Free The Little Sisters of Eluria by Stephen King Page A

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    ‘you'll tell no one anything,' Roland said.
    If he had planned his escape from the slings which entangled him, he no doubt would have made a bad business of it, but, as always, the gunslinger did best when he thought least. His arms were free in a moment; so was his left leg. His right caught at the ankle, however, twisting, hanging him up with his shoulders on the bed and his leg in the air.
    Coquina turned on him, hissing like a cat. Her lips pulled back from teeth that were needle-sharp. She rushed at him, her fingers splayed. The nails at the ends of them looked sharp and ragged.
    Roland clasped the medallion and shoved it out towards her. She recoiled from it, still hissing, and whirled back to Sister Jenna in a flare of white skirt. 'I'll do for ye, ye interfering trull!' she cried in a low, harsh voice.
    Roland struggled to free his leg and couldn't. It was firmly caught, the shitting sling actually wrapped around the ankle somehow, like a noose.
    Jenna raised her hands, and he saw he had been right: it was his revolvers she had brought, holstered and hanging from the two old gunbelts he had worn out of Gilead after the last burning.
    'Shoot her, Jenna! Shoot her!'
    Instead, still holding the holstered guns up, Jenna shook her head as she had on the day when Roland had persuaded her to push back her wimple so he could see her hair. The bells rang with a sharpness that seemed to go into the gunslinger's head like a spike.
    The Dark Bells. The sigil of their ka-tet. What –
    The sound of the doctor-bugs rose to a shrill, reedy scream that was eerily like the sound of the bells Jenna wore. Nothing sweet about them now. Sister Coquina's hands faltered on their way to Jenna's throat; Jenna herself had not so much as flinched or blinked her eyes.
    'No,' Coquina whispered. 'You can't!'
    'I have,' Jenna said, and Roland saw the bugs. Descending from the legs of the bearded man, he'd observed a battalion. What he saw coming from the shadows now was an army to end all armies; had they been men instead of insects, there might have been more than all the men who had ever carried arms in the long and bloody history of World.
    Yet the sight of them advancing down the boards of the aisle was what Roland would always remember, nor what would haunt his dream for a year or more; it was the way they coated the beds. These were turning black two by two on both sides of the aisle, like pairs of dim rectangular lights going out.
    Coquina shrieked and began to shake her own head, to ring her bells. The sound they made was thin and pointless compared to the sharp ringing of the Dark Bells.
    Still the bugs marched on, darkening the floor, blacking out the be
    Jenna darted past the shrieking Sister Coquina, dropped Roland's beside him, then yanked the twisted sling straight with one hard p Roland slid his leg free.
    'Come,' she said. 'I've started them, but staying them could be a different thing.'
    Now Sister Coquina's shrieks were not of horror but of pain. The bugs had found her.
    'Don't look,' Jenna said, helping Roland to his feet. He thought that never in his life had he been so glad to be upon them. 'Come. We mu be quick - she'll rouse the others. I've put your boots and clothes aside the path that leads away from here - I carried as much as I could. How ye? Are ye strong?'
    'Thanks to you.' How long he would stay strong Roland didn't know... and right now it wasn't a question that mattered. He saw Jenna snatch up two of the reeds - in his struggle to escape the slings, they had scattered all over the head of the bed - and then they were hurrying up the aisle, away from the bugs and from Sister Coquina, whose cries were now failing.
    Roland buckled on his guns and tied them down without breaking stride.
    They passed only three beds on each side before reaching the flap of the tent . . . and it was a tent, he saw, not a vast pavilion. The silk walls and ceiling were fraying canvas, thin enough to let in the light of a threequarters