Wizard and glass - Stephen King [55]
When the bird cried in the distance again, he roused himself and looked at Roland. “You had something you were going to tell us,” he said. “A thrilling tale of your youth, I believe. Susan—that was her name, wasn’t it?”
For a moment longer the gunslinger continued to look up at the sky—now it was Roland who must find himself adrift in the constellations, Eddie realized—and then he shifted his gaze to his friends. He looked strangely apologetic, strangely uneasy. “Would you think I was cozening,” he said, “if I asked for one more day to think of these things? Or perhaps it’s a night to dream of them that I really want. They are old things, dead things, perhaps, but I . . .” He raised his hands in a kind of distracted gesture. “Some things don’t rest easy even when they’re dead. Their bones cry out from the ground.”
“There are ghosts,” Jake said, and in his eyes Eddie saw a shadow of the horror he must have felt inside the house in Dutch Hill. The horror he must have felt when the Doorkeeper came out of the wall and reached for him. “Sometimes there are ghosts, and sometimes they come back.”
“Yes,” Roland said. “Sometimes there are, and sometimes they do.”
“Maybe it’s better not to brood,” Susannah said. “Sometimes—especially when you know a thing’s going to be hard—it’s better just to get on your horse and ride.”
Roland thought this over carefully, then raised his eyes to look at her. “At tomorrow night’s fire I will tell you of Susan,” he said. “This I promise on my father’s name.”
“Do we need to hear?” Eddie asked abruptly. He was almost astounded to hear this question coming out of his mouth; no one had been more curious about the gunslinger’s past than Eddie himself. “I mean, if it really hurts, Roland . . . hurts big-time . . . maybe . . .”
“I’m not sure you need to hear, but I think I need to tell. Our future is the Tower, and to go toward it with a whole heart, I must put my past to rest as best I may. There’s no way I could tell you all of it—in my world even the past is in motion, rearranging itself in many vital ways—but this one story may stand for all the rest.”
“Is it a Western?” Jake asked suddenly.
Roland looked at him, puzzled. “I don’t take your meaning, Jake. Gilead is a Barony of the Western World, yes, and Mejis as well, but—”
“It’ll be a Western,” Eddie said. “All Roland’s stories are Westerns, when you get right down to it.” He lay back and pulled his blanket over him. Faintly, from both east and west, he could hear the warble of the thinny. He checked in his pocket for the bullets Roland had given him, and nodded with satisfaction when he felt them. He reckoned he could sleep without them tonight, but he would want them again tomorrow. They weren’t done turnpikin’ just yet.
Susannah leaned over him, kissed the tip of his nose. “Done for the day, sugar?”
“Yep,” Eddie said, and laced his hands together behind his head. “It’s not every day that I hook a ride on the world’s fastest train, destroy the world’s smartest computer, and then discover that everyone’s been scragged by the flu. All before dinner, too. Shit like that makes a man tired.” Eddie smiled and closed his eyes. He was still smiling when sleep took him.
9
In his dream, they were all standing on the corner of Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, looking over the short board fence and into the weedy vacant lot behind it. They were wearing their Mid-World clothes—a motley combination of deerskin and old shirts, mostly held together with spit and shoelaces—but none of the pedestrians