The Dark Tower: Wild Card
RP Chapter I
The Childe Lost
Jaquelin Roke
The mirrored glass of the window sucked at Jaqi and she screamed again as her elbow became sucked into the rippling mirror with her reflection. She watched her own frantic struggle to pull free as the glass drew her in. Elbow, arm, shoulder, her hair, her face. Her final scream became distorted as the mirror sucked her in for good, pulling her, once her face was in, the rest of the way through. The last thing no one saw on the street where no one stood, were her black boots and leggings kicking frantically as she vanished.
Roland scrabbled up the beachhead to the door. He knew infection coming on when he felt it. A dull heat in the wounds in his leg and hand. A painful pressure in his sinuses, a knot in his stomach, none of these good signs. The door stood alone, absent of a frame or a wall.
The Childe Lost
Roland clambered on his hands and knees, feeling nothing but pins and needles below his waist, and put his whole hand on the door. Solid wood. He slid himself along side it, and grimaced in awe as the door vanished. Quiickly he tilted his head to the left, and the door reaappeared into view. He leaned back and drug himself behind it, and nothing was there again, just the beach nearing sunset again. He put his hand out where the door shouldbe, and waved it through empty air.
He slid back to the door front, and took note of the brass doorknob. Gingerly, he grasped the knob with his wounded hand, drew his gun with his left, and opened the door...
Had Jaqi not been carrying her backpack on both shoulders and looped the army issue messenger bag over her shoulder, the fall that came after being sucked through the glass would have caused her to loose every bit of the supplies she had packed. As she tumbled head over heels into what smelled damp, dank and like decaying vegetation, she felt as is she'd been spat out into some sort of jungle forest.. The bread became crushed, the cigarets squashed and a banana smashed open inside the pack. She groped for purchase, to stop her falling down what she hoped was just a hill. She had thought she was being eaten, she was only glad it wasn't a long slick tongue she was sliding down. She felt pain rocket through her thigh and then as she exclaimed at the sensation, something struck her head and she came to a stop at the bottom of the incline, dazed, dizzy and on the verge of unconsciousnes
s. She was unaware of the long spike-like thorn that was imbedded in the meat of her left thigh.
Roland's jaw dropped at what he saw. The view through the door tumbled and spun until he thought he might get sick, then it stopped in a blur, and slowly came into focus. A dim jungle, near the same time of day as where he was, plants, stones, a cloudy sky. He bit his cheek, thinking to himself.
"Dod-a-chock? Dack-a-chooo?" Roland looked behind himself, noting three of the lobster monsters, big as armchairs, creeping up with the tide, glimmering eyestalks watching him. The gunslinger swallowed hard, and rolled himself through the door.
Roland awoke in a body wracked with pain. His skull ached tremendously, his right hand was livid with pain, but at least the fingers were whole. Rather than lacking three fingers, there was a deep gash in his... His palm? The nails of the hand were strangely black, but the more important problem was the large wooden spike in his thigh... No not his thigh, but the girl's. He was wearing something like a suit of clothes, but around his wast was a short skirt that reached almost to his knees. Only whores wore skirts as short as this... There were strange lace up boots on his feet and he could feel twigs and leaves entangled in his... her hair. The girl was here, but at the moment, she was too dazed or addled to do much of anything but swim in dreamy absence.
Roland grasped the wooden thorn from... The leg, and yanked it out. He felt the sharp pain of the barbed thorn, but from a distance, almost muffled somehow. He stood the girl up with some effort, feeling very awkward in the skinny, limber body. He looked back, forth, he turned around and saw the door, saw himself laying there limp, saw the lobsters watching in the distance, saw the tide had already moved closer.
"Who are you?" he asked with his own voice, inside the girls head
She heard his voice in the foggy distance of her daze and thought it was the voice of her father. "Daddy?" She asked, hoping. He felt the hope well up inside of her and she asked again, this time louder as she came forward from her delirium. "Daddy?"
"No, girl. Not daddy. Where is this? Who are you? quickly now!" Roland got the girl up and moving down the hillside. There were some sentinel pines growing further down, odd for a tropical area, but Roland liked trees that could be climbed and could hide them. Something felt terribly wrong about this place.
"What?" She asked. This feeling of being unable to control herself made her feel slimy and occupied. "Who are you? What's going on?" He felt resistance, a panicking sort of resistance. "Daddy's gun!" She exclaimed. "Where's Daddy's gun?" She had no motor function to check her coat pocket herself, but he felt her frantically trying to.
Roland felt her mind reaching for the pocket of her coat and he felt at it with her/his hand. A gun! Swatting aside her annoyingly pannicked mind, he took the gun out. He had her take a deep breath. The gun was like his, the revolver cylinder snapped out. He checked the chambers, loaded with six rounds. He drew one out, cursing in his mind as the girls fingers trembled slightly. He was dissapointed by the bullets. They would not fit his own gun. If he could even get back to his body. As he skidded to the ground at the base of the hill, he glanced behind and saw the doorway had followed him. He stopped, stunned. It was already full dark in his world, and the tide had moved up the beach. It could only have been five minutes! He turned and walked through the door...
And found himself back in his own body, the fever upon him. Hot achy pain all over him, right hand shrieking.
"Girl!" he croaked, but the image through the doorway was no longer his own view, and he couldn't hear her mind anymore.
She had fallen to her knees, her thigh bleeding, her right hand empty. She looked up at the sound of his voice. "Who are you?" She asked. "Where am I?" She sounded frustrated, angry and somewhat fearful.
Roland croaked at her again to no avail, and drug himself back into the door. Once again he batted at her mind, trying to subdue her.
"Who are you? Where is this?" he, somwhat awkwardly, fought back into control of her body, and raised her right hand to point the gun... That was no longer in her hand. He patted at her coat and didn't find it there either.
"Where is the gun? Girl!"
"I don't know!" She cried out. "You had it, you took it from me and stop calling me that!" She didn't want to cry, but this feeling of helplessness, this lost desperate detachment from everything she had known overwhelmed her and Roland felt tears in his... her eyes. Though she wasn't sobbing. He felt too much anger and stress in her to sob. She was strong, but frightened. As if sensing her own impending mental break down, he felt her begin to fight him less. She began to calm and ease, but she was still suspicious and frightened. "My name is Jaquelin... Jaqi... and you took it... I want it back. It was my father's. I have other things you can have... cash... money, I just want it back."
Roland looked behind her and saw himself again, the magnum revolver in his mangled right hand. He gasped inside her mind, and went through the door again. He steeled himself against the pain, focused on the gun, and went back through the door again. He/the girl dropped the gun immediately, as it reappeared clenched by only her ring and pinky finger. He dropped to one knee to pick up the gun, when he heard the sound.
"Ooooooooiiiiiiioooooooooooo?" it sounded like the call of a dove, but it was so... Not loud, but BIG sounding, that Roland was reminded of another beast from his fantasy child book. The Leviathan. But that lived in the sea...
"OoooooIIIIoooooOO?" it was closer. He didn't know how he knew that, the sound came from everywhere, but it was definitely closer.
He ignored the weakness in the girls tired body, making her climb a pine as quietly as he could manage. Her skirt tore on a branch snag and he kept her going up, branch by branch, until they were nearly fifty feet up.
Half way up the tree he felt her fighting him again. "No..." She growled. she had such force of will that she refused to let him have her left hand as he tried to climb up. He had control over everything else, but she stubbornly took what she could. "Not another step till you tell me what this is. Who are you? What was that sound? Where am I?"
Furious, Roland grappled with her.
"You don't know where this is? Neither do I! But if you're only going to mewl and cry, then leave this to--" Roland could finish, because he saw it.
