The Wind Through The Keyhole (34 page)

Suddenly it was Ollie Ang’s ruined face peering at me from the ragged hole in the back of Luka’s neck—peering from atop a snake’s body. Shaggy black fur sprang from between the scales on its body as whatever force dying inside lost all control of the shapes it made. In the moment before it collapsed, the remaining blue eye turned yellow and became a wolf’s eye. Then it went down, bearing the unfortunate Steg Luka with it. In the corridor, the dying body of the skin-man shimmered and burned, wavered and changed. I heard the pop of muscles and the grind of shifting bones. A naked foot shot out, turned into a furry paw, then became a man’s foot again. The remains of Ollie Ang shuddered all over, then grew still.

The boy was still screaming.

“Go to yon pallet and lie down,” I said to him. My voice was not quite steady. “Close your eyes and tell yourself it’s over, for now it is.”

“I want you,” Billy sobbed as he went to the pallet. His cheeks were speckled with blood. I was drenched with it, but this he didn’t see. His eyes were already closed. “I want you with me! Please, sai, please!”

“I’ll come to you as soon as I can,” I said. And I did.

* * *

Three of us spent the night on pushed-together pallets in the drunk-and-disorderly cell: Jamie on the left, me on the right, Young Bill Streeter in the middle. The simoom had begun to die, and until late, we heard the sound of revels on the high street as Debaria celebrated the death of the skin-man.

“What will happen to me, sai?” Billy asked just before he finally fell asleep.

“Good things,” I said, and hoped Everlynne of Serenity would not prove me wrong about that.

“Is it dead? Really dead, sai Deschain?”

“Really.”

But on that score I meant to take no chance. After midnight, when the wind was down to a bare breeze and Bill Streeter lay in an exhausted sleep so deep even bad dreams couldn’t reach him, Jamie and I joined Sheriff Peavy on the waste ground behind the jail. There we doused the body of Ollie Ang with coal oil. Before setting match to it, I asked if either of them wanted the wrist-clock as a souvenir. Somehow it hadn’t been broken in the struggle, and the cunning little second hand still turned.

Jamie shook his head.

“Not I,” said Peavy, “for it might be haunted. Go on, Roland. If I may call ye so.”

“And welcome,” I said. I struck the sulphur and dropped it. We stood watching until the remains of Debaria’s skin-man were nothing but black bones. The wrist-clock was a charred lump in the ash.

* * *

The following morning, Jamie and I rounded up a crew of men—more than willing, they were—to go out to the rail line. Once they were there, it was a matter of two hours to put Sma’ Toot back on the double-steel. Travis, the enjie, directed the operation, and I made many friends by telling them I’d arranged for everyone in the crew to eat free at Racey’s at top o’ day and drink free at the Busted Luck that afternoon.

There was to be a town celebration that night, at which Jamie and I would be guests of honor. It was the sort of thing I could happily do without—I was anxious to get home, and as a rule, company doesn’t suit me—but such events are often part of the job. One good thing: there would be women, some of them no doubt pretty. That part I wouldn’t mind, and suspected Jamie wouldn’t, either. He had much to learn about women, and Debaria was as good a place to begin his studies as any.

He and I watched Sma’ Toot puff slowly up to the roundway and then make its way toward us again, pointed in the right direction: toward Gilead.

“Will we stop at Serenity on the way back to town?” Jamie asked. “To ask if they’ll take the boy in?”

“Aye. And the prioress said she had something for me.”

“Do you know what?”

I shook my head.

* * *

Everlynne, that mountain of a woman, swept toward us across the courtyard of Serenity, her arms spread wide. I was almost tempted to run; it was like standing in the path of one of the vast trucks that used to run at the oil-fields near Kuna.

Instead of running us down, she swept us into a vast and bosomy double hug. Her aroma was sweet: a mixture of cinnamon and thyme and baked goods. She kissed Jamie on the cheek—he blushed. Then she kissed me full on the lips. For a moment we were enveloped by her complicated and billowing garments and shaded by her winged silk hood. Then she drew back, her face shining.

“What a service you have done this town! And how we say thankya!”

I smiled. “Sai Everlynne, you are too kind.”

