by Стивен Кинг
Would that Eddie had plunged that knife into the Really Bad Man's throat! Better than a pig-slaughtering! Better by a country mile!
He hadn't, but she had seen the Really Bad Man's body. It had been breathing, but body was the right word just the same; it had only been a worthless thing, like a cast-off towsack which some idiot had stuffed full of weeds or cornshucks.
Detta's mind might have been as ugly as a rat's ass, but it was even quicker and sharper than Eddie's. Really Bad Man there used to be full of piss an vinegar. Not no mo. He know I'm up here and doan want to do nothin but git away befo I come down an kill his ass. His little buddy, though—he still be pretty strong, and he ain't had his fill of hurting on me just yet. Want to come up here and hunt me down no matter how that Really Bad Man be. Sho. He be thinkin, One black bitch widdout laigs no match fo a big ole swingin dick like me. I doan wan t'run. I want to be huntin that black quiff down. I give her a poke or two, den we kin go like you want. That what he be thinkin, and that be all right. That be jes fine, graymeat. You think you can take DettaWalker, you jes come on up here in these Drawers and give her a try. You goan find out when you fuckin with me, you fuckin wit the best, honeybunch! You goan find out—
But she was jerked from the rat-run of her thoughts by a sound that came to her clearly in spite of the surf and wind: the heavy crack of a pistol-shot.
15
"I think you understand better than you let on," Eddie said. "A whole hell of a lot better. You'd like for me to get in grabbing distance, that's what I think." He jerked his head toward the door without taking his eyes from Roland's face. Unaware that not far away someone was thinking exactly the same thing, he added: "I know you're sick, all right, but it could be you're pretending to be a lot weaker than you really are. Could be you're laying back in the tall grass just a little bit."
"Could be I am," Roland said, unsmiling, and added: "But I'm not."
He was, though … a little.
"A few more steps wouldn't hurt, though, would it? I'm not going to be able to shout much longer." The last syllable turned into a frog's croak as if to prove his point. "And I need to make you think about what you're doing—planning to do. If I can't persuade you to come with me, maybe I can at least put you on your guard … again."
"For your precious Tower," Eddie sneered, but he did come skidding halfway down the slope of ground he had climbed, his tattered tennies kicking up listless clouds of maroon dust.
"For my precious Tower and your precious health," the gunslinger said. "Not to mention your precious life."
He slipped the remaining revolver from the left holster and looked at it with an expression both sad and strange.
"If you think you can scare me with that—"
"I don't. You know I can't shoot you, Eddie. But I think you do need an object lesson in how things have changed. How much things have changed."
Roland lifted the gun, its muzzle pointing not toward Eddie but toward the empty surging ocean, and thumbed the hammer. Eddie steeled himself against the gun's heavy crack.
No such thing. Only a dull click.
Roland thumbed the hammer back again. The cylinder rotated. He squeezed the trigger, and again there was nothing but a dull click.
"Never mind," Eddie said. "Where I come from, the Defense Department would have hired you after the first misfire. You might as well qui—"
But the heavy KA-BLAM of the revolver cut off the word's end as neatly as Roland had cut small branches from trees as a target-shooting exercise when he had been a student. Eddie jumped. The gunshot momentarily silenced the constant riiiiii of the insects in the hills. They only began to tune up again slowly, cautiously, after Roland had put the gun in his lap.
"What in hell does that prove?"
"I suppose that all depends on what you'll listen to and what you refuse to hear," Roland said a trifle sharply. "It's supposed to prove that not all the shells are duds. Furthermore, it suggests—strongly suggests—that some, maybe even all, of the shells in the gun you gave Odetta may be live."
"Bullshit!" Eddie paused. "Why?"
"Because I loaded the gun I just fired with shells from the backs of my gunbelts—with shells that took the worst wetting, in other words. I did it just to pass the time while you were gone. Not that it takes much time to load a gun, even shy a pair of fingers, you understand!" Roland laughed a little, and the laugh turned into a cough he muzzled with an abridged fist. When the cough had subsided he went on: "But after you've tried to fire wets, you have to break the machine and clean the machine. Break the machine, clean the machine, you maggots— it was the first thing Cort, our teacher, drummed into us. I didn't know how long it would take me to break down my gun, clean it, and put it back together with only a hand and a half, but I thought that if I intended to go on living—and I do, Eddie, I do—I'd better find out. Find out and then learn to do it faster, don't you think so? Come a little closer, Eddie! Come a little closer for your father's sake!"
"All the better to see you with, my child," Eddie said, but did take a couple of steps closer to Roland. Only a couple.
"When the first slug I pulled the trigger on fired, I almost filled my pants," the gunslinger said. He laughed again. Shocked, Eddie realized the gunslinger had reached the edge of delirium. "The first slug, but believe me when I say it was the last thing I had expected."
Eddie tried to decide if the gunslinger was lying, lying about the gun, and lying about his condition as well. Cat was sick, yeah. But was he really this sick? Eddie didn't know. If Roland was acting, he was doing a great job; as for guns, Eddie had no way of telling because he had no experience with them. He had shot a pistol maybe three times in his life before suddenly finding himself in a firefight at Balazar's place. Henry might have known, but Henry was dead—a thought which had a way of constantly surprising Eddie into grief.
