The gunslinger - Stephen King [85]
He tittered and turned the fifth card.
A grinning reaper clutched a scythe with bony fingers. “Death,” the man in black said simply. “Yet not for you.”
The sixth card.
The gunslinger looked at it and felt a strange, crawling anticipation in his guts. The feeling was mixed with horror and joy, and the whole of the emotion was unnameable. It made him feel like throwing up and dancing at the same time.
“The Tower,” the man in black said softly. “Here is the Tower.”
The gunslinger’s card occupied the center of the pattern; each of the following four stood at one corner, like satellites circling a star.
“Where does that one go?” the gunslinger asked.
The man in black placed the Tower over the Hanged Man, covering it completely.
“What does that mean?” the gunslinger asked.
The man in black did not answer.
“What does that mean?” he asked raggedly.
The man in black did not answer.
“Goddamn you!”
No answer.
“Then be damned to you. What’s the seventh card?”
The man in black turned the seventh. A sun rose in a luminously blue sky. Cupids and sprites sported around it. Below the sun was a great red field upon which it shone. Roses or blood? The gunslinger could not tell. Perhaps, he thought, it’s both.
“The seventh card is Life,” the man in black said softly. “But not for you.”
“Where does it fit the pattern?”
“That is not for you to know now,” the man in black said. “Or for me to know. I’m not the great one you seek, Roland. I am merely his emissary.” He flipped the card carelessly into the dying fire. It charred, curled, and flashed to flame. The gunslinger felt his heart quail and turn icy in his chest.
“Sleep now,” the man in black said carelessly. “Perchance to dream and that sort of thing.”
“What my bullets won’t do, mayhap my hands will,” the gunslinger said. His legs coiled with savage, splendid suddenness, and he flew across the fire at the other, arms outstretched. The man in black, smiling, swelled in his vision and then retreated down a long and echoing corridor. The world filled with the sound of sardonic laughter, he was falling, dying, sleeping.
He dreamed.
III
The universe was void. Nothing moved. Nothing was.
The gunslinger drifted, bemused.
“Let’s have a little light,” the voice of the man in black said nonchalantly, and there was light. The gunslinger thought in a detached way that light was pretty good.
“Now darkness overhead with stars in it. Water down below.”
It happened. He drifted over endless seas. Above, the stars twinkled endlessly, yet he saw none of the constellations which had guided him across his long life.
“Land,” the man in black invited, and there was; it heaved itself out of the water in endless, galvanic convulsions. It was red, arid, cracked and glazed with sterility. Volcanoes blurted endless magma like giant pimples on some ugly adolescent’s baseball head.
“Okay,” the man in black was saying. “That’s a start. Let’s have some plants. Trees. Grass and fields.”
There was. Dinosaurs rambled here and there, growling and whoofing and eating each other and getting stuck in bubbling, odiferous tarpits. Huge tropical rain-forests sprawled everywhere. Giant ferns waved at the sky with serrated leaves. Beetles with two heads crawled on some of them. All this the gunslinger saw. And yet he felt big.
“Now bring man,” the man in black said softly, but the gunslinger was falling . . . falling up. The horizon of this vast and fecund earth began to curve. Yes, they had all said it curved, his teacher Vannay had claimed it had been proved long before the world had moved on. But this—
Further and further, higher and higher. Continents took shape before his amazed eyes, and were obscured with clocksprings of clouds. The world’s atmosphere held it in a placental sac. And the sun, rising beyond the earth’s shoulder—
He cried out and threw an arm before his eyes.
“Let there be light!”
The voice no longer belonged to the man in black. It was gigantic, echoing. It filled space, and the spaces between space.
“Light!”
Falling, falling.
The sun