“Not kind enough! You’ll have noonies with us, yes? And meadow wine, although only a little. Ye’ll have more to drink tonight, I have no doubt.” She gave Jamie a roguish side-glance. “But ye’ll want to be careful when the toasts go around; too much drink can make a man less a man later on, and blur memories he might otherwise want to keep.” She paused, then broke into a knowing grin that went oddly with her robes. “Or . . . p’raps not.”

Jamie blushed harder than ever, but said nothing.

“We saw you coming,” Everlynne said, “and there’s someone else who’d like to give you her thanks.”

She moved aside and there stood the tiny Sister of Serenity named Fortuna. She was still swathed in bandagement, but she looked less wraithlike today, and the side of the face we could see was shining with happiness and relief. She stepped forward shyly.

“I can sleep again. And in time, I may even be able to sleep wi’out nightmares.”

She twitched up the skirt of her gray robe, and—to my deep discomfort—fell on her knees before us. “Sister Fortuna, Annie Clay that was, says thank you. So do we all, but this comes from my own heart.”

I took her gently by the shoulders. “Rise, bondswoman. Kneel not before such as us.”

She looked at me with shining eyes, and kissed me on the cheek with the side of her mouth that could still kiss. Then she fled back across the courtyard toward what I assumed was their kitchen. Wonderful smells were already arising from that part of the
haci.

Everlynne watched her go with a fond smile, then turned back to me.

“There’s a boy—” I began.

She nodded. “Bill Streeter. I know his name and his story. We don’t go to town, but sometimes the town comes to us. Friendly birds twitter news in our ears, if you take my meaning.”

“I take it well,” I said.

“Bring him tomorrow, after your heads have shrunk back to their normal size,” said she. “We’re a company of women, but we’re happy to take an orphan boy . . . at least until he grows enough hair on his upper lip to shave. After that, women trouble a boy, and it might not be so well for him to stay here. In the meantime, we can set him about his letters and numbers . . . if he’s trig enough to learn, that is. Would you say he’s trig enough, Roland, son of Gabrielle?”

It was odd to be called from my mother’s side rather than my father’s, but strangely pleasant. “I’d say he’s very trig.”

“That’s well, then. And we’ll find a place for him when it’s time for him to go.”

“A plot and a place,” I said.

Everlynne laughed. “Aye, just so, like in the story of Tim Stoutheart. And now we’ll break bread together, shall we? And with meadow wine we’ll toast the prowess of young men.”

* * *

We ate, we drank, and all in all, it was a very merry meeting. When the sisters began to clear the trestle tables, Prioress Everlynne took me to her private quarters, which consisted of a bedroom and a much larger office where a cat slept in a bar of sun on a huge oaken desk heaped high with papers.

“Few men have been here, Roland,” she said. “One was a fellow you might know. He had a white face and black clothes. Do you know the man of whom I speak?”

“Marten Broadcloak,” I said. The good food in my stomach was suddenly sour with hate. And jealousy, I suppose—nor just on behalf of my father, whom Gabrielle of Arten had decorated with cuckold’s horns. “Did he see her?”

“He demanded to, but I refused and sent him hence. At first he declined to go, but I showed him my knife and told him there were other weapons in Serenity, aye, and women who knew how to use them. One, I said, was a gun. I reminded him he was deep inside the
haci,
and suggested that, unless he could fly, he had better take heed. He did, but before he went he cursed me, and he cursed this place.” She hesitated, stroked the cat, then looked up at me. “There was a time when I thought perhaps the skin-man was his work.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Nor I, but neither of us will ever be entirely sure, will we?” The cat tried to climb into the vast playground of her lap, and Everlynne shooed it away. “Of one thing I
am
sure: he spoke to her anyway, although whether through the window of her cell late at night or only in her troubled dreams, no one will ever know. That secret she took with her into the clearing, poor woman.”

To this I did not reply. When one is amazed and heartsick, it’s usually best to say nothing, for in that state, any word will be the wrong word.

“Your lady-mother quit her retirement with us shortly after we turned this Broadcloak fellow around. She said she had a duty to perform, and much to atone for. She said her son would come here. I asked her how she knew and she said, ‘Because ka is a wheel and it always turns.’ She left this for you.”