A ribbon, some kind of giant ribbon rippled it's undulating way down the side of the hill, following the girls path. The tree shuddered as the head of it brushed past, and the seemingly endless, mottled flesh colored body was still coming down the hill. With all of his mind he urged the girl to be still and silent.
"Hey fuck you pal-..." She began but she saw the thing as he turned their eyes on it. Her fear before had been the fear of being lost, of being controlled by a man she didn't know... at the sight of this thing, she felt all the fears of her childhood rolled into one. "Beep beep..." She said small inside her own mind and it rang on the ends of a whistled tune of "na-na na-na boo-boo" She and the Gunslinger (she understood he was a Gunslinger but she didn't know how) saw very different things. She saw a clown, skipping merrily down the trail, balloons and streamers following it in it's wake. He reminded her of those pictures she'd seen of John Wayn Gacy and she suddenly didn't want to be anywhere near it. She heeded the Gunslinger's call to be still and silent and she gave over function of her body to him as they watched the thing go by.
After an eternity of raw seconds, the clamor of the thing sliding through the brush passed. Roland looked about from the vantage of the tree, and when his gaze passed the doorway, which was even up here, he was mortified to see the surf had gained another ten feet towards his body, and the lobsters were pressing at the waters edge, eager to get to him. He half slid, half climbed down the tree, scratching the girl up even more, and started sprinting through the trees at an angle from the creatures path. There was a pull he felt, almost like the pull of the Tower, and he followed it as fast as he dared, noise or no noise. He found her feet hitting stone, and noticed he was on an old, weathered path. He followed it out of the trees and down another hillside towards an ominous wall enclosure. With the gun in hand, he cocked the hammer back and crept to the entrance.
A thousand questions hammered in his mind. "What was that thing?" Was the most prevalent of all of them. "I know it looked like a clown but... But... Stop." He was running and her leg ached furiously. She called for him to stop again. "Tell me what's going on!" And when he pulled back the hammer on her father's pistol she shouted at him, "Roland stop!" Though from where she had plucked his name, she had no idea.
Roland was suprised as his control over her body slipped right out of his mental grasp. Summoning some will, and a lot of anger, he railed at her with his own concioussness.
"Damn you, Stop That." he found images flooding to him, nightmare boogeymen, ugly men with knives, a balding man in finely made clothes, licking his lips and making sexual sounds. He shoved the ideas away before they could distract him, and he focused on the feel of the gun in her hand.
"You're LOST." the gunslinger growled. "Let me handle this!"
"Handel what?" She asked. "I don't know what's going on." She was fighting less for control now and more for answers, but thoughts of Rick slipped through and she suddenly found an urgency to hide those things from him. "If you'd just talk to me..."
Noticing her relent, Roland stepped quickly around the entranceway, gun raised, and found himself in a small, stone stadium. There were people in the seats, impossible to identify in the dark. The gun whipped from target to target, but none moved. None made a sound.
The first row was at ground level, and the gunslinger edged up to a couple of people sitting on the bench. He kept the gun leveled. Closest to him was a woman. Her blonde hair stuck out at silly angles from guaze wrapped around her head. Her eyes were covered, as was her mouth. Roland was of the impressionthis woman was alive, but the strange, bandaged lady didn't move. As the girls eyesight adjusted, he saw more than a hundred people smattered around the seats up to about thirty yards up. He turned to the center, and noticed the pool for the first time.
She stopped begging him for answers when they entered the stadium and he laid eyes on the woman covered in bandages. He sensed her worried curiosity replaced by trepidation and unease. "I don't like this place..." She told her strange new companion.
"This is a between place."The gunslinger said absently. He stepped closer to the pool. What looked like water from a distance was clearly not so up close. The stuff was liquid, he could see ripples even from his own footsteps, but the surface had the reflective sheen of polished alluminum. He leaned over the edge, and saw the girl for the first time. Beautiful, young, but with old, haunted eyes. Could have been a relative., Roland thought. Then he noticed the eyes were his own.
He felt her jump when he finally spoke to her. the first phrase she hadn't had to badger out of him. When he looked into the water she saw not herself, it looked like her, but it wasn't at the same time. She saw the Gunslinger's death-bringer's eyes and he felt her retreat for a moment, frightened more of those icy blue orbs than she was of this strange other place she'd fallen into. "What are you?"
He didn't answer immediately. Before he could answer, a horrible, echoing question sounded.
"OoooooeeeeeeOOOOOO?" by the end, the creature sounded infinitely closer. It was obviously rushing towards them. The gunslinger turned, and saw the weird, mumified audience had all turned their heads towards the sound too, frozen still, but watching for the monster. All but one, on the second row, a dark man was still facing him.
"Kill with your heart, Jaqi," the man said.
The far wall of the enclosure shook as the last syllable left his mouth. And then the monster was flowing down the stadium seats, a wild starburst of steel teeth extending from it's vertical mouth.
As she saw the clown which was not at all a clown, he felt the fear jump in her, and suddenly grow into a cold steel knot in the center of her belly. she was raising the pistol now, though she thought the function was being preformed by the Gunslinger who occupied her body. The echo of his old lesson rang inside her mind like it had when her father first taught her how to shoot his old .22. I do not kill with my gun; she who kills with her gun has forgotten the face of her father... I kill with my heart... As she raised the pistol to her eye, her right hand joined it to steady and he felt her body square. There was a strange steely calm that settled around that cold steel ball in her stomach and two shots rang out, aimed for the eyes of the clown as it's gaping maw opened to a frenzy of sharp silver teeth.
Roland didn't even notice control shift away from him. It happened too smoothly. The girl's aim was true though. The gunshots were like bombs going off in the acoustics of the theater, and it was perhaps more for this reason than the bullets that the long boy veered off slightly. Roland knew the impact was coming anyways, and instinctively braced himself, turning away.
The result of this is that he turned his own self to the door, the last thing he saw was a pair of lobsrtosities clambering onto his lifeless body.
The two story tall broadside of the monster smacked into Jaqi at it's bullet train pace, sending her flying end over end like a leaf in the wind into the pool. Viscous, metallic liquid splashed up in a wave, and washed the gunslinger back through the door. The lobsters shrieked as they were tidalwaved by the pool water. They screamed like stabbed cats as their flesh smoked and burned. Steam gouts shot up as the beach surf met the otherworldly wave, and the gunslinger was sloshed sideways down the length of the beach, mercifully clear of the surf, but swallowed by the pools outflow.
The sensation of striking the other worldly water stole the breath from her lungs and when she went under, the last bubble escaped as she tried to catch it. The pistol in her hand hampered her ability to swim as up became down and down became up. She refused to relinquish the gun, but her disorientation was so complete that she had no idea which direction she should swim. The backpack weighted her down. Her boots filled with water and she felt her lungs ache for breath as she began to sink. She drowns Gunslinger...
Wet! Wet was his first thought. He threw himself to a sitting position, and almost keeled over at how easy this action was. Sensations overloaded his brain. The fever was gone, the pain was gone. He looked at his right hand, whose haphazard bandage was gone, and marveled to see the ragged flesh of his wounds knitting itself together before his eyes. In mere seconds, shiny, healthy, new pink flesh had replaced the inflamed, infected holes. No new fingers, but the threat of death was gone. He stood, surprisingly easily, and patted at his bandoliers, but the quicksilver had already slid off them, down his pants to dissappear, smoking, into the sand. His bullets were dry, at least to the touch. Then he looked at the smoldering corpses of the lobster monsters. Then the door, the view through which was just silver and black. He sprinted to the door and reached in. He felt the oily slick feel of the quicksilver. He closed his eyes, demanding of his mind to stay here, and he seized on something, it felt like hair. He gripped it in his whole left hand and pulled with all his strength.
