If you turn back now, the dead King will be trapped forever where he is.”
“Sez you,” Susannah put in, and with a rudeness worthy of sai Fumalo.
“Whether you speak true or speak false,” Roland said, “I will push on. For I have promised.”
“To whom have you given your promise?” Fimalo burst out.
For the first time since stopping on the castle side of the bridge, he unclasped his hands and used them to push his hair back from his brow. The gesture was small but expressed his frustration with perfect eloquence. “For there’s no prophecy of such a promise; I tell you so!”
“There wouldn’t be. For it’s one I made myself, and one I mean to keep.”
“This man is as crazy as Los’ the Red,” Fumalo said, not without respect.
“All right,” Fimalo said. He sighed and once more clasped his hands before him. “I have done what I can do.” He nodded to his other two thirds, who were looking attentively back at him.
Feemalo and Fumalo each dropped to one knee: Feemalo his right, Fumalo his left. They lifted away the lids of the wicker boxes they had carried and tilted them forward. (Susannah was fleetingly reminded of how the models on The Price Is Right and Concentration showed off the prizes.)
Inside one was food: roasts of chicken and pork, joints of beef, great pink rounds of ham. Susannah felt her stomach expand at the sight, as if making ready to swallow all of it, and it was only with a great effort that she stopped the sensual
“moan rising in her throat. Her mouth flooded with saliva and she raised a hand to wipe it away. They would know what she was doing, she supposed there was no help for that, but she could at least keep them from the satisfaction of seeing the physical evidence of her hunger gleaming on her lips and chin. Oy barked, but kept his seat by the gunslinger’s left heel.
Inside the other basket were big cable-knit sweaters, one green and one red: Christmas colors.
“There’s also long underwear, coats, fleece-lined shor’-boots, and gloves,” said Feemalo. “For Empathica’s deadly cold at this time of year, and you’ll have months of walking ahead.”
“On the outskirts of town we’ve left you a light aluminum sledge,” Fimalo said. ’You can throw it in the back of your little cart and then use it to carry the lady and your gunna, once you reach the snowlands.”
“You no doubt wonder why we do all this, since we disapprove of your journey,” said Feemalo. “The fact is, we’re grateful for our survival-”
“We really did think we were done for,” Fumalo broke in.
“’The quarterback is toast,’ Eddie might have said.”
And this, too, hurt her… but not as much as looking at all that food. Not as much as imagining how it would feel to slip one of those bulky sweaters over her head and let the hem fall all the way to the middle of her thighs.
“My decision was to try and talk you out of going if I could,”
said Fimalo-the only one who spoke of himself in the firstperson singular, Susannah had noticed. “And if I couldn’t, I’d give you the supplies you’d need to go on with.”
“You can’t kill him!” Fumalo burst out. “Don’t you see that, you wooden-headed killing machine, don’t you see? All you can do is get overeager and play into his dead hands! How can you be so stu-”
“Hush,” Fimalo said mildly, and Fumalo hushed at once.
“He’s taken his decision.”
“What will you do?” Roland asked. “Once we’ve pushed on, that is?”
The three of them shrugged in perfect mirror unison, but it was Fimalo-the so-called uffi’s superego-who answered.
“Wait here,” he said. “See if the matrix of creation lives or dies.
In the meanwhile, try to refurbish Le Casse and bring it to some of its previous glory. It was a beautiful place once. It can be beautiful again. And now I think our palaver’s done. Take your gifts with our thanks and good wishes.”
“Grudging good wishes,” said Fumalo, and actually smiled.
Coming from him, that smile was both dazzling and unexpected.
Susannah almost started forward. Hungry as she was for fresh food (for fresh meat), it was the sweaters and the thermal underwear that she really craved. Although supplies were getting thin (and would surely run out before they were past the place die uffi called Empathica), there were still cans of beans and tuna and corned beef hash rolling around in the back of Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi, and their bellies were currendy full. It was the cold that was killing her. That was what it felt like, at least; cold working its way inward toward her heart, one painful inch at a time.
Two dungs stopped her. One was the realization that a single step forward was all it would take to destroy what little remained of her will; she’d run to the center of the bridge and fall on her knees before that deep basket of clothes and go grubbing through it like a predatory housewife at the annual Filene’s white-sale. Once she took diat first step, nothing would stop her.
