by Stephen King
“You’re a fool,” his father said. His grin was gone now; he looked haggard and old. He sat down heavily on the whore’s bed, looked at the gunbelts he still held, and dropped them between his feet. “You’re a fourteen-year-old fool, and that’s the worst, most desperate kind.” He looked up, angry all over again, but Roland didn’t mind; anger was better than that look of weariness. That look of age. “I’ve known since you toddled that you were no genius, but I never believed until yestereve that you were an idiot. To let him drive you like a cow in a chute! Gods! You have forgotten the face of your father! Say it!”
And that sparked the boy’s own anger. Everything he had done the day before he had done with his father’s face firmly fixed in his mind.
“That’s not true!” he shouted from where he now sat with his bare butt on the splintery boards of the whore’s crib and his back against the wall, the sun shining through the window and touching the fuzz on his fair, unscarred cheek.
“It is true, you whelp! Foolish whelp! Say your atonement or I’ll strip the hide from your very-”
“They were together!” he burst out. “Your wife and your minister- your magician! I saw the mark of his mouth on her neck! On my mother’s neck!” He reached for the gun and picked it up, but even in his shame and fury was still careful not to let his fingers stray near the trigger; he held the apprentice’s revolver only by the plain, undecorated metal of its barrel. “Today I end his treacherous, seducer’s life with this, and if you aren’t man enough to help me, at least you can stand aside and let m-”
One of the revolvers on Steven’s hip was out of its holster and in his hand before Roland’s eyes saw any move. There was a single shot, deafening as thunder in the little room; it was a full minute before Roland was able to hear the babble of questions and commotion from below. The 'prentice-gun, meanwhile, was long gone, blown out of his hand and leaving nothing behind but a kind of buzzing tingle. It flew out the window, down and gone, its grip a smashed ruin of metal and its short turn in the gunslinger’s long tale at an end.
Roland looked at his father, shocked and amazed. Steven looked back, saying nothing for a long time. But now he wore the face Roland remembered from earliest childhood: calm and sure. The weariness and the look of half-distracted fury had passed away like last night’s thunderstorms.
At last his father spoke. “I was wrong in what I said, and I apologize. You did not forget my face, Roland. But still you were foolish-you allowed yourself to be driven by one far slyer than you will ever be in your life. It’s only by the grace of the gods and the working of ka that you have not been sent west, one more true gunslinger out of Marten’s road… out of John Farson’s road… and out of the road which leads to the creature that rules them.” He stood and held out his arms. “If I had lost you, Roland, I should have died.”
Roland got to his feet and went naked to his father, who embraced him fiercely. When Steven Deschain kissed him first on one cheek and then the other, Roland began to weep. Then, in Roland’s ear, Steven Deschain whispered six words.
16
“What?” Susannah asked. “What six words?”
“I have known for two years,'” Roland said. “That was what he whispered.”
“Holy Christ,” Eddie said.
“He told me I couldn’t go back to the palace. If I did, I’d be dead by nightfall. He said, ‘You have been born to your destiny in spite of all Marten could do; yet he has sworn to kill you before you can grow to be a problem to him. It seems that, winner in the test or no, you must leave Gilead anyway. For only awhile, though, and you’ll go east instead of west. I’d not send you alone, either, or without a purpose.’ Then, almost as an afterthought, he added: ‘Or with a pair of sorry “prentice revolvers.”’”
“What purpose?” Jake asked. He had clearly been captivated by the story; his eyes shone nearly as bright as Oy’s. “And which friends?”
“These things you must now hear,” Roland said, “and how you judge me will come in time.”
He fetched a sigh-the deep sigh of a man who contemplates some arduous piece of work-and then tossed fresh wood on the fire. As the flames flared up, driving the shadows back a little way, he began to talk. All that queerly long night he talked, not finishing the story of Susan Delgado until the sun was rising in the east and painting the glass castle yonder with all the bright hues of a fresh day, and a strange green cast of light which was its own true color.
