The Drawing of the Three

1

To Eddie Dean, he and the Lady no longer seemed to be trudging or even walking up what remained of the beach. They seemed to be flying.

Odetta Holmes still neither liked nor trusted Roland; that was clear. But she recognized how desperate his condition had become, and responded to that. Now, instead of pushing a dead clump of steel and rubber to which a human body just happened to be attached, Eddie felt almost as if he were push­ing a glider.

Go with her. Before, I was watching out for you and that was important. Now I'll only slow you down.

He came to realize how right the gunslinger was almost at once. Eddie pushed the chair; Odetta pumped it.

One of the gunslinger's revolvers was stuck in the waist­band of Eddie's pants.

Do you remember when I told you to be on your guard and you weren't?

Yes.

I'm telling you again: Be on your guard. Every moment. If her other comes back, don't wait even a second. Brain her.

What if I kill her?

Then it's the end. But if she kills you, that's the end, too. And if she comes back she'll try. She'll try.

Eddie hadn't wanted to leave him. It wasn't just that cat-scream in the night (although he kept thinking about it); it was simply that Roland had become his only touchstone in this world. He and Odetta didn't belong here.

Still, he realized that the gunslinger had been right.

"Do you want to rest?" he asked Odetta. "There's more food. A little."

"Not yet," she answered, although her voice sounded tired. "Soon."

"All right, but at least stop pumping. You're weak. Your … your stomach, you know."

"All right." She turned, her face gleaming with sweat, and favored him with a smile that both weakened and strength­ened him. He could have died for such a smile … and thought he would, if circumstances demanded.

He hoped to Christ circumstances wouldn't, but it surely wasn't out of the question. Time had become something so crucial it screamed.

She put her hands in her lap and he went on pushing. The tracks the chair left behind were now dimmer; the beach had become steadily firmer, but it was also littered with rubble that could cause an accident. You wouldn't have to help one happen at the speed they were going. A really bad accident might hurt Odetta and that would be bad; such an accident could also wreck the chair, and that would be bad for them and probably worse for the gunslinger, who would almost surely die alone. And if Roland died, they would be trapped in this world forever.

With Roland too sick and weak to walk, Eddie had been forced to face one simple fact: there were three people here, and two of them were cripples.

So what hope, what chance was there?

The chair.

The chair was the hope, the whole hope, and nothing but the hope.

So help them God.

2

The gunslinger had regained consciousness shortly after Eddie dragged him into the shade of a rock outcropping. His face, where it was not ashy, was a hectic red. His chest rose and fell rapidly. His right arm was a network of twisting red lines.

"Feed her," he croaked at Eddie.

"You—"

"Never mind me. I'll be all right. Feed her. She'll eat now, I think. And you'll need her strength."

"Roland, what if she's just pretending to be—"

The gunslinger gestured impatiently.

"She's not pretending to be anything, except alone in her body. I know it and you do, too. It's in her face. Feed her, for the sake of your father, and while she eats, come back to me. Every minute counts now. Every second."

Eddie got up, and the gunslinger pulled him back with his left hand. Sick or not, his strength was still there.

"And say nothing about the other. Whatever she tells you, however she explains, don't contradict her."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I just know it's wrong. Now do as I say and don't waste any more time!"

Odetta had been sitting in her chair, looking out at the sea with an expression of mild and bemused amazement. When Eddie offered her the chunks of lobster left over from the previous night, she smiled ruefully. "I would if I could," she said, "but you know what happens."

Eddie, who had no idea what she was talking about, could only shrug and say, "It wouldn't hurt to try again, Odetta. You need to eat, you know. We've got to go as fast as we can."

She laughed a little and touched his hand. He felt some­thing like an electric charge jump from her to him. And it was her; Odetta. He knew it as well as Roland did.

"I love you, Eddie. You have tried so hard. Been so patient. So has he—" She nodded toward the place where the gunslinger lay propped against the rocks, watching. "—but he is a hard man to love."

"Yeah. Don't I know it."

"I'll try one more time.

"For you."

She smiled and he felt all the world move for her, because of her, and he thought Please God, I have never had much, so please don't take her away from me again. Please.

She took the chunks of lobster-meat, wrinkled her nose in a rueful comic expression, and looked up at him.

"Must I?"

"Just give it a shot," he said.

"I never ate scallops again," she said.

"Pardon?"

"I thought I told you."

"You might have," he said, and gave a little nervous laugh. What the gunslinger had said about not letting her know about the other loomed very large inside his mind just then.

"We had them for dinner one night when I was ten or eleven. I hated the way they tasted, like little rubber balls, and later I vomited them up. I never ate them again. But …" She sighed. "As you say, I'll 'give it a shot.'"

She put a piece in her mouth like a child taking a spoon­ful of medicine she knows will taste nasty. She chewed slowly at first, then more rapidly. She swallowed. Took another piece. Chewed, swallowed. Another. Now she was nearly wolfing it.

"Whoa, slow down!" Eddie said.

"It must be another kind! That's it, of course it is!" She looked at Eddie shiningly. "We've moved further up the beach and the species has changed! I'm no longer allergic, it seems! It doesn't taste nasty, like it did before … and I did try to keep it down, didn't I?" She looked at him nakedly. "I tried very hard."

"Yeah." To himself he sounded like a radio broadcasting a very distant signal. She thinks she's been eating every day and then upchucking everything. She thinks that's why she's so weak. Christ Almighty. "Yeah, you tried like hell."

"It tastes—" These words were hard to pick up because her mouth was full. "It tastes so good!" She laughed. The sound was delicate and lovely. "It's going to stay down! I'm going to take nourishment! I know it! I feel it!"

"Just don't overdo it," he cautioned, and gave her one of the water-skins. "You're not used to it. All that—" He swal­lowed and there was an audible (audible to him, at least) click in his throat. "All that throwing up."

"Yes. Yes."

"I need to talk to Roland for a few minutes."

"All right."

But before he could go she grasped his hand again.

"Thank you, Eddie. Thank you for being so patient. And thank him." She paused gravely. "Thank him, and don't tell him that he scares me."

"I won't," Eddie had said, and went back to the gunslinger.

3

Even when she wasn't pushing, Odetta was a help. She navigated with the prescience of a woman who has spent a long time weaving a wheelchair through a world that would not acknowledge handicapped people such as she for years to come.

