Wizard and Glass dt-4

by Stephen King

  Roland looked up, startled, and saw that the sky had darkened to a velvety purple. His friend was outlined against it and looking east, his face stained fever-orange with the light of the rising moon.

  Yes, orange, the thinny buzzed inside his head. Laughed inside his head. Orange as ’twas when it rose on the night you came out here to see me and count me. Orange like afire. Orange like a bonfire.

  How can it be almost dark? he cried inside himself, but he knew-yes, he knew very well. Time had slipped back together, that was all, like layers of ground embracing once more after the argument of an earthquake. Twilight had come. Moonrise had come.

  Terror struck Roland like a closed fist aimed at the heart, making him jerk backward on the small ledge he’d found. He groped for the horn-shaped outcrop above him, but that act of rebalancing was far away; most of him was inside the pink storm again, before he had been snatched away and shown half the cosmos. Perhaps the wizard’s glass had only shown him what stood worlds far away in order to keep from showing him what might soon befall so close to home.

  I’d turn around if I thought her life was in any real danger, he had said. In a second.

  And if the ball knew that? If it couldn’t lie, might it not misdirect? Might it not take him away and show him a dark land, a darker tower? And it had shown him something else, something that recurred to him only now: a scrawny man in farmer’s overalls who had said… what? Not quite what he’d thought, not what he had been used to hearing all his life; not Life for you and life for your crop, but…

  “Death,” he whispered to the stones surrounding him. “Death for you, life for my crop. Charyou tree. That’s what he said, Charyou tree. Come, Reap.”

  Orange, gunslinger, a cracked old voice laughed inside his head. The voice of the Coos. The color of bonfires. Charyou tree, fin de ano, these are the old ways of which only the stuffy-guys with their red hands remain… until tonight. Tonight the old ways are refreshed, as the old ways must be, from time to time. Charyou tree, you damned babby, Charyou tree: tonight you pay for my sweet Ermot. Tonight you pay for all. Come, Reap.

  “Climb!” he screamed, reaching up and slapping Alain’s behind. “Climb, climb! For your father’s sake, climb!”

  “Roland, what-?” Alain’s voice was dazed, but he did begin to climb, going from handhold to handhold and rattling small pebbles down into Roland’s upturned face. Squinting against their fall, Roland reached and swatted Al’s bottom again, driving him like a horse.

  “Climb, gods damn you!” he cried. “It mayn’t be too late, even now!”

  But he knew better. Demon Moon had risen, he had seen its orange light shining on Cuthbert’s face like delirium, arid he knew better. In his head the lunatic buzz of the thinny, that rotting sore eating through the flesh of reality, joined with the lunatic laughter of the witch, and he knew better.

  Death for you, life for the crop. Charyou tree.

  Oh, Susan-

  23

  Nothing was clear to Susan until she saw the man with the long red hair and the straw hat which did not quite obscure his lamb-slaughterer’s eyes; the man with the cornshucks in his hands. He was the first, just a farmer (she had glimpsed him in the Lower Market, she thought; had even nodded to him, as countryfolk do, and he back to her), standing by himself not far from the place where Silk Ranch Road and the Great Road intersected, standing in the light of the rising moon. Until they came upon him, nothing was clear; after he hurled his bundle of cornshucks at her as she passed, standing in the slowly rolling cart with her hands bound in front of her and her head lowered and a rope around her neck, everything was clear.

  “Charyou tree,” he called, almost sweetly uttering words of the Old People she hadn’t heard since her childhood, words that meant “Come, Reap”… and something else, as well. Something hidden, something secret, something to do with that root word, char, that word which meant only death. As the dried shucks fluttered around her boots, she understood the secret very well; understood also that there would be no baby for her, no wedding for her in the fairy-distant land of Gilead, no hall in which she and Roland would be joined and then saluted beneath the electric lights, no husband, no more nights of sweet love; all that was over. The world had moved on and all that was over, done before fairly begun.

  She knew that she had been put in the back of the cart, stood in the back of the cart, and that the surviving Coffin Hunter had looped a noose around her neck. “Don’t try to sit,” he had said, sounding almost apologetic. “I have no desire to choke you, girly. If the wagon bumps and you fall, I’ll try to keep the knot loose, but if you try to sit, I’ll have to give you a pinching. Her orders.” He nodded to Rhea, who sat erect on the seat of the cart, the reins in her warped hands. “She’s in charge now.”

