by Stephen King
“Ye wake, pretty man. So ye do. ‘Tis well.”
“Who are you? Where am I?”
“We are the Little Sisters of Eluria,” she said. “I am Sister Mary. Here is Sister Louise, and Sister Michela, and Sister Coquina—”
“And Sister Tamra,” said the last. “A lovely lass of one-and-twenty.” She giggled. Her face shimmered, and for a moment she was again as old as the world. Hooked of nose, gray of skin. Roland thought once more of Rhea.
They moved closer, encircling the complication of harness in which he lay suspended, and when Roland shrank back, the pain roared up his back and injured leg again. He groaned. The straps holding him creaked.
“Ooooo!”
“It hurts!”
“Hurts him!”
“Hurts so fierce!”
They pressed even closer, as if his pain fascinated them. And now he could smell them, a dry and earthy smell. The one named Sister Michela reached out—
“Go away! Leave him! Have I not told ye before?”
They jumped back from this voice, startled. Sister Mary looked particularly annoyed. But she stepped back, with one final glare (Roland would have sworn it) at the medallion lying on his chest. He had tucked it back under the bed-dress at his last waking, but it was out again now.
A sixth sister appeared, pushing rudely in between Mary and Tamra. This one perhaps was only one-and-twenty, with flushed cheeks, smooth skin, and dark eyes. Her white habit billowed like a dream. The red rose over her breast stood out like a curse.
“Go! Leave him!”
“Oooo, my dear!” cried Sister Louise in a voice both laughing and angry. “Here’s Jenna, the baby, and has she fallen in love with him?”
“She has!” Tamra said, laughing. “Baby’s heart is his for the purchase!”
“Oh, so it is!” agreed Sister Coquina.
Mary turned to the newcomer, lips pursed into a tight line. “Ye have no business here, saucy girl.”
“I do if I say I do,” Sister Jenna replied. She seemed more in charge of herself now. A curl of black hair had escaped her wimple and lay across her forehead in a comma. “Now go. He’s not up to your jokes and laughter.”
“Order us not,” Sister Mary said, “for we never joke. So you know, Sister Jenna.”
The girl’s face softened a little, and Roland saw she was afraid. It made him afraid for her. For himself, as well. “Go,” she repeated. “‘Tis not the time. Are there not others to tend?”
Sister Mary seemed to consider. The others watched her. At last she nodded, and smiled down at Roland. Again her face seemed to shimmer, like something seen through a heat-haze. What he saw (or thought he saw) beneath was horrible and watchful. “Bide well, pretty man,” she said to Roland. “Bide with us a bit, and we’ll heal ye.”
What choice have I? Roland thought.
The others laughed, birdlike titters which rose into the dimness like ribbons. Sister Michela actually blew him a kiss.
“Come, ladies!” Sister Mary cried. “We’ll leave Jenna with him a bit in memory of her mother, whom we loved well!” And with that, she led the others away, five white birds flying off down the center aisle, their skirts nodding this way and that.
“Thank you,” Roland said, looking up at the owner of the cool hand … for he knew it was she who had soothed him.
She took up his fingers as if to prove this, and caressed them. “They mean ye no harm,” she said … yet Roland saw she believed not a word of it, nor did he. He was in trouble here, very bad trouble.
“What is this place?”
“Our place,” she said simply. “The home of the Little Sisters of Eluria. Our convent, if’ee like.”
“This is no convent,” Roland said, looking past her at the empty beds. “It’s an infirmary. Isn’t it?”
“A hospital,” she said, still stroking his fingers. “We serve the doctors … and they serve us.” He was fascinated by the black curl lying on the cream of her brow—would have stroked it, if he had dared reach up. Just to tell its texture. He found it beautiful because it was the only dark thing in all this white. The white had lost its charm for him. “We are hospitalers … or were, before the world moved on.”
“Are you for the Jesus Man?”
She looked surprised for a moment, almost shocked, and then laughed merrily. “No, not us!”
“If you are hospitalers … nurses … where are the doctors?”