"Left," she'd call, and Eddie would gee to the left, gliding past a rock snarling out of the pasty grit like a decayed fang. On his own, he might have seen it … or maybe not.

"Right," she called, and Eddie hawed right, barely miss­ing one of the increasingly rare sandtraps.

They finally stopped and Eddie lay down, breathing hard.

"Sleep," Odetta said. "An hour. I'll wake you."

Eddie looked at her.

"I'm not lying. I observed your friend's condition, Eddie―"

"He's not exactly my friend, you kn—"

"—and I know how important time is. I won't let you sleep longer than an hour out of a misguided sense of mercy. I can tell the sun quite well. You won't do that man any good by wearing yourself out, will you?"

"No," he said, thinking: But you don't understand. If I sleep and DettaWalker comes back—

"Sleep, Eddie," she said, and since Eddie was too weary (and too much in love) to do other than trust her, he did. He slept and she woke him when she said she would and she was still Odetta, and they went on, and now she was pumping again, helping. They raced up the diminishing beach toward the door Eddie kept frantically looking for and kept not seeing.

4

When he left Odetta eating her first meal in days and went back to the gunslinger, Roland seemed a little better.

"Hunker down," he said to Eddie.

Eddie hunkered.

"Leave me the skin that's half full. All I need. Take her to the door."

"What if I don't—"

"Find it? You'll find it. The first two were there; this one will be, too. If you get there before sundown tonight, wait for dark and then kill double. You'll need to leave her food and make sure she's sheltered as well as she can be. If you don't reach it tonight, kill triple. Here."

He handed over one of his guns.

Eddie took it with respect, surprised as before by how heavy it was.

"I thought the shells were all losers."

"Probably are. But I've loaded with the ones I believe were wetted least—three from the buckle side of the left belt, three from the buckle side of the right. One may fire. Two, if you're lucky. Don't try them on the crawlies." His eyes considered Eddie briefly. "There may be other things out there."

"You heard it too, didn't you?"

"If you mean something yowling in the hills, yes. If you mean the Bugger-Man, as your eyes say, no. I heard a wildcat in the brakes, that's all, maybe with a voice four times the size of its body. It may be nothing you can't drive off with a stick. But there's her to think about. If her other comes back, you may have to—"

"I won't kill her, if that's what you're thinking!"

"You may have to wing her. You understand?"

Eddie gave a reluctant nod. Goddam shells probably wouldn't fire anyway, so there was no sense getting his panties in a bunch about it.

"When you get to the door, leave her. Shelter her as well as you can, and come back to me with the chair."

"And the gun?"

The gunslinger's eyes blazed so brightly that Eddie snapped his head back, as if Roland had thrust a flaming torch in his face. "Gods, yes! Leave her with a loaded gun, when her other might come back at any time? Are you insane?"

"The shells—"

"Fuck the shells!" the gunslinger cried, and a freak drop in the wind allowed the words to carry. Odetta turned her head, looked at them for a long moment, then looked back toward the sea. "Leave it with her not!"

Eddie kept his voice low in case the wind should drop again. "What if something comes down from the brakes while I'm on my way back here? Some kind of cat four times bigger than its voice, instead of the other way around? Something you can't drive off with a stick?"

"Give her a pile of stones," the gunslinger said.

"Stones! Jesus wept! Man, you are such a fucking shit!"

"I am thinking," the gunslinger said. "Something you seem unable to do. I gave you the gun so you could protect her from the sort of danger you're talking about for half of the trip you must make. Would it please you if I took the gun back? Then perhaps you could die for her. Would that please you? Very romantic … except then, instead of just her, all three of us would go down."

"Very logical. You're still a fucking shit, however."

"Go or stay. Stop calling me names."

"You forgot something," Eddie said furiously.

"What was that?"

"You forgot to tell me to grow up. That's what Henry always used to say. 'Oh grow up, kid.' "

The gunslinger had smiled, a weary, oddly beautiful smile. "I think you have grown up. Will you go or stay?"

"I'll go," Eddie said. "What are you going to eat? She scarfed the leftovers."

"The fucking shit will find a way. The fucking shit has been finding one for years."

Eddie looked away. "I … I guess I'm sorry I called you that, Roland. It's been—" He laughed suddenly, shrilly. "It's been a very trying day."

Roland smiled again. "Yes," he said. "It has."

5

They made the best time of the entire trek that day, but there was still no door in sight when the sun began to spill its gold track across the ocean. Although she told him she was perfectly capable of going on for another half an hour, he called a halt and helped her out of the chair. He carried her to an even patch of ground that looked fairly smooth, got the cushions from the back of the chair and the seat, and eased them under her.

"Lord, it feels so good to stretch out," she sighed. "But …" Her brow clouded. "I keep thinking of that man back there, Roland, all by himself, and I can't really enjoy it. Eddie, who is he? What is he?" And, almost as an afterthought: "And why does he shout so much?"

"Just his nature, I guess," Eddie said, and abruptly went off to gather rocks. Roland hardly ever shouted. He guessed some of it was this morning—FUCK the shells!— but that the rest of it was false memory: the time she thought she had been Odetta.

He killed triple, as the gunslinger had instructed, and was so intent on the last that he skipped back from a fourth which had been closing in on his right with only an instant to spare. He saw the way its claws clicked on the empty place which had been occupied by his foot and leg a moment before, and thought of the gunslinger's missing fingers.

He cooked over a dry wood fire—the encroaching hills and increasing vegetation made the search for good fuel quicker and easier, that was one thing—while the last of the daylight faded from the western sky.

"Look, Eddie!" she cried, pointing up.

He looked, and saw a single star gleaming on the breast of the night.

"Isn't it beautiful?"

"Yes," he said, and suddenly, for no reason, his eyes filled with tears. Just where had he been all of his goddamned life? Where had he been, what had he been doing, who had been with him while he did it, and why did he suddenly feel so grimy and abysmally beshitted?

Her lifted face was terrible in its beauty, irrefutable in this light, but the beauty was unknown to its possessor, who only looked at the star with wide wondering eyes, and laughed softly.

"Star light, star bright," she said, and stopped. She looked at him. "Do you know it, Eddie?"

"Yeah." Eddie kept his head down. His voice sounded clear enough, but if he looked up she would see he was weeping.

