The Gunslinger

by Stephen King

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

The gunslinger had been struck by a momentary dizziness, a kind of yawing sensation that made the entire world seem ephemeral, almost a thing that could be looked through.

He sat down and allowed himself a short pull from the waterbag. He thought of that momentary dizziness earlier in the day, that sense of being almost untethered from the world, and wondered what it might have meant. Why should that dizziness make him think of his horn and the last of his old friends, both lost so long ago at Jericho Hill? He still had the guns—his father’s guns—and surely they were more important than horns . . . or even friends. Weren’t they?

“Spark-a-dark, where’s my sire? Will I lay me? Will I stay me? Bless this camp with fire.” It was strange how some of childhood’s words and ways fell at the wayside and were left behind, while others clamped tight and rode for life, growing the heavier to carry as time passed.

“My dear little brothers and sisters in Christ.” It was a haunting line. For a moment the gunslinger felt mixed feelings of nostalgia and fear, stitched in with an eerie feeling of déjà vu, and he thought: I dreamed this. Or I was here before. If so, when? Not Mejis. No, not there. He shook the feeling off.

Could he hold up a hand, tell them he had spent a thousand years learning this trick and others, tell them of the guns and the blood that had blessed them? Not with his mouth. But his hands could speak their own tale.

He was a romantic, he knew it, and he guarded the knowledge jealously. It was a secret he had shared with only a few over the years. The girl named Susan, the girl from Mejis, had been one of them.

The world had moved on. The gunslinger shouldered his gunna and moved on with it.

Not for the first time the gunslinger tasted the smooth, loden taste of soul-sickness.

I am the last of that green and warm-hued world. And for all his nostalgia, he felt no self-pity. The world had moved on mercilessly, but his legs were still strong, and the man in black was closer.

It was not like him to think so much of the past.

It occurred to him later that this was when he began to love the boy—which was, of course, what the man in black must have planned all along. Was there ever a trap to match the trap of love?

He rolled it between fingers that would all too soon be gone and looked absently up at the sky.

Yet you have no idea how close you stand to the Tower now, as you resume your quest. Worlds turn about your head.” “What do you mean, resume? I never left off.”

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.

This is not the beginning but the beginning’s end. You’d do well to remember that . . . but you never do.” “I don’t understand.” “No. You don’t. You never did. You never will. You have no imagination. You’re blind that way.”