"Turn to me! Turn to the door!" he shouted, yanking on her hair.
She felt something lash at her hair and she thought that she was being eaten by the thing that had sucked her through the mirror window. She screamed, sacrificing the very last of her breath. With the only weapon she had she reached behind her and fired and the Gunslinger felt a hot round of led whiz dangerously close to his ear. A hand met his in her hair and she gripped it with her left hand. Another shot rang out, lower this time. Two inches to the right and the round would have torn a chunk from his neck.
The gunslinger knew what he had to do. No man could make a camel drink, no matter close you forced her to water. She had to come herself. Roland stepped into the door. This time, he didn't strike out at her mind, he embraced it.
"You aim with your eye, Jaqi," her father said. Somewhere inside the pool, cold, dead hands grasped her shoulders, and shook her.
"Open your eyes, Jaqi. Or have you already forgotten me?"
The sound of her father's voice made her forget her urge to breath, the fighting against the thing in her hair. Everything inside her stilled and she looked. He was up side down in her eyes, but it looked like him, long, lean, his hair was longer, but distorted by the ripples of the water... He was standing in a doorway, a dark beach behind him. It wasn't heaven, she knew that much, but he was her father and that was all that mattered. She turned, reaching for him, finger away from the trigger of his pistol. Her left hand grabbed his, paying no mind to the lack of fingers and he felt her trying to pull towards him.
Roland caught Jaqi as she came through the door, taking the gun out of her hand as she did. It was very dark, but the moon and stars were out.
"Did-a-chick?" a distant, high pitched voice asked.
He stepped a little ways back and watched her carefully. A quick snap of his wrist checked the gun, still four bullets loaded, the bullets still no good for his own gun. He licked his lips and set his face, waiting for her to freak out.
She didn't, not yet any way, because as she came through the door, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders, gasping and coughing for breath. She managed not to hamper his inspection of the pistol, but her pack and weight might have proven too much for a man who'd gone days with little to eat and drink.
He set her down and looked back at the lobsters, who were well back into the surf, despite the waterline being mere feet from where the two stood. Perhaps it was the not-unpleasant smell of boiled shellfish in the air. A seagul cawed, passing over the water, and the lobsters waved their claws at it.
"dad-a-chack! Dod-a-chock!"
The gunslinger looked down at himself, without his duster he looked rather ugly, with his unshaven face and sweatstained felt shirt, his jeans slim but baggy on him now. He realized finally that his hair was mysteriously longer than he remembered.
She let him put her aside and she shrugged out of her backpack, the spare bag and coat, finding it too warm and confining as she tried to catch her breath. She leaned over and vomited up a portion of quicksilver that slithered out of her strangely and she was glad to be rid of it. For the time being she did not notice that her savior was not her father. Motes swam in her vision as she finally coughed up the last of the quicksilver and regained her breath. "D-Dad-?" She asked, finally looking up on the man that had seemed so much like her father a moment ago. He saw the truth dawn in her eyes and she drew up away from him, her knees pressed tightly together as if in fear of being occupied in another way. A flush of fear brought color to her cheeks and she closed her hand around the straps of her bags as she prepared to run. "Are you..." She had forgotten his name, but the other one sprang to mind. "The- The Gunslinger?"
"The?" The haggard man was a little to thin and disheveled looking, he noticed it about himself. He had no idea how long the man in black's spell had been on him, but for how hungry and weary he was, it was, scary as it was to admit, likely a long time. He felt older somehow.
He laughed a little, "Yes, that is right. I am The Gunslinger now." he bowed to her, a little sarcastically.
"You don't have to be a dick about it..." She said, standing a little unsteadily, the straps of her bags in hand. "I want my dad's gun back... you've got your own... more than you can shoot by the look of it..." She reached her right hand out towards him tentatively.
Roland looked at her, blankly for a moment, then handed the gun back to her, butt first. Then he looked back at her bags, and spared a more honest smile. "You came prepared. Good." he sat down by his own bag, and drew out his jerky, only to find it moldy. He sighed.
" I might be eating lobster tonight." he mumbled to himself.
"I have food..." She said, gratefully, taking the gun back. She looked in the pocket of her coat and reloaded the two spent cartridges. With protection now he saw her relax a little and a small bud of trust bloomed between them. "But you have to tell me what's going on..." Then a word flickered in her mind. "Palaver... we have to palaver..." She knew the word, but she saw it in black and white, from an old episode of The Rifelmen with Chuck Conners... who strangely this man resembled in some way, but he more reminded him of someone else... a cowboy she had seen in color not long ago.
Roland was finding this girl very strange. Her clothes, where he found her, what she seemed to know already dispite being so alien. It bothered him.
"Palaver? No, maybe when I find the others. We can talk though. Who are you?" he threw the jerky aside, resumed sitting Indian style, and started examining his weapons. No trace of the silver liquid remained. He loaded a single bullet from his bandoliers into each of his guns, and spun the chambers shut.
Seeing him sit, she felt comfortable enough to hunker on her knees and see to her bags. "My name is Jaquelin Roke..." She said beginning. "I'm from Bloomsberg, Pennsylvanian..." She gently placed the pistol next to her and opened her backpack, finding the squashed banana and setting it aside too, along with the squashed loaf of of sliced Life white bread. She pulled out the metal box that contained her father's leather. She pulled it from the box and looked at The Gunslinger, wondering if she should put it on. She looked in one of three small compartments that were looped on the black belt along with the holster. Her father's speed loaders were empty, so she began to load them. "What about you?" She asked as she preformed this task a bit laboriously. "I knew your name earlier and now..." She shrugged. "I guess I forgot..."
"Roland." he said, as he checked his own bag. He had a large, leather saddlebag, worn like a knapsack. He pulled out things one by one. A battered tin set of pots and cups, a waterskin (that he drank at length from,) a smaller bag that his gun tools were in, a pouch of tabacco that he checked and found to still be usable. With uncanny speed he loaded a corn husk cigarette and lit it with a match. Lastly, he removed two black fabric bags. One was obviously filled with some kind of powder, the other looked much older, and the fabric was tattered. Something fairly big and solid, about the
size of one of his pistols was inside.
She saw him light the cigaret and suddenly understood why she'd brought Ricks Winstons. She placed her father's leather aside and looked in her bag. She brought out the three packs. "I guess these are for you..." She said, handing over the white boxes wrapped in plastic. "Roland..."
He set the last thing he pulled out down very carefully and reached for the things she gave him. There was a transparent material on them that was foreign to him. He touched the boxes and they made strange crackling sounds. He squinted at the text on them. It looked similar enough to high speech that he could make it out.
"Wine-Stone... sih... Cigarettes? Hum..." he rubbed at the packaging, confused by the cellophane. "Thankee-Sai..." he continued to rub at the box thoughtfully. "Jaqueline of Pensalvinna."
"Jaqi..." She said. "And most recently I was from New York... I had to move there after my... after my dad died..." She turned back to his leather and stood up on her knees to buckle the belt around her waist. She did so too high and there weren't enough notches in the belt to buckle it. "Do you have a knife? I think I'll feel a lot better with this on than in my pocket..."
Roland puffed on his smoke, held in the two fingers of his right hand, and gestured with it "Too high. Wait to put that on after I start a fire." he put his things back, one at a time except for the tins. The tattered bag he picked up, hesitated, then put back down. He got up, his knees popping loudly, and ventured over the beachline to gather some dry scrubs and wood.