"Then help me. But you have to look."

"Okay."

He wiped the tears into the palm of one hand and looked up at the star with her.

"Star light—" she looked at him and he joined her. "Star bright—"

Her hand reached out, groping, and he clasped it, one the delicious brown of light chocolate, the other the delicious white of a dove's breast.

"First star I see tonight," they spoke solemnly in unison, boy and girl for this now, not man and woman as they would be later, when the dark was full and she called to ask him if he was asleep and he said no and she asked if he would hold her because she was cold; "Wish I may, wish I might—"

They looked at each other, and he saw that tears were streaming down her cheeks. His own came again, and he let them fall in her sight. This was not a shame but an inexpressi­ble relief.

They smiled at each other.

"Have the wish I wish tonight," Eddie said, and thought: Please, always you.

"Have the wish I wish tonight," she echoed, and thought If I must die in this odd place, please let it not be too hard and let this good young man be with me.

"I'm sorry I cried," she said, wiping her eyes. "I don't usually, but it's been—"

"A very trying day," he finished for her.

"Yes. And you need to eat, Eddie."

"You do, too."

"I just hope it doesn't make me sick again."

He smiled at her.

"I don't think it will."

6

Later, with strange galaxies turning in slow gavotte over­head, neither thought the act of love had ever been so sweet, so full.

7

They were off with the dawn, racing, and by nine Eddie was wishing he had asked Roland what he should do if they came to the place where the hills cut off the beach and there was still no door in sight. It seemed a question of some impor­tance, because the end of the beach was coming, no doubt about that. The hills marched ever closer, running in a diago­nal line toward the water.

The beach itself was no longer a beach at all, not really; the soil was now firm and quite smooth. Something—run-off, he supposed, or flooding at some rainy season (there had been none since he had been in this world, not a drop; the sky had clouded over a few times, but then the clouds had blown away again)—had worn most of the jutting rocks away.

At nine-thirty, Odetta cried: "Stop, Eddie! Stop!"

He stopped so abruptly that she had to grab the arms of the chair to keep from tumbling out. He was around to her in a flash.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Are you all right?"

"Fine." He saw he had mistaken excitement for distress. She pointed. "Up there! Do you see something?"

He shaded his eyes and saw nothing. He squinted. For just a moment he thought … no, it was surely just heat-shimmer rising from the packed ground.

"I don't think so," he said, and smiled. "Except maybe your wish."

"I think I do!" She turned her excited, smiling face to him. "Standing all by itself! Near where the beach ends."

He looked again, squinting so hard this time that his eyes watered. He thought again for just a moment that he saw something. You did, he thought, and smiled. You saw her wish.

"Maybe," he said, not because he believed it but because she did.

"Let's go!"

Eddie went behind the chair again, taking a moment to massage his lower back where a steady ache had settled. She looked around.

"What are you waiting for?"

"You really think you've got it spotted, don't you?"

"Yes!"

"Well then, let's go!"

Eddie started pushing again.

8

Half an hour later he saw it, too. Jesus, he thought, her eyes are as good as Roland's. Maybe better.

Neither wanted to stop for lunch, but they needed to eat. They made a quick meal and then pushed on again. The tide was coming in and Eddie looked to the right—west—with rising unease. They were still well above the tangled line of kelp and seaweed that marked high water, but he thought that by the time they reached the door they would be in an uncom­fortably tight angle bounded by the sea on one side and the slanting hills on the other. He could see those hills very clearly now. There was nothing pleasant about the view. They were rocky, studded with low trees that curled their roots into the ground like arthritic knuckles, keeping a grim grip, and thorny-looking bushes. They weren't really steep, but too steep for the wheelchair. He might be able to carry her up a way, might, in fact, be forced to, but he didn't fancy leaving her there.

For the first time he was hearing insects. The sound was a little like crickets, but higher pitched than that, and with no swing of rhythm—just a steady monotonous riiiiiiii sound like power-lines. For the first time he was seeing birds other than gulls. Some were biggies that circled inland on stiff wings. Hawks, he thought. He saw them fold their wings from time to time and plummet like stones. Hunting. Hunting what? Well, small animals. That was all right.

Yet he kept thinking of that yowl he'd heard in the night.

By mid-afternoon they could see the third door clearly. Like the other two, it was an impossibility which nonetheless stood as stark as a post.

"Amazing," he heard her say softly. "How utterly amaz­ing."

It was exactly where he had begun to surmise it would be, in the angle that marked the end of any easy northward prog­ress. It stood just above the high tide line and less than nine yards from the place where the hills suddenly leaped out of the ground like a giant hand coated with gray-green brush instead of hair.

The tide came full as the sun swooned toward the water; and at what might have been four o'clock—Odetta said so, and since she had said she was good at telling the sun (and because she was his beloved), Eddie believed her—they reached the door.

9

They simply looked at it, Odetta in her chair with her hands in her lap, Eddie on the sea-side. In one way they looked at it as they had looked at the evening star the previous night—which is to say, as children look at things—but in another they looked differently. When they wished on the star they had been children of joy. Now they were solemn, wondering, like chil­dren looking at the stark embodiment of a thing which only belonged in a fairy tale.

Two words were written on this door.

"What does it mean?" Odetta asked finally.

"I don't know," Eddie said, but those words had brought a hopeless chill; he felt an eclipse stealing across his heart.

"Don't you?" she asked, looking at him more closely.

"No. I …" He swallowed. "No."

She looked at him a moment longer. "Push me behind it, please. I'd like to see that. I know you want to get back to him, but would you do that for me?"

He would.

They started around, on the high side of the door.

"Wait!" she cried. "Did you see it?"

"What?"

"Go back! Look! Watch!"

This time he watched the door instead of what might be ahead to trip them up. As they went above it he saw it narrow in perspective, saw its hinges, hinges which seemed to be buried in nothing at all, saw its thickness …

Then it was gone.

The thickness of the door was gone.

His view of the water should have been interrupted by three, perhaps even four inches of solid wood (the door looked extraordinarily stout), but there was no such interruption.

The door was gone.

Its shadow was there, but the door was gone.

He rolled the chair back two feet, so he was just south of the place where the door stood, and the thickness was there.

"You see it?" he asked in a ragged voice.

"Yes! It's there again!"