  And so she had been; so, as they neared town, she still was. Whatever the possession of her glam had done to her body, whatever the loss of it had done to her mind, it had not broken her power; that seemed to have increased, if anything, as if she’d found some other source from which she could feed, at least for awhile. Men who could have broken her over one knee like a stick of kindling followed her commands as unquestioningly as children.

  There were more and more men as that Reaping afternoon wound its shallow course to night: half a dozen ahead of the cart, riding with Rimer and the man with the cocked eye, a full dozen riding behind it with Reynolds, the rope leading to her neck wound around his tattooed hand, at their head. She didn’t know who these men were, or how they had been summoned.

  Rhea had taken this rapidly increasing party north a little farther, then turned southwest on the old Silk Ranch Road, which wound back toward town. On the eastern edge of Hambry, it rejoined the Great Road. Even in her dazed state, Susan had realized the harridan was moving slowly, measuring the descent of the sun as they went, not clucking at the pony to hurry but actually reining it in, at least until afternoon’s gold had gone. When they passed the farmer, thin-faced and alone, a good man, no doubt, with a freehold farm he worked hard from first gleam to last glow and a family he loved (but oh, there were those lamb-slaughterer eyes below the brim of his battered hat), she understood this leisurely course of travel, too. Rhea had been waiting for the moon.

  With no gods to pray to, Susan prayed to her father.

  Da? If thee’s there, help me to be strong as lean be, and help me hold to him, to the memory of him. Help me to hold to myself as well. Not for rescue, not for salvation, but just so as not to give them the satisfaction of seeing my pain and my fear. And him, help him as well…

  “Help keep him safe,” she whispered. “Keep my love safe; take my love safe to where he goes, give him joy in who he sees, and make him a cause of joy in those who see him.”

  “Praying, dearie?” the old woman asked without turning on the seat. Her croaking voice oozed false compassion. “Aye, ye’d do well t'make things right with the Powers while ye still can-before the spit’s burned right out of yer throat!” She threw back her head and cackled, the straggling remains of her broomstraw hair flying out orange in the light of the bloated moon.

  24

  Their horses, led by Rusher, had come to the sound of Roland’s dismayed shout. They stood not far away, their manes rippling in the wind, shaking their heads and whinnying their displeasure whenever the wind dropped enough for them to get a whiff of the thick white smoke rising from the canyon.

  Roland paid no attention to the horses or the smoke. His eyes were fixed on the drawstring sack slung over Alain’s shoulder. The ball inside had come alive again; in the growing dark, the bag seemed to pulse like some weird pink firefly. He held out his hands for it.

  “Give it to me!”

  “Roland, I don’t know if-”

  “Give it to me, damn your face!”

  Alain looked at Cuthbert, who nodded… then lifted his hands skyward in a weary, distracted gesture.

  Roland tore the bag away before Alain could do more than begin to shrug it off his shoulder. The
gunslinger dipped into it and pulled the glass out. It was glowing fiercely, a pink Demon Moon instead of an orange one.

  Behind and below them, the nagging whine of the thinny rose and fell, rose and fell.

  “Don’t look directly into that thing,” Cuthbert muttered to Alain. “Don’t, for your father’s sake.”

  Roland bent his face over the pulsing ball, its light running over his cheeks and brow like liquid, drowning his eyes in its dazzle.

  In Maerlyn’s Rainbow he saw her-Susan, horse-drover’s daughter, lovely girl at the window. He saw her standing in the back of a black cart decorated with gold symbols, the old witch’s cart. Reynolds rode behind her, holding the end of a rope that was noosed around her neck. The cart was rolling toward Green Heart, making its way with processional slow-ness. Hill Street was lined with people of whom the farmer with the lamb-slaughterer’s eyes had been only the first-all those folk of Hambry and Mejis who had been deprived of their fair but were now given this ancient dark attraction in its stead: Charyou tree, come, Reap, death for you, life for our crops.

  A soundless whispering ran through them like a gathering wave, and they began to pelt her-first with cornhusks, then with rotting tomatoes, then with potatoes and apples. One of these latter struck her cheek. She reeled, almost fell, then stood straight again, now raising her swollen but still lovely face so the moon painted it. She looked straight ahead.