Part two
SUSAN
Chapter I
BENEATH THE KISSING MOON
1
A perfect disc of silver-the Kissing Moon, as it was called in Full Earth-hung above the ragged hill five miles east of Hambry and ten miles south of Eyebolt Canyon. Below the hill the late summer heat still held, suffocating even two hours after sundown, but atop the Coos, it was as if Reap had already come, with its strong breezes and frost-pinched air. For the woman who lived here with no company but a snake and one old mutie cat, it was to be a long night.
Never mind, though; never mind, my dear. Busy hands are happy hands. So they are.
She waited until the hoofbeats of her visitors’ horses had faded, sitting quietly by the window in the hut’s large room (there was only one other, a bedroom little bigger than a closet). Musty, the six-legged cat, was on her shoulder. Her lap was full of moonlight.
Three horses, bearing away three men. The Big Coffin Hunters, they called themselves.
She snorted. Men were funny, aye, so they were, and the most amusing thing about them was how little they knew it. Men, with their swaggering, belt-hitching names for themselves. Men, so proud of their muscles, their drinking capacities, their eating capacities; so everlastingly proud of their pricks. Yes, even in these times, when a good many of them could shoot nothing but strange, bent seed that produced children fit only to be drowned in the nearest well. Ah, but it was never their fault, was it, dear? No, always it was the woman-her womb, her fault. Men were such cowards. Such grinning cowards. These three had been no different from the general run. The old one with the limp might bear watching-aye, so he might, a clear and overly curious pair of eyes had looked out at her from his head-but she saw nothing in them she could not deal with, came it to that.
Men! She could not understand why so many women feared them. Hadn’t the gods made them with the most vulnerable part of their guts hanging right out of their bodies, like a misplaced bit of bowel? Kick them there and they curled up like snails. Caress them there and their brains melted. Anyone who doubted that second bit of wisdom need only look at her night’s second bit of business, the one which still lay ahead. Thorin! Mayor of Hambry! Chief Guard o’ Barony! No fool like an old fool!
Yet none of these thoughts had any real power over her or any real malice to them, at least not now; the three men who called themselves the Big Coffin Hunters had brought her a marvel, and she would look at it; aye, fill up her eyes with it, so she would.
The gimp, Jonas, had insisted she put it away-he had been told she had a place for such things, not that he wanted to see it himself, not any of her secret places, gods forbid (at this sally Depape and Reynolds had laughed like trolls)-and so she had, but the hoofbeats of their horses had been swallowed by the wind now, and she would do as she liked. The girl whose tits had stolen what little there was of Hart Thorin’s mind would not be here for another hour, at least (the old woman had insisted that the girl walk from town, citing the purification value of such a moonlit heel-and-toe, actually just wanting to put a safe bumper of time between her two appointments), and during that hour she would do as she liked.
“Oh, it’s beautiful, I’m sure ’tis,” she whispered, and did she feel a certain heat in that place where her ancient bowlegs came together? A certain moisture in the dry creek which hid there? Gods!
“Aye, even through the box where they hid it I felt its glam. So beautiful, Musty, like you.” She took the cat from her shoulder and held it in front of her eyes. The old torn purred and stretched out its pug of a
face toward hers. She kissed its nose. The cat closed its milky gray-green eyes in ecstasy. “So beautiful, like you-so y’are, so y’are! Hee!”
She put the cat down. It walked slowly toward the hearth, where a late fire lazed, desultorily eating at a single log. Musty’s tail, split at the tip so it looked like the forked tail of a devil in an old drawing, switched back and forth in the room’s dim orange air. Its extra legs, dangling from its sides, twitched dreamily. The shadow which trailed across the floor and grew up the wall was a horror: a thing that looked like a cat crossed with a spider.
The old woman rose and went into her sleeping closet, where she had taken the thing Jonas had given her.
“Lose that and you’ll lose your head,” he’d said.
“Never fear me, my good friend,” she’d replied, directing a cringing, servile smile back over her shoulder, all the while thinking: Men! Foolish strutting creatures they were!
