Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,292

and not to be remembered for many years.

“Look ahead, Roland—see your destiny.”

Now, suddenly, he knows that voice—it is the voice of the Turtle.

He looks and sees a brilliant blue-gold glow piercing the dirty darkness of Thunderclap. Before he can do more than register it, he breaks out of the darkness and into the light like something coming out of an egg, a creature at last being born.

“Light! Let there be light!”

the voice of the Turtle cries, and Roland has to put his hands to his eyes and peek through his fingers to keep from being blinded. Below him is a field of blood—or so he thinks then, a boy of fourteen who has that day done his first real killing. This is the blood that has flowed out of Thunderclap and threatens to drown our side of the world, he thinks, and it will not be for untold years that he will finally rediscover his time inside the ball and put this memory together with Eddie’s dream and tell his compadres, as they sit in the turnpike breakdown lane at the end of the night, that he was wrong, that he had been fooled by the brilliance, coming as it did, so hard on the heels of Thunderclap’s shadows. “It wasn’t blood but roses,” he tells Eddie, Susannah, and Jake.

“Gunslinger, look—look there.”

Yes, there it is, a dusty gray-black pillar rearing on the horizon: the Dark Tower, the place where all Beams, all lines of force, converge. In its spiraling windows he sees fitful electric blue fire and hears the cries of all those pent within; he senses both the strength of the place and the wrongness of it; he can feel how it is spooling error across everything, softening the divisions between the worlds, how its potential for mischief is growing stronger even as disease weakens its truth and coherence, like a body afflicted with cancer; this jutting arm of dark gray stone is the world’s great mystery and last awful riddle.

It is the Tower, the Dark Tower rearing to the sky, and as Roland rushes toward it in the pink storm, he thinks: I will enter you, me and my friends, if ka wills it so; we will enter you and we will conquer the wrongness within you. It may be years yet, but I swear by bird and bear and hare and fish, by all I love that—

But now the sky fills with flaggy clouds which flow out of Thunderclap, and the world begins to go dark; the blue light from the Tower’s rising windows shines like mad eyes, and Roland hears thousands of screaming, wailing voices.

“You will kill everything and everyone you love,”

says the voice of the Turtle, and now it is a cruel voice, cruel and hard.

“and still the Tower will be pent shut against you.”

The gunslinger draws in all his breath and draws together all his force; when he cries his answer to the Turtle, he does so for all the generations of his blood: “NO! IT WILL NOT STAND! WHEN I COME HERE IN MY BODY, IT WILL NOT STAND! I SWEAR ON MY FATHER’S NAME, IT WILL NOT STAND!”

“Then die,”

the voice says, and Roland is hurled at the gray-black stone flank of the Tower, to be smashed there like a bug against a rock. But before that can happen—

6

Cuthbert and Alain stood watching Roland with increasing concern. He had the piece of Maerlyn’s Rainbow raised to his face, cupped in his hands as a man might cup a ceremonial goblet before making a toast. The drawstring bag lay crumpled on the dusty toes of his boots; his cheeks and forehead were washed in a pink glow that neither boy liked. It seemed alive, somehow, and hungry.

They thought, as if with one mind: I can’t see his eyes. Where are his eyes?

“Roland?” Cuthbert repeated. “If we’re going to get out to Hanging Rock before they’re ready for us, you have to put that thing away.”

Roland made no move to lower the ball. He muttered something under his breath; later, when Cuthbert and Alain had a chance to compare notes, they both agreed it had been thunderclap.

“Roland?” Alain asked, stepping forward. As gingerly as a surgeon slipping a scalpel into the body of a patient, he slipped his right hand between the curve of the ball and Roland’s bent, studious face. There was no response. Alain pulled back and turned to Cuthbert.

“Can you touch him?” Bert asked.

Alain shook his head. “Not at all. It’s like