He rolled the chair forward a foot. The door was still there. Another six inches. Still there. Another two inches. Still there. Another inch … and it was gone. Solid gone.

"Jesus," he whispered. "Jesus Christ."

"Would it open for you?" she asked. "Or me?"

He stepped forward slowly and grasped the knob of the door with those two words upon it.

He tried clockwise; he tried anti-clockwise.

The knob moved not an iota.

"All right." Her voice was calm, resigned. "It's for him, then. I think we both knew it. Go for him, Eddie. Now."

"First I've got to see to you."

"I'll be fine."

"No you won't. You're too close to the high tide line. If I leave you here, the lobsters are going to come out when it gets dark and you're going to be din—"

Up in the hills, a cat's coughing growl suddenly cut across what he was saying like a knife cutting thin cord. It was a good distance away, but closer than the other had been.

Her eyes flicked to the gunslinger's revolver shoved into the waistband of his pants for just a moment, then back to his face. He felt a dull heat in his cheeks.

"He told you not to give it to me, didn't he?" she said softly. "He doesn't want me to have it. For some reason he doesn't want me to have it."

"The shells got wet," he said awkwardly. "They probably wouldn't fire, anyway."

"I understand. Take me a little way up the slope, Eddie, can you? I know how tired your back must be, Andrew calls it Wheelchair Crouch, but if you take me up a little way, I'll be safe from the lobsters. I doubt if anything else comes very close to where they are."

Eddie thought, When the tide's in, she's probably right …but what about when it starts to go out again?

"Give me something to eat and some stones," she said, and her unknowing echo of the gunslinger made Eddie flush again. His cheeks and forehead felt like the sides of a brick oven.

She looked at him, smiled faintly, and shook her head as if he had spoken out loud. "We're not going to argue about this. I saw how it is with him. His time is very, very short. There is no time for discussion. Take me up a little way, give me food and some stones, then take the chair and go."

10

He got her fixed as quickly as he could, then pulled the gunslinger's revolver and held it out to her butt-first. But she shook her head.

"He'll be angry with both of us. Angry with you for giving, angrier at me for taking."

"Crap!" Eddie yelled. "What gave you that idea?"

"I know," she said, and her voice was impervious.

"Well, suppose that's true. Just suppose. I'll be angry with you if you don't take it."

"Put it back. I don't like guns. I don't know how to use them. If something came at me in the dark the first thing I'd do is wet my pants. The second thing I'd do is point it the wrong way and shoot myself." She paused, looking at Eddie sol­emnly. "There's something else, and you might as well know it. I don't want to touch anything that belongs to him. Not anything. For me, I think his things might have what my Ma used to call a hoodoo. I like to think of myself as a modern woman … but I don't want any hoodoo on me when you're gone and the dark lands on top of me."

He looked from the gun to Odetta, and his eyes still questioned.

"Put it back," she said, stern as a school teacher. Eddie burst out laughing and obeyed.

"Why are you laughing?"

"Because when you said that you sounded like Miss Hathaway. She was my third-grade teacher."

She smiled a little, her luminous eyes never leaving his. She sang softly, sweetly: "Heavenly shades of night are falling …it's twilight time …” She trailed off and they both looked west, but the star they had wished on the previous evening had not yet appeared, although their shadows had drawn long.

"Is there anything else, Odetta?" He felt an urge to delay and delay. He thought it would pass once he was actually headed back, but now the urge to seize any excuse to remain, seemed very strong.

"A kiss. I could do with that, if you don't mind."

He kissed her long and when their lips no longer touched, she caught his wrist and stared at him intently. "I never made love with a white man before last night," she said. "I don't know if that's important to you or not. I don't even know if it's important to me. But I thought you should know."

He considered.

"Not to me," he said. "In the dark, I think we were both gray. I love you, Odetta."

She put a hand over his.

"You're a sweet young man and perhaps I love you, too, although it's too early for either of us—"

At that moment, as if given a cue, a wildcat growled in what the gunslinger had called the brakes. It still sounded four or five miles away, but that was still four or five miles closer than the last time they heard it, and it sounded big.

They turned their heads toward the sound. Eddie felt hackles trying to stand up on his neck. They couldn't quite make it. Sorry, hackles, he thought stupidly. Iguess my hair's just a little too long now.

The growl rose to a tortured scream that sounded like a cry of some being suffering a horrid death (it might actually have signaled no more than a successful mating). It held for a moment, almost unbearable, and then it wound down, sliding through lower and lower registers until it was gone or buried beneath the ceaseless cry of the wind. They waited for it to come again, but the cry was not repeated. As far as Eddie was concerned, that didn't matter. He pulled the revolver out of his waistband again and held it out to her.

"Take it and don't argue. If you should need to use it, it won't do shit—that's how stuff like this always works—but take it anyway."

"Do you want an argument?"

"Oh, you can argue. You can argue all you want."

After a considering look into Eddie's almost-hazel eyes, she smiled a little wearily. "I won't argue, I guess." She took the gun. "Please be as quick as you can."

"I will." He kissed her again, hurriedly this time, and almost told her to be careful … but seriously, folks, how careful could she be, with the situation what it was?

He picked his way back down the slope through the deepening shadows (the lobstrosities weren't out yet, but they would be putting in their nightly appearance soon), and looked at the words written upon the door again. The same chill rose in his flesh. They were apt, those words. God, they were so apt. Then he looked back up the slope. For a moment he couldn't see her, and then he saw something move. The lighter brown of one palm. She was waving.

He waved back, then turned the wheelchair and began to run with it tipped up in front of him so the smaller, more delicate front wheels would be off the ground. He ran south, back the way he had come. For the first half-hour or so his shadow ran with him, the improbable shadow of a scrawny giant tacked to the soles of his sneakers and stretching long yards to the east. Then the sun went down, his shadow was gone, and the lobstrosities began to tumble out of the waves.

It was ten minutes or so after he heard the first of their buzzing cries when he looked up and saw the evening star glowing calmly against the dark blue velvet of the sky.

Heavenly shades of night are falling …it's twilight time …

Let her be safe. His legs were already aching, his breath too hot and heavy in his lungs, and there was still a third trip to make, this time with the gunslinger as his passenger, and although he guessed Roland must outweigh Odetta by a full hundred pounds and knew he should conserve his strength, Eddie kept running anyway. Let her be safe, that's my wish, let my beloved be safe.

