She suddenly understood what the gunslinger must have known, if not from the first then from soon after the three Stephen Kings appeared: this whole thing was a shuck. She didn't know what, exacdy, was in those wicker baskets, but she doubted like hell that it was food and clothes.
She setded within herself.
"Well?" Fimalo asked patiendy. "Will you come and take the presents I'd give you? You must come, if you'd have them, for halfway across the bridge is as far as I can go myself. Just beyond Feemalo and Fumalo is the King's dead-line. You and she may pass both ways. We may not."
Roland said, "We thank you for your kindness, sai, but we're going to refuse. We have food, and clothing is waiting for us up ahead, still on the hoof. Besides, it's really not that cold."
"No," Susannah agreed, smiling into the three identical-and identically dumbfounded-faces. "It's really not."
"We'll be pushing on," Roland said, and made another bow over his cocked leg.
"Say thankya, say may ya do well," Susannah put in, and once more spread her invisible skirts.
She and Roland began to turn away. And that was when Feemalo and Fumalo, still down on their knees, reached inside the open baskets before them.
Susannah needed no instruction from Roland, not so much as a shouted word. She drew the revolver from her belt and shot down the one on her left-Fumalo-just as he swung a longbarreled silver gun out of the basket. What looked like a scarf was hanging from it. Roland drew from his holster, as blindingly fast as ever, and fired a single shot. Above them the rooks took wing, cawing affrightedly, turning the blue sky momentarily black.
Feemalo, also holding one of the silver guns, collapsed slowly forward across his basket of food with a dying expression of surprise on his face and a bullet-hole dead center in his forehead.
FIVE
Fimalo stood where he was, on the far side of the bridge. His hands were still clasped in front of him, but he no longer looked like Stephen King. He now wore the long, yellowcomplexioned face of an old man who is dying slowly and not well. What hair he had was a dirty gray rather than luxuriant black. His skull was a peeling garden of eczema. His cheeks, chin, and forehead were lumped with pimples and open sores, some pustulating and some bleeding.
"What are you, really?" Roland asked him.
"A hume, just as you are," said Fimalo, resignedly. "Rando Thoughtful was my name during my years as the Crimson King's Minister of State. Once upon a time, however, I was plain old Austin Cornwell, from upstate New York. Not the Keystone World, I regret to say, but another. I ran the Niagara Mall at one time, and before that I had a successful career in advertising. You might be interested to know I worked on accounts for both Nozz-A-La and the Takuro Spirit."
Susannah ignored this bizarre and unexpected resume.
"So he didn't have his top boy beheaded, after all," she said.
"What about the three Stephen Kings?"
"Just a glammer," said the old man. "Are you going to kill me? Go ahead. All I ask is that you make quick work of it. I'm not well, as you must see."
"Was any of what you told us true?" Susannah asked.
His old eyes looked at her with watery amazement. "All of it was," he said, and advanced onto the bridge, where two other old men-his assistants, once upon a time, she had no doubt-lay sprawled. "All of it, anyway, save for one lie... and this." He kicked the baskets over so that the contents spilled out.
Susannah gave an involuntary shout of horror. Oy was up in a flash, standing protectively in front of her with his short legs spread and his head lowered.
"It's all right," she said, but her voice was still trembling. "I was just... startled."
The wicker basket which had seemed to contain all sorts of freshly cooked roasts was actually filled with decaying human limbs-long pork, after all, and in bad shape even considering what it was. The flesh was mostly blue-black and a-teem with maggots.
And there were no clothes in the other basket. What Fimalo had spilled out of it was actually a shiny knot of dying snakes.
Their beady eyes were dull; their forked tongues flickered listlessly in and out; several had already ceased to move.
"You would have refreshed them wonderfully, if you'd pressed them against your skin," Fimalo said regretfully.