Now she went to the foot of her bed, knelt, and passed one hand over the earth floor there. Lines appeared in the sour dirt as she did. They formed a square. She pushed her fingers into one of these lines; it gave before her touch. She lifted the hidden panel (hidden in such a way that no one without the touch would ever be able to uncover it), revealing a compartment perhaps a foot square and two feet deep. Within it was an ironwood box. Curled atop the box was a slim green snake. When she touched its back, its head came up. Its mouth yawned in a silent hiss, displaying four pairs of fangs-two on top, two on the bottom.
She took the snake up, crooning to it. As she brought its flat face close to her own, its mouth yawned wider and it’s hissing became audible. She opened her own mouth; from between her wrinkled gray lips she poked the yellowish, bad-smelling mat of her tongue. Two drops of poison- enough to kill an entire dinner-party, if mixed in the punch-fell on it. She swallowed, feeling her mouth and throat and chest bum, as if with strong liquor. For a moment the room swam out of focus, and she could hear voices murmuring in the stenchy air of the hut-the voices of those she called “the unseen friends.” Her eyes ran sticky water down the trenches time had drawn in her cheeks. Then she blew out a breath and the room steadied. The voices faded.
She kissed Ermot between his lidless eyes (time o’ the Kissing Moon, all right, she thought) and then set him aside. The snake slipped beneath her bed, curled itself in a circle, and watched as she passed her palms over the top of the ironwood box. She could feel the muscles in her upper arms quivering, and that heat in her loins was more pronounced. Years it had been since she had felt the call of her sex, but she felt it now, so she did, and it was not the doing of the Kissing Moon, or not much.
The box was locked and Jonas had given her no key, but that was nothing to her, who had lived long and studied much and trafficked with creatures that most men, for all their bold talk and strutting ways, would run from as if on fire had they caught even the smallest glimpse of them. She stretched one hand toward the lock, on which was inlaid the shape of an eye and a motto in the High Speech (I see who opens me), and then withdrew it. All at once she could smell what her nose no longer noticed under ordinary circumstances: must and dust and a dirty mattress and the crumbs of food that had been consumed in bed; the mingled stench of ashes and ancient incense; the odor of an old woman with wet eyes and (ordinarily, at least) a dry pussy. She would not open this box and look at the wonder it contained in here; she would go outside, where the air was clean and the only smells were sage and mesquite.
She would look by the light of the Kissing Moon.
Rhea of Coos Hill pulled the box from its hole with a grunt, rose to her feet with another grunt (this one from her nether regions), tucked the box under her arm, and left the room.
2
The hut was far enough below the brow of the hill to block off the bitterest gusts of the winter wind which blew almost constantly in these highlands from Reaping until the end of Wide Earth. A path led to the hill’s highest vantage; beneath the full moon it was a ditch of silver. The old woman toiled up it, puffing, her white hair standing out around her head in dirty clumps, her old dugs swaying from side to side under her black dress. The cat followed in her shadow, still giving off its rusty purr like a stink.
At the top of the hill, the wind lifted her hair away from her ravaged face and brought her the moaning whisper of the thinny which had eaten its way into the far end of Eyebolt Canyon. It was a sound few cared for, she knew, but she herself loved it; to Rhea of the Coos, it sounded like a lullaby. Overhead rode the moon, the shadows on its bright skin sketching the faces of lovers kissing… if you believed the ordinary fools below, that was. The ordinary fools below saw a different face or set of faces in each full moon, but the hag knew there was only one-the face of the Demon. The face of death.
She herself, however, had never felt more alive.
“Oh, my beauty,” she whispered, and touched the lock with her gnarled fingers. A faint glimmer of red light showed between her bunched knuckles, and there was a click. Breathing hard, like a woman who has run a race, she put the box down and opened it.
Rose-colored light, dimmer than that thrown by the Kissing Moon but infinitely more beautiful, spilled out. It touched the ruined face hanging above the box, and for a moment made it the face of a young girl again.