Everlynne opened one of the many drawers of her desk and removed an envelope. Written on the front was my name, in a hand I knew well. Only my father would have known it better. That hand had once turned the pages of a fine old book as she read me “The Wind Through the Keyhole.” Aye, and many others. I loved all the stories held in the pages that hand turned, but never so much as I loved the hand itself. Even more, I loved the sound of the voice that told them as the wind blew outside. Those were the days before she was mazed and fell into the sad bitchery that brought her under a gun in another hand. My gun, my hand.

Everlynne rose, smoothing her large apron. “I must go and see how things are advancing in other parts of my little kingdom. I’ll bid you goodbye now, Roland, son of Gabrielle, only asking that you pull the door shut when you go. It will lock itself.”

“You trust me with your things?” I asked.

She laughed, came around the desk, and kissed me again. “Gunslinger, I’d trust you with my life,” said she, and left. She was so tall she had to duck her head when she went through the door.

* * *

I sat looking at Gabrielle Deschain’s last missive for a long time. My heart was full of hate and love and regret—all those things that have haunted me ever since. I considered burning it, unread, but at last I tore the envelope open. Inside was a single sheet of paper. The lines were uneven, and the pigeon-ink in which they had been written was blotted in many places. I believe the woman who wrote those lines was struggling to hold onto a few last shreds of sanity. I’m not sure many would have understood her words, but I did. I’m sure my father would have, as well, but I never showed it to him or told him of it.

The feast I ate was rotten

what I thought was a palace was a dungeon

how it burns Roland

I thought of Wegg, dying of snakebite.

If I go back and tell what I know

what I overheard

Gilead may yet be saved a few years

you
may be saved a few years

your father little that he ever cared for me

The words “little that he ever cared for me” had been crossed out with a series of heavy lines, but I could read them anyway.

* * *

he says I dare not

he says “Bide at Serenity until death finds you.”

he says “If you go back death will find you early.”

he says “Your death will destroy the only one in the world

for whom you care.”

he says “Would you die at your brat’s hand and see

every goodness

every kindness

every loving thought

poured out of him like water from a dipper?

for Gilead that cared for you little

and will die anyway?”

But I must go back. I have prayed on it

and meditated on it

and the voice I hear always speaks the same words:

THIS IS WHAT KA DEMANDS

* * *

There was a little more, words I traced over and over during my wandering years after the disastrous battle at Jericho Hill and the fall of Gilead. I traced them until the paper fell apart and I let the wind take it—the wind that blows through time’s keyhole, ye ken. In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn’t it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.

I stayed in Everlynne’s office until I had myself under control. Then I put my mother’s last word—her dead-letter—in my purse and left, making sure the door locked behind me. I found Jamie and we rode to town. That night there were lights and music and dancing; many good things to eat and plenty of liquor to wash it down with. There were women, too, and that night Silent Jamie left his virginity behind him. The next morning . . .

1

“That night,” Roland said, “there were lights and music and dancing; many good things to eat and plenty of liquor to wash it down with.”

“Booze,” Eddie said, and heaved a seriocomic sigh. “I remember it well.”

It was the first thing any of them had said in a very long time, and it broke the spell that had held them through that long and windy night. They stirred like people awaking from a deep dream. All except Oy, who still lay on his back in front of the fireplace with his short paws splayed and the tip of his tongue lolling comically from the side of his mouth.

Roland nodded. “There were women, too, and that night Silent Jamie left his virginity behind him. The next morning we reboarded Sma’ Toot, and made our way back to Gilead. And so it happened, once upon a bye.”

“Long before my grandfather’s grandfather was born,” Jake said in a low voice.

“Of that I can’t say,” Roland said with a slight smile, and then took a long drink of water. His throat was very dry.

For a moment there was silence among them. Then Eddie said, “Thank you, Roland. That was boss.”

The gunslinger raised an eyebrow.

“He means it was wonderful,” Jake said. “It was, too.”

“I see light around the boards we put over the windows,” Susannah said. “Just a little, but it’s there. You talked down the dark, Roland. I guess you’re not the strong silent Gary Cooper type after all, are you?”