And, like an ill omen, a wildcat screeched somewhere in the tortured ravines that cut through the hills … only this wildcat sounded as big as a lion roaring in an African jungle.

Eddie ran faster, pushing the untenanted gantry of the wheelchair before him. Soon the wind began to make a thin, ghastly whine through the freely turning spokes of the raised front wheels.

11

The gunslinger heard a reedy wailing sound approach­ing him, tensed for a moment, then heard panting breath and relaxed. It was Eddie. Even without opening his eyes he knew that.

When the wailing sound faded and the running footsteps slowed, Roland opened his eyes. Eddie stood panting before him with sweat running down the sides of his face. His shirt was plastered against his chest in a single dark blotch. Any last vestiges of the college-boy look Jack Andolini had insisted upon were gone. His hair hung over his forehead. He had split his pants at the crotch. The bluish-purple crescents under his eyes completed the picture. Eddie Dean was a mess.

"I made it," he said. "I'm here." He looked around, then back at the gunslinger, as if he could not believe it. "Jesus Christ, I'm really here."

"You gave her the gun."

Eddie thought the gunslinger looked bad—as bad as he'd looked before the first abbreviated round of Keflex, maybe a trifle worse. Fever-heat seemed to be coming off him in waves, and he knew he should have felt sorry for him, but for the moment all he could seem to feel was mad as hell.

"I bust my ass getting back here in record time and all you can say is 'You gave her the gun.' Thanks, man. I mean, I expected some expression of gratitude, but this is just over-fucking–whelming."

" I think I said the only thing that matters."

"Well, now that you mention it, I did," Eddie said, put­ting his hands on his hips and staring truculently down at the gunslinger. "Now you have your choice. You can get in this chair or I can fold it and try to jam it up your ass. Which do you prefer, mawster?"

"Neither." Roland was smiling a little, the smile of a man who doesn't want to smile but can't help it. "First you're going to take some sleep, Eddie. We'll see what we'll see when the time for seeing comes, but for now you need sleep. You're done in."

"I want to get back to her."

"I do, too. But if you don't rest, you're going to fall down in the traces. Simple as that. Bad for you, worse for me, and worst of all for her."

Eddie stood for a moment, undecided.

"You made good time," the gunslinger conceded. He squinted at the sun. "It's four, maybe a quarter-past. You sleep five, maybe seven hours, and it'll be full dark—"

"Four. Four hours."

"All right. Until after dark; I think that's the important thing. Then you eat. Then we move."

"You eat, too."

That faint smile again. "I'll try." He looked at Eddie calmly. "Your life is in my hands now; I suppose you know that."

"Yes."

"I kidnapped you."

"Yes."

"Do you want to kill me? If you do, do it now rather than subject any of us to …" His breath whistled out softly. Eddie heard his chest rattling and cared very little for the sound. "… to any further discomfort," he finished.

"I don't want to kill you."

"Then—" he was interrupted by a sudden harsh burst of coughing "—lie down," he finished.

Eddie did. Sleep did not drift upon him as it sometimes did but seized him with the rough hands of a lover who is awkward in her eagerness. He heard (or perhaps this was only a dream) Roland saying, But you shouldn't have given her the gun, and then he was simply in the dark for an unknown time and then Roland was shaking him awake and when he finally sat up all there seemed to be in his body was pain: pain and weight. His muscles had turned into rusty winches and pullies in a deserted building. His first effort to get to his feet didn't work. He thumped heavily back to the sand. He managed it on the second try, but he felt as if it might take him twenty minutes just to perform such a simple act as turning around. And it would hurt to do it.

Roland's eyes were on him, questioning. "Are you ready?"

Eddie nodded. "Yes. Are you?"

"Yes."

"Can you?"

"Yes."

So they ate … and then Eddie began his third and last trip along this cursed stretch of beach.

12

They rolled a good stretch that night, but Eddie was still dully disappointed when the gunslinger called a halt. He offered no disagreement because he was simply too weary to go on without rest, but he had hoped to get further. The weight. That was the big problem. Compared to Odetta, pushing Roland was like pushing a load of iron bars. Eddie slept four more hours before dawn, woke with the sun coming over the eroding hills which were all that remained of the mountains, and listened to the gunslinger coughing. It was a weak cough, full of rales, the cough of an old man who may be coming down with pneumonia.

Their eyes met. Roland's coughing spasm turned into a laugh.

"I'm not done yet, Eddie, no matter how I sound. Are you?"

Eddie thought of Odetta's eyes and shook his head.

"Not done, but I could use a cheeseburger and a Bud."

"Bud?" the gunslinger said doubtfully, thinking of apple trees and the spring flowers in the Royal Court Gardens .

"Never mind. Hop in, my man. No four on the floor, no T-top, but we're going to roll some miles just the same.

And they did, but when sunset came on the second day following his leave-taking of Odetta, they were still only draw­ing near the place of the third door. Eddie lay down, meaning to crash for another four hours, but the screaming cry of one of those cats jerked him out of sleep after only two hours, his heart thumping. God, the thing sounded fucking huge.

He saw the gunslinger up on one elbow, his eyes gleam­ing in the dark.

"You ready?" Eddie asked. He got slowly to his feet, grinning with pain.

"Are you?" Roland asked again, very softly.

Eddie twisted his back, producing a series of pops like a string of tiny firecrackers. "Yeah. But I could really get behind that cheeseburger."

"I thought chicken was what you wanted."

Eddie groaned. "Cut me a break, man."

The third door was in plain view by the time the sun cleared the hills. Two hours later, they reached it.

All together again, Eddie thought, ready to drop to the sand.

But that was apparently not so. There was no sign of Odetta Holmes. No sign at all.

13

"Odetta!" Eddie screamed, and now his voice was broken and hoarse as the voice of Odetta's other had been.

There wasn't even an echo in return, something he might at least have mistaken for Odetta's voice. These low, eroded hills would not bounce sound. There was only the crash of the waves, much louder in this tight arrowhead of land, the rhythmic, hollow boom of surf crashing to the end of some tunnel it had dug in the friable rock, and the steady keening of the wind.

"Odetta!"