Musty sniffed, head stretched forward, ears laid back, old eyes rimmed with that rose light. Rhea was instantly jealous.
“Get away, foolish, ’tis not for the likes of you!”
She swatted the cat. Musty shied back, hissing like a kettle, and stalked in dudgeon to the hummock which marked the very tip of Coos Hill. There he sat, affecting disdain and licking one paw as the wind combed ceaselessly through his fur.
Within the box, peeping out of a velvet drawstring bag, was a glass globe. It was filled with that rosy light; it flowed in gentle pulses, like the beat of a satisfied heart.
“Oh, my lovely one,” she murmured, lifting it out. She held it up before her; let its pulsing radiance run down her wrinkled face like rain. “Oh, ye live, so ye do!”
Suddenly the color within the globe darkened toward scarlet. She felt it thrum in her hands like an immensely powerful motor, and again she felt that amazing wetness between her legs, that tidal tug she believed had been left behind long ago.
Then the thrumming died, and the light in the globe seemed to furl up like petals. Where it had been there was now a pinkish gloom… and three riders coming out of it. At first she thought it was the men who had brought her the globe-Jonas and the others. But no, these were younger, even younger than Depape, who was about twenty-five. The one on the left of the trio appeared to have a bird’s skull mounted on the pommel of his saddle-strange but true.
Then that one and the one on the right were gone, darkened away somehow by the power of the glass, leaving only the one in the middle. She took in the jeans and boots he wore, the flat-brimmed hat that hid the upper half of his face, the easy way he sat his horse, and her first alarmed thought was Gunslinger! Come east from the Inner Baronies, aye, perhaps from Gilead itself! But she did not have to see the upper half of the rider’s face to know he was little more than a child, and there were no guns on his hips. Yet she didn’t think the youth came unarmed. If only she could see a little better…
She brought the glass almost to the tip of her nose and whispered, “Closer, lovie! Closer still!”
She didn’t know what to expect-nothing at all seemed most likely-but within the dark circle of the glass, the figure did come closer. Swum closer, almost, like a horse and rider underwater, and she saw there was a quiver of arrows on his back. Before him, on the pommel of his saddle, was not a skull but a shortbow. And to the right side of the saddle, where a gunslinger might have carried a rifle in a scabbard, there was the feather-fluffed shaft of a lance. He was not one of the Old People, his face had none of that look… yet she did not think he was of the Outer Arc, either.
“But who are ye, cully?” she breathed. “And how shall I know ye? Ye’ve got y
er hat pulled down so far I can’t see your God-pounding eyes, so ye do! By yer horse, mayhap… or p'raps by yer… get away, Musty! Why do yer trouble me so? Arrrr!”
The cat had come back from its lookout point and was twining back and forth between her swollen old ankles, waowing up at her in a voice even more rusty than its purr. When the old woman kicked out at him, Musty dodged agilely away… then immediately came back and started in again, looking up at her with moonstruck eyes and making those soft yowls.
Rhea kicked out at it again, this one just as ineffectual as the first one, then looked into the glass once more. The horse and its interesting young rider were gone. The rose light was gone, as well. It was now just a dead glass ball she held, its only light a reflection borrowed from the moon.
The wind gusted, pressing her dress against the ruination that was her body. Musty, undaunted by the feeble kicks of his mistress, darted forward and began to twine about her ankles again, crying up at her the whole time.
“There, do ye see what you’ve done, ye nasty bag of fleas and disease? The light’s gone out of it, gone out just when I-”
Then she heard a sound from the cart track which led up to her hut, and understood why Musty had been acting out. It was singing she heard. It was the girl she heard. The girl was early.
Grimacing horribly-she loathed being caught by surprise, and the little miss down there would pay for doing it-she bent and put the glass back in its box. The inside was lined with padded silk, and the ball fit as neatly as the breakfast egg in His Lordship’s cup. And still from down the hill (the cursed wind was wrong or she would have heard it sooner), the sound of the girl singing, now closer than ever:
“Love, o love, o careless love.
Can’t you see what careless love has done?”