Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,291

voice of his subconscious, but Roland knows better; Roland knows that often the voices that sound the most like our own when they speak in our heads are those of the most terrible outsiders, the most dangerous intruders.

“Roland, son of Steven.”

The ball has taken him first to Hambry and to Mayor’s House, and he would see more of what is happening there, but then it takes him away—calls him away in that strangely familiar voice, and he has to go. There is no choice because, unlike Rhea or Jonas, he is not watching the ball and the creatures who speak soundlessly within it; he is inside the ball, a part of its endless pink storm.

“Roland, come. Roland, see.”

And so the storm whirls him first up and then away. He flies across the Drop, rising and rising through stacks of air first warm and then cold, and he is not alone in the pink storm which bears him west along the Path of the Beam. Sheb flies past him, his hat cocked back on his head; he is singing “Hey Jude” at the top of his lungs as his nicotine-stained fingers plink keys that are not there—transported by his tune, Sheb doesn’t seem to realize that the storm has ripped his piano away.

“Roland, come,”

the voice says—the voice of the storm, the voice of the glass—and Roland comes. The Romp flies by him, glassy eyes blazing with pink light. A scrawny man in farmer’s overalls goes flying past, his long red hair streaming out behind him. “Life for you, and for your crop,” he says—something like that, anyway—and then he’s gone. Next, spinning like a weird windmill, comes an iron chair (to Roland it looks like a torture device) equipped with wheels, and the boy gunslinger thinks The Lady of Shadows without knowing why he thinks it, or what it means.

Now the pink storm is carrying him over blasted mountains, now over a fertile green delta where a broad river runs its oxbow squiggles like a vein, reflecting a placid blue sky that turns to the pink of wild roses as the storm passes above. Ahead, Roland sees an uprushing column of darkness and his heart quails, but this is where the pink storm is taking him, and this is where he must go.

I want to get out, he thinks, but he’s not stupid, he realizes the truth: he may never get out. The wizard’s glass has swallowed him. He may remain in its stormy, muddled eye forever.

I’ll shoot my way out, if I have to, he thinks, but no—he has no guns. He is naked in the storm, rushing bareass toward that virulent blue-black infection that has buried all the landscape beneath it.

And yet he hears singing.

Faint but beautiful—a sweet harmonic sound that makes him shiver and think of Susan: bird and bear and hare and fish.

Suddenly Sheemie’s mule (Caprichoso, Roland thinks, a beautiful name) goes past, galloping on thin air with his eyes as bright as firedims in the storm’s lumbre fuego. Following him, wearing a sombrera and riding a broom festooned with fluttering reap-charms, comes Rhea of the Cöos. “I’ll get you, my pretty!” she screams at the fleeing mule, and then, cackling, she is gone, zooming and brooming.

Roland plunges into the black, and suddenly his breath is gone. The world around him is noxious darkness; the air seems to creep on his skin like a layer of bugs. He is buffeted, boxed to and fro by invisible fists, then driven downward in a dive so violent he fears he will be smashed against the ground: so fell Lord Perth.

Dead fields and deserted villages roll up out of the gloom; he sees blasted trees that will give no shade—oh, but all is shade here, all is death here, this is the edge of End-World, where some dark day he will come, and all is death here.

“Gunslinger, this is Thunderclap.”

“Thunderclap,” he says.

“Here are the unbreathing; the white faces.”

“The unbreathing. The white faces.”

Yes. He knows that, somehow. This is the place of slaughtered soldiers, the cloven helm, the rusty halberd; from here come the pale warriors. This is Thunderclap, where clocks run backward and the graveyards vomit out their dead.

Ahead is a tree like a crooked, clutching hand; on its topmost branch a billy-bumbler has been impaled. It should be dead, but as the pink storm carries Roland past, it raises its head and looks at him with inexpressible pain and weariness. “Oy!” it cries, and then it, too, is gone