She looked at him, biting at her lip, as if trying to decide something. Roland found her doubt utterly charming, and he realized that, sick or not, he was looking at a woman as a woman for the first time since Susan Delgado had died, and that had been long ago. The whole world had changed since then, and not for the better.
“Would you really know?”
“Yes, of course,” he said, a little surprised. A little disquieted, too. He kept waiting for her face to shimmer and change, as the faces of the others had done. It didn’t. There was none of that unpleasant dead-earth smell about her, either.
Wait, he cautioned himself. Believe nothing here, least of all your senses. Not yet.
“I suppose you must,” she said with a sigh. It tinkled the bells at her forehead, which were darker in color than those the others wore—not black like her hair but charry, somehow, as if they had been hung in the smoke of a campfire. Their sound, however, was brightest silver. “Promise me you’ll not scream and wake the pube in yonder bed.”
“Pube?”
“The boy. Do ye promise?”
“Aye,” he said, falling into the half-forgotten patois of the Outer Arc without even being aware of it. Susan’s dialect. “It’s been long since I screamed, pretty.”
She colored more definitely at that, roses more natural and lively than the one on her breast mounting in her cheeks.
“Don’t call pretty what ye can’t properly see,” she said.
“Then push back the wimple you wear.”
Her face he could see perfectly well, but he badly wanted to see her hair—hungered for it, almost. A full flood of black in all this dreaming white. Of course it might be cropped, those of her order might wear it that way, but he somehow didn’t think so.
“No, ‘tis not allowed.”
“By whom?”
“Big Sister.”
“She who calls herself Mary?”
“Aye, her.” She started away, then paused and looked back over her shoulder. In another girl her age, one as pretty as this, that look back would have been flirtatious. This girl’s was only grave.
“Remember your promise.”
“Aye, no screams.”
She went to the bearded man, skirt swinging. In the dimness, she cast only a blur of shadow on the empty beds she passed. When she reached the man (this one was unconscious, Roland thought, not just sleeping), she looked back at Roland once more. He nodded.
Sister Jenna stepped close to the suspended man, on the far side of his bed, so that Roland saw her through the twists and loops of woven white silk. She placed her hands lightly on the left side of his chest, bent over him … and shook her head from side to side, like one expressing a brisk negative. The bells she wore on her forehead rang sharply, and Roland once more felt that weird stirring up his back, accompanied by a low ripple of pain. It was as if he had shuddered without actually shuddering, or shuddered in a dream.
What happened next almost did jerk a scream from him; he had to bite his lips against it. Once more the unconscious man’s legs seemed to move without moving … because it was what was on them that moved. The man’s hairy shins, ankles, and feet were exposed below the hem of his bed-dress. Now a black wave of bugs moved down them. They were singing fiercely, like an army column that sings as it marches.
Roland remembered the black scar across the man’s cheek and nose—the scar that had disappeared. More such as these, of course. And they were on him, as well. That was how he could shiver without shivering. They were all over his back. Battening on him.
No, kee
ping back a scream wasn’t as easy as he had expected it to be.
The bugs ran down to the tips of the suspended man’s toes, then leaped off them in waves, like creatures springing off an embankment and into a swimming hole. They organized themselves quickly and easily on the bright white sheet below, and began to march down to the floor in a battalion about a foot wide. Roland couldn’t get a good look at them, the distance was too far and the light too dim, but he thought they were perhaps twice the size of ants, and a little smaller than the fat honeybees which had swarmed the flower beds back home.
They sang as they went.
The bearded man didn’t sing. As the swarms of bugs that had coated his twisted legs began to diminish, he shuddered and groaned. The young woman put her hand on his brow and soothed him, making Roland a little jealous even in his revulsion at what he was seeing.
And was what he was seeing really so awful? In Gilead, leeches had been used for certain ailments—swellings of the brain, the armpits, and the groin, primarily. When it came to the brain, the leeches, ugly as they were, were certainly preferable to the next step, which was trepanning.
Yet there was something loathsome about them, perhaps only because he couldn’t see them well, and something awful about trying to imagine them all over his back as he hung here, helpless. Not singing, though. Why? Because they were feeding? Sleeping? Both at once?
