The Waste Lands (10 page)

He tapped the line on the left. “This is your memory of the time before you got to the way station—a a single track.”

“Yes.”

He tapped the line on the right. “And after you came out on the far side of the mountains in the place of bones . . . the place where Walter was waiting for you.
Also
a single track.”

“Yes.”

Now Eddie first indicated the middle area and then drew a rough circle around it.

“That’s what you’ve got to do, Roland-close this double track off. Build a stockade around it in your mind and then forget it. Because it doesn’t
mean
anything, it doesn’t
change
anything, it’s
gone
, it’s
done—
”

“But it isn’t.” Roland held up the bone. “If my memories of the boy Jake are false—and I know they are—
how can I have this?
I took it to replace the one I threw away . . . but the one I threw away came from the cellar of the way station, and along the track I know is true,
I never went down cellar!
I never spoke with the demon! I moved on alone, with fresh water and
nothing else
!”

“Roland, listen to me,” Eddie said earnestly. “If that jawbone you’re holding was the one from the way station, that would be one thing. But isn’t it possible that if you hallucinated that whole thing—the way station, the kid, the Speaking Demon—then maybe you took Walter’s jawbone because—”

“It was no hallucination,” Roland said. He looked at them both with his faded blue bombardier’s eyes and then did something neither expected . . . something Eddie would have sworn Roland did not know he meant to do himself.

He threw the jawbone into the fire.

FOR A MOMENT IT
only lay there, a white relic bent in a ghostly half-grin. Then it suddenly blazed red, washing the clearing with dazzling scarlet light. Eddie and Susannah cried out and threw their hands up to shield their eyes from that burning shape.

The bone began to change. Not to melt, but to
change
. The teeth which leaned out of it like gravestones began to draw together in clumps. The mild curve of the upper arc straightened, then snubbed down at the tip.

Eddie’s hands fell into his lap and he stared at the bone which was no longer a bone with gape-jawed wonder. It was now the color of burning steel. The teeth had become three inverted V’s, the middle one larger than those on the ends. And suddenly Eddie saw what it wanted to become, just as he had seen the slingshot in the wood of the stump.

He thought it was a key.

You must remember the shape
, he thought feverishly.
You must, you must.

His eyes traced it desperately—three V’s, the one in the center larger and deeper than the two on the end. Three notches . . . and the one closest the end had a squiggle, the shallow shape of a lower-case
s
. . .

Then the shape in the flames changed again. The bone which had become something like a key drew inward, concentrating itself into bright, overlapping petals and folds as dark and velvety as a moonless summer midnight. For a moment Eddie saw a rose—a triumphant rose that might have bloomed in the dawn of this world’s first day, a thing of depthless, timeless beauty. His eye saw, and his heart was opened. It was as if all love and life had suddenly risen from Roland’s dead artifact; it was there in the fire, burning out in triumph and some wonderful, inchoate defiance, declaring that despair was a mirage and death a dream.

The rose!
he thought incoherently.
First the key, then the rose! Behold! Behold the opening of the way to the Tower!

There was a thick cough from the fire. A fan of sparks twisted outwards. Susannah screamed and rolled away, beating at the orange flecks on her dress as the flames gushed upward toward the starry sky. Eddie didn’t move. He sat transfixed in his vision, held in a cradle of wonder which was both gorgeous and terrible, unmindful of the sparks which danced across his skin. Then the flames sank back.

The bone was gone.

The key was gone.

The rose was gone.

Remember
, he thought.
Remember the rose . . . and remember the Shape of the key.

Susannah was sobbing with shock and terror, but he ignored her for the moment and found the stick with which he and Roland had both drawn. And in the dirt he made this shape with a shaking hand:

“WHY DID YOU DO it?” Susannah asked at last. “Why, for God’s sake—and what was it?”

Fifteen minutes had gone by. The fire had been allowed to burn low; the scattered embers had either been stamped out or had gone out on their own. Eddie sat with his arms about his wife: Susannah sat before him, with her back against his chest. Roland was off to one side, knees hugged to his chest, looking moodily into the orange-red coals. So far as Eddie could tell, neither of them had seen the bone change. They had both seen it glowing superhot, and Roland had seen it explode (or had it imploded? to Eddie that seemed closer to what he had seen), but that was all. Or so he believed; Roland, however, sometimes kept his own counsel, and when he decided to play his cards close to the vest, he played them very close indeed, Eddie knew that from bitter experience. He thought of telling them what he had seen—or
thought
he had seen—and decided to play his own cards tight and close-up, at least for the time being.

Of the jawbone itself there was no sign—not even a splinter.

“I did it because a voice spoke in my mind and told me I must,” Roland said. “It was the voice of my father; of
all
my fathers. When one hears such a voice, not to obey—and at once—is unthinkable. So I was taught. As to what it was, I can’t say ... not now, at least. I only know that the bone has spoken its final word. I have carried it all this way to hear it.”

Or to see it
, Eddie thought, and again:
Remember. Remember the rose. And remember the shape of the key.

“It almost flash-fried us!” She sounded both tired and exasperated.

Roland shook his head. “I think it was more like the sort of firework the barons used to sometimes shoot into the sky at their year-end parties. Bright and startling, but not dangerous.”

Eddie had an idea. “The doubling in your mind, Roland—is it gone? Did it leave when the bone exploded, or whatever it did?”

