The gunslinger - Stephen King [62]
“Please, please!” The boy raised a fist, as if to strike the gunslinger’s chest.
“No.”
The boy’s face took on wonder. “You’re going to kill me. He killed me the first time and you’re going to kill me this time. And I think you know it.”
The gunslinger felt the lie on his lips, then spoke it: “You’ll be all right.” And a greater lie yet. “I’ll take care.”
Jake’s face went gray, and he said no more. He put an unwilling hand out, and he and the gunslinger went around the elbow-bend that way, hand in hand. On the other side they came face-to-face with that final rising wall and the man in black.
He stood no more than twenty feet above them, just to the right of the waterfall that crashed and spilled from a huge ragged hole in the rock. Unseen wind rippled and tugged at his hooded robe. He held a staff in one hand. The other hand he held out to them in a mocking gesture of welcome. He seemed a prophet, and below that rushing sky, mounted on a ledge of rock, a prophet of doom, his voice the voice of Jeremiah.
“Gunslinger! How well you fulfill the prophecies of old! Good day and good day and good day!” He laughed and bowed, the sound echoing over the bellow of the falling water.
Without a thought the gunslinger had drawn his pistols. The boy cowered to his right and behind, a small shadow.
Roland fired three times before he could gain control of his traitor hands—the echoes bounced their bronze tones against the rock valley that rose around them, over the sound of the wind and water.
A spray of granite puffed over the head of the man in black; a second to the left of his hood; a third to the right. He had missed cleanly all three times.
The man in black laughed—a full, hearty laugh that seemed to challenge the receding echo of gunshots. “Would you kill all your answers so easily, gunslinger?”
“Come down,” the gunslinger said. “Do that I beg ya, and we’ll have answers all around.”
Again that huge, derisive laugh. “It’s not your bullets I fear, Roland. It’s your idea of answers that scares me.”
“Come down.”
“We’ll speak on the other side, I think,” the man in black said. “On the other side we will hold much council and long palaver.”
His eyes flicked to Jake and he added:
“Just the two of us.”
Jake flinched away from him with a small, whining cry, and the man in black turned, his robe swirling in the gray air like a batwing. He disappeared into the cleft in the rock from which the water spewed at full force. The gunslinger exercised grim will and did not send a bullet after him—would you kill all your answers so easily, gunslinger?
There was only the sound of wind and water, a sound that had been in this place of desolation for a thousand years. Yet the man in black had stood there. Twelve years after his last glimpse, Roland had seen him close-up again, had spoken to him. And the man in black had laughed.
On the other side we will hold much council and long palaver.
The boy looked up at him, his body trembling. For a moment the gunslinger saw the face of Allie, the girl from Tull, superimposed over Jake’s, the scar standing out on her forehead like a mute accusation, and felt brute loathing for them both (it wouldn’t occur to him until much later that both the scar on Alice’s forehead and the nail he saw spiked through Jake’s forehead in his dreams were in the same place). Jake perhaps caught a whiff of his thought; a moan slipped from his throat. Then he twisted his lips and cut the sound off. He held the makings of a fine man, perhaps a gunslinger in his own right if given time.
Just the two of us.
The gunslinger felt a great and unholy thirst in some deep unknown pit of his body, one no draft of water or wine could touch. Worlds trembled, almost within reach of his fingers, and in some instinctual way he strove not to be corrupted, knowing in his colder mind that such strife