The bearded man’s groans subsided. The bugs marched away across the floor, toward one of the mildly rippling silken walls. Roland lost sight of them in the shadows.
Jenna came back to him, her eyes anxious. “Ye did well. Yet I see how ye feel; it’s on your face.”
“The doctors,” he said.
“Yes. Their power is very great, but …” She dropped her voice. “I believe that drover is beyond their help. His legs are a little better, and the wounds on his face are all but healed, but he has injuries where the doctors cannot reach.” She traced a hand across her midsection, suggesting the location of these injuries, if not their nature.
“And me?” Roland asked.
“Ye were ta’en by the green folk,” she said. “Ye must have angered them powerfully, for them not to kill ye outright. They roped ye and dragged ye, instead. Tamra, Michela, and Louise were out gathering herbs. They saw the green folk at play with ye, and bade them stop, but—”
“Do the muties always obey you, Sister Jenna?”
She smiled, perhaps pleased he remembered her name. “Not always, but mostly. This time they did, or ye’d have now found the clearing in the trees.”
“I suppose so.”
“The skin was stripped almost clean off your back—red ye were from nape to waist. Ye’ll always bear the scars, but the doctors have gone far toward healing ye. And their singing is passing fair, is it not?”
“Yes,” Roland said, but the thought of those black things all over his back, roosting in his raw flesh, still revolted him. “I owe you thanks, and give it freely. Anything I can do for you—”
“Tell me your name, then. Do that.”
“I’m Roland of Gilead. A gunslinger. I had revolvers, Sister Jenna. Have you seen them?”
“I’ve seen no shooters,” she said, but cast her eyes aside. The roses bloomed in her cheeks again. She might be a good nurse, and fair, but Roland thought her a poor liar. He was glad. Good liars were common. Honesty, on the other hand, came dear.
Let the untruth pass for now, he told himself. She speaks it out of fear, I think.
“Jenna!” The cry came from the deeper shadows at the far end of the infirmary—today it seemed longer than ever to the gunslinger— and Sister Jenna jumped guiltily. “Come away! Ye’ve passed words enough to entertain twenty men! Let him sleep!”
“Aye!” she called, then turned back to Roland. “Don’t let on that I showed you the doctors.”
“Mum is the word, Jenna.”
She paused, biting her lip again, then suddenly swept back her wimple. It fell against the nape of her neck in a soft chiming of bells. Freed from its confinement, her hair swept against her cheeks like shadows.
“Am I pretty? Am I? Tell me the truth, Roland of Gilead—no flattery. For flattery’s kind only a candle’s length.”
“Pretty as a summer night.”
What she saw in his face seemed to please her more than his words, because she smiled radiantly. She pulled the wimple up again, tucking her hair back in with quick little finger-pokes. “Am I decent?”
“Decent as fair,” he said, then cautiously lifted an arm and pointed at her brow. “One curl’s out … just there.”
“Aye, always that one to devil me.” With a comical little grimace, she tucked it back. Roland thought how much he would like to kiss her rosy cheeks … and perhaps her rosy mouth for good measure.
“All’s well,” he said.
“Jenna!” The cry was more impatient than ever. “Meditations!”
“I’m coming just now!” she called, and gathered her voluminous skirts to go. Yet she turned back once more, her face now very grave and very serious. “One more thing,” she said in a voice only a step above a whisper. She snatched a quick look around. “The gold medallion ye wear—ye wear it because it’s yours. Do’ee understand … James?”
“Yes.” He turned his head a bit to look at the sleeping boy. “This is my brother.”
“If they ask, yes. To say different would be to get Jenna in serious trouble.”
How serious he did not ask, and she was gone in any case, seeming to flow along the aisle between all the empty beds, her skirt caught up in one hand. The roses had fled from her face, leaving her cheeks and brow ashy. He remembered the greedy look on the faces of the others, how they had gathered around him in a tightening knot … and the way their faces had shimmered.
Six women, five old and one young.
Doctors that sang and then crawled away across the floor when dismissed by jingling bells.
