The Dark Tower

Stanley looked perhaps thirty-five, but he could have been older; his face had the carefree smoothness Susannah associated with certain mental defects. Ted and Dinky both had pimples, but Stanley had none. Roland put his hands on the fellow’s forearms and looked earnestly at him. At first the gunslinger’s eyes met nothing but the masses of dark, curly hair on Stanley’s bowed head.

Dinky started to speak. Ted silenced him with a gesture.

“Will’ee not look me in the face?” Roland asked. He spoke with a gentleness Susannah had rarely heard in his voice. “Will’ee not, before you go, Stanley, son of Stanley? Sheemie that was?”

Susannah felt her mouth drop open. Beside her, Eddie grunted like a man who has been punched. She thought, But Roland’s old…so old! Which means that if this is the tavern-boy he knew in Mejis…the one with the donkey and the pink sombrera hat…then he must also be…

The man raised his face slowly. Tears were streaming from his eyes.

“Good old Will Dearborn,” he said. His voice was hoarse, and jigged up and down through the registers as a voice will do when it has lain long unused. “I’m so sorry, sai. Were you to pull your gun and shoot me, I’d understand. So I would.”

“Why do’ee say so, Sheemie?” Roland asked in that same gentle voice.

Stanley’s tears flowed faster. “You saved my life. Arthur and Richard, too, but mostly you, good old Will Dearborn who was really Roland of Gilead. And I let her die! Her that you loved! And I loved her, too!”

The man’s face twisted in agony and he tried to pull away from Roland. Yet Roland held him.

“None of that was your fault, Sheemie.”

“I should have died for her!” he cried. “I should have died in her place! I’m stupid! Foolish as they said!” He slapped himself across the face, first one way and then the other, leaving red weals. Before he could do it again, Roland seized the hand and forced it down to his side again.

“ ’Twas Rhea did the harm,” Roland said.

Stanley — who had been Sheemie an eon ago — looked into Roland’s face, searching his eyes.

“Aye,” Roland said, nodding. “ ’Twas the Cöos…and me, as well. I should have stayed with her. If anyone was blameless in the business, Sheemie—Stanley—it was you.”

“Do you say so, gunslinger? Truey-true?”

Roland nodded. “We’ll palaver all you would about this, if there’s time, and about those old days, but not now. No time now. You have to go with your friends, and I must stay with mine.”

Sheemie looked at him a moment longer, and yes, Susannah could now see the boy who had bustled about a long-ago tavern called the Travellers’ Rest, picking up empty beer schooners and dropping them into the wash-barrel which stood beneath the two-headed elk’s head that was known as The Romp, avoiding the occasional shove from Coral Thorin or the even more ill-natured kicks that were apt to come from an aging whore called Pettie the Trotter. She could see the boy who had almost been killed for spilling liquor on the boots of a hardcase named Roy Depape. It had been Cuthbert who had saved Sheemie from death that night…but it had been Roland, known to the townsfolk as Will Dearborn, who had saved them all.

Sheemie put his arms around Roland’s neck and hugged him tight. Roland smiled and stroked his curly hair with his disfigured right hand. A loud, honking sob escaped Sheemie’s throat. Susannah could see the tears in the corners of the gunslinger’s eyes.

“Aye,” Roland said, speaking in a voice almost too low to hear. “I always knew you were special; Bert and Alain did, too. And here we find each other, well-met further down the path. We’re well-met, Sheemie son of Stanley. So we are. So we are.”

Chapter VI: The Master of Blue Heaven

One

Pimli Prentiss, the Algul Siento Master, was in the bathroom when Finli (known in some quarters as The Weasel) knocked at the door. Prentiss was examining his complexion by the unforgiving light of the fluorescent bar over the washbasin. In the magnifying mirror, his skin looked like a grayish, crater-pocked plain, not much different from the surface of the wastelands stretching in every direction around the Algul. The sore on which he was currently concentrating looked like an erupting volcano.

“Who be for me?” Prentiss bawled, although he had a pretty good idea.

“Finli o’ Tego!”

“Walk in, Finli!” Never taking his eyes from the mirror. His fingers, closing in on the sides of the infected pimple, looked huge. They applied pressure.

Finli crossed Prentiss’s office and stood in the bathroom door. He had to bend slightly in order to look in. He stood over seven feet, very tall even for a taheen.