  “Charyou tree,” they whispered. Roland couldn’t hear them, but he could see the words on their lips. Stanley Ruiz was there, and Pettie, and Gert Moggins, and Frank Claypool, the deputy with the broken leg; Jamie McCann, who was to have been this year’s Reap Lad. Roland saw a hundred people he had known (and mostly liked) during his time in Mejis. Now these people pelted his love with cornshucks and vegetables as she stood, hands bound before her, in the back of Rhea’s cart.

  The slowly rolling cart reached Green Heart, with its colored paper lanterns and silent carousel where no laughing children rode… no, not this year. The crowd, still speaking those two words-chanting them now, it appeared-parted. Roland saw the heaped pyramid of wood that was the unlit bonfire. Sitting around it, their backs propped on the central column, their lumpy legs outstretched, was a ring of red-handed stuffy-guys. There was a single hole in the ring; a single waiting vacancy.

  And now a woman emerged from the crowd. She wore a rusty black dress and held a pail in one hand. A smear of ash stood out on one of her cheeks like a brand. She-

  Roland began to shriek. It was a single word, over and over again:

  No, no, no, no, no, no! The ball’s pink light flashed brighter with each repetition, as if his horror refreshed and strengthened it. And now, with each of those pulses, Cuthbert and Alain could see the shape of the gunslinger’s skull beneath his skin.

  “We have to take it away from him,” Alain said. “We have to, it’s sucking him dry. It’s killing him!”

  Cuthbert nodded and stepped forward. He grabbed the ball, but couldn’t take it from Roland’s hands. The gunslinger’s fingers seemed welded to it.

  “Hit him!” he told Alain. “Hit him again, you have to!”

  But Alain might as well have been hitting a post. Roland didn’t even rock back on his heels. He continued to cry out that single negative- “No! No! No! No”-and the ball flashed faster and faster, eating its way into him through the wound it had opened, sucking up his grief like blood.

  25

  “Charyou tree!” Cordelia Delgado cried, darting forward from where she had been waiting. The crowd cheered her, and beyond her left shoulder Demon Moon winked, as if in complicity. “Charyou tree, ye faithless bitch! Charyou tree!”

  She flung the pail of paint at her niece, splattering her pants and dressing her tied hands in a pair of wet scarlet gloves. She grinned up at Susan as the cart rolled past. The smear of ash stood out on her cheek; in the center of her pale forehead, a single vein pulsed like a worm.

  “Bitch!” Cordelia screamed. Her fists were clenched; she danced a kind of hilarious jig, feet jumping, bony knees pumping beneath her skirt. “Life for the crops! Death for the bitch! Charyou tree! Come, Reap!”

  The cart rolled past her; Cordelia faded from Susan’s sight, just one more cruel phantasm in a dream that would soon end. Bird and bear and hare and fish, she thought. Be safe, Roland; go with my love. That’s my fondest wish.

  “Take her!” Rhea screamed. “Take this murdering bitch and cook her red-handed! Charyou tree!”

  “Charyou tree!” the crowd responded. A forest of willing hands grew in the moonlit air; somewhere firecrackers rattled and children laughed excitedly.

  Susan was lifted from the cart and handed toward the waiting woodpile above the heads of the crowd, passed by uplifted hands like a heroine returned triumphantly home from the wars. Her hands dripped red tears upon their straining, eager faces. The moon overlooked it all, dwarfing the glow of the paper lanterns.

  “Bird and bear and hare and fish,” she murmured as she was first lowered and then slammed against the pyramid of dry wood, put in the place which had been left for her-the whole crowd chanting in unison now, “Charyou TREE! Charyou TREE! Charyou TREE!”

  “Bird and bear and hare and fish.”

  Trying to remember how he had danced with her that night. Trying to remember how he had loved with her in the willow grove. Trying to remember that first meeting on the dark road: Thankee-sai, we ’re well met, he had said, and yes, in spite of everything, in spite of this miserable ending with the folk who had been her neighbors turned into prancing goblins by moonlight, in spite of pain and betrayal and what was coming, he had spoken the truth: they had been well met, they had been very well met, indeed.

