The Waste Lands Read Free Page B

Manhattan in the mid-1970s, how is it that Roland still remembers him?
    Despite this confusing and possibly dangerous development, the test of the doors—and the drawing of the three—ends in success for Roland. Eddie Dean accepts his place in Roland’s world because he has fallen in love with The Lady of the Shadows. Detta Walker and Odetta Holmes, the other two of Roland’s three, are driven together into one personality combining elements of both Detta and Odetta when the gunslinger is finally able to force the two personalities to acknowledge each other. This hybrid is able to accept and return Eddie’s love. Odetta Susannah Holmes and Detta Susannah Walker thus become a new woman, a third woman: Susannah Dean.
    Jack Mort dies beneath the wheels of the same subway—that fabled A-train—which took Odetta’s legs fifteen or sixteen years before. No great loss there.
    And for the first time in untold years, Roland of Gilead is no longer alone in his quest for the Dark Tower. Cuthbert and Alain, his lost companions of yore, have been replaced by Eddie and Susannah . . . but the gunslinger has a way of being bad medicine for his friends. Very bad medicine, indeed.
    The Waste Lands takes up the story of these three pilgrims on the face of Mid-World some months after the confrontation by the final door on the beach. They have moved some fair way inland. The period of rest is ending, and a period of learning has begun. Susannah is learning to shoot . . . Eddie is learning to carve . . . and the gunslinger is learning how it feels to lose one’s mind, a piece at a time.
    (One further note: My New York readers will know that I have taken certain geographical liberties with the city. For these I hope I may be forgiven.)
     
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow in the morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust .
    —T. S. ELIOT
“The Waste Land”
     
     
If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk
Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents
Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents
In the dock’s harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to balk
All hope of greenness? ’tis a brute must walk
Pashing their life out, with a brute’s intents.
    —ROBERT BROWNING
“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
     
     
“What river is it?” enquired Millicent idly.
“It’s only a stream. Well, perhaps a little more than
that. It’s called the Waste.”
“Is it really?”
“Yes,” said Winifred, “it is. ”
    —ROBERT AICKMAN
“Hand in Glove”

BOOK ONE JAKE
    FEAR IN A HANDFUL OF DUST

I
    BEAR AND BONE

1
    IT WAS HER THIRD time with live ammunition . . . and her first time on the draw from the holster Roland had rigged for her.
    They had plenty of live rounds; Roland had brought back better than three hundred from the world where Eddie and Susannah Dean had lived their lives up until the time of their drawing. But having ammunition in plenty did not mean it could be wasted; quite the contrary, in fact. The gods frowned upon wastrels. Roland had been raised, first by his father and then by Cort, his greatest teacher, to believe this, and so he still believed. Those gods might not punish at once, but sooner or later the penance would have to be paid . . . and the longer the wait, the greater the weight.
    At first there had been no need for live ammunition, anyway. Roland had been shooting for more years than the beautiful brown-skinned woman in the wheelchair would believe. He had corrected her at first simply by watching her aim and dry-fire at the targets he had set up. She learned fast. Both she and Eddie learned fast.
    As he had suspected, both were born gunslingers.
    Today