this place, most likely, they who had sorcerously restored the lad
named James to his interrupted life - had taken it back from Roland
and put it around the boy's neck again.
Had the girl with the wonderfully cool hand done that? Did she in
consequence think Roland a ghoul who would steal from the dead?
He didn't like to think so. In fact, the notion made him more
uncomfortable than the idea that the young cowboy's bloated body
had been somehow returned to its normal size and then reanimated.
Further down the aisle on this side, perhaps a dozen empty beds
away from the boy and Roland Deschain, the gunslinger saw a
third inmate of this queer infirmary. This fellow looked at least
four times the age of the lad, twice the age of the gunslinger. He
had a long beard, more grey than black, that hung to his upper
chest in two straggly forks. The face above it was sun-darkened,
heavily lined, and pouched beneath the eyes. Running from his left
cheek and across the bridge of his nose was a thick dark mark
which Roland took to be a scar. The bearded man was either asleep
or unconscious - Roland could hear him snoring - and was
suspended three feet above his bed, held up by a complex series of
white belts that glimmered in the dim air. These crisscrossed each
other, making a series of figure eights all the way around the man's
body. He looked like a bug in some exotic spider's web. He wore a
gauzy white bed-dress. One of the belts ran beneath his buttocks,
elevating his crotch in a way that seemed to offer the bulge of his
privates to the grey and dreaming air. Further down his body,
Roland could see the dark shadow-shapes of his legs. They
appeared to be twisted like ancient dead trees. Roland didn't like to
think in how many places they must have been broken to look like
that. And yet they appeared to be moving. How could they be, if
the bearded man was unconscious? It was a trick of the light,
perhaps, or of the shadows ... perhaps the gauzy singlet the man
was wearing was stirring in a light breeze, or ...
Roland looked away, up at the billowy silk panels high above,
trying to control the accelerating beat of his heart. What he saw
hadn't been caused by the wind, or a shadow, or anything else. The
man's legs were somehow moving without moving ... as Roland
had seemed to feel his own back moving without moving. He
didn't know what could cause such a phenomenon, and didn't want
to know, at least not yet.
'I'm not ready,' he whispered. His lips felt very dry. He closed his
eyes again, wanting to sleep, wanting not to think about what the
bearded man's twisted legs might indicate about his own condition.
But
But you'd better get ready.
That was the voice that always seemed to come when he tried to
slack off, to scamp a job, or take the easy way around an obstacle.
It was the voice of Cort, his old teacher. The man whose stick they
had all feared, as boys. They hadn't feared his stick as much as his
mouth, however. His jeers when they were weak, his contempt
