King, Stephen- The Dark Tower 1- The Gunslinger (Illustrated)

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Dark Dark

Tower:Tower:

The The

GUNSLINGERGUNSLINGER

______________________________________

STEPHEN KINGSTEPHEN KING

This special limited edition is signed by author Stephen King.

This edition is limited to 500 copies.

This is copy 382382

ED FERMAN

who took a chance on these stories,

one by one.

THETHE

GUNSLINGERGUNSLINGER

The man in black fled across the desert, and the

gunslinger followed.

The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge,

standing to the sky for what might have been parsecs in all

directions. White; blinding; waterless; without feature save for

the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched

themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought

sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone

sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way

through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway and

coaches had followed it. The world had moved on since then.

The world had emptied.

The gunslinger walked stolidly, not hurrying, not loafing. A

hide waterbag was slung around his middle like a bloated

sausage. It was almost full. He had progressed through the khef

over many years, and had reached the fifth level. At the

seventh or eighth, he would not have been thirsty; he could

have watched own body dehydrate with clinical, detached

attention, watering its crevices and dark inner hollows only

when his logic told him it must be done. He was not seventh or

eighth. He was fifth. So he was thirsty, although he had no

particular urge to drink. In a vague way, all this pleased him. It

was romantic.

Below the waterbag were his guns, finely weighted to his

hand. The two belts crisscrossed above his crotch. The holsters

were oiled too deeply for even this Philistine sun to crack. The

stocks of the guns were sandalwood, yellow and finely grained.

The holsters were tied down with rawhide cord, and they

swung heavily against his hips. The brass casings of the

cartridges looped into the gun belts twinkled and flashed and

heliographed in the sun. The leather made subtle creaking

noises. The guns themselves made no noise. They had spilled

blood. There was no need to make noise in the sterility of the

desert

His clothes were the no-color of rain or dust. His shirt was

open at the throat, with a rawhide thong dangling loosely in

hand-punched eyelets. His pants were seam-stretched

dungarees.

He breasted a gently rising dune (although there was no sand

here; the desert was hardpan, and even the harsh winds that

blew when dark came raised only an aggravating harsh dust

like scouring powder) and saw the kicked remains of a tiny

campfire on the lee side, the side which the sun would quit

earliest. Small signs like this, once more affirming the man in

black’s essential humanity, never failed to please him. His lips

stretched in the pitted, flaked remains of his face. He squatted.

He had burned the devil-grass, of course. It was the only thing

out here that would burn. It burned with a greasy, flat light,

and it burned slow. Border dwellers had told him that devils

lived even in the flames. They burned it but would not look

into the light. They said the devils hypnotized, beckoned,

would eventually draw the one who looked into the fires. And

the next man foolish enough to look into the fire might see

you.

The burned grass was crisscrossed in the now-familiar

ideographic pattern, and crumbled to gray senselessness before

the gunslinger’s prodding hand. There was nothing

in the remains but a charred scrap of bacon, which he ate

thoughtfully. It had always been this way. The gunslinger had

followed the man in black across the desert for two months

now, across the endless, screamingly monotonous purgatorial

wastes, and had yet to find spoor other than the hygienic sterile

ideographs of the man in black’s campfires. He had not found

a can, a bottle, or a waterbag (the gunslinger had left four of

those behind, like dead snake-skins).

— Perhaps the campfires are a message, spelled out letter by

letter. Take a powder. Or, the end draweth nigh. Or maybe

even, Eat at Joe’s. It didn’t matter. He had no understanding of

the ideograms, if they were ideograms. And the remains were

as cold as all the others. He knew he was closer, but did not

know how he knew. That didn’t matter either. He stood up,

brushing his hands.

No other trace; the wind, razor-sharp, had of course filed away

even what scant tracks the hardpan held. He had never even

been able to find his quarry’s droppings. Nothing. Only these

cold campfires along the ancient highway and the relentless

range-finder in his own head.

He sat down and allowed himself a short pull from the

waterbag. He scanned the desert, looked up at the sun, which

was now sliding down the far quadrant of the sky. He got up,

removed his gloves from his belt, and began to pull devil-grass

for his own fire, which he laid over the ashes the man in black

had left. He found the irony, like the romance of his thirst,

bitterly appealing.

He did not use the flint and steel until the remains of the day

were only the fugitive heat in the ground beneath him and a

sardonic orange line on the monochrome western horizon. He

watched the south patiently, toward the mountains, not hoping

or expecting to see the thin straight line of smoke from a new

campfire, but merely watching because that was a part of it.

There was nothing. He was

close, but only relatively so. Not close enough to see smoke at

dusk.

He struck his spark to the dry, shredded grass and lay down

upwind, letting the dreamsmoke blow out toward the waste.

The wind, except for occasional gyrating dust devils, was

constant.

Above, the stars were unwinking, also constant. Suns and

worlds by the million. Dizzying constellations, cold fire in

every primary hue. As he watched, the sky washed from violet

to ebony. A meteor etched a brief, spectacular arc and winked

out. The fire threw strange shadows as the devil-grass burned

its slow way down into new patterns —not ideograms but a

straightforward crisscross vaguely frightening in its own no-

nonsense surety. He had laid his fuel in a pattern that was not

artful but only workable. It spoke of blacks and whites. It

spoke of a man who might straighten bad pictures in strange

hotel rooms. The fire burned its steady, slow flame, and

phantoms danced in its incandescent core. The gunslinger did

not see. He slept. The two patterns, art and craft, were welded

together. The wind moaned. Every now and then a perverse

downdraft would make the smoke whirl and eddy toward him,

and sporadic whiffs of the smoke touched him. They built

dreams in the same way that a small irritant may build a pearl

in an oyster. Occasionally the gunslinger moaned with the

wind. The stars were as indifferent to this as they were to wars,

crucifixions, resurrections. This also would have pleased him.

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摘要：

DarkDarkTower:Tower:TheTheGUNSLINGERGUNSLINGER______________________________________STEPHENKINGSTEPHENKING©1982DonaldM.GrantThisspeciallimitededitionissignedbyauthorStephenKing.Thiseditionislimitedto500copies.Thisiscopy382382TOEDFERMANwhotookachanceonthesestories,onebyone.THETHEGUNSLINGERGUNSLINGERT...

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King, Stephen- The Dark Tower 1- The Gunslinger (Illustrated)

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