"None of the others fired," the gunslinger said, "so I cleaned the machine, re-loaded, and fired around the chamber again. This time I used shells a little further toward the belt buckles. Ones which would have taken even less of a wetting. The loads we used to kill our food, the dry loads, were the ones closest to the buckles."
He paused to cough dryly into his hand, then went on.
"Second time around I hit two live rounds. I broke my gun down again, cleaned it again, then loaded a third time. You just watched me drop the trigger on the first three chambers of that third loading." He smiled faintly. "You know, after the first two clicks I thought it would be my damned luck to have filled the cylinder with nothing but wets. That wouldn't have been very convincing, would it? Can you come a little closer, Eddie?"
"Not very convincing at all," Eddie said, "and I think I'm just as close to you as I'm going to come, thanks. What lesson am I supposed to take from all this, Roland?"
Roland looked at him as one might look at an imbecile. "I didn't send you out here to die, you know. I didn't send either of you out here to die. Great gods, Eddie, where are your brains? She's packing live iron!" His eyes regarded Eddie closely. "She's someplace up in those hills. Maybe you think you can track her, but you're not going to have any luck if the ground is as stony as it looks from here. She's lying up there, Eddie, not Odetta but Detta, lying up there with live iron in her hand. If I leave you and you go after her, she'll blow your guts out of your asshole."
Another spasm of coughing set in.
Eddie stared at the coughing man in the wheelchair and the waves pounded and the wind blew its steady idiot's note.
At last he heard his voice say, "You could have held back one shell you knew was live. I wouldn't put it past you." And with that said he knew it to be true: he wouldn't put that or anything else past Roland.
His Tower.
His goddamned Tower.
And the slyness of putting the saved shell in the third cylinder! It provided just the right touch of reality, didn't it? Made it hard not to believe.
"We've got a saying in my world," Eddie said. " 'That guy could sell Fri
gidaires to the Eskimos.' That's the saying."
"What does it mean?"
"It means go pound sand."
The gunslinger looked at him for a long time and then nodded. "You mean to stay. All right. As Detta she's safer from … from whatever wildlife there may be around here … than she would have been as Odetta, and you'd be safer away from her—at least for the time being—but I can see how it is. I don't like it, but I've no time to argue with a fool."
"Does that mean," Eddie asked politely, "that no one ever tried to argue with you about this Dark Tower you're so set on getting to?"
Roland smiled tiredly. "A great many did, as a matter of fact. I suppose that's why I recognize you'll not be moved. One fool knows another. At any rate, I'm too weak to catch you, you're obviously too wary to let me coax you close enough to grab you, and time's grown too short to argue. All I can do is go and hope for the best. I'm going to tell you one last time before I do go, and hear me, Eddie: Be on your guard."
Then Roland did something that made Eddie ashamed of all his doubts (although no less solidly set in his own decision): he flicked open the cylinder of the revolver with a practiced flick of his wrist, dumped all the loads, and replaced them with fresh loads from the loops closest to the buckles. He snapped the cylinder back into place with another flick of his wrist.
"No time to clean the machine now," he said, "but 'twont matter, I reckon. Now catch, and catch clean—don't dirty the machine any more than it is already. There aren't many machines left in my world that work anymore."
He threw the gun across the space between them. In his anxiety, Eddie almost did drop it. Then he had it safely tucked into his waistband.
The gunslinger got out of the wheelchair, almost fell when it slid backward under his pushing hands, then tottered to the door. He grasped its knob; in his hand it turned easily. Eddie could not see the scene the door opened upon, but he heard the muffled sound of traffic.
Roland looked back at Eddie, his blue bullshooter's eyes gleaming out of a face which was ghastly pale.
16
Detta watched all of this from her hiding place with hungrily gleaming eyes.
17
"Remember, Eddie," he said in a hoarse voice, and then stepped forward. His body collapsed at the edge of the doorway, as if it had struck a stone wall instead of empty space.
Eddie felt an almost insatiable urge to go to the doorway, to look through and see where—and to what when— it led. Instead he turned and scanned the hills again, his hand on the gun-butt.
I'm going to tell you one last time.
Suddenly, scanning the empty brown hills, Eddie was scared.
Be on your guard.
Nothing up there was moving.
Nothing he could see, at least.
He sensed her all the same.
Not Odetta; the gunslinger was right about that.
It was Detta he sensed.
He swallowed and heard a click in his throat.
On your guard.
Yes. But never in his life had he felt such a deadly need for sleep. It would take him soon enough; if he didn't give in willingly, sleep would rape him.
And while he slept, Detta would come.
Detta.
Eddie fought the weariness, looked at the unmoving hills with eyes which felt swollen and heavy, and wondered how long it might be before Roland came back with the third—The Pusher, whoever he or she was.
"Odetta?" he called without much hope.
Only silence answered, and for Eddie the time of waiting began.