Jaqi watched him as he went. She put the belt aside and made sure her father's gun wouldn't slide on the rocks and ruin the blue finish and rose wood grip. She thought to ask if he was hungry and decided not to, watching him go. Noticing the sound his pistols and leather made as he went, she realized what it was she recognized him from, other than the slight resemblance to her father, who had been younger than this man. It wasn't Chuck Conners as the Rifelmen or Roger Moore as Beau Maverick. It was from Outlaw Josey Wales. It had been the last film her father had taken her to see before he died... was killed. Roland... the Gunslinger reminded her of the man who played Wales, though his name she could not recall at this moment in time. He had been on Rawhide as a young man and one episode of Maverick. He had played a coward then... but there was one distinct difference between Roland and that actor... While an actor could mimic the eyes of a seasoned killer, Roland didn't didn't have to... there was death in his eyes... all over him and she suddenly felt very worried about this strange place and how she had gotten here... To try to ease her nervousness about her new companion, she removed the sliced meat and cheese from her bag and set about making sandwiches with the squashed bread.
A moment later Roland came back with a number of knobby branches and some dry scrubbrush. With his usual efficiency, he set the branches vertical in a cone, like a teepee, then pushed the dry brush through it all. After a few strikes of a flint and steel, and careful blowing, a warm fire was ready. Roland sat down on the beach side of it and picked up the tattered bag, setting it in his lap. He put his duster back on for the moment, and examined his hat that he found in the beach brush. It was nibbled out of and sunbleached to near white, as was one side of his duster. He looked at the hat with a somewhat sour look, but didn't discard of it, instead setting it beside his bag. He looked at Jaqi's food.
"Hmm, Popkins. May I have one?"
As Roland lit the fire she found her lips whispering something she had ether never heard or heard a very long time ago. "Spark-a-dark, where's my sire? Will I lay me? Will I stay me? Bless this camp with fire..." As she wondered from what dark corner of her mind it had come, she almost didn't hear him. "Huh? Oh... sure..." She picked up one and handed it over, there were four in total but she only picked at one. "I'm not very hungry." And handed the other two over. She then began to take off her boots, the laces were loose so they flopped about nosily when she walked the halls of her too professional school. She poured out a bit of quicksilver and began to put them back on, lacing them properly to help keep out the sand. "So... um..." She hugged her knee to her chest as she retied the laces. "Is this like limbo or something? Did I like get squashed by a cab crossing the street and have to figure out my way to Heaven or something?"
Roland took the sandwiches and began eating, irritated that he had to pick some crumbs out of a beard he didn't remember growing. When she asked that question, he glanced sidelong at her. None of that made sense to him, but she was a strange girl from a strange land.
"Im not sure where this is anymore than you. As far as I know, we're on the beach of the southern sea. There's nothing more out that way," he pointed south, "And nothing but desert behind those mountains," he pointed west, "for at least five hundred miles. So I think we will go East." The man in black had been fleeing south-by-south-east for thousands of miles. There was nothing past the sea, could be nothing. Though Roland had no idea exactly which way the Dark Tower was, his heart said east, and that was the only way to go after all. He didn't expect in the way of civilization.
He looked up at the stars for a second, then looked down at his hands, which rested on the bag in his lap.
"What are you doing out here?" She asked. "If there's nothing but desert and mountains and you're obviously going that way-" She pointed a thumb over her shoulder, down the beach to the east. "where are you going?"
"I'm going to someplace that isn't a place, to kill a man who is no man, and to protect the Tower that holds the world in place." he laughed once at that, like a cough, and his hands closed some on the bag, revealing the object inside to be round, or maybe cylindrical. "And you, Jaqueline of Pencil Anna?." he frowned, thinking he said that wrong, "Where are you going? A girl of maybe 15, with a gun and a whore's dress, out in the land of the damned for a stroll..."
"Pennsyl-vania." She corrected. "And this is a school uniform... not a whore's dress..." She said that last bit a little hotly, reminding him of that speed of anger she'd exhibited earlier, but it softened a little as she continued. "And I don't know... I was running away from home... from my uncle... He's..." She trailed off there, not feeling homey enough around this killer to finish her thought. "The gun is my dad's... he was a county deputy... He got shot in the head by a guy who decided he didn't want a ticket for driving while intoxicated..." She picked at her sandwich, what he had called a popkin. "I was looking into a window... which was also a mirror... When I touched it it sucked me in... Then you were in my head, that's all I know..."
Roland willfully ignored the part about the mirror. "Your father was peacekeeper. Peacekeepers often die like that. Not much about men is peaceful. I heard him there, in the between place. He told you true as my father told me." he looked down once more at the bag in his hands and set it beside him, away from her. He finished the second popkin and set the third aside.
"You heard him?" She asked. "What- what did he say?" Her sandwich went ignored and he saw rapt attention in her eyes.
Roland glanced at her again. He grimaced for a split second, thinking she was crazy, or that he, himself, may be.
"I do not aim with my gun. He who aims with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I aim with my eye." Roland looked wistfully at the stars again and closed his eyes. "I do not kill with my gun. He who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart."
Roland opened his eyes and looked at her again, this time actually turning to face her.
"One of the dead men spoke to you as the monster came. He said 'Kill with your heart, Jaqi," and then you shot the beast yourself, without me.
"I thought that was you..." She said softly, unable to look at him under those horrible blue eyes. She looked away, into the fire, feeling as if she'd lost a contest of some sort. "I can see him in you... but I don't know if it's because I want to or not..." she hugged her legs to her chest, feeling cold but not wanting to put her coat on. "I duno if you're some ghost of him I churned up... a cowboy figure mishmashed from all the westerns we watched together... Some Eastwood, John Wayne, James Garner love child or something... You're fuckin' scarey as hell I know that much." She wiped her eye as she said it, wishing to get rid of a wayward tear before it made her seem weak in front of him.
"Hmm, I was wondering if you were a figure of my imagination for a while, as well. I was dying when I found your door. P'raps that's why I found you in a place where only dead men go." Roland relaxed some against the stone he was sitting on, when he felt something stick against his back. He leaned forward and pulled it from behind himself. It was a piece of card paper, withered and frayed but he could still see the red face of death on it. He threw it into the fire.
"What else did you bring?" he asked, changing the subject.
She watch the card curl up then flash out as if it held some strange magic. "I have some more food..." She said and reached into her bag, tossing him an orange. "You look like you need it... I don't know what all I have really... I just started grabbing stuff... things that seemed right..." She pulled her bag towards her and found the envelope with her mother's pearls. She took it and folded it into the breast pocket of her blazer. She then began to take stock of what she had brought. "What's that?" She asked, pointing to the sack that he had been holding a moment ago.
"As long as you brought cartridges for the pistol, everything else is a luxury. The food was excellent, though." He picked up the bag and ran his hand over the surface. "This... I... " Roland's lips pressed together and his eyes looked away. "I keep to remember my friends, from long ago. It's something very old, that my family always had. It's not anything useful, anymore. It's just something... Something that..." he looked at her again, and he suddenly seemed a different person. Someone more human. "Something that seemed right."
He undid the drawstring on the bag and emptied the contents into his lap. It was about ten inches from end to end, and looked like a carved, metal-adorned rhino horn that had been hollowed out. Gold scrollwork and a few gems still remained on the handle in some places.
"It's... pretty..." She said, then turned her head, looking at it. "It's been covered in blood hasn't it? Maybe not literally but... figuratively... There's been a lot of heartache around it..." He seemed less frightening as he looked on the horn. More like a person than a thing...
