The gunslinger - Stephen King [86]
“Light! Let there be—”
Other worlds, one, two, three. Far beyond the last, one lonely ball of ice and rock twirled in dead darkness about a sun that glittered no brighter than a tarnished penny.
Beyond this, darkness.
“No,” the gunslinger said, and his word on it was flat and echoless in the black. It was darker than dark, blacker than black. Beside this, the darkest night of a man’s soul was as noonday, the darkness under the mountains a mere smudge on the face of Light. “No more. Please, no more now. No more—”
“LIGHT!”
“No more. No more, please—”
The stars themselves began to shrink. Whole nebulae drew together and became glowing smudges. The whole universe seemed to be drawing around him.
“Please no more no more no more—”
The voice of the man in black whispered silkily in his ear: “Then renege. Cast away all thoughts of the Tower. Go your way, gunslinger, and begin the long job of saving your soul.”
He gathered himself. Shaken and alone, enwrapt in the darkness, terrified of an ultimate meaning rushing at him, he gathered himself and uttered the final answer on that subject:
“NEVER!”
“THEN LET THERE BE LIGHT!”
And there was light, crashing in on him like a hammer, a great and primordial light. Consciousness had no chance of survival in that great glare, but before it perished, the gunslinger saw something clearly, something he believed to be of cosmic importance. He clutched it with agonized effort and then went deep, seeking refuge in himself before that light should blind his eyes and blast his sanity.
He fled the light and the knowledge the light implied, and so came back to himself. Even so do the rest of us; even so the best of us.
IV
It was still night—whether the same or another, he had no immediate way of knowing. He pushed himself up from where his demon spring at the man in black had carried him and looked at the ironwood where Walter o’ Dim (as some along Roland’s way had named him) had been sitting. He was gone.
A great sense of despair flooded him—God, all that to do over again—and then the man in black said from behind him: “Over here, gunslinger. I don’t like you so close. You talk in your sleep.” He tittered.
The gunslinger got groggily to his knees and turned around. The fire had burned down to red embers and gray ashes, leaving the familiar decayed pattern of exhausted fuel. The man in black was seated next to it, smacking his lips with unlovely enthusiasm over the greasy remains of the rabbit.
“You did fairly well,” the man in black said. “I never could have sent that vision to your father. He would have come back drooling.”
“What was it?” the gunslinger asked. His words were blurred and shaky. He felt that if he tried to rise, his legs would buckle.
“The universe,” the man in black said carelessly. He burped and threw the bones into the fire where they first glistened and then blackened. The wind above the cup of the golgotha keened and moaned.
“Universe?” the gunslinger said blankly. It was a word with which he was unfamiliar. His first thought was that the other was speaking poetry.
“You want the Tower,” the man in black said. It seemed to be a question.
“Yes.”
“Well, you shan’t have it,” the man in black said, and smiled with bright cruelty. “No one cares in the counsels of the great if you pawn your soul or sell it outright, Roland. I have an idea of how close to the edge that last pushed you. The Tower will kill you half a world away.”
“You know nothing of me,” the gunslinger said quietly, and the smile faded from the other’s lips.
“I made your father and I broke him,” the man in black said grimly. “I came to your mother as Marten—there’s a truth you always suspected, is it not?—and took her. She bent beneath me like a willow . . . although