This time he screamed so loudly his voice broke and for a moment something sharp, like a jag of fishbone, tore at his vocal cords. His eyes scanned the hills frantically, looking for the lighter patch of brown that would be her palm, looking for movement as she stood up … looking (God forgive him) for bright splashes of blood on roan-colored rock.

He found himself wondering what he would do if he saw that last, or found the revolver, now with deep toothmarks driven into the smooth sandalwood of the grips. The sight of something like that might drive him into hysteria, might even run him crazy, but he looked for it—or something—just the same.

His eyes saw nothing; his ears brought not the faintest returning cry.

The gunslinger, meanwhile, had been studying the third door. He had expected a single word, the word the man in black had used as he turned the sixth Tarot card at the dusty Golgotha where they had held palaver. Death, Walter had said, but not for you, gunslinger.

There was not one word writ upon this door but two … and neither of them was DEATH. He read it again, lips moving soundlessly:

THE PUSHER

Yet it means death, Roland thought, and knew it was so.

What made him look around was the sound of Eddie's voice, moving away. Eddie had begun to climb the first slope, still calling Odetta's name.

For a moment Roland considered just letting him go.

He might find her, might even find her alive, not too badly hurt, and still herself. He supposed the two of them might even make a life of sorts for themselves here, that Eddie's love for Odetta and hers for him might somehow smother the nightshade who called herself Detta Walker. Yes, between the two of them he supposed it was possible that Detta might simply be squeezed to death. He was a romantic in his own harsh way … yet he was also realist enough to know that sometimes love actually did conquer all. As for himself? Even if he was able to get the drugs from Eddie's world which had almost cured him before, would they be able to cure him this time, or even make a start? He was now very sick, and he found himself wondering if perhaps things hadn't gone too far. His arms and legs ached, his head thudded, his chest was heavy and full of snot. When he coughed there was a painful grating in his left side, as if ribs were broken there. His left ear flamed. Perhaps, he thought, the time had come to end it; to just cry off.

At this, everything in him rose up in protest.

"Eddie!" he cried, and there was no cough now. His voice was deep and powerful.

Eddie turned, one foot on raw dirt, the other braced on a jutting spar of rock.

"Go on," he said, and made a curious little sweeping gesture with his hand, a gesture that said he wanted to be rid of the gunslinger so he could be about his real business, the important business, the business of finding Odetta and rescu­ing her if rescue were necessary. "It's all right. Go on through and get the stuff you need. We'll both be here when you get back."

"I doubt that."

"I have to find her." Eddie looked at Roland and his gaze was very young and completely naked. "I mean, I really have to."

"I understand your love and your need," the gunslinger said, "but I want you to come with me this time, Eddie."

Eddie stared at him for a long time, as if trying to credit what he was hearing.

"Come with you," he said at last, bemused. "Come with you! Holy God, now I think I really have heard everything. Deedle-deedle-dumpkin everything. Last time you were so determined I was gonna stay behind you were willing to take a chance on me cutting your throat. This time you want to take a chance on something ripping hers right out."

"That may have already happened," Roland said, al­though he knew it hadn't. The Lady might be hurt, but he knew she wasn't dead.

Unfortunately, Eddie did, too. A week or ten days without his drug had sharpened his mind remarkably. He pointed at the door. "You know she's not. If she was, that goddam thing would be gone. Unless you were lying when you said it wasn't any good without all three of us."

Eddie tried to turn back to the slope, but Roland's eyes held him nailed.

"All right," the gunslinger said. His voice was almost as soft as it had been when he spoke past the hateful face and screaming voice of Detta to the woman trapped somewhere behind it. "She's alive. That being so, why does she not answer your calls?"

"Well … one of those cats-things may have carried her away." But Eddie's voice was weak.

"A cat would have killed her, eaten what it wanted, and left the rest. At most, it might have dragged her body into the shade so it could come back tonight and eat meat the sun perhaps hadn't yet spoiled. But if that was the case, the door would be gone. Cats aren't like some insects, who paralyze their prey and carry them off to eat later, and you know it."

"That isn't necessarily true," Eddie said. For a moment he heard Odetta saying You should have been on the debate team, Eddie and pushed the thought aside. "Could be a cat came for her and she tried to shoot it but the first couple of shells in your gun were misfires. Hell, maybe even the first four or five. The cat gets to her, mauls her, and just before it can kill her … BANG!" Eddie smacked a fist against his palm, seeing all this so vividly that he might have witnessed it. "The bullet kills the cat, or maybe just wounds it, or maybe just scares it off. What about that?"

Mildly, Roland said: "We would have heard a gunshot."

For a moment Eddie could only stand, mute, able to think of no counter-argument. Of course they would have heard it. The first time they had heard one of the cats yowling, it had to have been fifteen, maybe twenty miles away. A pistol-shot—

He looked at Roland with sudden cunning. "Maybe you did," he said. "Maybe you heard a gunshot while I was asleep."

"It would have woken you."

"Not as tired as I am, man. I fall asleep, it's like—"

"Like being dead," the gunslinger said in that same mild voice. "I know the feeling."

"Then you understand—"

"But it's not being dead. Last night you were out just like that, but when one of those cats screeched, you were awake and on your feet in seconds. Because of your concern for her. There was no gunshot, Eddie, and you know it. You would have heard it. Because of your concern for her."

"So maybe she brained it with a rock!" Eddie shouted. "How the hell do I know when I'm standing here arguing with you instead of checking out the possibilities? I mean, she could be lying up there someplace hurt, man! Hurt or bleed­ing to death! How'd you like it if I did come through that door with you and she died while we were on the other side? How'd you like to look around once and see that doorway there, then look around twice and see it gone, just like it never was, because she was gone? Then you'd be trapped in my world instead of the other way around!" He stood panting and glaring at the gunslinger, his hands balled into fists.

Roland felt a tired exasperation. Someone—it might have been Cort but he rather thought it had been his father—had had a saying: Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover. If any proof of the saying were needed, there it stood above him, in a posture that was all defiance and defense. Go on, the set of Eddie Dean's body said. Go on, I can answer any question you throw at me.

"Might not have been a cat that found her," he said now. "This may be your world, but I don't think you've ever been to this part of it any more than I've ever been to Borneo . You don't know what might be running around up in those hills, do you? Could be an ape grabbed her, or something like that."

"Something grabbed her, all right," the gunslinger said.

