The Collective

Roland wondered how many towns the Sisters had been to With

this tent which was so small and plain on the outside, so huge and

gloriously on the inside. How many towns and over how many

years.

Now, cramming the mouth of it in a black, shiny tongue, were

doctor-bugs. They had stopped their singing. Their silence was

somehow terrible.

'Stand aside or I'll have them on ye,' Jenna said.

'Ye never would!' Sister Michela cried in a low, horrified voice.

'Aye. I've already set them on Sister Coquina. She's a part of the

medicine, now.'

Their gasp was like cold wind passing through dead trees. Nor was

all that dismay directed towards their own precious hides. What

Jenna h done was clearly far outside their reckoning.

'Then you're damned,' Sister Tamra said.

'Such ones to speak of damnation! Stand aside.'

They did. Roland walked past them and they shrank away from

him. but they shrank from her more.

'Damned?' he asked after they had skirted the haci and reached the

path beyond it. The Kissing Moon glimmered above a tumbled

scree of rocks In its light Roland could see a small black opening

low on the scarp. guessed it was the cave the Sisters called

Thoughtful House. 'What did they mean, damned?'

'Never mind. All we have to worry about now is Sister Mary. I like

not that we haven't seen her.'

She tried to walk faster, but he grasped her arm and turned her

about. He could still hear the singing of the bugs, but faintly; they

were leaving the place of the Sisters behind. Eluria, too, if the

compass in his head was still working; he thought the town was in

the other direction. The husk of the town, he amended.

'Tell me what they meant.'

'Perhaps nothing. Ask me not, Roland - what good is it? 'Tis done,

the bridge burned. I can't go back. Nor would if I could.' She

looked down, biting her lip, and when she looked up again, Roland

saw fresh tears falling on her cheeks. 'I have supped with them.

There were times when I couldn't help it, no more than you could

help drinking their wretched soup, no matter if you knew what was

in it.'

Roland remembered John Norman saying A man has to eat... a

woman, too. He nodded.

'I'd go no further down that road. If there's to be damnation, let it

be of my choosing, not theirs. My mother meant well by bringing

me back to them, but she was wrong.' She looked at him shyly and

fearfully ... but met his eyes. 'I'd go beside ye on yer road, Roland

of Gilead. For as long as I may, or as long as ye'd have me.'

`you're welcome to your share of my way,' he said. 'And I am `

Blessed by your company, he would have finished, but before he

could, a voice spoke from the tangle of moonshadow ahead of

them, where the path at last climbed out of the rocky, sterile valley

in which the Little Sisters had practised their glamours.

`It's a sad duty to stop such a pretty elopement, but stop it I must.'

Sister Mary came from the shadows. Her fine white habit with its

bright red rose had reverted to what it really was: the shroud of a

corpse. Caught, hooded in its grimy folds, was a wrinkled, sagging

face from which two black eyes stared. They looked like rotted

dates. Below them, exposed by the thing's smile, four great incisors

gleamed.

Upon the stretched skin of Sister Mary's forehead, bells tinkled ...

but not the Dark Bells, Roland thought. There was that.

'Stand clear,' Jenna said. 'Or I'll bring the can tam on ye.'

'No,' Sister Mary said, stepping closer, 'ye won't. They'll not stray

so far from the others. Shake your head and ring those damned

bells until the clappers fall out, and still they'll never come.'

Jenna did as bid, shaking her head furiously from side to side. The

Dark Bells rang piercingly, but without that extra, almost psychic

tone-quality that had gone through Roland's head like a spike. And

the doctor-bugs

what Jenna had called the can tam - did not come.

Smiling ever more broadly (Roland had an idea Mary herself

hadn't been completely sure they wouldn't come until the

experiment was made), the corpse-woman closed in on them,

seeming to float above the ground. Her eyes flicked towards him.

'And put that away,' she said.

Roland looked down and saw that one of his guns was in his hand.

He had no memory of drawing it.

'Unless it's been blessed or dipped in some sect's holy wet - blood,

water, semen - it can't harm such as I, gunslinger. For I am more

shade than substance ... yet still the equal to such as yerself, for all

that.'

She thought he would try shooting her, anyway; he saw it in her

eyes. Those shooters are all ye have, her eyes said. Without 'em,

you might as well be back in the tent we dreamed around ye,

caught up in our slings and awaiting our pleasure.

Instead of shooting, he dropped the revolver back into its holster

and launched himself at her with his hands out. Sister Mary uttered

a scream that was mostly surprise, but it was not a long one;

Roland's fingers clamped down on her throat and choked the sound

off before it was fairly started.

The touch of her flesh was obscene - it seemed not just alive but

various beneath his hands, as if it was trying to crawl away from

him. He could feel it running like liquid, flowing, and the sensation

was horrible beyond description. Yet he clamped down harder,

determined to choke the I out of her.

Then there came a blue flash (not in the air, he would think later;

that flash happened inside his head, a single stroke of lightning as

she touch off some brief but powerful brainstorm), and his hands

flew away from h neck. For one moment his dazzled eyes saw

great wet gouges in her flesh - gouges in the shapes of his hands.

Then he was flung backwards hitting the scree on his back and

sliding, striking his head on a jutting rock hard enough to provoke

a second, lesser, flash of light.

'Nay, my pretty man,' she said, grimacing at him, laughing with

those terrible dull eyes of hers. 'Ye don't choke such as I, and I'll

take ye slow yer impertinence - cut ye shallow in a hundred places

to refresh my thirst First, though, I'll have this vowless girl ... and

I'll have those damned bells off her, in the bargain.'

'Come and see if you can!' Jenna cried in a trembling voice, and

shook her head from side to side. The Dark Bells rang mockingly,

provokingly

Mary's grimace of a smile fell away. 'Oh, I can,' she breathed. Her

mouth yawned. In the moonlight, her fangs gleamed in her gums

like bone needles poked through a red pillow. 'I can and I -'

There was a growl from above them. It rose, then splintered into a

volley of snarling barks. Mary turned to her left, and in the

moment before the snarling thing left the rock on which it was

standing, Roland could clearly read the startled bewilderment on

Big Sister's face.

It launched itself at her, only a dark shape against the stars, legs

outstretched so it looked like some sort of weird bat, but even

before it crashed into the woman, striking her in the chest above

her half-raise arms and fastening its own teeth on her throat,

Roland knew exactly what it was.

As the shape bore her over on to her back, Sister Mary uttered a

gibbering shriek that went through Roland's head like the Dark

Bells themselves. He scrambled to his feet, gasping. The shadowy

thing tore at her, forepaws on either side of her head, rear paws

planted on the grave-shroud above her, chest, where the rose had

been.

Roland grabbed Jenna, who was looking down at the fallen Sister