He wheeled his new horse back the way it had come. More horses loomed out of the fog. Latigo crashed into one of them and was thrown for the second time in five minutes. He landed on his knees, scrambled to his feet, and staggered back downwind, coughing and retching, eyes red and streaming.
It was a little better beyond the canyon's northward jog, but wouldn't be for much longer. The edge of the thinny was a tangle of milling horses, many with broken legs, and crawling, shrieking men. Latigo saw several hats floating on the greenish surface of the whining organism that filled the back of the canyon; he saw boots; he saw wristlets; he saw neckerchiefs; he saw the bugle-boy's dented instrument, still trailing its frayed strap.
Come in, the green shimmer invited, and Latigo found its buzz strangely attractive ... intimate, almost. Come in and visit, squat and hunker, be at rest, be at peace, be at one.
Latigo raised his gun, meaning to shoot it. He didn't believe it could be killed, but he would remember the face of his father and go down shooting, all the same.
Except he didn't. The gun dropped from his relaxing fingers and he walked forward - others around him were now doing the same - into the thinny. The buzzing rose and rose, filling his ears until there was nothing else.
Nothing elseat all.
22
They saw it all from the notch, where Roland and his friends had stopped in a strung-out line about twenty feet below the top. They saw the screaming confusion, the panicky milling, the men who were trampled, the men and horses that were driven into the thinny ... and the men who, at the end, walked willingly into it.
Cuthbert was closest to the top of the canyon's wall, then Alain, then Roland, standing on a six-inch shelf of rock and holding an outcrop just above him. From their vantage-point they could see what the men struggling in their smoky hell below them could not: that the thinny was growing, reaching out, crawling eagerly toward them like an incoming tide.
Roland, his battle-lust slaked, did not want to watch what was happening below, but he couldn't turn away. The whine of the thinny - cowardly and triumphant at the same time, happy and sad at the same time, lost and found at the same time - held him like sweet, sticky ropes. He hung where he was, hypnotized, as did his friends above him, even when the smoke began to rise, and its pungent tang made him cough dryly.
Men shrieked their lives away in the thickening smoke below. They struggled in it like phantoms. They faded as the fog thickened, climbing the canyon walls like water. Horses whinnied desperately from beneath that acrid white death. The wind swirled its surface in prankish whirlpools. The thinny buzzed, and above where it lay, the surface of the smoke was stained a mystic shade of palest green.
Then, at long last, John Farson's men screamed no more. We killed them, Roland thought with a kind of sick and fascinated horror. Then: No, not we. I. I killed them.
How long he might have stayed there Roland didn't know - perhaps until the rising smoke engulfed him as well, but then Cuthbert, who had begun to climb again, called down three words from above him; called down in a tone of surprise and dismay. "Roland! The moon!"
Roland looked up, startled, and saw that the sky had darkened to a velvety purple. His friend was outlined against it and looking east, his face stained fever-orange with the light of the rising moon.
Yes, orange, the thinny buzzed inside his head. Laughed inside his head. Orange as 'twas when it rose on the night you came out here to see me and count me. Orange like afire. Orange like a bonfire.
How can it be almost dark? he cried inside himself, but he knew - yes, he knew very well. Time had slipped back together, that was all, like layers of ground embracing once more after the argument of an earthquake. Twilight had come. Moonrise had come.
Terror struck Roland like a closed fist aimed at the heart, making him jerk backward on the small ledge he'd found. He groped for the horn-shaped outcrop above him, but that act of rebalancing was far away; most of him was inside the pink storm again, before he had been snatched away and shown half the cosmos. Perhaps the wizard's glass had only shown him what stood worlds far away in order to keep from showing him what might soon befall so close to home.
I'd turn around if I thought her life was in any real danger, he had said. In a second.
And if the ball knew that? If it couldn't lie, might it not misdirect? Might it not take him away and show him a dark land, a darker tower? And it had shown him something else, something that recurred to him only now: a scrawny man in farmer's overalls who had said. . . what? Not quite what he'd thought, not what he had been used to hearing all his life; not Life for you and life for your crop, but. . .