"Well thank God getting sick hasn't driven all the sense out of your m—"

"And we both know what it was. Detta Walker. That's what grabbed her. Detta Walker."

Eddie opened his mouth, but for some little time—only seconds, but enough of them so both acknowledged the truth—the gunslinger's inexorable face bore all his arguments to silence.

14

"It doesn't have to be that way."

"Come a little closer. If we're going to talk, let's talk. Every time I have to shout at you over the waves, it rips another piece of my throat out. That's how it feels, anyway."

"What big eyes you have, grandma," Eddie said, not moving.

"What in hell's name are you talking about?"

"A fairy tale." Eddie did descend a short way back down the slope—four yards, no more. "And fairy tales are what you're thinking about if you believe you can coax me close enough to that wheelchair."

"Close enough for what? I don't understand," Roland said, although he understood perfectly.

Nearly a hundred and fifty yards above them and perhaps a full quarter of a mile to the east, dark eyes—eyes as full of intelligence as they were lacking in human mercy—watched this tableau intently. It was impossible to tell what they were saying; the wind, the waves, and the hollow crash of the surf digging its underground channel saw to that, but Detta didn't need to hear what they were saying to know what they were talking about. She didn't need a telescope to see that the Really Bad Man was now also the Really Sick Man, and maybe the Really Bad Man was willing to spend a few days or even a few weeks torturing a legless Negro woman—way things looked around here, entertainment was mighty hard to come by—but she thought the Really Sick Man only wanted one thing, and that was to get his whitebread ass out of here. Just use that magic doorway to haul the fucker out. But before, he hadn't been hauling no ass. Before, he hadn't been hauling nothing. Before, the Really Bad Man hadn't been nowhere but inside her own head. She still didn't like to think of how that had been, how it had felt, how easily he had overridden all her clawing efforts to push him out, away, to take control of herself again. That had been awful. Terrible. And what made it worse was her lack of understanding. What, exactly, was the real source of her terror? That it wasn't the invasion itself was frightening enough. She knew she might understand if she examined herself more closely, but she didn't want to do that. Such examination might lead her to a place like the one sailors had feared in the ancient days, a place which was no more or less than the edge of the world, a place the cartographers had marked with the legend HERE THERE BE SARPENTS. The hideous thing about the Really Bad Man's invasion had been the sense of familiarity that came with it, as if this amazing thing had happened before—not once, but many times. But, frightened or not, she had denied panic. She had observed even as she fought, and she remembered looking into that door when the gunslinger used her hands to pivot the wheelchair toward it. She remembered seeing the body of the Really Bad Man lying on the sand with Eddie crouched above it, a knife in his hand.

Would that Eddie had plunged that knife into the Really Bad Man's throat! Better than a pig-slaughtering! Better by a country mile!

He hadn't, but she had seen the Really Bad Man's body. It had been breathing, but body was the right word just the same; it had only been a worthless thing, like a cast-off towsack which some idiot had stuffed full of weeds or cornshucks.

Detta's mind might have been as ugly as a rat's ass, but it was even quicker and sharper than Eddie's. Really Bad Man there used to be full of piss an vinegar. Not no mo. He know I'm up here and doan want to do nothin but git away befo I come down an kill his ass. His little buddy, though—he still be pretty strong, and he ain't had his fill of hurting on me just yet. Want to come up here and hunt me down no matter how that Really Bad Man be. Sho. He be thinkin, One black bitch widdout laigs no match fo a big ole swingin dick like me. I doan wan t'run. I want to be huntin that black quiff down. I give her a poke or two, den we kin go like you want. That what he be thinkin, and that be all right. That be jes fine, graymeat. You think you can take DettaWalker, you jes come on up here in these Drawers and give her a try. You goan find out when you fuckin with me, you fuckin wit the best, honeybunch! You goan find out—

But she was jerked from the rat-run of her thoughts by a sound that came to her clearly in spite of the surf and wind: the heavy crack of a pistol-shot.

15

"I think you understand better than you let on," Eddie said. "A whole hell of a lot better. You'd like for me to get in grabbing distance, that's what I think." He jerked his head toward the door without taking his eyes from Roland's face. Unaware that not far away someone was thinking exactly the same thing, he added: "I know you're sick, all right, but it could be you're pretending to be a lot weaker than you really are. Could be you're laying back in the tall grass just a little bit."

"Could be I am," Roland said, unsmiling, and added: "But I'm not."

He was, though … a little.

"A few more steps wouldn't hurt, though, would it? I'm not going to be able to shout much longer." The last syllable turned into a frog's croak as if to prove his point. "And I need to make you think about what you're doing—planning to do. If I can't persuade you to come with me, maybe I can at least put you on your guard … again."

"For your precious Tower," Eddie sneered, but he did come skidding halfway down the slope of ground he had climbed, his tattered tennies kicking up listless clouds of maroon dust.

"For my precious Tower and your precious health," the gunslinger said. "Not to mention your precious life."

He slipped the remaining revolver from the left holster and looked at it with an expression both sad and strange.

"If you think you can scare me with that—"

"I don't. You know I can't shoot you, Eddie. But I think you do need an object lesson in how things have changed. How much things have changed."

Roland lifted the gun, its muzzle pointing not toward Eddie but toward the empty surging ocean, and thumbed the hammer. Eddie steeled himself against the gun's heavy crack.

No such thing. Only a dull click.

Roland thumbed the hammer back again. The cylinder rotated. He squeezed the trigger, and again there was nothing but a dull click.

"Never mind," Eddie said. "Where I come from, the Defense Department would have hired you after the first mis­fire. You might as well qui—"

But the heavy KA-BLAM of the revolver cut off the word's end as neatly as Roland had cut small branches from trees as a target-shooting exercise when he had been a student. Eddie jumped. The gunshot momentarily silenced the constant riiiiii of the insects in the hills. They only began to tune up again slowly, cautiously, after Roland had put the gun in his lap.

"What in hell does that prove?"

"I suppose that all depends on what you'll listen to and what you refuse to hear," Roland said a trifle sharply. "It's supposed to prove that not all the shells are duds. Further­more, it suggests—strongly suggests—that some, maybe even all, of the shells in the gun you gave Odetta may be live."

"Bullshit!" Eddie paused. "Why?"