And losing her will wouldn’t be the worst of it; she would also lose the self-respect Odetta Holmes had labored all her life to win, despite die barely suspected saboteur lurking in her mind.
Yet even that wouldn’t have been enough to hold her back.
What did was a memory of die day they’d seen die crow with die green stuff in its beak, the crow that had been going Croo, crool instead of Caw, caw!Only devilgrass, true, but green stuff, all the same. Living stuff. That was die day Roland had told her to hold her tongue, had told her-what was it? Before victory comes temptation.
She never would have suspected that her life’s greatest temptation would be a cable-knit fisherman’s sweater, but-
She suddenly understood what the gunslinger must have known, if not from the first then from soon after the three Stephen Kings appeared: this whole thing was a shuck. She didn’t know what, exacdy, was in those wicker baskets, but she doubted like hell that it was food and clothes.
She setded within herself.
“Well?” Fimalo asked patiendy. “Will you come and take the presents I’d give you? You must come, if you’d have them, for halfway across the bridge is as far as I can go myself. Just beyond Feemalo and Fumalo is the King’s dead-line. You and she may pass both ways. We may not.”
Roland said, “We thank you for your kindness, sai, but we’re going to refuse. We have food, and clothing is waiting for us up ahead, still on the hoof. Besides, it’s really not that cold.”
“No,” Susannah agreed, smiling into the three identical-and identically dumbfounded-faces. “It’s really not.”
“We’ll be pushing on,” Roland said, and made another bow over his cocked leg.
“Say thankya, say may ya do well,” Susannah put in, and once more spread her invisible skirts.
She and Roland began to turn away. And that was when Feemalo and Fumalo, still down on their knees, reached inside the open baskets before them.
Susannah needed no instruction from Roland, not so much as a shouted word. She drew the revolver from her belt and shot down the one on her left-Fumalo-just as he swung a longbarreled silver gun out of the basket. What looked like a scarf was hanging from it. Roland drew from his holster, as blindingly fast as ever, and fired a single shot. Above them the rooks took wing, cawing affrightedly, turning the blue sky momentarily black.
Feemalo, also holding one of the silver guns, collapsed slowly forward across his basket of food with a dying expression of surprise on his face and a bullet-hole dead center in his forehead.
FIVE
Fimalo stood where he was, on the far side of the bridge. His hands were still clasped in front of him, but he no longer looked like Stephen King. He now wore the long, yellowcomplexioned face of an old man who is dying slowly and not well. What hair he had was a dirty gray rather than luxuriant black. His skull was a peeling garden of eczema. His cheeks, chin, and forehead were lumped with pimples and open sores, some pustulating and some bleeding.
“What are you, really?” Roland asked him.
“A hume, just as you are,” said Fimalo, resignedly. “Rando Thoughtful was my name during my years as the Crimson King’s Minister of State. Once upon a time, however, I was plain old Austin Cornwell, from upstate New York. Not the Keystone World, I regret to say, but another. I ran the Niagara Mall at one time, and before that I had a successful career in advertising. You might be interested to know I worked on accounts for both Nozz-A-La and the Takuro Spirit.”
Susannah ignored this bizarre and unexpected resume.
“So he didn’t have his top boy beheaded, after all,” she said.
“What about the three Stephen Kings?”
“Just a glammer,” said the old man. “Are you going to kill me? Go ahead. All I ask is that you make quick work of it. I’m not well, as you must see.”
“Was any of what you told us true?” Susannah asked.
His old eyes looked at her with watery amazement. “All of it was,” he said, and advanced onto the bridge, where two other old men-his assistants, once upon a time, she had no doubt-lay sprawled. “All of it, anyway, save for one lie… and this.” He kicked the baskets over so that the contents spilled out.
Susannah gave an involuntary shout of horror. Oy was up in a flash, standing protectively in front of her with his short legs spread and his head lowered.
“It’s all right,” she said, but her voice was still trembling. “I was just… startled.”
The wicker basket which had seemed to contain all sorts of freshly cooked roasts was actually filled with decaying human limbs-long pork, after all, and in bad shape even considering what it was. The flesh was mostly blue-black and a-teem with maggots.
And there were no clothes in the other basket. What Fimalo had spilled out of it was actually a shiny knot of dying snakes.
Their beady eyes were dull; their forked tongues flickered listlessly in and out; several had already ceased to move.
