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 he’s gone somewhere far away.”

“We have to wake him up.” Cuthbert’s voice was dust-dry and shaky at the edges.

“Vannay told us that if you wake a person from a deep hypnotic trance too suddenly, he can go mad,” Alain said. “Remember? I don’t know if I dare—”