It was a weirding village, and she could not begin to imagine what species of freakish people might once have lived here.
The sidestreets were cobbled. The cottages were narrow and steep-roofed, the doorways thin and abnormally high, as if made for the sort of narrow folk seen in the distorted curves of funhouse mirrors. They were Lovecraft houses, Clark Ashton Smith houses, William Hope Hodgson borderlands houses, all crammed together under a Lee Brown Coye sickle moon, the houses all a-tilt and a-lean on the hills that grew up gradually around the way they walked. Here and there one had collapsed, and there was an unpleasantly organic look to these ruins, as if they were torn and rotted flesh instead of ancient boards and glass. Again and again she caught herself seeing dead faces peering at her from some configuration of boards and shadow, faces that seemed to rotate in the rubble and follow their course with terrible zombie eyes. They made her think of the Doorkeeper on Dutch Hill, and that made her shiver.
On their fourth night on The King's Way, they came to a major intersection where the main road made a crooked turn, bending more south than east and thus off the Path of the Beam. Ahead, less than a night's walk (or ride, if one happened to be aboard Ho Fat's Luxury Taxi), was a high hill with an enormous black castle dug into it. In the chancy moonlight it had a vaguely Oriental look to Susannah. The towers bulged at the tops, as if wishing they could be minarets. Fantastic walkways flew between them, crisscrossing above the courtyard in front of the casde proper. Some of these walkways had fallen to ruin, but most still held. She could also hear a vast, low rumbling sound. Not machinery. She asked Roland about it.
"Water," he said.
"What water? Do you have any idea?"
He shook his head. "But I'd not drink what flowed close to that castle, even were I dying of thirst."
"This place is bad," she muttered, meaning not just the castle but the nameless village of leaning
(leering)
houses that had grown up all around it. "And Roland-it's not empty."
"Susannah, if thee feels spirits knocking for entrance into thy head-knocking or gnawing-then bid them away."
"Will that work?"
"I'm not sure it will," he admitted, "but I've heard that such things must be granted entry, and that they're wily at gaining it by trick and by ruse."
She had read Dracula as well as heard Pere Callahan's story of Jerusalem's Lot, and understood what Roland meant all too well.
He took her gendy by the shoulders and turned her away from the castle-which might not be naturally black after all, she had decided, but only tarnished by the years. Daylight would tell. For the present their way was lit by a cloud-scummed quarter-moon.
Several other roads led away from the place where they had stopped, most as crooked as broken fingers. The one Roland wanted her to look upon was straight, however, and Susannah realized it was the only completely straight street she had seen since the deserted village began to grow silently up around their way. It was smoothly paved rather than cobbled and pointed southeast, along the Path of die Beam. Above it flowed the moon-gilded clouds like boats in a procession.
"Does thee glimpse a darkish blur at the horizon, dear?" he murmured.
"Yes. A dark blur and a whitish band in front of it. What is it? Do you know?"
"I have an idea, but I'm not sure," Roland said. "Let's have us a rest here. Dawn's not far off, and then we'll both see. And besides, I don't want to approach yonder castle at night."
"If the Crimson King's gone, and if the Path of the Beam lies that way-" She pointed. "Why do we need to go to his damn old casde at all?"
"To make sure he is gone, for one thing," Roland said.
And we may be able to trap the one behind us. I doubt it-he's wily-but there's a chance. He's also young, and the young are sometimes careless."
"You'd kill him?"
Roland's smile was wintry in the moonlight. Merciless.
"Without a moment's hesitation," said he.
EIGHT
In the morning Susannah woke from an uncomfortable doze amid the scattered supplies in the back of the rickshaw and saw Roland standing in the intersection and looking along the Path of the Beam. She got down, moving with great care because she was stiff and didn't want to fall. She imagined her bones cold and brittle inside her flesh, ready to shatter like glass.
"What do you see?" he asked her. "Now that it's light, what do you see over that way?"
The whitish band was snow, which did not surprise her given the fact that those were true uplands. What did surprise her-and gladdened her heart more than she would have believed possible-were the trees beyond the band of snow.
Green fir-trees. Living things.
"Oh, Roland, they look lovely!" she said. "Even with their feet in the snow, they look lovely! Don't they?"