Gunslinger

The gunslinger only looked at him.

“No,” Jake said after a moment “I guess you’re not.”

“I want you to stay right here while I’m gone. And if you feel strange – fu

Hate and disgust crossed Jake’s face, mixed with bewilderment. “I couldn’t. I . . . I just couldn’t”

“You can. You may have to. Especially after midday. It’s important. Dig?”

“Why do you have to go away?” Jake burst out.

“I just do.”

The gunslinger caught another fascinating glimpse of the steel that lay under the boy’s surface, as enigmatic as the story he had told about coming from a city where the buildings were so tall they actually scraped the sky.

“All right,” Jake said.

The gunslinger laid the jawbone carefully on the ground next to the ruins of the fire, where it gri

The gunslinger opened his tobacco poke and pawed through it, pushing the dry strands of leaf aside until he came to a minuscule object wrapped in a fragment of white paper. He hefted it in his hand, looking absently up at the sky. Then he unwrapped it and held the contents – a tiny white pill with edges that had been much worn with traveling – in his hand.

Jake looked at it curiously. “What’s that?”

The gunslinger uttered a short laugh. “The philosopher's stone,” he said. “The story that Cort used to tell us was that the Old Gods pissed over the desert and made mescaline.”

Jake only looked puzzled.

“A drug,” the gunslinger said. “But not one that puts you to sleep. One that wakes you up all the way for a little while.”

“Like LSD,” the boy agreed instantly and then looked puzzled.

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know,” Jake said. “It just popped out I think it came from… you know, before.”

The gunslinger nodded, but he was doubtful. He had never heard of mescaline referred to as LSD, not even in Marten’s old books.

“Will it hurt you?” Jake asked.

“It never has,” the gunslinger said, conscious of the evasion.

“I don’t like it”

“Never mind.”

The gunslinger squatted in front of the waterskin, took a mouthful, and swallowed the pill. As always, he felt an immediate reaction in his mouth; it seemed overloaded with saliva. He sat down before the dead fire.

“When does something happen to you?” Jake asked.

“Not for a little while. Be quiet.”

So Jake was quiet, watching with open suspicion as the gunslinger went calmly about the ritual of cleaning his guns.

He reholstered them and said, “Your shirt, Jake. Take it off and give it to me.”

Jake pulled his faded shirt reluctantly over his head and gave it to the gunslinger.

The gunslinger produced a needle that had been threaded into the side-seam of his jeans, and thread from an empty cartridge-loop in his gunbelt He began to sew up a long rip in one of the sleeves of the boy’s shirt. As he finished and handed the shirt back, he felt the mesc begi

“I have to go,” he said, getting up.

The boy half rose, his face a shadow of concern, and then he settled back. “Be careful,” he said. “Please.”

“Remember the jawbone,” the gunslinger said. He put his hand on Jake’s head as he went by and touseled the corn-colored hair. The gesture startled him into a short laugh. Jake watched after him with a troubled smile until he was gone into the willow jungle.

The gunslinger walked deliberately toward the circle of stones, pausing once to get a cool drink from the spring. He could see his own reflection in a tiny pool edged with moss and lilypads, and he looked at himself for a moment, as fascinated as Narcissus. The mind-reaction was begi

The drug often had disturbed him: his ego was too strong (or perhaps just too simple) to enjoy being eclipsed and peeled back, made a target for more sensitive emotions

– they tickled at him like a cat’s whiskers. But this time he felt fairly calm. That was good.

He stepped into the clearing and walked straight into the circle. He stood, letting his mind run free. Yes, it was coming harder now, faster. The grass screamed green at him; it seemed that if he bent over and rubbed his hands in it he would stand up with green paint all over his fingers and palms. He resisted a puckish urge to try the experiment

But there was no voice from the oracle. No sexual stirring.

He went to the altar, stood beside it for a moment coherent thought was now almost impossible. His teeth felt strange in his head. The world held too much light. He climbed up on the altar and lay back. His mind was becoming a jungle full of strange thought-plants that he had never seen or suspected before, a willow-jungle that had grown up around a mescaline spring. The sky was water and he hung suspended over it The thought gave him a vertigo that seemed faraway and unimportant.

A line of old poetry occurred to him, not a nursery verse now, no; his mother had feared the drugs and the necessity of them (as she had feared Cort and the necessity for this beater of boys); this verse came from one of the Dens to the north of the desert, where men still lived among the machines that usually didn’t work… and which sometimes ate the men when they did. The lines played again and again, reminding him (in an unco

Beyond the reach of human range

A drop of hell, a touch of strange…

The trees which overhung the altar contained faces. He watched them with abstracted fascination: Here was a dragon, green and twitching. Here a wood-nymph with beckoning branch arms. Here a living skull overgrown with slime. Faces. Faces.

The grasses of the clearing suddenly whipped and bent

I come.

I come.

Vague stirrings within his flesh. How far I have come,

he thought From couching with Susan in sweet hay to this. She pressed over him, a body made of the wind, a breast