Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,307

white death. The wind swirled its surface in prankish whirlpools. The thinny buzzed, and above where it lay, the surface of the smoke was stained a mystic shade of palest green.

Then, at long last, John Farson’s men screamed no more.

We killed them, Roland thought with a kind of sick and fascinated horror. Then: No, not we. I. I killed them.

How long he might have stayed there Roland didn’t know—perhaps until the rising smoke engulfed him as well, but then Cuthbert, who had begun to climb again, called down three words from above him; called down in a tone of surprise and dismay.

“Roland! The moon!”

Roland looked up, startled, and saw that the sky had darkened to a velvety purple. His friend was outlined against it and looking east, his face stained fever-orange with the light of the rising moon.

Yes, orange, the thinny buzzed inside his head. Laughed inside his head. Orange as ’twas when it rose on the night you came out here to see me and count me. Orange like a fire. Orange like a bonfire.

How can it be almost dark? he cried inside himself, but he knew—yes, he knew very well. Time had slipped back together, that was all, like layers of ground embracing once more after the argument of an earthquake.

Twilight had come.

Moonrise had come.

Terror struck Roland like a closed fist aimed at the heart, making him jerk backward on the small ledge he’d found. He groped for the horn-shaped outcrop above him, but that act of rebalancing was far away; most of him was inside the pink storm again, before he had been snatched away and shown half the cosmos. Perhaps the wizard’s glass had only shown him what stood worlds far away in order to keep from showing him what might soon befall so close to home.

I’d turn around if I thought her life was in any real danger, he had said. In a second.

And if the ball knew that? If it couldn’t lie, might it not misdirect? Might it not take him away and show him a dark land, a darker tower? And it had shown him something else, something that recurred to him only now: a scrawny man in farmer’s overalls who had said . . . what? Not quite what he’d thought, not what he had been used to hearing all his life; not Life for you and life for your crop, but . . .

“Death,” he whispered to the stones surrounding him. “Death for you, life for my crop. Charyou tree. That’s what he said, Charyou tree. Come, Reap.”

Orange, gunslinger, a cracked old voice laughed inside his head. The voice of the Cöos. The color of bonfires. Charyou tree, fin de año, these are the old ways of which only the stuffy-guys with their red hands remain . . . until tonight. Tonight the old ways are refreshed, as the old ways must be, from time to time. Charyou tree, you damned babby, charyou tree: tonight you pay for my sweet Ermot. Tonight you pay for all. Come, Reap.

“Climb!” he screamed, reaching up and slapping Alain’s behind. “Climb, climb! For your father’s sake, climb!”

“Roland, what—?” Alain’s voice was dazed, but he did begin to climb, going from handhold to handhold and rattling small pebbles down into Roland’s upturned face. Squinting against their fall, Roland reached and swatted Al’s bottom again, driving him like a horse.

“Climb, gods damn you!” he cried. “It mayn’t be too late, even now!”

But he knew better. Demon Moon had risen, he had seen its orange light shining on Cuthbert’s face like delirium, and he knew better. In his head the lunatic buzz of the thinny, that rotting sore eating through the flesh of reality, joined with the lunatic laughter of the witch, and he knew better.

Death for you, life for the crop. Charyou tree.

Oh, Susan—

23

Nothing was clear to Susan until she saw the man with the long red hair and the straw hat which did not quite obscure his lamb-slaughterer’s eyes; the man with the cornshucks in his hands. He was the first, just a farmer (she had glimpsed him in the Lower Market, she thought; had even nodded to him, as countryfolk do, and he back to her), standing by himself not far from the place where Silk Ranch Road and the Great Road intersected, standing in the light of the rising moon. Until they came upon him, nothing was clear; after he hurled his bundle of cornshucks at her as she passed, standing in the slowly