The remains of the wood he had carried had turned to something like stone, and the man in black was a laughing skeleton in a rotting black robe, more bones in this place of bones, one more skull in this golgotha.

  Or is it really you? he thought. I have my doubts, Walter o’ Dim . . . I have my doubts, Marten-that-was.

  He stood up and looked around. Then, with a sudden quick gesture, he reached toward the remains of his companion of the night before (if it was indeed the remains of Walter), a night that had somehow lasted ten years. He broke off the grinning jawbone and jammed it carelessly into the left hip pocket of his jeans—a fitting enough replacement for the one lost under the mountains.

  “How many lies did you tell me?” he asked. Many, he was sure, but what made them good lies was that they had been mixed with the truth.

  The Tower. Somewhere ahead, it waited for him—the nexus of Time, the nexus of Size.

  He began west again, his back set against the sunrise, heading toward the ocean, realizing that a great passage of his life had come and gone. “I loved you, Jake,” he said aloud.

  The stiffness wore out of his body and he began to walk more rapidly. By that evening he had come to the end of the land. He sat on a beach which stretched left and right forever, deserted. The waves beat endlessly against the shore, pounding and pounding. The setting sun painted the water in a wide strip of fool’s gold.

  There the gunslinger sat, his face turned up into the fading light. He dreamed his dreams and watched as the stars came out; his purpose did not flag, nor did his heart falter; his hair, finer now and gray at the temples, blew around his head, and the sandalwood-inlaid guns of his father lay smooth and deadly against his hips, and he was lonely but did not find loneliness in any way a bad or ignoble thing. The dark came down and the world moved on. The gunslinger waited for the time of the drawing and dreamed his long dreams of the Dark Tower, to which he would someday come at dusk and approach, winding his horn, to do some unimaginable final battle.

  * For a fuller discussion of the Bullshit Factor, see On Writing, published by Scribner’s in 2000.

  * Those bound by destiny.

  * One example of this will probably serve for all. In the previously issued text of The Gunslinger, Farson is the name of a town. In later volumes, it somehow became the name of a man: the rebel John Farson, who engineers the fall of Gilead, the city-state where Roland spends his childhood.

  Contents

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  INTRODUCTION On Being Nineteen (and a Few Other Things)

  Foreword

  The GUNSLINGER

  CHAPTER ONE The Gunslinger

  The WAY STATION

  CHAPTER TWO The Way Station

  The ORACLE AND THE MOUNTAINS

  CHAPTER THREE The Oracle and the Mountains

  The SLOW MUTANTS

  CHAPTER FOUR The Slow Mutants

  The GUNSLINGER AND THE MAN IN BLACK

  CHAPTER FIVE The Gunslinger and the Man in Black

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

 

 

  Stephen King, The Dark Tower I: The Gun Slinger

 

 

  Thank you for reading books on GrayCity.Net
Share this book with friends