And an improbable hospital ward of perhaps a hundred beds, a ward with a silk roof and silk walls …
… and all the beds empty save three.
Roland didn’t understand why Jenna had taken the dead boy’s medallion from his pants pocket and put it around his neck, but he had an idea that if they found out she had done so, the Little Sisters of Eluria might kill her.
Roland closed his eyes, and the soft singing of the doctor-insects once again floated him off into sleep.
IV. A BOWL OF SOUP. THE BOY IN THE NEXT BED.
THE NIGHT-NURSES.
Roland dreamed that a very large bug (a doctor-bug, mayhap) was flying around his head and banging repeatedly into his nose—collisions which were annoying rather than painful. He swiped at the bug repeatedly, and although his hands were eerily fast under ordinary circumstances, he kept missing it. And each time he missed, the bug giggled.
I’m slow because I’ve been sick, he thought.
No, ambushed. Dragged across the ground by slow mutants, saved by the Little Sisters of Eluria.
Roland had a sudden, vivid image of a man’s shadow growing from the shadow of an overturned freight wagon; heard a rough, gleeful voice cry “Booh!”
He jerked awake hard enough to set his body rocking in its complication of slings, and the woman who had been standing beside his head, giggling as she tapped his nose lightly with a wooden spoon, stepped back so quickly that the bowl in her other hand slipped from her fingers.
Roland’s hands shot out, and they were as quick as ever—his frustrated failure to catch the bug had been only part of his dream. He caught the bowl before more than a few drops could spill. The woman—Sister Coquina—looked at him with round eyes.
There was pain all up and down his back from the sudden movement, but it was nowhere near as sharp as it had been before, and there was no sensation of movement on his skin. Perhaps the “doctors” were only sleeping, but he had an idea they were gone.
He held out his hand for the spoon Coquina had been teasing him with (he found he wasn’t surprised a
t all that one of these would tease a sick and sleeping man in such a way; it would have surprised him only if it had been Jenna), and she handed it to him, her eyes still big.
“How speedy ye are!” she said. “‘Twas like a magic trick, and you still rising from sleep!”
“Remember it, sai,” he said, and tried the soup. There were tiny bits of chicken floating in it. He probably would have considered it bland under other circumstances, but under these, it seemed ambrosial. He began to eat greedily.
“What do’ee mean by that?” she asked. The light was very dim now, the wall panels across the way a pinkish orange that suggested sunset. In this light, Coquina looked quite young and pretty … but it was a glamour, Roland was sure; a sorcerous kind of makeup.
“I mean nothing in particular.” Roland dismissed the spoon as too slow, preferring to tilt the bowl itself to his lips. In this way he disposed of the soup in four large gulps. “You have been kind to me—”
“Aye, so we have!” she said, rather indignantly.
“—and I hope your kindness has no hidden motive. If it does, Sister, remember that I’m quick. And, as for myself, I have not always been kind.”
She made no reply, only took the bowl when Roland handed it back. She did this delicately, perhaps not wanting to touch his fingers. Her eyes dropped to where the medallion lay, once more hidden beneath the breast of his bed-dress. He said no more, not wanting to weaken the implied threat by reminding her that the man who made it was unarmed, next to naked, and hung in the air because his back couldn’t yet bear the weight of his body.
“Where’s Sister Jenna?” he asked.
“Oooo,” Sister Coquina said, raising her eyebrows. “We like her, do we? She makes our heart go …” She put her hand against the rose on her breast and fluttered it rapidly.
“Not at all, not at all,” Roland said, “but she was kind. I doubt she would have teased me with a spoon, as some would.”
Sister Coquina’s smile faded. She looked both angry and worried. “Say nothing of that to Mary, if she comes by later. Ye might get me in trouble.”
“Should I care?”
“I might get back at one who caused me trouble by causing little Jenna trouble,” Sister Coquina said. “She’s in Big Sister’s black books, just now, anyway. Sister Mary doesn’t care for the way Jenna spoke to her about ye … nor does she like it that Jenna came back to us wearing the Dark Bells.”