"My best friend died holding it. It was my father's, and his father's and his father's father's. It's a relic of an ancient king. The first king. That king and his wizard made the world back from the nothing it once was, but now... Now it's nothing again. I saw it happen. But that's not enough. Now my father's wizard, the man who destroyed everything worth anything in this world, isn't satisfied by that. He wants the Dark Tower." Roland put the horn back in the bag, suddenly disgusted at himself for having said all that. He put the black bag back in the saddlebag and took another drink from his waterskin, anything to occupy his mouth.
"Do... do roses have anything to do with it?" She asked, feeling her heart flutter as he told her those things. "Or... a rose... a rose in purple grass?" She found herself looking at the palm of her right hand. The gash was gone, taken away by the quicksilver pool. "I... saw one... when I ran away... it protected me... kept me warm, but I think... I think it might have something to do with all this... like it's the most precious thing in the world... like without it... there would be no world... Is that what your tower is like?"
Roland opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again. He prodded the fire for a second, then sat back some, but resumed his hunched, crosslegged position instead of reclining again.
"No one truly knows the Dark Tower. For many, it is a myth. The center of the world, or the castle of God, or the lynchpin between all the worlds. I've thought about it some, but before today, I never knew the other worlds were anything but stories. Yet, I've seen many wonders most men do not dream, and I do not deny the truth in this experience. The Dark Tower could be none of these things, or all of them." he tilted his head slightly, eyeing her sidelong again.
"I don't know what you speak of, but..." he looked to the fire, and remembered what he saw in Marten's vision. "It does have something to do with roses."
"Then I don't think I'm lost anymore..." She said softly, looking into the fire herself. Her legs were crossed and her backpack was in her lap, her arms draped over it. "I thought I was looking for the rose..." She said. "When I left I thought I had to go back there, that it would keep me safe like it did before... but when I realized where I was, I was at the place with the mirror... and then that brought me here to you... I think... I'm not sure... but my rose and your tower may be the same thing... and that's where I'm going... so I have to go with you..." She looked at him again, in those pale blue killer's eyes. Her bottom lip was pinched between her teeth and he looked like her father again... The fire flickered in front of his face and it went away. She wasn't so scared any more. "Do I have to be afraid of you Gunslinger?" Her hand unwittingly left her pack and settled on her father's naked pistol beside her. "Am I a poker chip in your game?"
Roland found he liked the edge in her voice. It reassured him at last that she was no little girl. It wasn't just that she the first human company he had outside a brothel in years, but that she could be strong, and useful, and enjoyable to be around. He looked at her though, once more as he settled against the rock once more. and, though a glint of his feeling side still showed in his eyes, he looked every bit the killer again. He closed his eyes then, and folded his hands across his belly.
"The answer to both of those questions-- is yes."
She didn't know how she felt about that. "Are you gonna hurt me?" There was a difference in her voice now, a vulnerability that told him she'd been hurt before. He might recall the flicker of the balding man from when he was in her mind. Was it rape she was worried about? Or was it being left behind, being used and discarded? Or was it all the same thing to her? She'd almost trade becoming his gilly (another word plucked from nowhere and deposited in her mind) so long as she didn't get left behind in this barren place. Then the edge returned to her voice and her gray eyes darkened. After all she had killed, or the best she could do to that clown-snake-boy-thing that came for them. "Or should I just let you fuck me now and get it over with?" In that statement there was an icy chill. The expectation of a girl who had learned to hope for nothing more than a quick finish and a puddle on her rather than inside her. The look of a girl who long ago forsook the thought of love and romance for a misconception of what all men wanted. The look of a girl who knew the only good man in the world had been her father, who had left her to be abused by everyone else. Letting The Gunslinger have her now would almost be better than waiting for it... not knowing when he might roll over in the night and decide to make her more than just a girl he'd saved... Or less than a thing placed in his road to soil, ruin and put aside when he was done. Maybe she shouldn't have asked, but if he would admit that she should fear him and she was nothing more than a poker chip in some big game, maybe he would be honest about this too...
The gunslinger opened one of his eyes. "You think too much. I don't do that." he closed his eye again, rethinking some about the girl. She was traumatized, and therefore dangerous, maybe prone to panic and poor judgement. That was unfortunate. "Go to sleep. You'll need it for tomorrow. We'll bend a bit north, and look for water."
She had expect ether a small outburst, perhaps a laugh or a scoff, maybe even to call her a whore after all. She hadn't expected him to dismiss it all completely. She felt foolish now and the awkwardness of a fifteen year old girl slipped back over her, "I... ok..." She said softly. She placed the canned food she had brought in the bottom of her backpack, left out the fruit and placed the meat, cheese and bread in on top the cans. Her father's leather and pistol she left out, just in case. She didn't think he would hurt her, she felt truth in him when he spoke and so far, she didn't think he'd lied to her. She laid down on her coat and used the green messenger bag with the pencils and notebooks as a pillow. She regarded him for a moment, the way the firelight cast gold on his face, the brim of his hat guarding his eyes from the bright flickers. "I'm sorry..." She said suddenly. "I guess I'm just so used to being dicked around..."
Roland sighed. He assumed she meant "dicked around" literally. And that did still make sense after all. "Go to sleep." he said again, folding his arms over his chest. It would be a little while yet before sleep came. The gravity of the events of the day disturbed him. The man in black was far gone now. Only destiny could bring him closer to the Tower now. And he wasn't alone anymore. Others now would share his terrible burden. And one more thing unnerved him. The Prisoner... Didn't Marten say the Prisoner was first?
Maybe she was a prisoner in her own way... but she wasn't the one he needed. The wizard's fortune telling might have been a little... effected by events that the man in black could not detect. After all, the Horn of Eld was in their midst wasn't it?
Jaqi said no more as he bid her to sleep again. She laid her head down, curling up around the lump of leather and pistol against her belly. He wouldn't have left her with it if he intended to outright hurt her and it made her feel better to have it so close. With her mother's pearls over her heart and her father's pistol next to her, she fought a little for sleep, but not much. She watched him for a while though, feeling him watching her. She felt very small in his presence and though she had the pearls and the pistol, she didn't like it. There was something about him... something she couldn't quite pin down. He was like a knight from a fairy tale... or a hero from a Louis L'moure novel... He was real, he was here, but he wasn't quite... real... normal? She didn't know. One thing she was sure of, he had the look of a man who does not surprise easily. The look of a man who had done it all and seen it all so many times before... Maybe even this... though she didn't think she had been a part of it until now... These thoughts and more rattled around in her brain as the exhaustion of the day stole over her and finally put her to sleep.
Dawn came and Roland got up to take a piss. He did so without paying attention, using his hands to fiddle with the wine-stone cigarette box. A piece of the celophane that was gold came loose and he pulled on it, and the top of the plastic came off. He looked at it for a moment, crunching it in his left hand, then put it in his pocket. He opened the top, and had a similar experience examining the silver material inside. It was both metal and paper, and he harrumphed at it and pocketed it too. He drew out one of the cigarettes and was in awe of it. It was rolled in white paper, material worth more than gold, and had some sort of cork or cotton filter on the end. He looked around, almost guilty with the idea of smoking even one of them. But there was twenty in the box, and three boxes. So he lit it. The flavor brought to mind the words "fucking exquisite," a phrase Cuthbert might have used. It was very light though, and he was somewhat dissapointed when he finished it.
She had stirred when he got up, but she had huddled beneath her coat in the middle of the night and shivered, not wanting to get out from under what little warmth it provided. "T-take off th-the f-filter..." She said, trying not to let her teeth chatter together.
Roland looked back at the camp and then back at the cigarettes. He shrugged, and put the box back in his pocket.
