Intermission – The Fourth Door
By Michelle Harris aka
Lady M. Harris
"What does this mean?" The gunslinger asked to no one in particular. This was strange. He did not like this at all. Eddie and Susannah Dean were nowhere in site, as he looked at his hands and saw all the fingers there. Where on his right hand there should have been two missing fingers. He wiggled his toes in his boots and sure enough his missing large left toe was there as if it had never been bitten off by the lobstrosities on the Western Sea beach nearly a fortnight ago. But that was impossible, he thought as his gaze swung toward the eastern sky of the pebble beach. Another door appeared, sitting nonchalantly on the water's edge stood in the hazy mist like a dream that hovered on the back of your mind after waking.
Intermission, your guarantee, gunslinger, the man in black cackled in the gunslinger's mind like some madman. Which of course, he was, at least in the gunslinger's mind he was. The man in black was a part of him just as breathing was.
The gunslinger started walking towards the door. What's the purpose of this, he asked the man in black.
There was a brief, low chuckling, a sort of chortle. The sound echoed eerily in the gunslinger's mind.
Can't have you scaring the girl, with your withered look and guns. The man in black shrugged his shoulders in the gunslinger's mind's eye, stating, ten years younger should be okay for her.
Girl? Is that why I look the way I do, ten years younger, he asked himself, but he already knew the answer to his own question. Ah, Go fuck yourself, Walter. The door crudely labeled, Intermission, swung open of its own accord, the dark edge touching the seawaters. Like the other three doors before, this door opened to another world.
The gunslinger was not surprised to see a world from this new person's eyes. What did surprise him was that the other one was obviously a gunslinger just like him. This girl was in the midst of an all-out battle that he intended to take over. She was yelling something that he did not comprehend, something like: Burning Mandala. It mattered not to him and who she was fighting at the moment, because he was coming to take her from her battle. For what, he had yet to understand.
He surged into her mind with brutal force but was taken aback by the girl when she immediately began to fight against the presence within her. She had an indomitable spirit that matched his own, a sense of justice for her own kind and he, without a doubt knew that if he didn't hurry her back to his world she would win against him. This shocked him, of course. However, he also instantly realized how much he recognized himself in her.
They lay panting on the beach. One, a slender, vicious young woman in a short, sailor suit of red and white, with dainty red high heels on her feet. The other, a gunslinger, slightly out of breath.
The gunslinger stared at his new prisoner, the shock beginning to ebb away.
She was so young, he thought, as he looked his fill of the woman before him. Everything about her was stunning. Every so often his gaze would reluctantly stare back at her long, luscious legs exposed by the shortness of her red skirt. Her midnight black hair was wrapped around her supple body like a string on a present that was about to be opened.
He watched her in his quiet way and waited. Always, in a quiet way, even while he cleaned his guns, he watched her silently and waited. He had those kind of blue eyes, so brilliant that they glittered like twin, sapphire gems at her. There was nothing soft about him, whether it was his body that was sinew and powerful and in his mind which was obviously sharp and dangerous, she thought warily. Raye would shiver, not entirely pleased or dismayed by her reaction to him.
She had no idea how long they had been on this God-forsaken beach, while monster lobsters roamed the evening waters. He had brought her back to his world, and she had fought his presence in her mind as now she fought his presence in flesh. He said very little to her, but kept a sharp eye on her to make sure that she did not escape from him. She didn't try, even though she knew she could, but her wary eyes stayed on those polished guns strapped dangerously about those strong thighs of his.
At night, he shot the monster lobsters easily with those gleaming guns of his. He shot them for them to have something to eat and to keep the monsters away from their campsite. He was so fast that at first, Raye did see not him draw until she heard the crack of two gunshots. There had been a sardonic grin on the curl of his lips when she stared back at him with her breath indrawn. At that moment, she had never seen anything so beautiful and terrifying as the gunslinger.
She was here now, and at first did not know why the gunslinger had brought her here. At last, in the last few days, she finally understood her purpose. The gunslinger confirmed it to her one evening when she stared longingly at the misty, closed door on the edge of the beach.
"It will open when you finally succumb and accept your destiny to me, warrior girl," the gunslinger had stated, smoking his hand-made cigarette. It glowed briefly like a firefly in the night when she swung her pretty, ruby gaze toward him. The long, silken strands of her midnight-violet hair obscured half of her face, before sliding back over a full breast of her sailor outfit. The gunslinger watched the movement, hungrily.
Raye had said nothing to his comment, knowing with a woman's intuition even though she still was intact that eventually she would. When it finally did happen, Raye could not begin to describe the magnitude of the event. The gunslinger was gentle and harsh all at once. In the only way that she could imagine him to be, he was quiet and powerfully in control of their mating. In the quiet of the midnight with the sound of the ocean in their ears, they made love underneath the bright stars of another world. That night he would ride her well and hard, as if to ward away the encroaching daylight that would bring reality. And she could only cling to his strong shoulders, her fingers sliding though the black, silky length of his too-long hair as salty tears slid down her face of joy and reaffirmation of her womanhood was reached again and again.
In the morning, Raye crossed through the open doorway and back into her world, glancing over her shoulders at the solitary figure standing on the sandy beach watching her, silently. She touched her lips with trembling fingers, once more feeling the gunslinger's sensuous kiss one last time, remembering his coarse voice, and the husky catch of his voice in her mind.
"We will meet again, warrior girl, and when that time comes, I will come for you. Be ready," the gunslinger had promised. Raye knew that without a doubt and because she somehow knew deep inside her heart, understood this gunslinger's code of honor, knew that he would come for her. And she would be waiting for him. Patiently.
In the following weeks after her re-entry into her world, her friends could not believe the transformation of the quiet, temple maiden named Raye. Their friend was expecting a child. She was already six months. No one knew who the father was.
"Who is he?" Serena, the neo-queen of Tokyo and her longtime friend would ask her for the hundredth time.
Finally, Raye relented with a mysterious smile, "Roland. A gunslinger. And I am the last, his guarantee."
Serena had no clue who Roland was or what her friend meant with that comment about a gunslinger. The quiet smile on Raye's face only confirmed that perhaps, soon, they would be meeting this Roland guy.
Intermission.
Author's notes: Characters of The Gunslinger belong to Stephen King. Story inspired by of course, Stephen King and The Dark Tower Trilogy. Sailor Moon characters belong to Naoko Takeuchi. This story was originally written for my written communication class as a more shorten version. What you read was much more descriptive than the original. Will I finish it, who knows?