They were another week before they reached the end of the beginning – for the gunslinger, a twisted prologue of twelve years, from the final crash of his native place and the gathering of the other three. For Jake, the gateway had been a strange death in another world. For the gunslinger it had been a stranger death yet – the endless hunt for the man in black through a world with neither map nor memory. Cuthbert and the others were gone, all of them gone:
Randolph, Jamie de Curry, Aileen, Susan, Marten (yes, they had dragged him down, and there had been gunplay, and even that grape had been bitter). Until finally only three remained of the old world, three like dreadful cards from a terrible deck of tarot cards: gunslinger, man in black, and the Dark Tower.
A week after Jake saw the footstep, they faced the man in black for a brief moment of time. In that moment, the gunslinger felt he could almost understand the gravid implication of the Tower itself, for that moment seemed to stretch out forever.
They continued southwest, reaching a point perhaps halfway through the Cyclopean mountain range, and just as the going seemed about to become really difficult for the first time (above them, seeming to lean out, the icy ledges and screaming buttes made the gunslinger feel an unpleasant reverse vertigo), they began to descend again along the side of the narrow pass. An angular, zigzagging path led them toward a canyon floor where an ice-edged stream boiled with slaty, headlong power from higher country still.
On that afternoon the boy paused and looked back at the gunslinger, who had paused to wash his face in the stream.
“I smell him,” Jake said.
“So do I.”
Ahead of them the mountain threw up its final defense
– a huge slab of insurmountable granite facing that climbed into cloudy infinity. At any moment the gunslinger expected a twist in the stream to bring them upon a high waterfall and the insurmountable smoothness of rock – dead end. But the air here had that odd magnifying quality that is common to high places, and it was another day before they reached that great granite face.
The gunslinger began to feel the dreadful tug of anticipation again, the feeling that it was all finally in his grasp. Near the end, he had to fight himself to keep from breaking into a trot.
“Wait!” The boy had stopped suddenly. They faced a sharp elbow-bend in the stream; it boiled and frothed with high energy around the eroded hang of a giant sandstone boulder. All that morning they had been in the shadow of the mountains as the canyon narrowed.
Jake was trembling violently and his face had gone pale.
“What’s the matter?”
“Let’s go back,” Jake whispered. “Let’s go back quick.”
The gunslinger’s face was wooden.
“Please?” The boy’s face was drawn, and his jawline shook with suppressed agony. Through the heavy blanket of stone they still heard thunder, as steady as machines in the earth. The slice of sky they could see had itself assumed a turbulent, gothic gray above them as warm and cold currents met and warred.
“Please, please!” The boy raised a fist, as if to strike the gunslinger’s chest.
“No.”
The boy’s face took on wonder. “You’re going to kill me. He killed me the first time and you are going to kill me now.”
The gunslinger felt the lie on his lips. He spoke it:
“You’ll be all right” And a greater lie. “I’ll take care. “
Jake’s face went gray, and he said no more. He put an unwilling hand out, and he and the gunslinger went around the elbow-bend. They came face to face with that final rising wall and the man in black.
He stood no more than twenty feet above them, just to the right of the waterfall that crashed and spilled from a huge ragged hole in the rock. Unseen wind rippled and tugged at his hooded robe. He held a staff in one hand. The other hand he held out to them in a mocking gesture of wel come. He seemed a prophet, and below that rushing sky, mounted on a ledge of rock, a prophet of doom, his voice the voice of Jeremiah.
“Gunslinger! How well you fulfill the prophecies of old! Good day and good day and good day!” He laughed, the sound echoing ever over the bellow of the falling water.
Without a thought and seemingly without a click of motor relays, the gunslinger had drawn his pistols. The boy cowered to his right and behind, a small shadow.
Roland fired three times before he could gain control of his traitor hands – the echoes bounced their bronze tones against the rock valley that rose around them, over the sound of the wind and water.
A spray of granite puffed over the head of the man in black; a second to the left of his hood; a third to the right. He had missed cleanly all three times.
The man in black laughed – a full, hearty laugh that seemed to challenge the receding echo of gunshots. “Would you kill all your answers so easily, gunslinger?”
“Come down,” the gunslinger said. “Answers all around.”
Again that huge, derisive laugh. “It’s not your bullets I fear, Roland. It’s your idea of answers that scares me. “
“Come down.”
“The other side, I think,” the man in black said. “On the other side we will hold much council.”
His eyes flicked to Jake and he added:
“Just the two of us.”
Jake flinched away from him with a small, whining cry, and the man in black turned, his robe swirling in the gray air like a batwing. He disappeared into the cleft in the rock from which the water spewed at full force. The gunslinger exercised grim will and did not send a bullet after him – would you kill all your answers so easily, gunslinger?
There was only the sound of wind and water, sounds that had been in this place of desolation for a thousand years. Yet the man in black had been here. After these twelve years, Roland had seen him close-up, spoken to him. And the man in black had laughed at him.
On the other side we will hold much council.
The boy looked up at him with dumbly submissive sheep’s eyes, his body trembling. For a moment the gunslinger saw the face of Alice, the girl from Tull, superimposed over Jake’s, the scar standing out on her forehead like a mute accusation, and felt brute loathing for them both (it would not occur to him until much later that both the scar on Alice’s forehead and the nail he saw spiked through Jake’s forehead in his dreams were in the same place). Jake seemed to catch a whiff of his thought and a moan was dragged from his throat. But it was short; he twisted his lips shut over it. He held the makings of a fine man, perhaps a gunslinger in his own right if given time.
Just the two of us.
The gunslinger felt a great and unholy thirst in some deep unknown pit of his body, a thirst no wine could touch. Worlds trembled, almost within reach of his fingers, and
in some instinctual way he strove not to be corrupted, knowing in his colder mind that such strife was vain and always would be.
It was noon. He looked up, letting the cloudy, unsettled daylight shine for the last time on the all-too-vulnerable sun of his own righteousness. No one ever really pays for it in silver, he thought. The price of any evil – necessary or otherwise – comes due in flesh.
“Come with me or stay,” the gunslinger said.
The boy only looked at him mutely. And to the gunslinger, in that final and vital moment of uncoupling from a moral principle, he ceased to be Jake and became only the boy, an impersonality to be moved and used.