"Get up and move around if you're cold. It will be much warmer later, and you will be thankful that we started early." he went out to the beach and formed a little pool of water in the sand. Using his dim reflection, he shaved his beard with a long buck-knife, repeatedly wetting the blade as he sawed at the unruly growth.
She sat up begrudgingly, shivering into her coat as she slipped it on and buttoned it. It was a black wool peacoat and she was thankful for the warmth it provided. She tipped the collar up and ran her hands into her pockets as she waited for the bleariness of sleep to go away. She had hoped it had all been a dream... but at the same time was glad it had not been. She might be trapped here with him, but it was better than facing Rick when he got out of the hospital. She picked up the stob he had used to stoke the fire last night and churned up a last few bits of red coal. She placed her hands over the warmth for a few moments and looked into the rocks, wondering where she might preform the task of early morning necessity.
Roland finally gotthe length of beard off and then ran the blade over his face to trim the stubble. Then he looked closer as the light increased at the gray in his hair and the lines in his face. So Marten did rob him of some time after all. Maybe too much. Roland was angry. He got up and grabbed his bag and picked up his hat. The thing was so beat up he considered throwing it away, but then he sighed and put it on.
"Let's go," he said, and started walking up the beach side.
She was gone, but he could still sense her in the way a rock cat senses the rabbit it's about to cull. "Kinda busy." He heard her voice call. She was no stranger to tasks like these without facilities. Her father after all was a game warden as well as a peacekeeper. She liked Roland's term for that. It sounded more noble than 'deputy'. She stayed hidden where she was for a few moments before emerging from behind the rocks, something white and mottled in her hands. "Do we have time for breakfast?" She asked, watching her feet as she stepped lightly through the rocks. It would be easy to turn an ankle and wind up lame, but she seemed to manage the task quite easily. "I duno how you were starving when these things are all over up there..." She of course was only vaguely aware of his illness before ordeal with the quicksilver. As she approached he saw that the things in her hands were eggs. Not white but gray and dappled with the same color specks as the dark rocks that lined the beach. They looked to be the eggs of the strange gull-like birds that followed them. She looked quite proud of herself for having found them. She was useful, in more ways than the one she had alluded to last night.
Roland sighed, and decided to put some wood on the fire. Eggs sounded good. "When we are walking in the noon sun, don't complain." he said. He added a few branches then put his pot on the coals.
"Have I complained yet?" She asked, handing over the eggs. She saw his mangled right hand and felt his fingers brush hers as he took the eggs. He wore two pistols and she understood how grave an injury that must have been for him. "Have you thought about a twist draw?" She asked, hunkering by the fire to pack what she had left out last night. "Like Wild Bill Hickock..." And then figuring he wouldn't know who that was she added, "He was a lawman before the Civil War... then a scout during the war but made a reputation as a gambler and pistoleer... A lot of stuff about him is made up from dime novels, but what made him famous was he wore his guns backwards... You could do that... hold the pistol with your thumb and ring finger, pull the trigger with your pinky..."
"And have my weapon go flying into my balls immediately afterwards," the gunslinger finished. He waved his hand in dismissal of the idea. "Its possible that I won't be so lucky as to have my other... Companions, come as well prepared as you. An extra gun is no dead weight." he crouched by the fire, looking at her. "Put the holster on. I need to see if it will even fit you."
"It was just an idea..." She said softly, tying off the drawstring of her backpack. "So... there are more people who are supposed to join us?" She asked as she took the holster, remembering what he said last night about it being too high an lowered it several inches. They would still have to cut a notch, but it was closer to where it ought to lay. Much lower and it would slip off her hips, which weren't terribly womanly yet. She held it in place and stood up, testing here her hand lay. She would have just a few inches to lift her hand on the way to drawing, but it could potentially be done in a smooth quick movement... with training. "Do you know who they are or will it be like when you got me? Will you have to face that clown thing again?" And then feeling like the pistol was just about right added, "This look ok?"
Roland walked over to her, and, without warning, cinched the holster tighter and dragged it down another inch on her hips. He grabbed the actual holster part and yanked it back towards her butt about an inch.
Her heart thundered to have him so close, but she stayed stiff, fear squirming in her as he manipulated the belt. He looked very different without the shabby beard. His eyes were wind closed and the hills and valleys of his face made him look very distinguished... in a handsome murderous sort of way. It didn't stop the pounding in her chest and when he jerked her and synched the belt, the sudden motion made her squeak in fear. "That's- That's too tight." She told him with a wince. It frightened her to have him inches from her, his hands on her hips, the smell of Rick's Winston cigaret clouding off of him. "Let go..." She said softly, the panic rising i her chest. He said he wouldn't rape her, but the panic attack was beginning to become too much to hold off. She suddenly found herself pushing away from him, "Let me go!" her father's leather and pistol were at the mercy of the stones as she staggered back, desperately needing to be out of his presence. She nearly toppled over when her boot hung on a jagged rock. She managed to right herself but looked frantic as she looked at him, her chest rising and falling rapidly. He was going to yell at her... like Rick yelled at her when Aunt Shirley was out of the house and she hid from him. He was going to scream at her, call her useless... a burden... nothing but a whore and whores were only good for one thing... being used.
Roland bent at the waist, peering right into her eyes at the same level.
"When I answered 'yes' to your question should you fear me, I didnt explain to you why." His voice was again like scaled down version of Korts commanding tone. Full of stark, bullshit-free seriousness, like a command. It was still a quiet and respectful pitch, where Kort would scream like R. Lee Ermy in Full Metal Jacket. But that movie would debut in another decade after Jaqi left New York.
"My destiny lies in a place no one goes. Where no man dares tread. A place far more fearsome than wear you just were."
That might have reminded her of some phrase she did know, from a Led Zepplin song. The meaning certainly was the same. She should expect no quarter.
Jaqi's voice was less sturdy than she intended it to be, but she managed to call up the words without whimpering them to him. "Walking side by side with death, the devil mocks their every step... You're going to get me killed aren't you?"
You wouldn't be the first." He straightened, then looked back to the fire. He remained like that, looking at the eggs next to thepan and his satchel, and thought again about Marten. He wasnt feeling like Breakfast. He wanted to get going now. Immediately.
"Will..." She swallowed, trying to gather her courage. "Will it be worth it?" She asked, her voice still sounding smaller than he wanted it to. She cleared her throat and tried again. "When I die I mean..."
"I have no say in how you die. If I I can help it, you wont." He said without turning. He had a habit of only looking at people when he was deadly serious. "But here, fear has no use, and worth is where you will it." He walked over to his things and began packing them for travel, again returning the Horn of Eld into his bag. As he packed, crouched on his haunches. "I've not thought of 'worth' the word as you mean it, in a very long time. I do what must be done."
"It might do me no good to be afraid..." She said, still standing very still. "But I'm still afraid... How do I stop it? I know you're one of the good guys but... You still scare the shit out of me... How do I do what must be done if I can't even stand to be near you? You want to make me something I don't know how to be..."
"You think too much" was his reply. He hefted his satchel. He turned and looked East, squinting as he looked for the door. He could pick out the shadows against the risen sun, but no shadow was more like a door than the next. A gust of wind rippled his thick, greasy hair and swept his duster around his knees.
"I know fear. But my will is stronger." Those machine-like eyes of his tilted to her for a moment. "You are the same." He held out the eggs to her. "These will be lunch."
