Everything's Eventual

aside.'

   They gaped at her, counterfeit laughter disappearing in shock.

   'No!' Louise whispered. 'Are ye mad? Ye know what'll happen!'

   'No, and neither do you,' Jenna said. 'Besides, I care not.' She half-turned and held her hand out to the mouth of the ancient hospital tent. It was a faded olive-drab in the moonlight, with an old red cross drawn on its roof. Roland wondered how many towns the Sisters had been to with this tent, which was so small and plain on the outside, so huge and gloriously dim on the inside. How many towns and over how many years.

   Now, cramming the mouth of it in a black, shiny tongue, were the doctor-bugs. They had stopped their singing. Their silence was terrible.

   'Stand aside or I'll have them on ye,' Jenna said.

   'Ye never would!' Sister Michela cried in a low, horrified voice.

   'Aye. I've already set them on Sister Coquina. She's a part of their medicine, now.'

   Their gasp was like cold wind passing through dead trees. Nor was all of that dismay directed toward their own precious hides. What Jenna had done was clearly far outside their reckoning.

   'Then you're damned,' Sister Tamra said.

   'Such ones to speak of damnation! Stand aside.'

   They did. Roland walked past them and they shrank away from him . . . but they shrank from her more.

   'Damned?' he asked after they had skirted the hacienda and reached the path beyond it. The Kissing Moon glimmered above a tumbled scree of rocks. In its light Roland could see a small black opening low on the scarp. He guessed it was the cave the Sisters called Thoughtful House. 'What did they mean, damned?'

   'Never mind. All we have to worry about now is Sister Mary. I like it not that we haven't seen her.'

   She tried to walk faster, but he grasped her arm and turned her about. He could still hear the singing of the bugs, but faintly; they were leaving the place of the Sisters behind. Eluria, too, if the compass in his head was still working; he thought the town was in the other direction. The husk of the town, he amended.

   'Tell me what they meant.'

   'Perhaps nothing. Ask me not, Roland—what good is it? 'Tis done, the bridge burned. I can't go back. Nor would if I could.' She looked down, biting her lip, and when she looked up again, Roland saw fresh tears falling on her cheeks. 'I have supped with them. There were times when I couldn't help it, no more than you could help drinking their wretched soup, no matter if you knew what was in it.'

   Roland remembered John Norman saying A man has to eat . . . a woman, too. He nodded.

   'I'd go no farther down that road. If there's to be damnation, let it be of my choosing, not theirs. My mother meant well by bringing me back to them, but she was wrong.' She looked at him shyly and fearfully . . . but met his eyes. 'I'd go beside ye on yer road, Roland of Gilead. For as long as I may, or as long as ye'd have me.'

   'You're welcome to your share of my way,' he said. 'And I am—'

   Blessed by your company, he would have finished, but before he could, a voice spoke from the tangle of moonshadow ahead of them, where the path at last climbed out of the rocky, sterile valley in which the Little Sisters had practiced their glamours.

   'It's a sad duty to stop such a pretty elopement, but stop it I must.'

   Sister Mary came from the shadows. Her fine white habit with its bright red rose had reverted to what it really was: the shroud of a corpse. Caught, hooded in its grimy folds, was a wrinkled, sagging face from which two black eyes stared. They looked like rotted dates. Below them, exposed by the thing's smile, four great incisors gleamed.

   Upon the stretched skin of Sister Mary's forehead, bells tinkled . . . but not the Dark Bells, Roland thought. There was that.

   'Stand clear,' Jenna said. 'Or I'll bring the can tam on ye.'

   'No,' Sister Mary said, stepping closer, 'ye won't. They'll not stray so far from the others. Shake your head and ring those damned bells until the clappers fall out, and still they'll never come.'

   Jenna did as bid, shaking her head furiously from side to side. The Dark Bells rang piercingly, but without that extra, almost psychic tone-quality that had gone through Roland's head like a spike. And the doctor-bugs—what Jenna had called the can tam—did not come.

   Smiling ever more broadly (Roland had an idea Mary herself hadn't been completely sure they wouldn't come until the experiment was made), the corpse-woman closed in on them, seeming to float above the ground. Her eyes flicked toward him. 'And put that away,' she said.

   Roland looked down and saw that one of his guns was in his hand. He had no memory of drawing it.

   'Unless 'tis been blessed or dipped in some sect's holy wet— blood, water, semen—it can't harm such as me, gunslinger. For I am more shade than substance . . . yet still the equal to such as yerself, for all that.'

   She thought he would try shooting her, anyway; he saw it in her eyes. Those shooters are all ye have, her eyes said. Without em, you might as well be back in the tent we dreamed around ye, caught up in our slings and awaiting our pleasure.

   Instead of shooting, he dropped the revolver back into its holster and launched himself at her with his hands out. Sister Mary uttered a scream that was mostly surprise, but it was not a long one; Roland's fingers clamped down on her throat and choked the sound off before it was fairly started.

   The touch of her flesh was obscene—it seemed not just alive but various beneath his hands, as if it was trying to crawl away from him. He could feel it running like liquid, flowing, and the sensation was horrible beyond description. Yet he clamped down harder, determined to choke the life out of her.

   Then there came a blue flash (not in the air, he would think later; that flash happened inside his head, a single stroke of lightning as she touched off some brief but powerful brainstorm), and his hands flew away from her neck. For one moment his dazzled eyes saw great wet gouges in her gray flesh—gouges in the shapes of his hands. Then he was flung backward, hitting the scree on his back and sliding, hitting his head on a jutting rock hard enough to provoke a second, lesser, flash of light.

   'Nay, my pretty man,' she said, grimacing at him, laughing with those terrible dull eyes of hers. 'Ye don't choke such as me, and I'll take ye slow for'ee impertinence—cut ye shallow in a hundred places to refresh my thirst! First, though, I'll have this vowless girl . . . and I'll have those damned bells off her, in the bargain.'

   'Come and see if you can!' Jenna cried in a trembling voice, and shook her head from side to side. The Dark Bells rang mockingly, provokingly.

   Mary's grimace of a smile fell away. 'Oh, I can,' she breathed. Her mouth yawned. In the moonlight, her fangs gleamed in her gums like bone needles poked through a red pillow. 'I can and I—'

   There was a growl from above them. It rose, then splintered into a volley of snarling barks. Mary turned to her left, and in the moment before the snarling thing left the rock on which it was standing, Roland could clearly read the startled bewilderment on Big Sister's face.

   It launched itself at her, only a dark shape against the stars, legs outstretched so it looked like some sort of weird bat, but even before it crashed into the woman, striking her in the chest above her halfraised arms and fastening its own teeth on her throat, Roland knew exactly what it was.

   As the shape bore her over onto her back, Sister Mary uttered a gibbering shriek that went through Roland's head like the Dark Bells themselves. He scrambled to his feet, gasping. The shadowy thing tore at her, forepaws on either side of her head, rear paws planted on the grave-shroud above her chest, where the rose had been.