“I don’t understand any of this,” Susannah said worriedly.

“I think,” Roland said, “that I’m just beginning to.”

He threw more wood on the fire, sending thick sheaves of red sparks spiralling up into the dark sky, and then settled back between them. “I’ll tell you a story that’s true,” he said, “and then I’ll tell you a story that isn’t true... but should be.

“I bought a mule in Pricetown, and when I finally got to Tull, the last town before the desert, it was still fresh...”

14

SO THE GUNSLINGER EMBARKED on the most recent part of his long tale. Eddie had heard isolated fragments of the story, but he listened in utter fascination, as did Susannah, for whom it was completely new. He told them about the bar with the endless game of Watch Me going on in the corner, the piano player named Sheb, the woman named Allie with the scar on her forehead... and about Nort, the weed-eater who had died and then been brought back to some sort of tenebrous life by the man in black. He told them about Sylvia Pittston, that avatar of religious insanity, and about the final apocalyptic slaughter, in which he, Roland the Gunslinger, had killed every man, woman, and child in town.

“Holy crispy crap!” Eddie said in a low, shaky voice. “Now I know why you were so low on shells, Roland.”

“Be quiet!” Susannah snapped. “Let him finish!”

Roland went on, telling his story as stolidly as he had crossed the desert after passing the hut of the last Dweller, a young man whose wild, strawberry-colored hair had reached almost to his waist. He told them about how his mule had finally died. He even told them about how the Dweller’s pet bird, Zoltan, had eaten the mule’s eyes.

He told them about the long desert days and the short desert nights which had come next, and how he had followed the cool remains of Walter’s campfires, and how he had come at last, reeling and dying of dehydration, to the way station.

“It was empty. It had been empty, I think, since the days when yonder great bear was still a newly made thing. I stayed a night and pushed on. That’s what happened... but now I’ll tell you another story.”

“The one that isn’t true but should be?” Susannah asked.

Roland nodded. “In this made-up story—this fable—a gunslinger named Roland met a boy named Jake at the way station. This boy was from your world, from your city of New York, and from a when someplace between Eddie’s 1987 and Odetta Holmes’s 1963.”

Eddie was leaning forward eagerly. “Is there a door in this story, Roland? A door marked THE BOY, or something like that?”

Roland shook his head. “The boy’s doorway was death. He was on his way to school when a man—a man I believed to be Walter—pushed him into the street, where he was run over by a car. He heard this man say something like ‘Get out of the way, let me through, I’m a priest.’ Jake saw this man—just for an instant—and then he was in my world.”