those words echoed: You dare not.
VI
“Someone has dared,” the gunslinger said.
“Who would that be?”
“God,” the gunslinger said softly. His eyes gleamed. “God has dared . . . or the king you spoke of . . . or . . . is the room empty, seer?”
“I don’t know.” Fear passed over the man in black’s bland face, as soft and dark as a buzzard’s wing. “And, furthermore, I don’t ask. It might be unwise.”
“Afraid of being struck dead?”
“Perhaps afraid of . . . an accounting.”
The man in black was silent for a while. The night was very long. The Milky Way sprawled above them in great splendor, yet terrifying in the emptiness between its burning lamps. The gunslinger wondered what he would feel if that inky sky should split open and let in a torrent of light.
“The fire,” he said. “I’m cold.”
“Build it up yourself,” said the man in black. “It’s the butler’s night off.”
VII
The gunslinger drowsed awhile and awoke to see the man in black regarding him avidly, unhealthily.
“What are you staring at?” An old saying of Cort’s occurred to him. “Do you see your sister’s bum?”
“I’m staring at you, of course.”
“Well, don’t.” He poked up the fire, ruining the precision of the ideogram. “I don’t like it.” He looked to the east to see if there was the beginning of light, but this night went on and on.
“You seek the light so soon.”
“I was made for light.”
“Ah, so you were! And so impolite of me to forget the fact! Yet we have much to discuss yet, you and I. For so has it been told to me by my king and master.”
“Who is this king?”
The man in black smiled. “Shall we tell the truth then, you and I? No more lies?”
“I thought we had been.”
But the man in black persisted as if Roland hadn’t spoken. “Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as equals? There is an offer you will get rarely, Roland. Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t. Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of regard. How tiresome!”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to tire you, so let us speak the truth.” He had never spoken less on this night. “Start by telling me what exactly you mean by glammer.”
“Why, enchantment, gunslinger! My king’s enchantment has prolonged this night and will prolong it until our palaver is done.”
“How long will that be?”
“Long. I can tell you no better. I do not know myself.” The man in black stood over the fire, and the glowing embers made patterns on his face. “Ask. I will tell you what I know. You have caught me. It is fair; I did not think you would. Yet your quest has only begun. Ask. It will lead us to business soon enough.”
“Who is your king?”
“I have never seen him, but you must. But before you meet him, you must first meet the Ageless Stranger.” The man in black smiled spitelessly. “You must slay him, gunslinger. Yet I think it is not what you wished to ask.”
“If you’ve never seen your king and master, how do you know him?”
“He comes to me in dreams. As a stripling he came to me, when I lived, poor and unknown, in a far land. A sheaf of centuries ago he imbued me with my duty and promised me my reward, although there were many errands in my youth and the days of my manhood, before my apotheosis. You are that apotheosis, gunslinger. You are my climax.” He tittered. “You see, someone has taken you seriously.”
“And this Stranger, does he have a name?”
“O, he is named.”
“And what is his name?”
“Legion,” the man in black said softly, and somewhere in the easterly darkness where the mountains lay, a rock-slide punctuated his words and a puma screamed like a woman. The gunslinger shivered and the man in black flinched. “Yet I do not think that is what you wished to ask, either. It is not your nature to think so far ahead.”
The gunslinger knew the question; it had gnawed him all this night, and he thought, for years before. It trembled on his lips but he didn’t ask it . . . not yet.
“This Stranger is a minion of the Tower? Like yourself?”
“Yar. He darkles. He tincts. He is in all times. Yet there is one greater than he.”
“Who?”
“Ask me no more!” the man in black cried. His voice aspired to sternness and crumbled into beseechment. “I know not! I do not wish to know. To speak of the things in End-World is to speak of the ruination of one’s own soul.”
“And beyond the Ageless Stranger is the Tower and whatever the Tower contains?”
“Yes,” whispered the man in black. “But none of these things are what you wish to ask.”
True.