"I'm..." But she looked at the eggs and the large callused hand that held them out to her. She was the same... Her will was stronger than her fear... She took a deep, bracing breath and reached forward, plucking the eggs from his hand with both of hers. "Ok..." She said softly and perhaps there was something a little stronger in her expression than there had been before. She nodded, looking at the eggs she had taken from him. "Ok..." She knelt to her bag and took out some spare socks. She wrapped the eggs so they wouldn't break and placed them in with her clothes for protection. Finished she stood, grabbed her bags and turned toward him again. "Well, Pilgrim... we're burnin' daylight." She didn't try to mimic John Wayn's voice, she was no good at it but her father could do it almost perfectly. She walked away from last nights camp and east, in the direction The Gunslinger intended to take them.
He began walking. There was something ghostly about his gait; even though the sand was fine and deep, he moved gracefully with no bob in his step. Perhaps the only thought in his mind was wishing he had awoken earlier. His body needed the sleep,but his mind really didnt. In a way, his brain slept in the long travels through the wastes between waypoints. Unlike most all humans, his brain had no need to just think all the time. His mind was a unique thing, focused, and uninquisitive. It was both a weakness and a strength.
She on the other hand seemed to do nothing but think in the idle time during their traveling. My will is stronger than my fear... she told herself and tried exploring that as she walked. She tried to keep pace with him, walking higher up on the shore where the sun packed the shelves of shale left behind by the tide. Within an hour of trying to keep up with him, her thighs ached and she began to tell herself that her will was stronger than her pain.
Roland did eventually notice Jaqi's unusual silence, only after he noticed her wheezing to keep up with his brisk stride. He looked to the sun and judged about and hour had passed, as well as about five wheels. He stopped.
"We can stop for a while," he said, pitying her. She wasnt built for long bouts of excercise, and Roland thought of her as a woman like any in Gilead. Mostly frail and not used to hard work. Her clothes were made of very fine material. He assumedshe was very wealthy. He took out the Winstons and looked at them.
"This is the filter?" He said, holding the cigerette pinched between his two right fingers with the filter up.
His sudden stop surprised her and she turned, breathing a little hard. She saw the cigarette and nodded. "Filter..." She said. "T-tear it off..." She dropped the messenger bag with the notebooks, money, smokes and sewing utensils and set the back pack down carefully because of the eggs. She sat down on a convenient rock. "If you're used to... to cowboy smokes..." That was what her father had called them. She made a little motion with her fingers. "If you roll your own..." She took off her coat. It wasn't hot yet, but she was sweating and hadn't wanted to ask about stopping, not wanting to seem weak.
Roland pinched at the cigarette, studying it for a moment. Finally he pinched the cotyon inside the filter between the thumb and pointer nails from his left hand and pulled it out without tearing the cigarette, then tore off half the remaining paper of the filter part and lit the cigarette.
"Better," he said, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke. He looked at her expectantly. He'd let her get more questions out of her system. Maybe her eyes would stop rolling around like a mad deer if she did.
For now she panted with her hands on her knees, catching her breath. She didn't want to ask for water either, so she didn't. Instead she reached in her bag and was glad she found a scrunchie. She put her hair back and tied it in a pony tail. Her unruly black curls still haloed her face, but the bulk of it was off her neck. She wiped sweat off her brow and neck and took one last deep breath as she finally managed to catch her breath. "Don't you get tired?" She asked, seeing the way he just seemed to stand there.
"Yes. But I am used to walking." He thought of the water in his skin and decided it'd be very gross, but maybe drinkable. He brought it out and tested it. Awful, but not toxic.
"Here." He handed it to her. "The water is very old, so do your best to get it down your throat and not over your tongue."
She lifted it and he saw her sneer at the odor. She tilted the skin and took only one drink before dropping it from her lips. "Ugh... ewww..." She shivered and held the skin back out to him. "Is..." She shivered in disgust again. "Isn't there some way to filter salt from seawater?" She asked. "Some old Indian trick you know or something?"
"I don't know of one. But we are going to turn north. There's much brush and swordweed around here. Up there," he pointedto the northern horizon, "are willow trees. There will be fresh water. With a good turn, a river, bad turn, a pond. Either way, we drink." Perhaps forgetting the average person's rest stop was longer than two minutes, he started up the beach hill.
She saw him starting off again and not wanting to be left behind she grabbed her coat and bags and hurried after him. She fumbled with her things as she tried to follow, trying to figure out how to carry the coat now. She ended up draping it over the messenger bag and slung the bag over her shoulder.
As they walked about half a wheel north, Roland peered at the ground. He noticed a trail of muddy soil beneath the grass. Eventually, they came a cross a little natural dam of mud with atrickle of a stream behind it. He followed that a bit further to another hill, and behind that was a legitimate creek he drew water from it, satisfied it moved fast enough to not be brackish, he let her have the skin first.
She'd gotten a little winded again as she trailed behind. How he found it so quickly was beyond her, but she took to skin and drank deeply while they had the chance to refill the skin. The water was crisp and clean and tasted better than anything that came from a New York faucet. It reminded her of the spring water back home in Pennsylvanian. She finally dropped the skin and sighed deeply. "So good." She groaned and held the bag out to him. She never seemed to get much closer than both of their arm lengths.
He drank too, not so eagerly as her. He wasnt fond of stomach cramps. He nodded to her. "You're quiet now... if I offended you, it wasn't my intention to."
"Was that an apology?" She asked, almost smirking. It left her expression and she responded a little more seriously. "It's just that you seem like the kinda guy who doesn't like a lot of random chit chat... I've been trying to think of stuff to ask but..." She shrugged. "I figured you'd rather I just shut my yap and walk..."
He figured chitchat was like yammering.
"I like talking just fine. Maybe it would ease the walking for you. It could stop you from thinking so much, too." He said that deadpan, but gave her a wink, letting her know it was teasing.
Her lips parted in a sort of shocked expression. Roland had brought the joke back around in a very dry and serious way, but it was the wink that surprised her. Her dad did that. It was like a silent little "Love you" no matter where they were or what they were doing. In that wink she swore she saw a glimmer of her father again. It was too familiar and a little more comfortable than she liked at the moment. It just... it surprised her considering how stern he was all the time. She looked down at her feet and tried to regain the armor he'd knocked off of her with that wink. "So you just want to... talk?" She asked, peeking up at him. "I have a thousand questions but... I don't know where to start..." She expected him to become exasperated with her. "I... I feel like I'm going to ask the wrong thing... Like I'm gonna say something stupid and you're gonna get pissed at me..." She looked away from him again, like a dog that was too frightened to look at it's disappointed master. It was an irrational reaction to his little wink, but she wasn't exactly the most rational person in the world these days. Rick had taught her to be afraid, to flinch from comfort. That wink had been comfortable and her silly little irrational fear of his disappointment in her questions was her way of flinching.
"You're a beaten dog," he said, shouldering the skin with his purse. "You wont trust unless the world keeps..." his lips flattened as he searched for the words, "unless the world makes you ashamed of your fear." He started walking again, back around the dirt dune that had damned the water. Still in her line of sight, he stopped, looking straight ahead at something that she couldnt see.
She didn't follow him. Not immediately any way. She was still turned toward the stream with him behind her. "My will is stronger than my fear..." She said softly and tried to believe it. She looked and saw him looking off in the distance. She followed, moving till she was on his left, just out of arms reach. "What is it?" She asked, letting that be the first of those questions she was too afraid to ask. "You've done that a couple times today... Like you see something I can't..."
"Do you see that?" He asked flatly and pointed directly in front of him. Centered directly in the dirt they just walked through, standing freely right across their footprints, was a door across the front, in bold high speech, was two words.
THE PRISONER
"Shit..." She said, stunned. She'd been looking at him and hadn't noticed the door. "Where the hell did it come from?"
