dust. Although he could still feel the smooth sandalwood grip of
the other, he thought it was nevertheless already gone.
He could smell them - the rich, rotted smell of decaying meat. Or
was that only his hands, as he raised them in a feeble and useless
effort to protect his head? His hands, which had been in the
polluted water where flecks and strips of the dead boy's skin
floated?
The clubs slamming down on him, slamming down all over him, as
if the green folk wanted not just to beat him to death but to
tenderize him as they did so. And as he went down into the
darkness of what he most certainly believed would be his death, he
heard the bugs singing, the dog he had spared barking, and the
bells hung on the church door ringing. These sounds merged
together into strangely sweet music. Then that was gone, too; the
darkness ate it all.
II. Rising. Hanging Suspended. White Beauty.
Two Others. The Medallion.
The gunslinger's return to the world wasn't like coming back to
consciousness after a blow, which he'd done several times before,
and it wasn't like waking from sleep, either. It was like rising.
I'm dead, he thought at some point during this process ... when the
power to think had been at least partially restored to him. Dead
and rising into whatever afterlife there is. That's what it must be.
The singing I hear is the singing of dead souls.
Total blackness gave way to the dark grey of rainclouds, then to
the lighter grey of fog. This brightened to the uniform clarity of a
heavy mist moments before the sun breaks through. And through it
all was that sense of rising, as if he had been caught in some mild
but powerful updraught.
As the sense of rising began to diminish and the brightness behind
his eyelids grew, Roland at last began to believe he was still alive.
It was the singing that convinced him. Not dead souls, not the
heavenly host of angels sometimes described by the Jesus-man
preachers, but only those bugs. A little like crickets, but sweeter-
voiced. The ones he had heard in Eluria.
On this thought, he opened his eyes.
His belief that he was still alive was severely tried, for Roland
found himself hanging suspended in a world of white beauty - his
first bewildered thought was that he was in the sky, floating within
a fair-weather cloud. All around him was the reedy singing of the
bugs. Now he could hear the tinkling of bells, too.
He tried to turn his head and swayed in some sort of harness. He
could hear it creaking. The soft singing of the bugs, like crickets in
the grass at the end of day back home in Gilead, hesitated and
broke rhythm. When it did, what felt like a tree of pain grew up
Roland's back. He had no idea what its burning branches might be,
but the trunk was surely his spine. A far deadlier pain sank into one
of his lower legs ~ in his confusion, the gunslinger could not tell
which one. That's where the club with the nails in it got me, he
thought. And more pain in his head. His skull felt like a badly
