by Stephen King
Tell him he’s right for the -wrong reasons, and that makes him all the way wrong.
That couldn’t be. Could it?
Cuthbert was smiling and his color was high, as if he had galloped most of the way back. He looked young, handsome, and vital. He looked happy, in fact, almost like the Cuthbert of old-the one who’d been capable of babbling happy nonsense to a rook’s skull until someone told him lo please, please shut up.
But Roland didn’t trust what he saw. There was something wrong with the smile, the color in Bert’s cheeks could have been anger rather than good health, and the sparkle in his eyes looked like fever instead of humor. Roland showed nothing on his own face, but his heart sank. He’d hoped the storm would blow itself out, given a little time, but he didn’t think it had. He shot a glance at Alain, and saw that Alain felt the same.
Cuthbert, it will be over in three weeks. If only I could tell you that.
The thought which returned was stunning in its simplicity: Why can’t you?
He realized he didn’t know. Why had he been holding back, keeping his own counsel? For what purpose? Had he been blind? Gods, had he?
“Hello, Bert,” he said, “did you have a nice r-”
“Yes, very nice, a very nice ride, an instructive ride. Come outside. I want to show you something.”
Roland liked the thin glaze of hilarity in Bert’s eyes less and less, but he laid his cards in a neat facedown fan on the table and got up.
Alain pulled at his sleeve. “No!” His voice was low and panicky. “Do you not see how he looks?”
“I see,” Roland said. And felt dismay in his heart.
For the first time, as he walked slowly toward the friend who no longer looked like a friend, it occurred to Roland that he had been making decisions in a state close akin to drunkenness. Or had he been making decisions at all? He was no longer sure.
“What is it you’d show me, Bert?”
“Something wonderful,” Bert said, and laughed. There was hate in the sound. Perhaps murder. “You’ll want a good close look at this. I know you will.”
“Bert, what’s wrong with you?” Alain asked.
“Wrong with me? Nothing wrong with me, Al-I’m as happy as a dart at sunrise, a bee in a flower, a fish in the ocean.” And as he turned away to go back through the door, he laughed again.
“Don’t go out there,” Alain said. “He’s lost his wits.”
“If our fellowship is broken, any chance we might have of getting out of Mejis alive is gone,” Roland said. “That being the case, I’d rather die at the hands of a friend than an enemy.”
He went out. After a moment of hesitation, Alain followed. On his face was a look of purest misery.
15
Huntress had gone and Demon had not yet begun to show his face, but the sky was powdered with stars, and they threw enough light to see by. Cuthbert’s horse, still saddled, was tied to the hitching rail. Beyond it, the square of dusty dooryard gleamed like a canopy of tarnished silver.
“What is it?” Roland asked. They weren’t wearing guns, any of them. That was to be grateful for, at least. “What would you show me?”
“It’s here.” Cuthbert stopped at a point midway between the bunk-house and the charred remains of the home place. He pointed with great assurance, but Roland could see nothing out of the ordinary. He walked over to Cuthbert and looked down.
“I don’t see-”
Brilliant light-starshine times a thousand-exploded in his head as Cuthbert’s fist drove against the point of his chin. It was the first time, except in play (and as very small boys), that Bert had ever struck him. Roland didn’t lose consciousness, but he did lose control over his arms and legs. They were there, but seemingly in another country, flailing like the limbs of a rag doll. He went down on his back. Dust puffed up around him. The stars seemed strangely in motion, running in arcs and leaving milky trails behind them. There was a high ringing in his ears.
From a great distance he heard Alain scream: “Oh, you fool! You stupid fool!”
By making a tremendous effort, Roland was able to turn his head. He saw Alain start toward him and saw Cuthbert, no longer smiling, push him away. “This is between us, Al. You stay out of it.”
“You sucker-punched him, you bastard!” Alain, slow to anger, was now building toward a rage Cuthbert might well regret. I have to get up, Roland thought. I have to get between them before something even worse happens. His arms and legs began to swim weakly in the dust.
