Wizard and glass - Stephen King [345]
Jake turns for him, and is not surprised to see a green-faced woman in a pointed black hat swimming inside the ball. It is the Wicked Witch of the East; it is also, he knows, Rhea of the Cöos. She stares at the boy with the guns in his hands and bares her teeth at him in the most terrible grin Jake has ever seen in his life.
“I’ve burned the stupid girl ye loved—aye, burned her alive, I did—and now I’ve made ye a matricide. Do ye repent of killing my snake yet, gunslinger? My poor, sweet Ermot? Do ye regret playing yer hard games with one more trig than ye’ll ever be in yer miserable life?”
He gives no sign that he hears, only stares at his lady mother. Soon he will go to her, kneel by her, but not yet; not yet.
The face in the ball now turns toward the three pilgrims, and as it does it changes, becomes old and bald and raddled—becomes, in fact, the face Roland saw in the lying mirror. The gunslinger has been unable to see his future friends, but Rhea sees them; aye, she sees them very well.
“Cry it off!” she croaks—it is the caw of a raven sitting on a leafless branch beneath a winter-dimmed sky. “Cry it off! Renounce the Tower!”
“Never, you bitch,” Eddie says.
“Ye see what he is! What a monster he is! And this is only the beginning of it, ye ken! Ask him what happened to Cuthbert! To Alain—Alain’s touch, clever as ’twas, saved him not in the end, so it didn’t! Ask him what happened to Jamie De Curry! He never had a friend he didn’t kill, never had a lover who’s not dust in the wind!”
“Go your way,” Susannah says, “and leave us to ours.”
Rhea’s green, cracked lips twist in a horrible sneer. “He’s killed his own mother! What will he do to you, ye stupid brown-skinned bitch?”
“He didn’t kill her,” Jake said. “You killed her. Now go!”
Jake takes a step toward the ball, meaning to pick it up and dash it to the floor . . . and he can do that, he realizes, for the ball is real. It’s the one thing in this vision that is. But before he can put his hands to it, it flashes a soundless explosion of pink light. Jake throws his hands up in front of his face to keep from being blinded, and then he is ( melting I’m melting what a world oh what a world )
falling, he is being whirled down through the pink storm,
out of Oz and back to Kansas, out of Oz and back to Kansas, out of Oz and back to—
CHAPTER V
THE PATH OF THE BEAM
1
“—home,” Eddie muttered. His voice sounded thick and punch-drunk to his own ears. “Back home, because there’s no place like home, no indeed.”
He tried to open his eyes and at first couldn’t. It was as if they were glued shut. He put the heel of his hand to his forehead and pushed up, tightening the skin on his face. It worked; his eyes popped open. He saw neither the throneroom of the Green Palace nor (and this was what he had really expected) the richly appointed but somehow claustrophobic bedroom in which he had just been.
He was outside, lying in a small clearing of winter-white grass. Nearby was a little grove of trees, some still with their last brown leaves clinging to the branches. And one branch with an odd white leaf, an albino leaf. There was a pretty trickle of running water farther into the grove. Standing abandoned in the high grass was Susannah’s new and improved wheelchair. There was mud on the tires, Eddie saw, and a few late leaves, crispy and brown, caught in the spokes. A few swatches of grass, too. Overhead was a skyful of still white clouds, every bit as interesting as a laundry-basket full of sheets.
The sky was clear when we went inside the Palace, he thought, and realized time had slipped again. How much or how little, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know—Roland’s world was like a transmission with its gear-teeth all but stripped away; you never knew when time was going to pop into neutral or race you away in overdrive.
Was this Roland’s world, though? And if it was, how had they gotten back to it?
“How should I know?” Eddie croaked, and got slowly to his feet, wincing as he did so. He didn’t think he was hungover, but his legs were