And if she still won’t go, Jake thinks, or tries to brave it out, pretend she doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he’ll give her a choice: leave Gilead with his help-now, tonight-or be clapped in chains tomorrow morning, a traitor so outrageous she will almost certainly be hung as Hax the cook was hung.
“Mother?” he calls, still unaware of the shape standing in the shadows behind him. He takes one further step into the room, and now the shape moves. The shape raises its hands. There is something in its hands. Not a gun, Jake can tell that much, but it has a deadly look to it, a snaky look, somehow-
“Roland, watch out!” Susannah shrieks, and her voice is like a magical switch. There is something on the dressing table-the glass, of course;
Gabrielle has stolen it, it’s what she’ll bring to her lover as a consolation prize for the murder her son prevented-and now it lights as if in response to Susannah’s voice. It sprays brilliant pink light up the triple mirror and casts its glow back into the room. In that light, in that triple glass, Roland finally sees the figure behind him.
“Christ!” Eddie Dean shrieks, horrified. “Oh Christ, Roland! That’s not your mother! That’s-”
It’s not even a woman, not really, not anymore; it is a kind of living corpse in a road-filthy black dress. There are only a few straggling tufts of hair left on her head and there’s a gaping hole where her nose used to be, but her eyes still blaze, and the snake she holds wriggling between her hands is very lively. Even in his own horror, Jake has time to wonder if she got it from under the same rock where she found the one Roland killed.
It is Rhea who has been waiting for the gunslinger in his mother’s apartment; it is the Coos, come not just to retrieve her glam but to finish with the boy who has caused her so much trouble.
“Now, ye trollop’s get!” she cries shrilly, cackling. “Now ye’ll pay!”
But Roland has seen her, in the glass he has seen her, Rhea betrayed by the very ball she came to take back, and now he is whirling, his hands dropping to his new guns with all their deadly speed. He is fourteen, his reflexes are the sharpest and quickest they’ll ever be, and he goes off like exploding gunpowder.
“No, Roland, don’t!” Susannah screams. “It’s a trick, it’s a glam!”
Jake has just time to look from the mirror to the woman actually standing in the doorway; has just time to realize he, too, has been tricked.
Perhaps Roland also understands the truth at the last split-second- that the woman in the doorway really is his mother after all, that the thing in her hands isn’t a snake but a belt, something she has made for him, a peace offering, mayhap, that the glass has lied to him in the only way it can…by reflection.
In any case, it’s too late. The guns are out and thundering, their bright yellow flashes lighting the room. He pulls the trigger of each gun twice before he can stop, and the four slugs drive Gabrielle Deschain back into the corridor with the hopeful can-we-make-peace smile still on her face.
She dies that way, smiling.
Roland stands where he is, the smoking guns in his hands, his face cramped in a grimace of surprise and horror, just beginning to get the truth of what he must carry with him the rest of his life: he has used the guns of his father to kill his mother.
Now cackling laughter fills the room. Roland does not turn; he is frozen by the woman in the blue dress and black shoes who lies bleeding in the corridor of her apartment; the woman he came to save and has killed, instead. She lies with the hand-woven belt draped across her bleeding stomach.
Jake turns for him, and is not surprised to see a green-faced woman in a pointed black hat swimming inside the hall. It is the Wicked Witch of the East; it is also, he knows, Rhea of the Coos. She stares at the boy with the guns in his hands and bares her teeth at him in the most terrible grin Jake has ever seen in his life.
“I’ve burned the stupid girl ye loved-aye, burned her alive, I did- and now I’ve made ye a matricide. Do ye repent of killing my snake yet, gunslinger? My poor, sweet Ermot? Do ye regret playing yer hard games with one more trig than ye’ll ever be in yer miserable life?”
He gives no sign that he hears, only stares at his lady mother. Soon he will go to her, kneel by her, but not yet; not yet.
The face in the ball now turns toward the three pilgrims, and as it does it changes, becomes old and bald and raddled-becomes, in fact, the face Roland saw in the lying mirror. The gunslinger has been unable to see his future friends, but Rhea sees them; aye, she sees them very well.
“Cry it off!” she croaks-it is the caw of a raven sitting on a leafless branch beneath a winter-dimmed sky. “Cry it off! Renounce the Tower!”
“Never, you bitch,” Eddie says.
“Ye see what he is! What a monster he is! And this is only the beginning of it, ye ken! Ask him what happened to Cuthbert! To Alain-Alain ’s touch, clever as ’twas, saved him not in the end, so it didn’t! Ask him what happened to Jamie De Curry! He never had a friend he didn’t kill, never had a lover who’s not dust in the wind!”
“Go your way,” Susannah says, “and leave us to ours.”
Rhea’s green, cracked lips twist in a horrible sneer. “He’s killed his own mother! What will he do to you, ye stupid brown-skinned bitch?”
“He didn’t kill her,” Jake said. “You killed her. Now go!”
Jake takes a step toward the ball, meaning to pick it up and dash it to the floor… and he can do that, he realizes, for the ball is real. It’s the one thing in this vision that is. But before he can put his hands to it, it flashes a soundless explosion of pink light. Jake throws his hands up in front of his face to keep from being blinded, and then he is
(melting I’m melting what a world oh what a world) falling, he is being whirled down through the pink storm, out of Oz and back to Kansas, out of Oz and back to Kansas, out of Oz and back to-
Chapter V
THE PATH OF THE BEAM
1
“-home,” Eddie muttered. His voice sounded thick and punch-drunk to his own ears. “Back home, because there’s no place like home, no indeed.”
He tried to open his eyes and at first couldn’t. It was as if they were glued shut. He put the heel of his hand to his forehead and pushed up, tightening the skin on his face. It worked; his eyes popped open. He saw neither the throneroom of the Green Palace nor (and this was what he had really expected) the richly appointed but somehow claustrophobic bedroom in which he had just been.
He was outside, lying in a small clearing of winter-white grass. Nearby was a little grove of trees, some still with their last brown leaves clinging to the branches. And one branch with an odd white leaf, an albino leaf. There was a pretty trickle of running water farther into the grove. Standing abandoned in the high grass was Susannah’s new and improved wheelchair. There was mud on the tires, Eddie saw, and a few late leaves, crispy and brown, caught in the spokes. A few swatches of grass, too. Overhead was a skyful of still white clouds, every bit as interesting as a laundry-basket full of sheets.
The sky was clear when we went inside the Palace, he thought, and realized time had slipped again. How much or how little, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know-Roland’s world was like a transmission with its gear-teeth all but stripped away; you never knew when time was going to pop into neutral or race you away in overdrive.
Was this Roland’s world, though? And if it was, how had they gotten back to it?