“Yes-that’s how he’s played us,” Cuthbert said. “I only returned the favor.” He looked down. “That’s what I wanted to show you, Roland.
That particular piece of ground. That particular puff of dust in which you are now lying. Get a good taste of it. Mayhap it’ll wake you up.”
Now Roland’s own anger began to rise. He felt the coldness that was seeping into his thoughts, fought it, and realized he was losing. Jonas ceased to matter; the tankers at Citgo ceased to matter; the supply conspiracy they had uncovered ceased to matter. Soon the Affiliation and the ka-tet he had been at such pains to preserve would cease to matter as well.
The surface numbness was leaving his feet and legs, and he pushed himself to a sitting position. He looked up calmly at Bert, his tented hands on the ground, his face set. Starshine swam in his eyes.
“I love you, Cuthbert, but I’ll have no more insubordination and jealous tantrums. If I paid you back for all, I reckon you’d finish in pieces, so I’m only going to pay you for hitting me when I didn’t know it was coming.”
“And I’ve no doubt ye can, cully,” Cuthbert said, falling effortlessly into the Hambry patois. “But first ye might want to have a peek at this.” Almost contemptuously, he tossed a folded sheet of paper. It hit Roland’s chest and bounced into his lap.
Roland picked it up, feeling the fine point of his developing rage lose its edge. “What is it?”
“Open and see. There’s enough starlight to read by.”
Slowly, with reluctant fingers, Roland unfolded the sheet of paper and read what was printed there.
He read it twice. The second time was actually harder, because his hands had begun to tremble. He saw every place he and Susan had met- the boathouse, the hut, the shack-and now he saw them in a new light, knowing someone else had seen them, too. How clever he had believed they were being. How confident of their secrecy and their discretion. And yet someone had been watching all the time. Susan had been right. Someone had seen.
I’ve put everything at risk. Her life as well as our lives.
Tell him what I said about the doorway to hell.
And Susan’s voice, too: Ka like a wind… if you love me, then love me.
So he had done, believing in his youthful arrogance that everything would turn out all right for no other reason-yes, at bottom he had believed this-than that he was he, and ka must serve his love.
“I’ve been a fool,” he said. His voice trembled like his hands.
“Yes, indeed,” Cuthbert said. “So you have.” He dropped to his knees in the dust, facing Roland. “Now if you want to hit me, hit away. Hard as you want and as many as you can manage. I’ll not hit back. I’ve done all I can to wake you up to your responsibilities. If you still sleep, so be it. Either way, I still love you.” Bert put his hands on Roland’s shoulders and briefly kissed his friend’s cheek.
Roland began to cry. They were partly tears of gratitude, but mostly those of mingled shame and confusion; there was even a small, dark part of him that hated Cuthbert and always would. That part hated Cuthbert more on account of the kiss than because of the unexpected punch on the jaw; more for the forgiveness than the awakening.
He got to his feet, still holding the letter in one dusty hand, the other ineffectually brushing his cheeks and leaving damp smears there. When he staggered and Cuthbert put out a hand to steady him, Roland pushed him so hard that Cuthbert himself would have fallen, if Alain hadn’t caught hold of his shoulders.
Then, slowly,
Roland went back down again-this time in front of Cuthbert with his hands up and his head down.
“Roland, no!” Cuthbert cried.
“Yes,” Roland said. “I have forgotten the face of my father, and cry your pardon.”
“Yes, all right, for gods’ sake, yes!” Cuthbert now sounded as if he were crying himself. “Just… please get up! It breaks my heart to see you so!”
And mine to be so, Roland thought. To be humbled so. But I brought it on myself, didn’t I? This dark yard, with my head throbbing and my heart full of shame and fear. This is mine, bought and paid for.
They helped him up and Roland let himself be helped. “That’s quite a left, Bert,” he said in a voice that almost passed for normal.
“Only when it’s going toward someone who doesn’t know it’s coming,” Cuthbert replied.
“This letter-how did you come by it?”
