The waste lands - Stephen King [18]
The bear uttered a long, purring growl. Yellowish foam, thick with worms, squeezed between its paws in curdled gobbets. If he had never looked into the face of utter lunacy (and he supposed he had, having been eyeball to eyeball with that world-class bitch Detta Walker on more than one occasion), Eddie was looking into it now . . . but that face was, thankfully, a good thirty feet below him, and at their highest reach those killing talons were fifteen feet under the soles of his feet. And, unlike the trees upon which the bear had vented its spleen as it approached the clearing, this one was not dead.
“Mexican standoff, honey,” Eddie panted. He wiped sweat from his forehead with one sap-sticky hand and flicked the mess down into the bugbear’s face.
Then the creature the Old People had called Mir embraced the tree with its great forepaws and began to shake it. Eddie grabbed the trunk and held on for dear life, eyes squeezed into grim slits, as the pine began to sway back and forth like a pendulum.
6
ROLAND HALTED AT THE EDGE of the clearing. Susannah, perched on his shoulders, stared unbelievingly across the open space. The creature stood at the base of the tree where Eddie had been when the two of them left the clearing forty-five minutes ago. She could see only chunks and sections of its body through the screen of branches and dark green needles. Roland’s other gunbelt lay beside one of the monster’s feet. The holster, she saw, was empty.
“My God,” she murmured.
The bear screamed like a distraught woman and began shaking the tree. The branches lashed as if in a high wind. Her eyes skated upward and she saw a dark form near the top. Eddie was hugging the trunk as the tree rocked and rolled. As she watched, one of his hands slipped and flailed wildly for purchase.
“What do we do?” she screamed down at Roland. “It’s goan shake him loose! What do we do?”
Roland tried to think about it, but that queer sensation had returned again—it was always with him now, but stress seemed to make it worse. He felt like two men existing inside one skull. Each man had his own set of memories, and when they began to argue, each insisting that his memories were the true ones, the gunslinger felt as if he were being ripped in two. He made a desperate effort to reconcile these two halves and succeeded . . . at least for the moment.
“It’s one of the Twelve!” he shouted. “One of the Guardians! Must be! But I thought they were—”
The bear bellowed up at Eddie again. Now it began to slap at the tree like a punchy fighter. Branches snapped and fell around its feet in a tangle.
“What?” Susannah screamed. “What’s the rest?”
Roland closed his eyes. Inside his head, a voice shouted, The boy’s name was Jake! Another voice shouted back, There WAS no boy! There WAS no boy, and you know it!
Get away, both of you! he snarled, and then called out aloud: “Shoot it! Shoot it in the ass, Susannah! It’ll turn and charge! When it does, look for something on its head! It—”
The bear squalled again. It gave up slapping the tree and went back to shaking it. Ominous popping, grinding sounds were now coming from the upper part of the trunk.
When he could be heard again, Roland shouted: “I think it looks like a hat! A little steel hat! Shoot it, Susannah! And don’t miss!”
Terror suddenly filled her—terror and another emotion, one she would never have expected: crushing loneliness.
“No! I’ll miss! You do it, Roland!” She began to fumble his revolver out of the belt she wore, meaning to give it to him.
“Can’t!” Roland shouted. “The angle’s bad! You have to do it, Susannah! This is the real test, and you’d better pass it!”
“Roland—”
“It means to snap the top of the tree off!” he roared at her. “Can’t you see that?”
She looked at the revolver in her hand. Looked across the clearing, at the