THE PUSHER
CHAPTER 1
BITTER MEDICINE
1
When the gunslinger entered Eddie, Eddie had experienced a moment of nausea and he had had a sense of being watched (this Roland hadn't felt; Eddie had told him later). He'd had, in other words, some vague sense of the gunslinger's presence. With Detta, Roland had been forced to come forward immediately, like it or not. She hadn't just sensed him; in a queer way it seemed that she had been waiting for him—him or another, more frequent, visitor. Either way, she had been totally aware of his presence from the first moment he had been in her.
Jack Mort didn't feel a thing.
He was too intent on the boy.
He had been watching the boy for the last two weeks.
Today he was going to push him.
2
Even with the back to the eyes from which the gunslinger now looked, Roland recognized the boy. It was the boy he had met at the way station in the desert, the boy he had rescued from the Oracle in the Mountains, the boy whose life he had sacrificed when the choice between saving him or finally catching up with the man in black finally came; the boy who had said Go then—there are other worlds than these before plunging into the abyss. And sure enough, the boy had been right.
The boy was Jake.
He was holding a plain brown paper bag in one hand and a blue canvas bag by its drawstring top in the other. From the angles poking against the sides of the canvas, the gunslinger thought it must contain books.
Traffic flooded the street the boy was waiting to cross—a street in the same city from which he had taken the Prisoner and the Lady, he realized, but for the moment none of that mattered. Nothing mattered but what was going to happen or not happen in the next few seconds.
Jake had not been brought into the gunslinger's world through any magic door; he had come through a cruder, more understandable portal: he had been born into Roland's world by dying in his own.
He had been murdered.
More specifically, he had been pushed.
Pushed into the street; run over by a car while on his way to school, his lunch-sack in one hand and his books in the other.
Pushed by the man in black.
He's going to do it! He's going to do it right now! That's to be my punishment for murdering him in my world—to see him murdered in this one before I can stop it!
But the rejection of brutish destiny had been the gunslinger's work all his life—it had been his ka, if you pleased—and so he came forward without even thinking, acting with reflexes so deep they had nearly become instincts.
And as he did a thought both horrible and ironic flashed into his mind: What if the body he had entered was itself that of the man in black? What if, as he rushed forward to save the boy, he saw his own hands reach out and push? What if this sense of control was only an illusion, and Walter's final gleeful joke that Roland himself should murder the boy?
3
For one single moment Jack Mort lost the thin strong arrow of his concentration. On the edge of leaping forward and shoving the kid into the traffic, he felt something which his mind mistranslated just as the body may refer pain from one part of itself to another.
When the gunslinger came forward, Jack thought some sort of bug had landed on the back of his neck. Not a wasp or a bee, nothing that actually stung, but something that bit and itched. Mosquito, maybe. It was on this that he blamed his lapse in concentration at the crucial moment. He slapped at it and returned to the boy.
He thought all this happened in a bare wink; actually, seven seconds passed. He sensed neither the gunslinger's swift advance nor his equally swift retreat, and none of the people around him (going-to-work people, most from the subway station on the next block, their faces still puffy with sleep, their half-dreaming eyes turned inward) noticed Jack's eyes turn from their usual deep blue to a lighter blue behind the prim gold-rimmed glasses he wore. No one noticed those eyes darken to their normal cobalt color either, but when it happened and he refocused on the boy, he saw with frustrated fury as sharp as a thorn that his chance was gone. The light had changed.
He watched the boy crossing with the rest of the sheep, and then Jack himself turned back the way he had come and began shoving himself upstream against the tidal flow of pedestrians.
"Hey, mister! Watch ou—"
Some curd-faced teenaged girl he barely saw. Jack shoved her aside, hard, not looking back at he
r caw of anger as her own armload of schoolbooks went flying. He went walking on down Fifth Avenue and away from Forty-Third, where he had meant for the boy to die today. His head was bent, his lips pressed together so tightly he seemed to have no mouth at all but only the scar of a long-healed wound above his chin. Once clear of the bottleneck at the corner, he did not slow down but strode even more rapidly along, crossing Forty-Second, Forty-First, Fortieth. Somewhere in the middle of the next block he passed the building where the boy lived. He gave it barely a glance, although he had followed the boy from it every school-morning for the last three weeks, followed him from the building to the corner three and a half blocks further up Fifth, the corner he thought of simply as the Pushing Place.
The girl he bumped was screaming after him, but Jack Mort didn't notice. An amateur lepidopterist would have taken no more notice of a common butterfly.
Jack was, in his way, much like an amateur lepidopterist.
By profession, he was a successful C.P.A.
Pushing was only his hobby.
4
The gunslinger returned to the back of the man's mind and fainted there. If there was relief, it was simply that this man was not the man in black, was not Walter.
All the rest was utter horror … and utter realization.
Divorced of his body, his mind—his ka— was as healthy and acute as ever, but the sudden knowing struck him like a chisel-blow to the temple.
The knowing didn't come when he went forward but when he was sure the boy was safe and slipped back again. He saw the connection between this man and Odetta, too fantastic and yet too hideously apt to be coincidental, and understood what the real drawing of the three might be, and who they might be.