Cuthbert told of meeting Sheemie, who had been dithering along in his own misery, as if waiting for ka to intervene… and, in the person of “Arthur Heath,” ka had.
“From the witch,” Roland mused. “Yes, but how did she know? For she never leaves the Coos, or so Susan has told me.”
“I can’t say. Nor do I much care. What I’m most concerned about right now is making sure that Sheemie isn’t hurt because of what he told me and gave me. After that, I’m concerned that what old witch Rhea has tried to tell once she doesn’t try to tell again.”
“I’ve made at least one terrible mistake,” Roland said, “but I don’t count loving Susan as another. That was beyond me to change. As it was beyond her. Do you believe that?”
“Yes,” Alain said at once, and after a moment, almost reluctantly, Cuthbert said, “Aye, Roland.”
“I’ve been arrogant and stupid. If this note had reached her aunt, she could have been sent into exile.”
“And we to the devil, by way of hangropes,” Cuthbert added dryly. “Although I know that’s a minor matter to you by comparison.”
“What about the witch?” Alain asked. “What do we do about her?” Roland smiled a little, and turned toward the northwest. “Rhea,” he said. “Whatever else she is, she’s a first-class troublemaker, is she not? And troublemakers must be put on notice.”
He started back toward the bunkhouse, trudging with his head down. Cuthbert looked at Alain, and saw that Al was also a little teary-eyed. Bert put out his hand. For a moment Alain only looked at it. Then he nodded-to himself rather than to Cuthbert, it seemed-and shook it.
“You did what you had to,” Alain said. “I had my doubts at first, but not now.”
Cuthbert let out his breath. “And I did it the way I had to. If I hadn’t surprised him-”
“-he would have beaten you black and blue.”
“So many more colors than that,” Cuthbert said. “I would have looked like a rainbow.”
“The Wizard’s Rainbow, even,” Alain said. “Extra colors for your penny.”
That made Cuthbert laugh. The two of them walked back toward the bunkhouse, where Roland was unsaddling Bert’s horse.
Cuthbert turned in that direction to help, but Alain held him back. “Leave him alone for a little while,” he said. “It’s best you do.”
They went on ahead, and when Roland came in ten minutes later, he found Cuthbert playing his hand. And winning with it.
“Bert,” he said.
Cuthbert looked up.
“We have a spot of business tomorrow, you and I. Up on the Coos.” “Are we going to kill her?”
Roland thought, and thought hard. At last he looked up, biting his lip. “We should.”
“Aye. We should. But are we going to?”
“Not unless we have to, I reckon.” Later he would regret this decision-if it was a decision-bitterly, but there never came a time when he did not understand it. He had been a boy not much older than Jake Chambers during that Mejis fall, and the decision to kill does not come easily or naturally to most boys. “Not unless she makes us.”
“Perhaps it would be best if she did,” Cuthbert said. It was hard gunslinger talk, but he looked troubled as he said it.
“Yes. Perhaps it would. It’s not likely, though, not in one as sly as her. Be ready to get up early.”
“All right. Do you want your hand back?”
“When you’re on the verge of knocking him out? Not at all.”
Roland went past them to his bunk. There he sat, looking at his folded hands in his lap. He might have been praying; he might only have been thinking hard. Cuthbert looked at him for a moment, then turned back to his cards.
16
The sun was just over the horizon when Roland and Cuthbert left the next morning. The Drop, still drenched with morning dew, seemed to bum with orange fire in the early light. Their breath and that of their horses puffed frosty in the air. It was a morning neither of them ever forgot. For the first time in their lives they went forth wearing bolstered revolvers; for the first time in their lives they went into the world as gunslingers.
Cuthbert said not a word-he knew that if he started, he’d do nothing but babble great streams of his usual nonsense-and Roland was quiet by nature. There was only one exchange between them, and it was brief.
“I said I made at least one very bad mistake,” Roland told him. “One that this note”-he touched his breast pocket-“brought home to me. Do you know what that mistake was?”
