Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [192]
Yet it would turn on those hinges easily, he thought. Will turn. When the time comes.
There was no keyhole. The knob appeared to be crystal. Etched upon it was a rose. On the beach of the Western Sea, the three doors had been marked with the High Speech: THE PRISONER on one, THE LADY OF THE SHADOWS on another, THE PUSHER on the third. Here were the hieroglyphs he had seen on the box hidden in Callahan’s church:
“It means ‘unfound,’ ” Roland said.
Henchick nodded, but when Roland moved to walk around the door, the old man took a step forward and held out a hand. “Be careful, or’ee may be able to discover who those voices belong to for yourself.”
Roland saw what he meant. Eight or nine feet beyond the door, the floor of the cave sloped down at an angle of fifty or even sixty degrees. There was nothing to hold onto, and the rock looked smooth as glass. Thirty feet down, this slippery-slide disappeared into a chasm. Moaning, intertwined voices rose from it. And then one came clear. It was that of Gabrielle Deschain.
“Roland, don’t!” his dead mother shrieked up from the darkness. “Don’t shoot, it’s me! It’s your m—” But before she could finish, the overlapping crash of pistol shots silenced her. Pain shot up into Roland’s head. He was pressing the bandanna against his face almost hard enough to break his own nose. He tried to ease the muscles in his arm and at first was unable to do so.
Next from that reeking darkness came the voice of his father.
“I’ve known since you toddled that you were no genius,” Steven Deschain said in a tired voice, “but I never believed until yestereve that you were an idiot. To let him drive you like a cow in a chute! Gods!”
Never mind. These are not even ghosts. I think they’re only echoes, somehow taken from deep inside my own head and projected.
When he stepped around the door (minding the drop now to his right), the door was gone. There was only the silhouette of Henchick, a severe man-shape cut from black paper standing in the cave’s mouth.
The door’s still there, but you can only see it from one side. And in that way it’s like the other doors, too.
“A trifle upsetting, isn’t it?” tittered the voice of Walter from deep in the Doorway Cave’s gullet. “Give it over, Roland! Better to give it over and die than to discover the room at the top of the Dark Tower is empty.”
Then came the urgent blare of Eld’s Horn, raising gooseflesh on Roland’s arms and hackles on the back of his neck: Cuthbert Allgood’s final battle-cry as he ran down Jericho Hill toward his death at the hands of the barbarians with the blue faces.
Roland lowered the bandanna from his own face and began walking again. One pace; two; three. Bones crunched beneath his bootheels. At the third pace the door reappeared, at first side-to, with its latch seeming to bite into thin air, like the hinges on its other side. He stopped for a moment, gazing at this thickness, relishing the strangeness of the door just as he had relished the strangeness of the ones he’d encountered on the beach. And on the beach he had been sick almost to the point of death. If he moved his head forward slightly, the door disappeared. If he pulled it back again, it was there. The door never wavered, never shimmered. It was always a case of either/or, there/not there.
He stepped all the way back, put his splayed palms on the ironwood, leaned on them. He could feel a faint but perceptible vibration, like the feel of powerful machinery. From the dark gullet of the cave, Rhea of the Cöos screamed up at him, calling him a brat who’d never seen his true father’s face, telling him his bit o’ tail burst her throat with her screams as she burned. Roland ignored