The Gunslinger

by Stephen King

You will not see what you do not look for, maggot, Cort would have said. Open the gobs the gods gave ya, will ya not?

“Spark-a-dark, where’s my sire? Will I lay me? Will I stay me? Bless this camp with fire.”

The stars were as indifferent to this as they were to wars, crucifixions, resurrections. This also would have pleased him.

the mule was at the end of its endurance, only living because it was a habit.

Lend me your wings, bird. I’ll spread them and fly on the thermals.

“Do you believe in an afterlife?” the gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped three ears of hot corn onto his plate. Brown nodded. “I think this is it.”

“A nice story.” “Oh yes, thankee-sai. This be a nice place.”

Because, if given a knife and a hand in which to hold it, the mind would eventually eat itself. Not because it wanted to; because it did not want to.

He was like something out of a fairytale or a myth, a fabulous, dangerous creature. Could he grant wishes? She thought the answer was yes, and that she would have hers. He would stay awhile. That was wish enough for a luckless scarred bitch such as she.

When he left she turned to the sink, feeling the hot, warm drift of her grateful tears. How long since anyone had thanked her? Someone who mattered?

“Who was she?” And then, answering her own question: “A girl you loved.” “Leave it, Allie.” “I can make you strong—” “No,” he said. “You can’t do that.”

“Who are you, Demon? Speak, if you would speak. My time is short; my patience shorter.”

someone always has to have his or her neck popped, as you so quaintly put it. The people demand it. Sooner or later, if there isn’t a turncoat, the people make one.”

lovely Susan Delgado, waiting for him in an abandoned drover’s hut on the Drop with her hair spilled down her back and over her shoulders.

What shall I call you, then? Star-slut? Whore of the Winds?

Have your way with me, bitch.

Why? Silly question. When a boy, wounded in body or spirit, called that question out to Cort, that ancient, scarred battle-engine whose job it was to teach the sons of gunslingers the beginning of what they had to know, Cort would answer: Why is a crooked letter and can’t be made straight . . . never mind why, just get up, pus-head! Get up! The day’s young!

They were revered ones, the feared ones, the guardians, but they seemed like hostlers in that crowd of cavaliers with their soft women . . .

“Aye. Gabrielle-of-the-Waters, daughter of Alan, wife of Steven, mother of Roland.” The gunslinger spread his hands apart in a mocking little gesture that seemed to say Here I am, and what of it? Then he dropped them into his lap again.

Bad times are on horseback.”

You cannot friend a hawk, they said, unless you are half a hawk yourself, alone and only a sojourner in the land, without friends or the need of them. The hawk pays no coinage to love or morals.

“Let the word and the legend go before you. There are those who will carry both.” His eyes flicked over the gunslinger’s shoulder. “Fools, perchance. Let your shadow grow hair on its face. Let it become dark.” He smiled grotesquely. “Given time, words may even enchant an enchanter.

he would flee the boy’s face and try to bury it in cunts and killing, only to enter one final room and find it looking at him over a candle flame.

He fled the light and the knowledge the light implied, and so came back to himself. Even so do the rest of us; even so the best of us.

Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities?

Could it be that everything we can perceive, from the microscopic virus to the distant Horsehead Nebula, is contained in one blade of grass that may have existed for only a single season in an alien time-flow? What if that blade should be cut off by a scythe? When it begins to die, would the rot seep into our own universe and our own lives, turning everything yellow and brown and desiccated? Perhaps it’s already begun to happen. We say the world has moved on; maybe we really mean that it has begun to dry up.

“I ought to kill you. You need killing.” His hands had dropped to the worn butts of his guns. “Those do not open doors, gunslinger; those only close them forever.”