"Because I loaded the gun I just fired with shells from the backs of my gunbelts—with shells that took the worst wetting, in other words. I did it just to pass the time while you were gone. Not that it takes much time to load a gun, even shy a pair of fingers, you understand!" Roland laughed a little, and the laugh turned into a cough he muzzled with an abridged fist. When the cough had subsided he went on: "But after you've tried to fire wets, you have to break the machine and clean the machine. Break the machine, clean the machine, you mag­gots— it was the first thing Cort, our teacher, drummed into us. I didn't know how long it would take me to break down my gun, clean it, and put it back together with only a hand and a half, but I thought that if I intended to go on living—and I do, Eddie, I do—I'd better find out. Find out and then learn to do it faster, don't you think so? Come a little closer, Eddie! Come a little closer for your father's sake!"

"All the better to see you with, my child," Eddie said, but did take a couple of steps closer to Roland. Only a couple.

"When the first slug I pulled the trigger on fired, I almost filled my pants," the gunslinger said. He laughed again. Shocked, Eddie realized the gunslinger had reached the edge of delirium. "The first slug, but believe me when I say it was the last thing I had expected."

Eddie tried to decide if the gunslinger was lying, lying about the gun, and lying about his condition as well. Cat was sick, yeah. But was he really this sick? Eddie didn't know. If Roland was acting, he was doing a great job; as for guns, Eddie had no way of telling because he had no experience with them. He had shot a pistol maybe three times in his life before suddenly finding himself in a firefight at Balazar's place. Henry might have known, but Henry was dead—a thought which had a way of constantly surprising Eddie into grief.

"None of the others fired," the gunslinger said, "so I cleaned the machine, re-loaded, and fired around the chamber again. This time I used shells a little further toward the belt buckles. Ones which would have taken even less of a wetting. The loads we used to kill our food, the dry loads, were the ones closest to the buckles."

He paused to cough dryly into his hand, then went on.

"Second time around I hit two live rounds. I broke my gun down again, cleaned it again, then loaded a third time. You just watched me drop the trigger on the first three chambers of that third loading." He smiled faintly. "You know, after the first two clicks I thought it would be my damned luck to have filled the cylinder with nothing but wets. That wouldn't have been very convincing, would it? Can you come a little closer, Eddie?"

"Not very convincing at all," Eddie said, "and I think I'm just as close to you as I'm going to come, thanks. What lesson am I supposed to take from all this, Roland?"

Roland looked at him as one might look at an imbecile. "I didn't send you out here to die, you know. I didn't send either of you out here to die. Great gods, Eddie, where are your brains? She's packing live iron!" His eyes regarded Eddie closely. "She's someplace up in those hills. Maybe you think you can track her, but you're not going to have any luck if the ground is as stony as it looks from here. She's lying up there, Eddie, not Odetta but Detta, lying up there with live iron in her hand. If I leave you and you go after her, she'll blow your guts out of your asshole."

Another spasm of coughing set in.

Eddie stared at the coughing man in the wheelchair and the waves pounded and the wind blew its steady idiot's note.

At last he heard his voice say, "You could have held back one shell you knew was live. I wouldn't put it past you." And with that said he knew it to be true: he wouldn't put that or anything else past Roland.

His Tower.

His goddamned Tower.

And the slyness of putting the saved shell in the third cylinder! It provided just the right touch of reality, didn't it? Made it hard not to believe.

"We've got a saying in my world," Eddie said. " 'That guy could sell Frigidaires to the Eskimos.' That's the saying."

"What does it mean?"

"It means go pound sand."

The gunslinger looked at him for a long time and then nodded. "You mean to stay. All right. As Detta she's safer from … from whatever wildlife there may be around here … than she would have been as Odetta, and you'd be safer away from her—at least for the time being—but I can see how it is. I don't like it, but I've no time to argue with a fool."

"Does that mean," Eddie asked politely, "that no one ever tried to argue with you about this Dark Tower you're so set on getting to?"

Roland smiled tiredly. "A great many did, as a matter of fact. I suppose that's why I recognize you'll not be moved. One fool knows another. At any rate, I'm too weak to catch you, you're obviously too wary to let me coax you close enough to grab you, and time's grown too short to argue. All I can do is go and hope for the best. I'm going to tell you one last time before I do go, and hear me, Eddie: Be on your guard."

Then Roland did something that made Eddie ashamed of all his doubts (although no less solidly set in his own deci­sion): he flicked open the cylinder of the revolver with a practiced flick of his wrist, dumped all the loads, and replaced them with fresh loads from the loops closest to the buckles. He snapped the cylinder back into place with another flick of his wrist.

"No time to clean the machine now," he said, "but 'twont matter, I reckon. Now catch, and catch clean—don't dirty the machine any more than it is already. There aren't many machines left in my world that work anymore."

He threw the gun across the space between them. In his anxiety, Eddie almost did drop it. Then he had it safely tucked into his waistband.

The gunslinger got out of the wheelchair, almost fell when it slid backward under his pushing hands, then tottered to the door. He grasped its knob; in his hand it turned easily. Eddie could not see the scene the door opened upon, but he heard the muffled sound of traffic.

Roland looked back at Eddie, his blue bullshooter's eyes gleaming out of a face which was ghastly pale.

16

Detta watched all of this from her hiding place with hungrily gleaming eyes.

17

"Remember, Eddie," he said in a hoarse voice, and then stepped forward. His body collapsed at the edge of the doorway, as if it had struck a stone wall instead of empty space.

Eddie felt an almost insatiable urge to go to the doorway, to look through and see where—and to what when— it led. Instead he turned and scanned the hills again, his hand on the gun-butt.

I'm going to tell you one last time.

Suddenly, scanning the empty brown hills, Eddie was scared.

Be on your guard.

Nothing up there was moving.

Nothing he could see, at least.

He sensed her all the same.

Not Odetta; the gunslinger was right about that.

It was Detta he sensed.

He swallowed and heard a click in his throat.

On your guard.

Yes. But never in his life had he felt such a deadly need for sleep. It would take him soon enough; if he didn't give in willingly, sleep would rape him.

And while he slept, Detta would come.

Detta.

Eddie fought the weariness, looked at the unmoving hills with eyes which felt swollen and heavy, and wondered how long it might be before Roland came back with the third—The Pusher, whoever he or she was.

"Odetta?" he called without much hope.

Only silence answered, and for Eddie the time of waiting began.