The Dark Tower III - The Waste Lands by Stephen King

Author:Stephen King
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi

42

THEY EMERGED INTO WET air and slackening hail like babies being born. Eddie was the midwife, as the gunslinger had told him he must be. He was sprawled forward on his chest and belly, his arms out of sight in the doorway, his hands clutching fistfuls of Roland’s hair.

“Suze! Help me!”

She wriggled forward, reached through, and groped a hand under Roland’s chin. He came up to her with his head cocked backward and his lips parted in a snarl of pain and effort.

Eddie felt a tearing sensation and one of his hands came free holding a thick lock of the gunslinger’s gray-streaked hair. “He’s slipping!”

“This motherfucker... ain’t... nowhere!” Susannah gasped, and gave a terrific wrench, as if she meant to snap Roland’s neck.

Two small hands shot out of the doorway in the center of the circle and clutched one of the edges. Freed of Jake’s weight, Roland got an elbow up, and a moment later he was boosting himself out. As he did it, Eddie grabbed Jake’s wrists and hauled him up.

Jake rolled onto his back and lay there, panting.

Eddie turned to Susannah, took her in his arms, and began to rain kisses on her forehead, cheeks, and neck. He was laughing and crying at the same time. She clung to him, breathing hard... but there was a small, satisfied smile on her lips and one hand slipped over Eddie’s wet hair in slow, contented strokes.

From below them came a cauldron of black sounds: squeals, grunts, thuds, crashes.

Roland crawled away from the hole with his head down. His hair stood up in a wild wad. Threads of blood trickled down his cheeks. “Shut it!” he gasped at Eddie. “Shut it, for your father’s sake!”

Eddie got the door moving, and those vast, unseen hinges did the rest. The door fell with a gigantic, toneless bang, cutting off all sound from below. As Eddie watched, the lines that had marked its edges faded back to smudged marks in the dirt. The doorknob lost its dimension and was once more only a circle he’d drawn with a stick. Where the keyhole had been there was only a crude shape with a chunk of wood sticking out of it, like the hilt of a sword from a stone.

Susannah went to Jake and pulled him gently to a sitting position. “You all right, sugar?”

He looked at her dazedly. “Yes, I think so. Where is he? The gunslinger? There’s something I have to ask him.”

“I’m here, Jake,” Roland said. He got to his feet, drunk-walked over to Jake, and hunkered beside him. He touched the boy’s smooth cheek almost unbelievingly.

“You won’t let me drop this time?”

“No,” Roland said. “Not this time, not ever again.” But in the deepest darkness of his heart, he thought of the Tower and wondered.

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