his open eyes, and as Roland watched, white tendrils of steam
began to rise from his skin, which was rapidly losing its green
undertint. There was also a hissing sound, like a gob of spit on top
of a hot stove.
Saves explaining, at least, Roland thought, and swept his eyes over
the others. 'All right; he was the first one to move. Who wants to
be the second?'
None did, it seemed. They only stood there, watching him, not
coming at him ... but not retreating, either. He thought (as he had
about the crucifix-dog) that he should kill them as they stood there,
just draw his other gun and mow them down. It would be the work
of seconds only, and child's play to his gifted hands, even if some
ran. But he couldn't.
Not just cold, like that. He wasn't that kind of killer ... at least, not
yet.
Very slowly, he began to step backwards, first bending his course
around the watering trough, then putting it between him and them.
When Bowler Hat took a step forward, Roland didn't give the
others in the line a chance to copy him; he put a bullet into the dust
of High Street an inch in advance of Bowler Hat's foot.
'That's your last warning,' he said, still using the low speech. He
had no idea if they understood it, didn't really care. He guessed
they caught this tune's music well enough. 'Next bullet I fire eats
up someone's heart. The way it works is, you stay and I go. You
get this one chance. Follow me, and you all die. It's too hot to play
games and I've lost my -'
'Booh!' cried a rough, liquidy voice from behind him. There was
unmistakable glee in it. Roland saw a shadow grow from the
shadow of the overturned freight wagon, which he had now almost
reached, and had just time to understand that another of the green
folk had been hiding beneath it.
As he began to turn, a club crashed down on Roland's shoulder,
numbing his right arm all the way to the wrist. He held on to the
gun and fired once, but the bullet went into one of the wagon-
wheels, smashing a wooden spoke and turning the wheel on its hub
with a high screeching sound. Behind him, he heard the green folk
in the street uttering hoarse, yapping cries as they charged forward.
The thing which had been hiding beneath the overturned wagon
was a monster with two heads growing out of his neck, one with
the vestigial, slack face of a corpse. The other, although just as
green, was more lively. Broad lips spread in a cheerful grin as he
raised his club to strike again.
Roland drew with his left hand - the one that wasn't numbed and
distant. He had time to put one bullet through the bushwhacker's
grin, flinging him backwards in a spray of blood and teeth, the
bludgeon flying out of his relaxing fingers. Then the others were
on him, clubbing and drubbing.
The gunslinger was able to slip the first couple of blows, and there
was one moment when he thought he might be able to spin around
to the rear of the overturned wagon, spin and turn and go to work
with his guns. Surely he would be able to do that. Surely his quest
for the Dark Tower wasn't supposed to end on the sun-blasted
street of a little far-western town called Eluria, at the hands of half
a dozen green-skinned slow mutants. Surely ka could not be so
cruel.
But Bowler Hat caught him with a vicious sidehand blow, and
Roland crashed into the wagon's slowly spinning rear wheel
instead of skirting around it. As he went to his hands and knees,
still scrambling and trying to turn, trying to evade the blows which
rained down on him, he saw there were now many more than half a
dozen. Coming up the street towards the town square were at least
thirty green men and women. This wasn't a clan but a damned tribe
of them. And in broad, hot daylight! Slow mutants were, in his
experience, creatures that loved the dark, almost like toadstools
with brains, and he had never seen any such as these before. They -
The one in the red vest was female. Her bare breasts swinging
beneath the dirty red vest were the last things he saw clearly as
they gathered around and above him, bashing away with their
clubs. The one with the nails studded in it came down on his lower
right calf, sinking its stupid rusty fangs in deep. He tried again to
raise one of the big guns (his vision was fading, now, but that
wouldn't help them if he got to shooting; he had always been the
most hellishly talented of them; Jamie DeCurry had once
proclaimed that Roland could shoot blindfolded, because he had
eyes in his fingers), and it was kicked out of his hand and into the
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