“Dad-a—” the monstrosity began, its claws lowering and opening as the wave broke and its sound receded, and the gunslinger swept the rock down upon it with all his strength.
There was a crunching noise as the creature’s segmented back broke. It lashed wildly beneath the rock, its rear half lifting and thudding, lifting and thudding. Its interrogatives became buzzing exclamations of pain. Its claws opened and shut upon nothing. Its maw of a beak gnashed up clots of sand and pebbles.
And yet, as another wave broke, it tried to raise its claws again, and when it did the gunslinger stepped on its head with his remaining boot. There was a sound like many small dry twigs being broken. Thick fluid burst from beneath the heel of Roland’s boot, splashing in two directions. It looked black. The thing arched and wriggled in a frenzy. The gunslinger planted his boot harder.
A wave came.
The monstrosity’s claws rose an inch . . . two inches . . . trembled and then fell, twitching open and shut.
The gunslinger removed his boot. The thing’s serrated beak, which had separated two fingers and one toe from his living body, slowly opened and closed. One antenna lay broken on the sand. The other trembled meaninglessly.
The gunslinger stamped down again. And again.
He kicked the rock aside with a grunt of effort and marched along the right side of the monstrosity’s body, stamping methodically with his left boot, smashing its shell, squeezing its pale guts out onto dark gray sand. It was dead, but he meant to have his way with it all the same; he had never, in all his long strange time, been so fundamentally hurt, and it had all been so unexpected.
He kept on until he saw the tip of one of his own fingers in the dead thing’s sour mash, saw the white dust beneath the nail from the golgotha where he and the man in black had held their long palaver, and then he looked aside and vomited.
The gunslinger walked back toward the water like a drunken man, holding his wounded hand against his shirt, looking back from time to time to make sure the thing wasn’t still alive, like some tenacious wasp you swat again and again and still twitches, stunned but not dead; to make sure it wasn’t following, asking its alien questions in its deadly despairing voice.
Halfway down the shingle he stood swaying, looking at the place where he had been, remembering. He had fallen asleep, apparently, just below the high tide line. He grabbed his purse and his torn boot.
In the moon’s glabrous light he saw other creatures of the same type, and in the caesura between one wave and the next, heard their questioning voices.
The gunslinger retreated a step at a time, retreated until he reached the grassy edge of the shingle. There he sat down, and did all he knew to do: he sprinkled the stumps of fingers and toe with the last of his tobacco to stop the bleeding, sprinkled it thick in spite of the new stinging （his missing great toe had joined the chorus）， and then he only sat, sweating in the chill, wondering about infection, wondering how he would make his way in this world with two fingers on his right hand gone （when it came to the guns both hands had been equal, but in all other things his right had ruled）， wondering if the thing had some poison in its bite which might already be working its way into him, wondering if morning would ever come.
THE
PRISONER
CHAPTER 1
The Door
1
Three. This is the number of your fate.
Three?
Yes, three is mystic. Three stands at the heart of the mantra.
Which three?
The first is dark-haired. He stands on the brink of robbery and murder. A demon has infested him. The name of the demon is HEROIN.
Which demon is that? I know it not, even from nursery stories.
He tried to speak but his voice was gone, the voice of the oracle, Star-Slut, Whore of the Winds, both were gone; he saw a card fluttering down from nowhere to nowhere, turning and turning in the lazy dark. On it a baboon grinned from over the shoulder of a young man with dark hair; its disturbingly human fingers were buried so deeply in the young man’s neck that their tips had disappeared in flesh. Looking more closely, the gunslinger saw the baboon held a whip in one of those clutching, strangling hands. The face of the ridden man seemed to writhe in wordless terror.