“All right,” the gunslinger said, and then asked the world’s oldest question. “Will I succeed? Will I win through?”
“If I answered that question, gunslinger, you’d kill me.”
“I ought to kill you. You need killing.” His hands had dropped to the worn butts of his guns.
“Those do not open doors, gunslinger; those only close them forever.”
“Where must I go?”
“Start west. Go to the sea. Where the world ends is where you must begin. There was a man who gave you advice . . . the man you bested so long ago—”
“Yes, Cort,” the gunslinger interrupted impatiently.
“The advice was to wait. It was bad advice. For even then my plans against your father had proceeded. He sent you away and when you returned—”
“I’d not hear you speak of that,” the gunslinger said, and in his mind he heard his mother singing: Baby-bunting, baby dear, baby bring your basket here.
“Then hear this: when you returned, Marten had gone west, to join the rebels. So all said, anyway, and so you believed. Yet he and a certain witch left you a trap and you fell into it. Good boy! And although Marten was long gone by then, there was a man who sometimes made you think of him, was there not? A man who affected the dress of a monk and the shaven head of a penitent—”
“Walter,” the gunslinger whispered. And although he had come so far in his musings, the bald truth still amazed him. “You. Marten never left at all.”
The man in black tittered. “At your service.”
“I ought to kill you now.”
“That would hardly be fair. Besides, all of that was long ago. Now comes the time of sharing.”
“You never left,” the gunslinger repeated, stunned. “You only changed.”
“Sit,” the man in black invited. “I’ll tell you stories, as many as you would hear. Your own stories, I think, will be much longer.”
“I don’t talk of myself,” the gunslinger muttered.
“Yet tonight you must. So that we may understand.”
“Understand what? My purpose? You know that. To find the Tower is my purpose. I’m sworn.”
“Not your purpose, gunslinger. Your mind. Your slow, prodding, tenacious mind. There has never been one quite like it, in all the history of the world. Perhaps in the history of creation.
“This is the time of speaking. This is the time of histories.”
“Then speak.”
The man in black shook the voluminous arm of his robe. A foil-wrapped package fell out and caught the dying embers in many reflective folds.
“Tobacco, gunslinger. Would you smoke?”
He had been able to resist the rabbit, but he could not resist this. He opened the foil with eager fingers. There was fine crumbled tobacco inside, and green leaves to wrap it in, amazingly moist. He had not seen such tobacco for ten years.
He rolled two cigarettes and bit the ends of each to release the flavor. He offered one to the man in black, who took it. Each of them took a burning twig from the fire.
The gunslinger lit his cigarette and drew the aromatic smoke deep into his lungs, closing his eyes to concentrate the senses. He blew out with long, slow satisfaction.
“Is it good?” the man in black inquired.
“Yes. Very good.”
“Enjoy it. It may be the last smoke for you in a very long time.”
The gunslinger took this impassively.
“Very well,” the man in black said. “To begin then:
“You must understand the Tower has always been, and there have always been boys who know of it and lust for it, more than power or riches or women . . . boys who look for the doors that lead to it . . .”
VIII
There was talk then, a night’s worth of talk and God alone knew how much more (or how much was true), but the gunslinger remembered little of it later . . . and to his oddly practical mind, little of it seemed to matter. The man in black told him again that he must go to the sea, which lay no more than twenty easy miles to the west, and there he would be invested with the power of drawing.
“But that’s not exactly right, either,” the man in black said, pitching his cigarette into the remains of the campfire. “No one wants to invest you with a power of any kind, gunslinger; it is simply in you, and I am compelled to tell you, partly because of the sacrifice of the boy, and partly because it is the law; the natural law of things. Water must run downhill, and you must be told. You will draw three, I understand . . . but I don’t really care, and I don’t really want to know.”
“The three,” the gunslinger murmured, thinking of the Oracle.
“And then the fun begins! But, by then, I’ll be long gone. Goodbye, gunslinger. My part is done now. The chain is still in your hands. ’Ware it doesn’t wrap itself around your neck.”