Roland placed his hands on his hips. The first of the three.. At first, he hadn't paid any mind to Marten's cryptic words.. But now that he saw this door, there was something wrong. But not just wrong, something was... broken. The first door was static, visible from a distance. This one... followed him?
A sour taste developed in his mouth. He wasnt aware that he just stood there, staring, not blinking.
Since he wasn't saying anything she walked forward and looked at the door. She walked around behind it and paled. "Shit..." She said again and moved around to the front of the door. "It... it disappears..." She moved to the side and leaned from foot to foot, watching the thing vanish and reappear. She smiled. "Cool... So this is how you found me? The Childe Lost... and this one is The Prisoner?" He'd told her more people would join them. "We gotta break a guy out of jail or something?"
When she said jail, he thought of something. Just for a moment, he saw a balding man across a black, shiny table. The feel of cold metal on his back, manacles on his wrist, an then he thought in the next instant of sleeping in a jail cell on a sack next to a farmer's boy. His mind swung on next to that skinchanger, the monster he shot with the silver bullet. His mind keyed onto that monster, eager to reject the first instinctual memory. It was far more disturbing.
"I..." the next word didn't come. It was going to be "dont" and then "think so," but he wouldn't let himself say so. How was he supposed to know? The sour taste strengthened, he could practically smell the coppery, bitter stuff under his tongue.
"What?" She asked, looking at him expectantly. The expression on her face made her feel as if he might not exactly know everything after all. It humanized him, just like that wink had. "Shouldn't we open it?"
"Not yet." He said. Something in him hurt. He had to sit down. He set his purse back down and leaned against the dirt hill. He started to recognize the twist in his heart. He was sad. He shook his head and untied his skin and drank more.
"Jaqi, tell me about Penn.. penn syl.. however you say it." He removed the winstons and looked at the pack in his hands, turning it to and fro.
"Are you ok?" She asked, ignoring his request to tell him about home. She noticed how the door followed him a few paces before he sat and was creeped out just a little. "You're not gonna have a heart attack on me are you?" She looked worried, more than just the fact that if he died out here she was dead too.
Roland scratched at the underside of his jaw. "I'm fine." He looked at her, saw the worry. Looked to the door. "I don't see things like this everyday either. And..." he flipped the box top open and shut, then turned it on it side. "And I'd like to know more about your country. These words, they look familiar."
She frowned, but he seemed ok for now. She moved to the other side of the burm and sat, again just out of arms reach. It was less because she chose to and more because she was used to staying away from people. She put her bags down and sat with her knees against her chest. "It's Pensilvania." She said and then because he had issues with saying it she said. "Pencil, like what you write with and Vania like... well... I don't know what a Vania is... Any way... I'm from Bloomsberg. It's the only village in Pensilvania. We don't have a town hall or a mayor. Dad was a dep- a peace officer." She smiled, preferring his version of the word. "And the local game warden. He took me with him a lot. I know a hell of a lot more about forests and stuff than I do beaches and sea shores... It's in the Appalachian mountains... Crazy winters, but nice mild summers... " She trailed off, not sure exactly what he wanted her to tell him.
He nodded, again looking at her, noticing the quality of her boots and the fabric of her clothes. "Game warden and peace officer." He looked at her belt. "Was he a... reputable peace officer? Is that why he was a gunslinger?"
"My dad was a good man." Jaqi said. "He didn't take bribes and he did his job... The only thing he ever got in trouble for was breaking a man's jaw... He went on a domestic call... A guy was drunk... beating on his wife. By the time Dad got there the woman was missing a tooth and he'd busted one of her ear drums... There was a two year old screaming in a playpen... Dad shouldn't have hit the guy while he was in hand cuffs... but all he got was a three day suspension without pay..." She shrugged.
Roland blinked. She hadnt answered his question, but that was fine. "We remember our fathers at their best. And that's for the best." He handed her the winstons back, pointing to the writing on the side. "What does that say?"
"Surgeon General's Warning. It has been determined that cigarette smoking is harmful to your health." She took the box and took one of the cigarets. "No one listens to those..." She reached in the bag with the notebooks and fished out a match. She proceeded to light the cigaret.
He raised his eyebrows and nodded. It was interesting that such a finely crafted box would have such trivial information on it. It was difficult to lead her into an information dump. But pethaps that was a good thing in the long run. He was only fishing for a distraction, something to dissapate this ugly feeling of wrongness.
"You seem to love and admire your father. His memory serves you better than most living fathers serve their children." She may have not said what became of her father, but past tense meant dead, sure as shit.
He looked at the door, then up to the sun that was passing to the point that the tree that Roland had called a "willow" was shading them from it. The tree did have the long hanging tendrils of a weeping willow, but its base was a gnarled, viney and tentacle-like structure more akin to a cyprus tree.
She offered him the box of cigarets back and inhaled, pausing as the harsh regular flavor wafted into her lungs. She'd smoked before, but it wasn't a habit of hers. She paused, holding in the cough and exhaled, enjoying the swimmy feeling that washed through her. "My mom died when I was little." She said. "He didn't know anything about raising a girl... but he loved me and he did his best..." She batted away a tear she didn't want him to see. "I know it's childish to say it wasn't fair for me to loose both of them but... I'd have rather had more time with him than I did." She didn't remember much about her mother, but if she had to choose, she'd pick her father.
He nodded. Sympathy wasnt his strong suit, and he was starting to feel somewhat uncomfortable. He changed the subject.
"I'm afraid of that door," he said. "Ive never seen these... things before, but your door was no different. It was magic, it was strange, and I felt nothing." He read the words again.
THE PRISONER
"But I have to open it."
"If you weren't afraid of mine, why are you afraid of this one?" She asked, finding his fear all the more humanizing.
He looked at her.
"I don't know." His eyes were as flat and matter of fact as his tone.
"When I go in, my body will stay here. I don't know where it goes, or who is on the other side..." he stood. "You'll see through it. But don't go in." He took one step, then looked at her again, thinking something else needed to be said. But nothing came to mind. He grasped the doorknob.
"Wait!" She stood quickly. Her leg muscles were tired and she had to catch herself before she fell over. She still had the cigaret in her hand, but she ignored it. She moved well within reaching distance without thinking. It frightened her that he was afraid. If someone as frightening as he was was afraid, then she should be down right pissing herself.
Inwardly he was upset that he'd gotten himself to open the door, and she prevented him. Her eyes were buggy and lolling about again. He took a deep breath and sighed it out.
"Fear is strong, and wil is stronger, Jaqi-sai." He looked her in the eyes, pinning her with them like a snake pins a mouse. "But strongest of all is Ka. Even if I don't want to open the door, I don't have a choice."
"I know..." She said. "Or... I think I do... I just..." She frowned, her brow pinching a little. She looked like she didn't know what she wanted to say, then it came out rather deliberately. "Just... be careful... come back..."
"I must do that as well," he said, and actually smiled at her. "Maybe you can fix lunch while you wait." He opened the door.
Through the doorway, a white wall was visible. The view blurred as it shifted back to a book in a pair of white hands. Male hands. The hands were loosely holding the book on a lap wearing blue jeans, seated on a bed. Then the eyes looked to a window. The room appeared small and unadorned. Roland nodded. Didnt look near as bad as the last one.
Jaqi's chest ache with anxiety as he smiled. For a brief moment she saw her father on that last morning he'd left to go to work. She rushed to his side as he crumpled to a heap in front of the door. "Roland!" She begged, but she knew he wouldn't respond. On her knees, closer than she had been since he'd brought her through the door, she hesitated before putting her hand on his chest. She sighed a deep sigh of relief as she felt the thumping of his heart under the thin fabric of his worn no color shirt.
The Dark Tower WC Chapter 2
Stumble!