Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,332

go to that drape and yank it aside, but he knows this isn’t the way it’s supposed to go. Even if he tried, he doubts it would do any good; his hand would likely pass right through, like the hand of a ghost.

“Come on,” Eddie says. “Stay with him.”

They go in a cluster that might have been comic under other circumstances. Not under these; here it is a case of three people desperate for the comfort of friends.

Roland stands looking at the bed against the room’s left wall. He looks at it as if hypnotized. Perhaps he is trying to imagine Marten in it with his mother; perhaps he is remembering Susan, with whom he never slept in a proper bed, let alone a canopied luxury such as this. Jake can see the gunslinger’s dim profile in a three-paneled mirror across the room, in an alcove. This triple glass stands in front of a small table the boy recognizes from his mother’s side of his parents’ bedroom; it is a vanity.

The gunslinger shakes himself and comes back from whatever thoughts have seized his mind. On his feet are those terrible boots; in this dim light, they look like the boots of a man who has walked through a creek of blood.

“Mother!”

He takes a step toward the bed and actually bends a little, as if he thinks she might be hiding under it. If she’s been hiding, however, it wasn’t there; the shoes which Jake saw beneath the drape were women’s shoes, and the shape which now stands at the end of the short corridor, just outside the bedroom door, is wearing a dress. Jake can see its hem.

And he sees more than that. Jake understands Roland’s troubled relationship with his mother and father better than Eddie or Susannah ever could, because Jake’s own parents are peculiarly like them: Elmer Chambers is a gunslinger for the Network, and Megan Chambers has a long history of sleeping with sick friends. This is nothing Jake has been told, but he knows, somehow; he has shared khef with his mother and father, and he knows what he knows.

He knows something about Roland, as well: that he saw his mother in the wizard’s glass. It was Gabrielle Deschain, fresh back from her retreat in Debaria, Gabrielle who would confess to her husband the errors of her ways and her thinking after the banquet, who would cry his pardon and beg to be taken back to his bed . . . and, when Steven drowsed after their lovemaking, she would bury the knife in his breast . . . or perhaps only lightly scratch his arm with it, not even waking him. With that knife, it would come to the same either way.

Roland had seen it all in the glass before finally turning the wretched thing over to his father, and Roland had put a stop to it. To save Steven Deschain’s life, Eddie and Susannah would have said, had they seen so far into the business, but Jake has the unhappy wisdom of unhappy children and sees further. To save his mother’s life as well. To give her one last chance to recover her sanity, one last chance to stand at her husband’s side and be true. One last chance to repent of Marten Broadcloak.

Surely she will, surely she must! Roland saw her face that day, how unhappy she was, and surely she must! Surely she cannot have chosen the magician! If he can only make her see. . .

So, unaware that he has once more lapsed into the unwisdom of the very young—Roland cannot grasp that unhappiness and shame are often no match for desire—he has come here to speak to his mother, to beg her to come back to her husband before it’s too late. He has saved her from herself once, he will tell her, but he cannot do it again.

And if she still won’t go, Jake thinks, or tries to brave it out, pretend she doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he’ll give her a choice: leave Gilead with his help—now, tonight—or be clapped in chains tomorrow morning, a traitor so outrageous she will almost certainly be hung as Hax the cook was hung.

“Mother?” he calls, still unaware of the shape standing in the shadows behind him. He takes one further step into the room, and now the shape moves. The shape raises its hands. There is something in its hands. Not a gun, Jake can tell that much, but it