Despair is dry.
Insidious, crafty and slow, it creeps up upon you.
It is not like pain, which can be bitter, sharp, or horror, which can strike like a psychic heart attack. It is not like lust, which can batter down emotional defences like a runaway train in an instant, or rage, which can sweep you away on a wave. These feelings hit and run, leave their mark and then fade away, often as quickly as they arrive, leaving only an echo in the brain and heart.
Despair is not like that. Despair is slow, and dry, like a desert.
The desert the gunslinger had been walking across for what had seemed an eternity differed in many respects from many deserts he had traversed during his near-immortal lifespan. For one thing, this desert was cold. Not just cold at night, when the sun set beneath the perpetual horizon and the stars twinkled out to flirt at one another, but cold during the day,too. A vicious, arid wind whipped endlessly across the plains, chilling the gunslinger to the bone through his thin chambray shirt and jeans, making his lips crack and bleed and his hands shake before whistling its way eastwards towards whatever awaited on the far side of the world - if this was indeed the world upon which he walked; had not a great seer once remarked that Hell is repetition? There was not sand or dust underneath his feet, but a dark, painful kind of shale which sought the soft spots on his boots and cut through with eager, hungry teeth. There was also rain from time to time, a cold, hard rain which never fell strongly but which always soaked him to the skin in minutes.
Yes, indeed, this was true depair.
And yet the gunslinger walked on, with no goal in mind but to reach the next pale sunset, and the next, and the next. Why would he look for more? He knew where he was, and he knew that this was his hell. He reckoned he deserved it, mayhap he had even sought it, for didn't all know he had killed all he loved and ruined many more in pursuit of an impossible goal? His old ka-mai would have said "Payback's a bitch, Roland," and could he argue? He could not, and so he walked.
Time passed, did so again, and more, and more, until the gunslinger raised his head on another endless drizzly day and saw a figure walking with him, a tall, slim figure, easily keeping pace with the stalking gunslinger. His arms lay easily by his side but the gunslinger's trained eyes noticed the muscle tone, and the lack of slackness in the forearms, uncovered by the figure's rolled up sleeves. His clothes were odd to the gunslinger's eyes; he wore not jeans but smooth, dark coloured slacks made of an unknown material. These slacks were drawn tight across the stranger's waist with a belt of what looked like leather, and had a crease as sharp as an arrow leading down each leg, tapering the legs of the garment into a sharp point. His shirt, rolled up, was starkly white against the slate grey sky and his tanned forearms, buttoned down the front, and open at the neck. The stranger wore something on his head unlike anything the gunslinger had seen on his travels; he could not call it a hat, as it had no brim, it was pulled tight across his scalp and down over his ears, covering his hair - if the man had any. Overall, the figure looked as strange as any Roland had encountered. He reflected dully that the adverb 'stranger' fitted this character better than any other.
He carried on walking. The figure walked with him.
Days passed, or what could be called days in this featureless, desolate landscape, where the view never changed, the weather was constant, and the monotony of despair remained oppressive and sinister, and the man walked with the gunslinger, never slowing his pace, never speeding either, and never making a sound. Roland never looked directly at him, and never looked directly away from him, resolutely seeming to never take any notice. At nights, Roland would stop, drink from his waterskin, and swiftly fall asleep; the man would be there when he closed his eyes, and there again when he opened them. Never did he ask for sustenance, or seem to take any himself. The fellow might just as well be sucking the moisture out of the air, for all Roland knew or cared.
How long this silent stand-off would have lasted for neither could say, for one morning something happened which forced both men to react instantly.
The ground began to shudder, forcing both men to the ground. A tremendous roaring filled the air - Roland looked over to his companion to see the man lying on the earth, head cocked, that ridiculous cap slanted down over his ear. He had an eyebrow raised in quizzical bemusement. The shuddering grew more pronounced, and Roland could feel the earth beginning to tear itself apart from under him. He tried to pull himself to his knees -
Just as the earth cracked open underneath him.
The gunslinger's inhuman reflexes saved him, but barely. His mangled, decimated left hand shot out as he began to slide downwards through a gap of about five feet and grabbed hold of a sharp outcrop. Blood flew as his remaining fingernails tore off, but he held his silence still as his downward progress was halted. To avoid looking down, he looked up, and saw the man on the surface. He was holding out his hand.
"Take it," he said.
It was Roland's only hope, he knew, of avoiding falling into the darkness of the depths of the earth, but he resisted. There had been a moment, ages ago, where he had been in this position reversed, where he had been the only salvation for somebody on the edge, about to fall. He had let the other fall - why should he be saved? After all, this was hell, wasn't it?
"Roland," the man said. "Take my hand. For you, there are no other worlds than these."
The gunslinger was so shocked that he grasped the hand, and allowed himself to be pulled up.