Dark Tower 4暗黑塔4英文版.docx

1、Dark Tower 4暗黑塔4英文版 IV: THE DARK TOWER IV: WIZARD & GLASS1997 . 1 2 .Chapter 1BENEATH THE DEMON MOONThe town of Candleton was a poisoned and irradiated ruin, but not dead; after all the decades and centuries, it still twitched, still pulsed with its own tenebrous life-trundling beetles the size of t

2、urtles, birds that looked like small, misshapen dragonlets, a few stumbling robots that passed in and out of the rotten buildings like stainless-steel zombies, their joints squalling, their nuclear eyes flickering. Show your pass, pard! cried the one that had been stuck in a corner of the lobby of t

3、he Candleton Travellers Hotel for the last two hundred and thirty-four years. Embossed on the rusty lozenge of its head was a six-pointed star. It had over the years managed to dig a shallow concavity in the steel-sheathed wall blocking its way, but that was all. Show your pass, pard! Elevated radia

4、tion levels possible south and east of town! Show your pass, pard! Elevated radiation levels possible south and east of town! A bloated rat-thing, blind and dragging most of its guts behind it in a sac like a rotten placenta, struggled over the posse robots feet. The posse robot took no notice, just

5、 went on butting its steel head into the steel wall. Show your pass, pard! Elevated radiation levels possible, dad rattit and gods cuss it! Caution advised! Behind it, in the hotel bar, the skulls of men and women who had come in here for one last drink before the cataclysm caught up with them grinn

6、ed as if they had died laughing. Perhaps some of them had. When Blaine the Mono blammed overhead, running up the night like a bullet running up the barrel of a gun, windows broke, dust sifted down, and several of the skulls disintegrated like ancient pottery vases. Outside, a brief hurricane of radi

7、oactive dust blew up the street, and the hitching-post in front of the Elegant Beef and Pork Restaurant was sucked into the squally updraft like smoke. In the town square, the Candleton Fountain split in two, spilling out not water but only dust, snakes, mutie scorpions, and a few of the blindly tru

8、ndling turtle-beetles. Then the shape which had hurtled above the town was gone as if it had never been, Candleton reverted to the mouldering activity which had been its substitute for life over the last two and a half centuries . . . and then the trailing sonic boom caught up, slamming its thunderc

9、lap above the town for the first time in seven years, causing enough vibration to tumble the mercantile store on the far side of the fountain . . . and to at long last kill the posse robot. It tried to voice one final warning: Elevated rad- and then quit for good, facing into its corner like a child

10、 that has been bad. Two or three hundred wheels outside of Candleton, as one travelled along the path of the beam, the radiation levels and concentrations of DEP3 in the soil began to fall off rapidly. Here the monos track swooped back down until it was less than ten feet off the ground, and here a

11、doe that looked almost normal walked prettily from piney woods to drink from a stream in which the water had three-quarters cleansed itself. The doe was not normal-a stumpish fifth leg dangled down from the center of her lower belly like a teat, waggling bonelessly to and fro when she walked, and a

12、third eye-not just blind but vestigial-peered milkily from the left side of her muzzle. Yet she was fertile, and her DNA was in reasonably good order for a twelfth- generation mutie. In her six years of life, she had given birth to three live young. Two of these fawns had been not just viable but no

13、rmal-threaded stock, Aunt Talitha of River Crossing would have called them. The third, a skinless, bawling horror, had been killed quickly by its sire. The world-this part of it, at any rate-had begun to heal itself. The deer slipped her mouth into the water, began to drink . . . and then looked up,

14、 eyes wide, muzzle dripping. Off in the distance she could hear a low humming sound. A moment later this was joined by an eyelash of light. Alarm flared in the does nerves, but although her reflexes were fast and the light when first glimpsed was still many wheels away across the desolate countrysid

15、e, there was never a chance for her to escape what was coming. Before she could even begin to fire her muscles, the distant spark had swelled to a searing dragons eye of light that flooded the stream and the clearing with its glare. With the light came the maddening hum of Blaines slo-trans engines,

16、 running at full capacity. There was a blur of pink above the concrete ridge which bore the rail; a rooster-tail of dust, stones, small dismembered animals, and whirling foliage followed along after. The doe was killed instantly by the concussion of Blaines passage. Too large to be sucked along in the monos wake, she was still y