Compelled by something outside him, Roland said, “You have one more thing to say, don’t you?”
“Yes,” the man in black said, and he smiled at the gunslinger with his depthless eyes and stretched one of his hands out toward him. “Let there be light.”
And there was light, and this time the light was good.
IX
Roland awoke by the ruins of the campfire to find himself ten years older. His black hair had thinned at the temples and there had gone the gray of cobwebs at the end of autumn. The lines in his face were deeper, his skin rougher.
The remains of the wood he had carried had turned to something like stone, and the man in black was a laughing skeleton in a rotting black robe, more bones in this place of bones, one more skull in this golgotha.
Or is it really you? he thought. I have my doubts, Walter o’ Dim . . . I have my doubts, Marten-that-was.
He stood up and looked around. Then, with a sudden quick gesture, he reached toward the remains of his companion of the night before (if it was indeed the remains of Walter), a night that had somehow lasted ten years. He broke off the grinning jawbone and jammed it carelessly into the left hip pocket of his jeans—a fitting enough replacement for the one lost under the mountains.
“How many lies did you tell me?” he asked. Many, he was sure, but what made them good lies was that they had been mixed with the truth.
The Tower. Somewhere ahead, it waited for him—the nexus of Time, the nexus of Size.
He began west again, his back set against the sunrise, heading toward the ocean, realizing that a great passage of his life had come and gone. “I loved you, Jake,” he said aloud.
The stiffness wore out of his body and he began to walk more rapidly. By that evening he had come to the end of the land. He sat on a beach which stretched left and right forever, deserted. The waves beat endlessly against the shore, pounding and pounding. The setting sun painted the water in a wide strip of fool’s gold.
There the gunslinger sat, his face turned up into the fading light. He dreamed his dreams and watched as the stars came out; his purpose did not flag, nor did his heart falter; his hair, finer now and gray at the temples, blew around his head, and the sandalwood-inlaid guns of his father lay smooth and deadly against his hips, and he was lonely but did not find loneliness in any way a bad or ignoble thing. The dark came down and the world moved on. The gunslinger waited for the time of the drawing and dreamed his long dreams of the Dark Tower, to which he would someday come at dusk and approach, winding his horn, to do some unimaginable final battle.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
* * *
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe. Copyright Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929; copyright renewed © Edward C. Ashwell, Administrator, C.T.A., and/or Fred W. Wolfe, 1957. Reprinted with permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group.
“The Gunslinger” copyright © Mercury Press, Inc., 1978, for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1978.
“The Way Station” copyright © Mercury Press, Inc., 1980, for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1980.
“The Oracle and the Mountain” copyright © Mercury Press, Inc., 1981, for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1981.
“The Slow Mutants” copyright © Mercury Press, Inc., 1981, for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1981.
“The Gunslinger and the Dark Man” copyright © Mercury Press, Inc., 1981, for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1981.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
* * *
Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes the short story collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, End of Watch, Finders Keepers, Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel), Revival, Doctor Sleep, and Under the Dome. His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten boo
k of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for best Mystery/Thriller. He is the recipient of the 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
authors.simonandschuster.com/Stephen-King
Also by Stephen King
FICTION
Carrie
’Salem’s Lot
The Shining
Night Shift
The Stand
The Dead Zone
Firestarter
Cujo
Creepshow
Different Seasons
Cycle of the Werewolf
Christine
Pet Sematary
IT
Skeleton Crew
The Eyes of the Dragon
Misery
The Tommyknockers
The Dark Half
Four Past Midnight
Needful Things
Gerald’s Game
Dolores Claiborne
Nightmares & Dreamscapes
Insomnia
Rose Madder
The Green Mile
Desperation
Bag of Bones
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Hearts in Atlantis
Dreamcatcher
Everything’s Eventual
From a Buick 8
The Colorado Kid
Cell
Lisey’s Story
Duma Key
Just After Sunset