The gunslinger - Stephen King [33]
He watched his feet move up and down like the heddles of a loom, listened to the nonsense rhyme sing itself into a pitiful garble in his mind, and wondered when he would fall down for the first time. He didn’t want to fall, even though there was no one to see him. It was a matter of pride. A gunslinger knows pride, that invisible bone that keeps the neck stiff. What hadn’t come to him from his father had been kicked into him by Cort, a boy’s gentleman if there ever was one. Cort, yar, with his red bulb of a nose and his scarred face.
He stopped and looked up suddenly. It made his head buzz and for a moment his whole body seemed to float. The mountains dreamed against the far horizon. But there was something else up ahead, something much closer. Perhaps only five miles away. He squinted at it, but his eyes were sandblasted and going glareblind. He shook his head and began to walk again. The rhyme circled and buzzed. About an hour later he fell down and skinned his hands. He looked at the tiny beads of blood on his flaked skin with disbelief. The blood looked no thinner; it looked like any blood, now dying in the air. It seemed almost as smug as the desert. He dashed the drops away, hating them blindly. Smug? Why not? The blood was not thirsty. The blood was being served. The blood was being made sacrifice unto. Blood sacrifice. All the blood needed to do was run . . . and run . . . and run.
He looked at the splotches that had landed on the hardpan and watched as they were sucked up with uncanny suddenness. How do you like that, blood? How does that suit you?
O Jesus, I’m far gone.
He got up, holding his hands to his chest, and the thing he’d seen earlier was almost in front of him, so close it made him cry out—a dust-choked crow-croak. It was a building. No, two buildings, surrounded by a fallen rail fence. The wood seemed old, fragile to the point of elvishness; it was wood being transmogrified into sand. One of the buildings had been a stable—the shape was clear and unmistakable. The other was a house, or an inn. A way station for the coach line. The tottering sand-house (the wind had crusted the wood with grit until it looked like a sand castle that the sun had beat upon at low tide and hardened to a temporary abode) cast a thin line of shadow, and someone sat in the shadow, leaning against the building. And the building seemed to lean with the burden of his weight.
Him, then. At last. The man in black.
The gunslinger stood with his hands to his chest, unaware of his declamatory posture, and gawped. But instead of the tremendous winging excitement he had expected (or perhaps fear, or awe), there was nothing but the dim, atavistic guilt for the sudden, raging hate of his own blood moments earlier and the endless ring-a-rosy of the childhood song:
. . . the rain in Spain . . .
He moved forward, drawing one gun.
. . . falls on the plain.
He came the last quarter mile at a jolting, flat-footed run, not trying to hide himself; there was nothing to hide behind. His short shadow raced him. He was not aware that his face had become a gray and dusty deathmask of exhaustion; he was aware of nothing but the figure in the shadow. It did not occur to him until later that the figure might even have been dead.
He kicked through one of the leaning fence rails (it broke in two without a sound, almost apologetically) and lunged across the dazzled and silent stable yard, bringing the gun up.
“You’re covered! You’re covered! Hands up, you whoreson, you’re—”
The figure moved restlessly and stood up. The gunslinger thought: My God, he is worn away to nothing, what’s happened to him? Because the man in black had shrunk two full feet and his hair had gone white.
He paused, struck dumb, his head buzzing tunelessly. His heart was racing at a lunatic rate and he thought, I’m dying right here—
He sucked the white-hot air into his lungs and hung his head for a moment. When he raised it again, he saw it wasn’t the man in black but a boy with sun-bleached