Jake nodded.
“I guess you know I’m on the prod for that man you saw.”
“Are you going to kill him?”
“I don’t know. I have to make him tell me something. I may have to make him take me someplace.”
“Where?”
“To find a tower,” the gunslinger said. He held his cigarette over the chimney of the lamp and drew on it; the smoke drifted away on the rising night breeze. Jake watched it. His face showed neither fear nor curiosity, certainly not enthusiasm.
“So I’m going on tomorrow,” the gunslinger said. “You’ll have to come with me. How much of that meat is left?”
“Only a handful.”
“Corn?”
“A little.”
The gunslinger nodded. “Is there a cellar?”
“Yes.” Jake looked at him. The pupils of his eyes had grown to a huge, fragile size. “You pull up on a ring in the floor, but I didn’t go down. I was afraid the ladder would
break and I wouldn’t be able to get up again. And it smells bad. It’s the only thing around here that smells at all.”
“We’ll get up early and see if there’s anything down there worth taking. Then we’ll bug out”
“All right” The boy paused and then said, “I’m glad I didn’t kill you when you were sleeping. I had a pitchfork and I thought about doing it. But I didn’t, and now I won’t have to be afraid to go to sleep.”
“What would you be afraid of?”
The book looked at him ominously. “Spooks. Of him coming back.”
“The man in black,” the gunslinger said. Not a question.
“Yes. Is he a bad man?”
“That depends on where you’re standing,” the gunslinger said absently. He got up and pitched his cigarette out onto the hardpan. “I’m going to sleep.”
The boy looked at him timidly. “Can I sleep in the stable with you?”
“Of course.”
The gunslinger stood on the steps, looking up, and the boy joined him. Polaris was up there, and Mars. It seemed to the gunslinger that, if he closed his eyes he would be able to hear the croaking of the first spring peepers, smell the green and almost-summer smell of the court lawns after their first cutting (and hear, perhaps, the indolent click of croquet balls as the ladies of the East Wing, attired only in their shifts as dusk glimmered toward dark, played at Points), could almost see Aileen as she came through the break in the hedges —It was not like him to think so much of the past.
He turned back and picked up the lamp. “Let’s go to sleep,” he said.
They crossed to the stable together.
The next morning he explored the cellar.
Jake was right; it smelled bad. It had a wet, swampy smell that made the gunslinger feel nauseous and a little lightheaded after the antiseptic odorlessness of the desert and the stable. The cellar smelled of cabbages and turnips and potatoes with long, sightless eyes gone to everlasting rot The ladder, however, seemed quite sturdy, and he climbed down.
The floor was earthen, and his head almost touched the overhead beams. Down here spiders still lived, disturbingly big ones with mottled gray bodies. Many of them had mutated. Some had eyes on stalks, some had what might have been as many as sixteen legs.
The gunslinger peered around and waited for his nighteyes.
“You all right?” Jake called down nervously.
“Yes. He focused on the corner. “There are cans. Wait”
He went carefully to the corner, ducking his head. There was an old box with one side folded down. The cans were vegetables — green beans, yellow beans… and three cans of corned beef.
He scooped up an armload and went back to the ladder. He climbed halfway up and handed them to Jake, who knelt to receive them. He went back for more.
It was on the third trip that he heard the groaning in the foundations.
He turned, looked, and felt a kind of dreamy terror wash over him, a feeling both languid and repellent, like sex in the water — one drowning within another.
The foundation was composed of huge sandstone blocks that had probably been evenly cornered when the way station was new, but which were now at every zigzag, drunken angle. It made the wall look as if it were inscribed with strange, meandering hierogliphics. And from the joining of two of these abstruse cracks, a thin spill of sand was running, as if something on the other side was digging
itself through with slobbering, agonized intensity.
The groaning rose and fell, becoming louder, until the whole cellar was full of the sound, an abstract noise of ripping pain and dreadful effort.
“Come up!” Jake screamed. “0 Jesus, mister, come up!”
“Go away,” the gunslinger said calmly.
“Come up!” Jake screamed again.
The gunslinger did not answer. He pulled leather with his right hand.
There was a hole in the wall now, a hole as big as a coin. He could hear, through the curtain of his own terror, Jake’s pattering feet as the boy ran. Then the spill of sand stopped. The groaning ceased, but there was a sound of steady, labored breathing.
“Who are you?” The gunslinger asked.
No answer.
And in the High Speech, his voice filling with the old thunder of command, Roland demanded: “Who are you, Demon? Speak, if you would speak. My time is short; my hands lose patience.”
“Go slow,” a dragging, clotted voice said from within the wall. And the gunslinger felt the dreamlike terror deepen and grow almost solid. It was the voice of Alice, the woman he had stayed with in the town of Tull. But she was dead; he had seen her go down himself, a bullet hole between her eyes. Fathoms seemed to swim by his eyes, descending. “Go slow past the Drawers, gunslinger. While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.”
“What do you mean? Speak on!”
But the breathing was gone.
The gunslinger stood for a moment, frozen, and then one of the huge spiders dropped on his arm and scrambled frantically up to his shoulder. With an involuntary grunt he brushed it away and got his feet moving. He did not want
To do it, but custom was strict, inviolable. The dead from the dead, as the old proverb has it; only a corpse may speak. He went to the hole and punched at it. The sandstone crumbled easily at the edges, and with a bare stiffening of muscles, he thrust his hand through the wall.
And touched something solid, with raised and fretted knobs. He drew it out. He held a jawbone, rotted at the far hinge. The teeth leaned this way and that.
“All right,” he said softly. He thrust it rudely into his back pocket and went back up the ladder, carrying the last cans awkwardly. He left the trapdoor open. The sun would get in and kill the spiders.
Jake was halfway across the stable yard, cowering on the cracked, rubbly hardpan. He screamed when he saw the gunslinger, backed away a step or two, and then ran to him, crying.
“I thought it got you, that it got you, I thought —“
“It didn’t.” He held the boy to him, feeling his face, hot against his chest, and his hands, dry against his ribcage. It occurred to him later that this was when he began to love the boy — which was, of course, what the man in black must have planned all along.
“Was it a demon?” The voice was muffled.
“Yes. A speaking-demon. We don’t have to go back there anymore. Come on.”
They went to the stable, and the gunslinger made a rough pack from the blanket he had slept under — it
