The waste lands - Stephen King [25]
Eddie thought it over carefully. Roland had spoken of a thousand things as the two of them made their tortuous way up the beach from the door marked THE PRISONER to the one marked THE LADY OF THE SHADOWS, and he had mentioned what seemed like a thousand names in his fever-heated monologues—Alain, Cort, Jamie de Curry, Cuthbert (this one more often than all the others), Hax, Martin (or perhaps it was Marten, like the animal), Walter, Susan, even a guy with the unlikely name of Zoltan. Eddie had gotten very tired of hearing about these people he had never met (and didn’t care to meet), but of course Eddie had had a few problems of his own at that time, heroin withdrawal and cosmic jet-lag being only two of them. And, if he was to be fair, he guessed Roland had gotten as tired of Eddie’s own Fractured Fairy Tales—the ones about how he and Henry had grown up together and turned into junkies together—as Eddie had of Roland’s.
But he couldn’t remember ever telling Roland he would gag him with his own shirt if he didn’t stop talking about some kid.
“Nothing comes to you?” Roland asked. “Nothing at all?”
Was there something? Some far-off tickle, like the feeling of déjà vu he’d gotten when he saw the slingshot hiding inside the chunk of wood jutting out of the stump? Eddie tried to find that tickle, but it was gone. He decided it had never been there in the first place; he only wanted it to be there, because Roland was hurting so badly.
“No,” he said. “Sorry, man.”
“But I did tell you.” Roland’s tone was calm, but urgency ran and pulsed beneath it like a scarlet thread. “The boy’s name was Jake. I sacrificed him—killed him—in order that I might finally catch up with Walter and make him talk. I killed him under the mountains.”
On this point Eddie could be more positive. “Well, maybe that’s what happened, but it’s not what you said happened. You said you went under the mountains alone, on some kind of crazy handcar. You talked about that a lot while we were coming up the beach, Roland. About how scary it was to be alone.”
“I remember. But I also remember telling you about the boy, and how he fell from the trestle into the chasm. And it’s the distance between those two memories that is pulling my mind apart.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” Susannah said worriedly.
“I think,” Roland said, “that I’m just beginning to.”
He threw more wood on the fire, sending thick sheaves of red sparks spiralling up into the dark sky, and then settled back between them. “I’ll tell you a story that’s true,” he said, “and then I’ll tell you a story that isn’t true . . . but should be.
“I bought a mule in Pricetown, and when I finally got to Tull, the last town before the desert, it was still fresh . . .”
14
SO THE GUNSLINGER EMBARKED on the most recent part of his long tale. Eddie had heard isolated fragments of the story, but he listened in utter fascination, as did Susannah, for whom it was completely new. He told them about the bar with the endless game of Watch Me going on in the corner, the piano player named Sheb, the woman named Allie with the scar on her forehead . . . and about Nort, the weed-eater who had died and then been brought back to some sort of tenebrous life by the man in black. He told them about Sylvia Pittston, that avatar of religious insanity, and about the final apocalyptic slaughter, in which he, Roland the Gunslinger, had killed every man, woman, and child in town.
“Holy crispy crap!” Eddie said in a low, shaky voice. “Now I know why you were so low on shells, Roland.”
“Be quiet!” Susannah snapped. “Let him finish!”
Roland went on, telling his story as stolidly as he had crossed the desert after passing the hut of the last Dweller, a young man whose wild, strawberry-colored hair had reached almost to his waist. He told them about how his mule had finally died. He even told them about how the Dweller’s pet bird, Zoltan, had eaten the mule’s eyes.
He told them about the long desert