  “Charyou TREE! Charyou TREE! Charyou TREE!”

  Women came and piled dry cornshucks around her feet. Several of them slapped her (it didn’t matter; her bruised and puffy face seemed to have gone numb), and one-it was Misha Alvarez, whose daughter Susan had taught to ride-spat into her eyes and then leaped prankishly away, shaking her hands at the sky and laughing. For a moment she saw Coral Thorin, festooned with reap-charms, her arms filled with dead leaves which she threw at Susan; they fluttered down around her in a crackling, aromatic shower.

  And now came her aunt again, and Rhea beside her. Each held a torch. They stood before her, and Susan could smell sizzling pitch.

  Rhea raised her torch to the moon. “CHARYOU TREE!” she screamed in her rusty old voice, and the crowd responded, “CHARYOU TREE!”

  Cordelia raised her own torch. “COME, REAP!”

  “COME, REAP!” they cried back to her.

  “Now, ye bitch,” Rhea crooned. “Now comes warmer kisses than any yer love ever gave ye.”

  “Die, ye faithless,” Cordelia whispered. “Life for the crops, death for you.”

  It was she who first flung her torch into the cornshucks which were piled as high as Susan’s knees; Rhea flung hers a bare second later. The cornshucks blazed up at once, dazzling Susan with yellow light.

  She drew in a final breath of cool air, warmed it with her heart, and loosed it in a defiant shout: “ROLAND, I LOVE THEE!”

  The crowd fell back, murmuring, as if uneasy at what they had done, now that it was too late to take it back; here was not a stuffy-guy but a cheerful girl they all knew, one of their own, for some mad reason backed up against the Reap-Night bonfire with her hands painted red. They might have saved her, given another moment-some might have, anyway-but it was too late. The dry wood caught; her pants caught; her shirt caught; her long blonde hair blazed on her head like a crown.

  “ROLAND, I LOVE THEE!”

  At the end of her life she was aware of heat but not pain. She had time to consider his eyes, eyes of that blue which is the color of the sky at first light of morning. She had time to think of him on the Drop, riding Rusher flat-out with his black hair flying back from his temples and his neckerchief rippling; to see him laughing with an ease and freedom he would never find again in the long life which s
tretched out for him beyond hers, and it was his laughter she took with her as she went out, fleeing the light and heat into the silky, consoling dark, calling to him over and over as she went, calling bird and bear and hare and fish.

  26

  There was no word, not even no, in his screams at the end: he howled like a gutted animal, his hands welded to the ball, which beat like a runaway heart. He watched in it as she burned.

  Cuthbert tried again to take the cursed thing away, and couldn’t. He did the only other thing he could think of-drew his revolver, pointed it at the ball, and thumbed back the hammer. He would likely wound Roland, and the flying glass might even blind him, but there was no other choice. If they didn’t do something, the glam would kill him.

  But there was no need. As if seeing Cuthbert’s gun and understanding what it meant, the ball went instantly dark and dead in Roland’s hands. Roland’s stiff body, every line and muscle trembling with horror and outrage, went limp. He dropped like a stone, his fingers at last letting go of the ball. His stomach cushioned it as he struck the ground; it rolled off him and trickled to a stop by one of his limp, outstretched hands. Nothing burned in its darkness now except for one baleful orange spark-the tiny reflection of the rising Demon Moon.

  Alain looked at the glass with a species of disgusted, frightened awe; looked at it as one might look at a vicious animal that now sleeps… but will wake again, and bite when it does.

  He stepped forward, meaning to crush it to powder beneath his boot. “Don’t you dare,” Cuthbert said in a hoarse voice. He was kneeling beside Roland’s limp form but looking at Alain. The rising moon was in his eyes, two small, bright stones of light. “Don’t you dare, after all the misery and death we’ve gone through to get it. Don’t you even think of it.”

  Alain looked at him uncertainly for a moment, thinking he should destroy the cursed thing, anyway-misery suffered did not justify misery to come, and as long as the thing on the ground remained whole, misery was all it would bring anyone. It was a misery-machine, that was what it was, and it had killed Susan Delgado. He hadn’t seen what Roland had seen in the glass, but he had seen his friend’s face, and that had been enough. It had killed Susan, and it would kill more, if left whole.