The Waste Lands

He threw the jawbone into the fire.

17

FOR A MOMENT IT only lay there, a white relic bent in a ghostly half-grin. Then it suddenly blazed red, washing the clearing with dazzling scarlet light. Eddie and Susa

The bone began to change. Not to melt, but to change. The teeth which leaned out of it like gravestones began to draw together in clumps.

The mild curve of the upper arc straightened, then snubbed down at the tip.

Eddie’s hands fell into his lap and he stared at the bone which was no longer a bone with gape-jawed wonder. It was now the color of burning steel. The teeth had become three inverted V’s, the middle one larger than those on the ends. And suddenly Eddie saw what it wanted to become, just as he had seen the slingshot in the wood of the stump.

He thought it was a key.

You must remember the shape, he thought feverishly. You must, you must.

His eyes traced it desperately-three V’s, the one in the center larger and deeper than the two on the end. Three notches… and the one closest the end had a squiggle, the shallow shape of a lower-cases…

Then the shape in the flames changed again. The bone which had become something like a key drew inward, concentrating itself into bright, overlapping petals and folds as dark and velvety as a moonless summer midnight. For a moment Eddie saw a rose-a triumphant rose that might have bloomed in the dawn of this world’s first day, a thing of depthless, timeless beauty. His eye saw, and his heart was opened. It was as if all love and life had suddenly risen from Roland’s dead artifact; it was there in the fire, burning out in triumph and some wonderful, inchoate defiance, declaring that despair was a mirage and death a dream.

The rose! he thought incoherently. First the key, then the rose! Behold! Behold the opening of the way to the Tower!

There was a thick cough from the fire. A fan of sparks twisted outwards. Susa

The bone was gone.

The key was gone.

The rose was gone.

Remember, he thought. Remember the rose… and remember the shape of the key.

Susa

18

“WHY DID YOU DO it?” Susa

Fifteen minutes had gone by. The fire had been allowed to burn low; the scattered embers had either been stamped out or had gone out on their own. Eddie sat with his arms about his wife: Susa

Of the jawbone itself there was no sign-not even a splinter.

“I did it because a voice spoke in my mind and told me I must,” Roland said. “It was the voice of my father; of all my fathers. When one hears such a voice, not to obey-and at once-is unthinkable. So I was taught. As to what it was, I can’t say… not now, at least. I only know that the bone has spoken its final word. I have carried it all this way to hear it.”

Or to see it, Eddie thought, and again: Remember. Remember the rose. And remember the shape of the key.

“It almost flash-fried us!” She sounded both tired and exasperated.

Roland shook his head. “I think it was more like the sort of firework the barons used to sometimes shoot into the sky at their year-end parties. Bright and startling, but not dangerous.”

Eddie had an idea. “The doubling in your mind, Roland-is it gone? Did it leave when the bone exploded, or whatever it did?”

He was almost convinced that it had; in the movies he’d seen, such rough shock-therapy almost always worked. But Roland shook his head.

Susa

Roland nodded. “I think so, yes. If I’m right, I fear for Jake. Wherever he is, whenever he is, I fear for him.”

“What do you mean?” Eddie asked.

Roland got up, went to his roll of hides, and began to spread them out. “Enough stories and excitement for one night. It’s time to sleep. In the morning we’ll follow the bear’s backtrail and see if we can find the portal he was set to guard. I’ll tell you what I know and what I believe has happened-what I believe is happening still-along the way.”

With that he wrapped himself in an old blanket and a new deerskin, rolled away from the fire, and would say no more.

Eddie and Susa

It was, he thought, fine to be young and in love. Even in the graveyard which this world had become, it was fine.

Enjoy it while you can, he thought, because there is more death ahead. We have come to a stream of blood. That it will lead us to a river of the same stuff I have no doubt. And, further along, to an ocean. In this world the graves yawn and none of the dead rest easy.

As dawn began to come up in the east, he closed his eyes. Slept briefly. And dreamed of Jake.

19

EDDIE ALSO DREAMED-DREAMED he was back in New York, walking along Second Avenue with a book in his hand.

In this dream it was spring. The air was warm, the city was blooming, and homesickness sobbed within him like a muscle with a fishhook caught deep within it. Enjoy this dream, and make it go on as long as you can, he thought. Savor it… because this is as close to New York as you’re going to get. You can’t go home, Eddie. That part’s done.

He looked down at the book and was utterly unsurprised to find it was You Can’t Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe. Stamped into the dark red cover were three shapes; key, rose, and door. He stopped for a moment, flipped the book open, and read the first line. The man in black fled across the desert, Wolfe had written, and the gunslinger followed.

Eddie closed it and walked on. It was about nine in the morning, he judged, maybe nine-thirty, and traffic on Second Avenue was light. Taxis honked and wove their way from lane to lane with spring sunshine twinkling off their windshields and bright yellow paintjobs. A bum on the corner of Second and Fifty-second asked him for a handout and Eddie tossed the book with the red cover into his lap. He observed (also without surprise) that the bum was Enrico Balazar. He was sitting cross-legged in front of a magic shop. HOUSE OF CARDS, the sign in the window read, and the display inside showed a tower which had been built of Tarot cards. Standing on top was a model of King Kong. There was a tiny radar-dish growing out of the great ape’s head.