Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower, #4)

by Stephen King

So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.

Time was a face on the water, and this time it was the face of her father.

And as the barrel of Roland’s gun opened in his eye like the entrance to a tunnel or a mineshaft, Jonas remembered what the brat had said to him in the dusty dooryard of that burned-out ranch: The soul of a man such as you can never leave the west.

“No! It will not stand!” he cried in a voice that made gooseflesh ripple the skin of the other two boys; that was not Roland’s voice at all, at least not as he was now; that was the voice of a man. “No,” Alain said much later, when Roland slept and he and Cuthbert sat up before the campfire. “That was the voice of a king.”

How infinite was love, twining in and out of hope and memory like a braid with three strong strands, so much the Bright Tower of every human’s life and soul.

At the end of her life she was aware of heat but not pain. She had time to consider his eyes, eyes of that blue which is the color of the sky at first light of morning. She had time to think of him on the Drop, riding Rusher flat-out with his black hair flying back from his temples and his neckerchief rippling; to see him laughing with an ease and freedom he would never find again in the long life which stretched out for him beyond hers, and it was his laughter she took with her as she went out, fleeing the light and heat into the silky, consoling dark, calling to him over and over as she went, calling bird and bear and hare and fish.