"We'll get up early and see if there's anything down there worth taking. Then we'll go."
"All right." The boy paused and then said, "I'm glad I didn't kill you when you were sleeping. I had a pitchfork and I thought about doing it. But I didn't, and now I won't have to be afraid to go to sleep."
"What would you be afraid of?"
The boy looked at him ominously. "Spooks. Of him coming back."
"The man in black," the gunslinger said. Not a question.
"Yes. Is he a bad man?"
"I guess that depends on where you're standing," the gunslinger said absently. He got up and pitched his cigarette out onto the hardpan. "I'm going to sleep."
The boy looked at him timidly. "Can I sleep in the stable with you?"
"Of course."
The gunslinger stood on the steps, looking up, and the boy joined him. Old Star was up there, and Old Mother. It seemed to the gunslinger that if he closed his eyes he would be able to hear the croaking of the first spring peepers, smell the green, almost-summer smell of the court lawns after their first cutting (and hear, perhaps, the indolent click of wooden balls as the ladies of the East Wing, attired only in their shifts as dusk glimmered toward dark, played at Points), could almost see Cuthbert and Jamie as they came through the break in the hedges, calling for him to ride out with them . . .
It was not like him to think so much of the past.
He turned back and picked up the lamp. "Let's go to sleep," he said.
They crossed to the stable together.
VI
The next morning he explored the cellar.
Jake was right; it smelled bad. It had a wet, swampy stench that made the gunslinger feel nauseous and a little lightheaded after the antiseptic odorlessness of the desert and the stable. The cellar smelled of cabbages and turnips and potatoes with long, sightless eyes gone to everlasting rot. The ladder, however, seemed quite sturdy, and he climbed down.
The floor was earthen, and his head almost touched the overhead beams. Down here spiders still lived, disturbingly big ones with mottled gray bodies. Many were muties, the true thread long-lost. Some had eyes on stalks, some had what might have been as many as sixteen legs.
The gunslinger peered around and waited for his nighteyes.
"You all right?" Jake called down nervously.
"Yes." He focused on the corner. "There are cans. Wait."
He went carefully to the corner, ducking his head. There was an old box with one side folded down. The cans were vegetables--green beans, yellow beans--and three cans of corned beef.
He scooped up an armload and went back to the ladder. He climbed halfway up and handed them to Jake, who knelt to receive them. He went back for more.
It was on the third trip that he heard the groaning in the foundations.
He turned, looked, and felt a kind of dreamy terror wash over him, a feeling both languid and repellent.
The foundation was composed of huge sandstone blocks that had probably been evenly cornered when the way station was new, but which were now at every zigzag, drunken angle. It made the wall look as if it were inscribed with strange, meandering hieroglyphics. And from the joining of two of these abstruse cracks, a thin spill of sand was running, as if something on the other side was digging itself through with slobbering, agonized intensity.
The groaning rose and fell, becoming louder, until the whole cellar was full of the sound, an abstract noise of ripping pain and dreadful effort.
"Come up!" Jake screamed. "Oh Jesus, mister, come up!"
"Go away," the gunslinger said calmly. "Wait outside. If I don't come up by the time you count to two . . . no, three hundred, get the hell out."
"Come up!" Jake screamed again.
The gunslinger didn't answer. He pulled leather with his right hand.
There was a hole as big as a coin in the wall now. He could hear, through the curtain of his own terror, Jake's pattering feet as the boy ran. Then the spill of sand stopped. The groaning ceased, but there was a sound of steady, labored breathing.
"Who are you?" the gunslinger asked.
No answer.
And in the High Speech, his voice filling with the old thunder of command, Roland demanded: "Who are you, Demon? Speak, if you would speak. My time is short; my patience shorter."
"Go slow," a dragging, clotted voice said from within the wall. And the gunslinger felt the dream-like terror deepen and grow almost solid. It was the voice of Alice, the woman he had stayed with in the town of Tull. But she was dead; he had seen her go down himself, a bullet hole between her eyes. Fathoms seemed to swim by his eyes, descending. "Go slow past the Drawers, gunslinger. Watch for the taheen. While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket."
"What do you mean? Speak on!"
But the breathing was gone.
The gunslinger stood for a moment, frozen, and then one of the huge spiders dropped on his arm and scrambled frantically up to his shoulder. With an involuntary grunt he brushed it away and got his feet moving. He did not want to do the next thing, but custom was strict, inviolable. Take the dead from the dead, the old proverb said; only a corpse may speak true prophecy. He went to the hole and punched at it. The sandstone crumbled easily at the edges, and with a bare stiffening of muscles, he thrust his hand through the wall.
And touched something solid, with raised and fretted knobs. He drew it out. He held a jawbone, rotted at the far hinge. The teeth leaned this way and that.
"All right," he said softly. He thrust it rudely into his back pocket and went back up the ladder, carrying the last cans awkwardly. He left the trapdoor open. The sun would get in and kill the mutie spiders.
Jake was halfway across the stable yard, cowering on the cracked, rubbly hardpan. He screamed when he saw the gunslinger, backed away a step or two, and then ran to him, crying.
"I thought it got you, that it got you. I thought--"
"It didn't. Nothing got me." He held the boy to him, feeling his face, hot against his chest, and his hands, dry against his ribcage. He could feel the rapid beating of the boy's heart. It occurred to him later that this was when he began to love the boy--which was, of course, what the man in black must have planned all along. Was there ever a trap to match the trap of love?
"Was it a demon?" The voice was muffled.
"Yes. A speaking-demon. We don't have to go back there anymore. Come on. Let's shake a mile."
They went to the stable, and the gunslinger made a rough pack from the blanket he'd slept under--it was hot and prickly, but there was nothing else. That done, he filled the waterbags from the pump.
"You carry one of the waterbags," the gunslinger said. "Wear it around your shoulders--see?"
"Yes." The boy looked up at him worshipfully, the look quickly masked. He slung one of the bags over his shoulders.
"Is it too heavy?"
"No. It's fine."
"Tell me the truth, now. I can't carry you if you get a sunstroke."
"I won't have a sunstroke. I'll be okay."
The gunslinger nodded.
"We're going to the mountains, aren't we?"
"Yes."
They walked out into the steady smash of the sun. Jake, his head as high as the swing of the gunslinger's elbows, walked to his right and a little ahead, the rawhide-wrapped ends of the waterbag hanging nearly to his shins. The gunslinger had crisscrossed two more waterbags across his shoulders and carried the sling of food in his armpit, his left arm holding it against his body. In his right hand was his pack, his poke, and the rest of his gunna.
They passed through the far gate of the way station and found the blurred ruts of the stage track again. They had walked perhaps fifteen minutes when Jake turned around and waved at the two buildings. They seemed to huddle in the titanic space of the desert.
"Goodbye!" Jake cried. "Goodbye!" Then he turned back to the gunslinger, looking troubled. "I feel like something's watching us."