Everything's Eventual

This is a slightly Kafka-esque story about an interrogation roomin the South American version of Hell. In such stories, the fellowbeing interrogated usually ends up spilling everything and thenbeing killed (or losing his mind). I wanted to write one with ahappier ending, however unreal that might be. And here it is.

The Little Sistersof Eluria

If there's a magnum opus in my life, it's probably the yet unfinishedseven-volume series about Roland Deschain of Gilead and hissearch for the Dark Tower which serves as the hub of existence. In1996 or 1997, Ralph Vicinanza (my sometime agent and foreignrights man of business) asked me if I'd like to contribute a storyabout Roland's younger years for a whopper fantasy anthologyRobert Silverberg was putting together. I tentatively agreed.Nothing came, though, and nothing came. I was about to give upwhen I woke one morning thinking about The Talisman, and the great pavilion where Jack Sawyer first glimpses the Queen of the Territories. In the shower (where I invariably do my best imagining—I think it's a womb thing), I started to visualize that tent in ruins . . . but still filled with whispering women. Ghosts. Maybe vampires. Little Sisters. Nurses of death instead of life. Composing a story from that central image was amazingly difficult. I had lots of space to move around in—Silverberg wanted short novels, not short stories—but it was still hard. These days, everything about Roland and his friends wants to be not just long but sort of epic. One thing this story has going for it is that you don't need to have read the Dark Tower novels to enjoy it. And by the way, for you Tower junkies, DT 5 is now finished, all nine hundred pages of it. It's called Wolves of the Calla.

[Author's Note: The Dark Tower books begin with Roland of Gilead, the last gunslinger in an exhausted world that has "moved on," pursuing a magician in a black robe. Roland has been chasing Walter for a very long time. In the first book of the cycle, he finally catches up. This story, however, takes place while Roland is still casting about for Walter's trail. S. K.]

I. FULL EARTH

. THE EMPTY TOWN

                                 . THE BELLS. THE DEAD BOY. THE OVERTURNED WAGON.

THE GREEN FOLK.

On a day in Full Earth so hot that it seemed to suck the breath from his chest before his body could use it, Roland of Gilead came to the gates of a village in the Desatoya Mountains. He was travelling alone by then, and would soon be travelling afoot, as well. This whole last week he had been hoping for a horse doctor, but guessed such a fellow would do him no good now, even if this town had one. His mount, a two-year-old roan, was pretty well done for.

   The town gates, still decorated with flowers from some festival or other, stood open and welcoming, but the silence beyond them was all wrong. The gunslinger heard no clip-clop of horses, no rumble of wagon wheels, no merchants' huckstering cries from the marketplace. The only sounds were the low hum of crickets (some sort of bug, at any rate; they were a bit more tuneful than crickets, at that), a queer wooden knocking sound, and the faint, dreamy tinkle of small bells.

   Also, the flowers twined through the wrought-iron staves of the ornamental gate were long dead.