“Not loving her-not that,” Cuthbert said. “You called that ka, and I call it the same.” It was a relief to be able to say this, and a greater one to believe it. Cuthbert thought he could even accept Susan herself now, not us his best friend’s lover, a girl he had wanted himself the first time he saw her, but as a part of their entwined fate.
“No,” Roland said. “Not loving her, but thinking that love could somehow be apart from everything else. That I could live two lives-one with you and Al and our job here, one with her. I thought that love could lilt me above ka, the way a bird’s wings can take it above all the things that would kill it and eat it, otherwise. Do you understand?”
“It made you blind.” Cuthbert spoke with a gentleness quite foreign to the young man who had suffered through the last two months.
“Yes,” Roland said sadly. “It made me blind… but now I see. Come on, a little faster, if you please. I want to get this over.”
17
They rode up the rutty cart-track along which Susan (a Susan who had known a good deal less about the ways of the world) had come singing “Careless Love” beneath the light of the Kissing Moon. Where the track opened into Rhea’s yard, they stopped.
“Wonderful view,” Roland murmured. “You can see the whole sweep of the desert from here.”
“Not much to say about the view right here in front of us, though.”
That was true. The garden was full of unpicked mutie vegetables, the stuffy-guy presiding over them either a bad joke or a bad omen. The yard supported just one tree, now moulting sickly-looking fall leaves like an old vulture shedding its feathers. Beyond the tree was the hut itself, made of rough stone and topped by a single sooty pot of a chimney with a hex-sign painted on it in sneering yellow. At the rear comer, beyond one overgrown window, was a woodpile.
Roland had seen plenty of huts like it-the three of them had passed any number on their way here from Gilead-but never one that felt as powerfully wrong as this. He saw nothing untoward, yet there was a feeling, too strong to be denied, of a presence. One that watched and waited.
Cuthbert felt it, too. “Do we have to go closer?” lie swallowed. “Do we have to go in? Because… Roland, the door is open. Do you see?”
He saw. As if she expected them. As if she was inviting them in, wanting them to sit down with her to some unspeakable breakfast.
“Stay here.” Roland gigged Rusher forward.
“No! I’m coming!”
“No, cover my back. If I need to go inside, I’ll call you to join me… but if I need to go inside, the old woman who lives here will breathe
no more. As you said, that might be for the best.”
At every slow step Rusher took, the feeling of wrongness grew in Roland’s heart and mind. There was a stench to the place, a smell like rotten meat and hot putrefied tomatoes. It came from the hut, he supposed, but it also seemed to come wafting out of the very ground. And at every step, the whine of the thinny seemed louder, as if the atmosphere of this place somehow magnified it.
Susan came up here alone, and in the dark, he thought. Gods, I’m not sure I could have come up here in the dark with my friends for company.
He stopped beneath the tree, looking through the open door twenty paces away. He saw what could have been a kitchen; the legs of a table, the back of a chair, a filthy hearthstone. No sign of the lady of the house. But she was there. Roland could feel her eyes crawling on him like loathsome bugs.
I can’t see her because she’s used her art to make herself dim… but she’s there.
And just perhaps he did see her. The air had a strange shimmer just inside the door to the right, as if it had been heated. Roland had been told that you could see someone who was dim by turning your head and looking from the comer of your eye. He did that now.
“Roland?” Cuthbert called from behind him.
“Fine so far, Bert.” Barely paying attention to the words he was saying, because… yes! That shimmer was clearer now, and it had almost the shape of a woman. It could be his imagination, of course, but…
But at that moment, as if understanding he’d seen her, the shimmer moved farther back into the shadows. Roland glimpsed the swinging hem of an old black dress, there and then gone.
No matter. He had not come to see her but only to give her her single warning… which was one more than any of their fathers would have given her, no doubt.
“Rhea!” His voice rolled in the harsh tones of old, stem and commanding. Two yellow leaves fell from the tree, as if shivered loose by that voice, and one fell in his black hair. From the hut came only a waiting, listening silence… and then the discordant, jeering yowl of a cat.