He was almost convinced that it had; in the movies he’d seen, such rough shock-therapy almost always worked. But Roland shook his head.

Susannah shifted in Eddie’s arms. “You said you were beginning to understand.”

Roland nodded. “I think so, yes. If I’m right, I fear for Jake. Wherever he is,
whenever
he is, I fear for him.”

“What do you mean?” Eddie asked.

Roland got up, went to his roll of hides, and began to spread them out. “Enough stories and excitement for one night. It’s time to sleep. In the morning we’ll follow the bear’s backtrail and see if we can find the portal he was set to guard. I’ll tell you what I know and what I believe has happened—what I believe is happening still—along the way.”

With that he wrapped himself in an old blanket and a new deerskin, rolled away from the fire, and would say no more.

Eddie and Susannah lay down together. When they were sure the gunslinger must be asleep, they made love. Roland heard them going about it as he lay wakeful and heard their quiet after-love talk. Most of it was about him. He lay quietly, open eyes looking into the darkness long after their talk had ceased and their breathing had evened out into a single easy note.

It was, he thought, fine to be young and in love. Even in the graveyard which this world had become, it was fine.

Enjoy it while you can,
he thought
, because there is more death ahead. We have come to a stream of blood. That it will lead us to a river of the same stuff, I have no doubt. And, further along, to an ocean. In this world the graves yawn and none of the dead rest easy.

As dawn began to come up in the east, he closed his eyes. Slept briefly. And dreamed of Jake.

EDDIE ALSO DREAMED—DREAMED he was back in New York, walking along Second Avenue with a book in his hand.

In this dream it was spring. The air was warm, the city was blooming, and homesickness sobbed within him like a muscle with a fishhook caught. deep within it.
Enjoy this dream, and make it go on as long as you can,
he thought.
Savor it ... because this is as close to New York as you’re going to get. You can’t go home, Eddie. That part’s done.

He looked down at the book and was utterly unsurprised to find it was
You Can’t Go Home Again
, by Thomas Wolfe. Stamped into the dark red cover were three shapes; key, rose, and door. He stopped for a moment, flipped the book open, and read the first line.
The man in black fled across the desert
, Wolfe had written,
and the gunslinger followed.

Eddie closed it and walked on. It was about nine in the morning, he judged, maybe nine-thirty, and traffic on Second Avenue was light. Taxis honked and wove their way from lane to lane with spring sunshine twinkling off their windshields and bright yellow paintjobs. A bum on the corner of Second and Fifty-second asked him for a handout and Eddie tossed the book with the red cover into his lap. He observed (also without surprise) that the bum was Enrico Balazar. He was sitting cross-legged in front of a magic shop. HOUSE OF CARDS, the sign in the window read, and the display inside showed a tower which had been built of Tarot cards. Standing on top was a model of King Kong. There was a tiny radar-dish growing out of the great ape’s head.

Eddie walked on, lazing his way downtown, the street-signs floating past him. He knew where he was going as soon as he saw it: a small shop on the corner of Second and Forty-sixth.

Yeah
, he thought. A feeling of great relief swept through him.
This is the place. The very place.
The window was full of hanging meats and cheeses. TOM AND GERRY’S ARTISTIC DELI, the sign read. PARTY PLATTERS OUR SPECIALTY!

As he stood looking in, someone else he knew came around the corner. It was Jack Andolini, wearing a three-piece suit the color of vanilla ice cream and carrying a black cane in his left hand. Half of his face was gone, lopped off by the claws of the lobstrosities.

Go on in, Eddie,
Jack said as he passed
. After all, there are other worlds than these and that fuckin train rolls through all of them.

I can’t,
Eddie replied.
The door is locked
. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he did; knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Dad-a-chum, dud-a-chee, not to worry, you’ve got the key,
Jack said, not looking back. Eddie looked down and saw he did have a key; a primitive-looking thing with three notches like inverted V’s.

That little s-shape at the end of the last notch is the secret
, he thought. He stepped under the awning of Tom and Gerry’s Artistic Deli and inserted the key in the lock. It turned easily. He opened the door and stepped through into a huge open field. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the traffic on Second Avenue hurrying by, and then the door slammed shut and fell over. There was nothing behind it. Nothing at all. He turned back to survey his new surroundings, and what he saw filled him with terror at first. The field was a deep scarlet, as if some titanic battle had been fought here and the ground had been drenched with so much blood that it could not all be absorbed.

Then he realized that it was not blood he was looking at, but roses.

That feeling of mingled joy and triumph surged through him again, swelling his heart until he felt it might burst within him. He raised his clenched fists high over his head in a gesture of victory . . . and then froze that way.

The field stretched on for miles, climbing a gentle slope of land, and standing at the horizon was the Dark Tower. It was a pillar of dumb stone rising so high into the sky that he could barely discern its tip. Its base, surrounded by red, shouting roses, was formidable, titanic with weight and size, yet the Tower became oddly graceful as it rose and tapered. The stone of which it had been made was not black, as he had imagined it would be, but soot-colored. Narrow, slitted windows marched about it in a rising spiral; below the windows ran an almost endless flight of stone stairs, circling up and up. The Tower was a dark gray exclamation point planted in the earth and rising above the field of blood-red roses. The sky arched above it was blue, but filled with puffy white clouds like sailing ships. They flowed above and around the top of the Dark Tower in an endless stream.