“I don’t know who that is.”

She took his hand and gave it a brief hard squeeze. “Ne’mine, sugar.”

“Wind’s dropped, but it’s still blowing pretty hard,” Jake observed.

“We’ll build up the fire, then sleep,” the gunslinger said. “This afternoon it should be warm enough for us to go out and gather more wood. And tomorrowday . . .”

“Back on the road,” Eddie finished.

“As you say, Eddie.”

Roland put the last of their fuel on the guttering fire, watched as it sprang up again, then lay down and closed his eyes. Seconds later, he was asleep.

Eddie gathered Susannah into his arms, then looked over her shoulder at Jake, who was sitting cross-legged and looking into the fire. “Time to catch forty winks, little trailhand.”

“Don’t call me that. You know I hate it.”

“Okay, buckaroo.”

Jake gave him the finger. Eddie smiled and closed his eyes.

The boy gathered his blanket around him.
My shaddie,
he thought, and smiled. Beyond the walls, the wind still moaned—a voice without a body. Jake thought,
It’s on the other side of the keyhole. And over there, where the wind comes from? All of eternity. And the Dark Tower.

He thought of the boy Roland Deschain had been an unknown number of years ago, lying in a circular bedroom at the top of a stone tower. Tucked up cozy and listening to his mother read the old tales while the wind blew across the dark land. As he drifted, Jake saw the woman’s face and thought it kind as well as beautiful. His own mother had never read him stories. In his plot and place, that had been the housekeeper’s job.

He closed his eyes and saw billy-bumblers on their hind legs, dancing in the moonlight.

He slept.

2

When Roland woke in the early afternoon, the wind was down to a whisper and the room was much brighter. Eddie and Jake were still deeply asleep, but Susannah had awakened, boosted herself into her wheelchair, and removed the boards blocking one of the windows. Now she sat there with her chin propped on her hand, looking out. Roland went to her and put his own hand on her shoulder. Susannah reached up and patted it without turning around.

“Storm’s over, sugar.”

“Yes. Let’s hope we never see another like it.”

“And if we do, let’s hope there’s a shelter as good as this one close by. As for the rest of Gook village . . .” She shook her head.

Roland bent a little to look out. What he saw didn’t surprise him, but it was what Eddie would have called
awesome.
The high street was still there, but it was full of branches and shattered trees. The buildings that had lined it were gone. Only the stone meeting hall remained.

“We were lucky, weren’t we?”

“Luck’s the word those with poor hearts use for ka, Susannah of New York.”

She considered this without speaking. The last breezes of the dying starkblast came through the hole where the window had been and stirred the tight cap of her hair, as if some invisible hand were stroking it. Then she turned to him. “She left Serenity and went back to Gilead—your lady-mother.”

“Yes.”

“Even though the sonofabitch told her she’d die at her own son’s hand?”

“I doubt if he put it just that way, but . . . yes.”

“It’s no wonder she was half-crazy when she wrote that letter.”

Roland was silent, looking out the window at the destruction the storm had brought. Yet they had found shelter. Good shelter from the storm.

She took his three-fingered right hand in both of hers. “What did she say at the end? What were the words you traced over and over until her letter fell apart? Can you tell me?”

He didn’t answer for a long time. Just when she was sure he wouldn’t, he did. In his voice—almost undetectable, but most certainly there—was a tremor Susannah had never heard before. “She wrote in the low speech until the last line. That she wrote in the High, each character beautifully drawn:
I forgive you everything.
And:
Can you forgive me?
”

Susannah felt a single tear, warm and perfectly human, run down her cheek. “And could you, Roland? Did you?”

Still looking out the window, Roland of Gilead—son of Steven and Gabrielle, she of Arten that was—smiled. It broke upon his face like the first glow of sunrise on a rocky landscape. He spoke a single world before going back to his gunna to build them an afternoon breakfast.

The word was
yes.

3

They spent one more night in the meeting hall. There was fellowship and palaver, but no stories. The following morning they gathered their gunna and continued along the Path of the Beam—to Calla Bryn Sturgis, and the borderlands, and Thunderclap, and the Dark Tower beyond. These are things that happened, once upon a bye.