Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,49

thinny. It was as if unreality had been given . . . what? A face? No. The vast and humming silver shimmer ahead of them had no face, was the very antithesis of a face, in fact, but it had a body . . . an aspect . . . a presence.

Yes; that last was best. It had a presence, as the demon which had come to the circle of stones while they were trying to draw Jake had had a presence.

Roland, meanwhile, was rummaging in the depths of his purse. He appeared to dig all the way to the bottom before finding what he wanted: a fistful of bullets. He plucked Susannah’s right hand off the arm of her chair, and put two of the bullets in her palm. Then he took two more and poked them, slug ends first, into his ears. Susannah looked first amazed, then amused, then doubtful. In the end, she followed his example. Almost at once an expression of blissful relief filled her face.

Eddie unshouldered the pack he wore and pulled out the half-full box of .44s that went with Jake’s Ruger. The gunslinger shook his head and held out his hand. There were still four bullets in it, two for Eddie and two for Jake.

“What’s wrong with these?” Eddie shook a couple of shells from the box that had come from behind the hanging files in Elmer Chambers’s desk drawer.

“They’re from your world and they won’t block out the sound. Don’t ask me how I know that; I just do. Try them if you want, but they won’t work.”

Eddie pointed at the bullets Roland was offering. “Those are from our world, too. The gun-shop on Seventh and Forty-ninth. Clements’, wasn’t that the name?”

“These didn’t come from there. These are mine, Eddie, reloaded often but originally brought from the green land. From Gilead.”

“You mean the wets?” Eddie asked incredulously. “The last of the wet shells from the beach? The ones that really got soaked?”

Roland nodded.

“You said those would never fire again! No matter how dry they got! That the powder had been . . . what did you say? ‘Flattened.’ ”

Roland nodded again.

“So why’d you save them? Why bring a bunch of useless bullets all this way?”

“What did I teach you to say after a kill, Eddie? In order to focus your mind?”

“ ‘Father, guide my hands and heart so that no part of the animal will be wasted.’ ”

Roland nodded a third time. Jake took two shells and put them in his ears. Eddie took the last two, but first he tried the ones he’d shaken from the box. They muffled the sound of the thinny, but it was still there, vibrating in the center of his forehead, making his eyes water the way they did when he had a cold, making the bridge of his nose feel like it was going to explode. He picked them out, and put the bigger slugs—the ones from Roland’s ancient revolvers—in their place. Putting bullets in my ears, he thought. Ma would shit. But that didn’t matter. The sound of the thinny was gone—or at least down to a distant drone—and that was what did. When he turned and spoke to Roland, he expected his own voice to sound muffled, the way it did when you were wearing earplugs, but he found he could hear himself pretty well.

“Is there anything you don’t know?” he asked Roland.

“Yes,” Roland said. “Quite a lot.”

“What about Oy?” Jake asked.

“Oy will be fine, I think,” Roland said. “Come on, let’s make some miles before dark.”

7

Oy didn’t seem bothered by the warble of the thinny, but he stuck close to Jake Chambers all that afternoon, looking mistrustfully at the stalled cars which clogged the eastbound lanes of I-70. And yet, Susannah saw, those cars did not clog the highway completely. The congestion eased as the travellers left downtown behind them, but even where the traffic had been heavy, some of the dead vehicles had been pulled to one side or the other; a number had been pushed right off the highway and onto the median strip, which was a concrete divider in the metro area and grass outside of town.

Somebody’s been at work with a wrecker, that’s my guess, Susannah thought. The idea made her happy. No one would have bothered clearing a path down the center of the highway while the plague was still raging, and if someone had done it after—if someone had been around to do it after—that meant