rested, and so I refilled my waterskins and pushed on. I took nothing from that place but water. That’s the most important part of what really happened.”
Susannah spoke in her most reasonable, pleasant, and Odetta Holmes–like voice. “All right, that’s what really happened. You refilled your waterskins and went on. Now tell us the rest of what didn’t happen, Roland.”
The gunslinger put the jawbone in his lap for a moment, curled his hands into fists, and rubbed his eyes with them—a curiously childlike gesture. Then he grasped the jawbone again, as if for courage, and went on.
“I hypnotized the boy who wasn’t there,” he said. “I did it with one of my shells. It’s a trick I’ve known for years, and I learned it from a very unlikely source—Marten, my father’s court magician. The boy was a good subject. While he was tranced, he told me the circumstances of his death, as I’ve told them to you. When I’d gotten as much of his story as I felt I could without upsetting or actually hurting him, I gave him a command that he should not remember anything about his dying when he woke up again.”
“Who’d want to?” Eddie muttered.
Roland nodded. “Who, indeed? The boy passed from his trance directly into a natural sleep. I also slept. When we woke, I told the boy that I meant to catch the man in black. He knew who I meant; Walter had also stopped at the way station. Jake was afraid and hid from him. I’m sure Walter knew he was there, but it suited his purpose to pretend he didn’t. He left the boy behind like a set trap.
“I asked him if there was anything to eat there. It seemed to me there must be. He looked healthy enough, and the desert climate is wonderful when it comes to preserving things. He had a little dried meat, and he said there was a cellar. He hadn’t explored that, because he was afraid.” The gunslinger looked at them grimly. “He was right to be afraid. I found food . . . and I also found a Speaking Demon.”
Eddie looked down at the jawbone with widening eyes. Orange firelight danced on its ancient curves and hoodoo teeth. “Speaking Demon? Do you mean that thing?”
“No,” he said. “Yes. Both. Listen and you shall understand.”
He told them about the inhuman groans he’d heard coming from the earth beyond the cellar; how he had seen sand running from between two of the old blocks which made up the cellar walls. He told them of approaching the hole that was appearing there as Jake screamed for him to come up.
He had commanded the demon to speak . . . and so the demon had, in the voice of Allie, the woman with the scar on her forehead, the woman who had kept the bar in Tull. Go slow past the Drawers, gunslinger. While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.
“The Drawers?” Susannah asked, startled.
“Yes.” Roland looked at her closely. “That means something to you, doesn’t it?”
“Yes . . . and no.”
She spoke with great hesitation. Some of it, Roland divined, was simple reluctance to speak of things which were painful to her. He thought most of it, however, was a desire not to confuse issues which were already confused by saying more than she actually knew. He admired that. He admired her.
“Say what you can be sure of,” he said. “No more than that.”
“All right. The Drawers was a place Detta Walker knew about. A place Detta thought about. It’s a slang term, one she picked up from listening to the grownups when they sat out on the porch and drank beer and talked about the old days. It means a place that’s spoiled, or useless, or both. There was something in the Drawers—in the idea of the Drawers—that called to Detta. Don’t ask me what; I might have known once, but I don’t anymore. And don’t want to.
“Detta stole my Aunt Blue’s china plate—the one my folks gave her for a wedding present—and took it to the Drawers—her Drawers—to break it. That place was a gravel-pit filled with trash. A dumping-ground. Later on, she sometimes picked up boys at roadhouses.”
Susannah dropped her head for a moment, her lips pressed tightly together. Then she looked up again and went on.
“White boys. And when they took her back to their cars in the parking lot, she cock-teased them and then