But that doesn't necessarily mean the same hands, he thought wildly, but that would only hold for a second. He had studied her hands. They were the same, long-fingered and delicate.
"No," the gunslinger continued. "She is not." His blue eyes studied Eddie carefully.
"Her hands―"
"Listen," the gunslinger said, "and listen carefully. Our lives may depend on it―mine because I'm getting sick again, and yours because you have fallen in love with her."
Eddie said nothing.
"She is two women in the same body. She was one woman when I entered her, and another when I returned here."
Now Eddie could say nothing.
"There was something else, something strange, but either I didn't understand it or I did and it's slipped away. It seemed important."
Roland looked past Eddie, looked to the beached wheel-chair, standing alone at the end of its short track from nowhere. Then he looked back at Eddie.
"I understand very little of this, or how such a thing can be, but you must be on your guard. Do you understand that?"
"Yes." Eddie's lungs felt as if they had very little wind in them. He understood―or had, at least, a moviegoer's understanding of the sort of thing the gunslinger was speaking of―but he didn't have the breath to explain, not yet. He felt as if Roland had kicked all his breath out of him.
"Good. Because the woman I entered on the other side of the door was as deadly as those lobster-things that come out at night."
THE LADY OF SHADOWS CHAPTER 4 DETTA ON THE OTHER SIDE
1
You must be on your guard, the gunslinger said, and Eddie had agreed, but the gunslinger knew Eddie didn't know what he was talking about; the whole back half of Eddie's mind, where survival is or isn't, didn't get the message.
The gunslinger saw this.
It was a good thing for Eddie he did.
2
In the middle of the night, Detta Walker's eyes sprang open. They were full of starlight and clear intelligence.
She remembered everything: how she had fought them, how they had tied her into her chair, how they had taunted her, calling her niggerbitch, niggerbitch.
She remembered monsters coming out of the waves, and she remembered how one of the men―the older―had killed one of them. The younger had built a fire and cooked it and then had offered her smoking monster-meat on a stick, grinning. She remembered spitting at his face, remembered his grin turning into an angry honky scowl. He had hit her upside the face, and told her Well, that's all right, you'll come around, niggerbitch. Wait and see if you don't. Then he and the Really Bad Man―had laughed and the Really Bad Man had brought out a haunch of beef which he spitted and slowly cooked over the fire on the beach of this alien place to which they had brought her.
The smell of the slowly roasting beef had been seductive, but she had made no sign. Even when the younger one had waved a chunk of it near her face, chanting Bite for it, niggerbitch, go on and bite for it, she had sat like stone, holding herself in.
Then she had slept, and now she was awake, and the ropes they had tied her with were gone. She was no longer in her chair but lying on one blanket and under another, far above the high-tide line, where the lobster-things still wandered and questioned and snatched the odd unfortunate gull out of the air.
She looked to her left and saw nothing.
She looked to her right and saw two sleeping men wrapped in two piles of blankets. The younger one was closer, and the Really Bad Man had taken off his gunbelts and laid them by him.
The guns were still in them.
You made a bad mistake, mahfah, Detta thought, and rolled to her right. The gritty crunch and squeak of her body on the sand was inaudible under the wind, the waves, the questioning creatures. She crawled slowly along the sand (like one of the lobstrosities herself), her eyes glittering.
She reached the gunbelts and pulled one of the guns.
It was very heavy, the grip smooth and somehow independently deadly in her hand. The heaviness didn't bother her. She had strong arms, did Detta Walker.
She crawled a little further.
The younger man was no more than a snoring rock, but the Really Bad Man stirred a little in his sleep and she froze with a snarl tattooed on her face until he quieted again.
He be one sneaky sumbitch. You check, Detta. You check, be sho.
She found the worn chamber release, tried to shove it forward, got nothing, and pulled it instead. The chamber swung open.
Loaded! Fucker be loaded! You goan do this young cocka-de-walk first, and dat Really Bad Man be wakin up and you goan give him one big grin―smile honeychile so I kin see where you is―and den you goan clean his clock somethin righteous.
She swung the chamber back, started to pull the hammer ... and then waited.
When the wind kicked up a gust, she pulled the hammer to full cock.
Detta pointed Roland's gun at Eddie's temple.
3
The gunslinger watched all this from one half-open eye. The fever was back, but not bad yet, not so bad that he must mistrust himself. So he waited, that one half-open eye the finger on the trigger of his body, the body which had always been his revolver when there was no revolver at hand.
She pulled the trigger.
Click.
Of course click.
When he and Eddie had come back with the waterskins from their palaver, Odetta Holmes had been deeply asleep in her wheelchair, slumped to one side. They had made her the best bed they could on the sand and carried her gently from her wheelchair to the spread blankets. Eddie had been sure she would awake, but Roland knew better.
He had killed, Eddie had built a fire, and they had eaten, saving a portion aside for Odetta in the morning.
Then they had talked, and Eddie had said something which burst upon Roland like a sudden flare of lightning. It was too bright and too brief to be total understanding, but he saw much, the way one may discern the lay of the land in a single lucky stroke of lightning.
He could have told Eddie then, but did not. He understood that he must be Eddie's Cort, and when one of Cort's pupils was left hurt and bleeding by some unexpected blow, Cort's response had always been the same: A child doesn't understand a hammer until he's mashed his finger at a nail. Get up and stop whining, maggot! You have forgotten the face of your father!
So Eddie had fallen asleep, even though Roland had told him he must be on his guard, and when Roland was sure they both slept (he had waited longer for the Lady, who could, he thought, be sly), he had reloaded his guns with spent casings, unstrapped them (that caused a pang), and put them by Eddie.
Then he waited.
One hour; two; three.
Halfway through the fourth hour, as his tired and feverish body tried to drowse, he sensed rather than saw the Lady come awake and came fully awake himself.
He watched her roll over. He watched her turn her hands into claws and pull herself along the sand to where his gun-belts lay. He watched her take one of them out, come closer to Eddie, and then pause, her head cocking, her nostrils swelling and contracting, doing more than smelling the air; tasting it.
Yes. This was the woman he had brought across.
When she glanced toward the gunslinger he did more than feign sleep, because she would have sensed sham; he went to sleep. When he sensed her gaze shift away he awoke and opened that single eye again. He saw her begin to raise the gun―she did this with less effort than Eddie had shown the first time Roland saw him do the same thing―and point it toward Eddie's head. Then she paused, her face filled with an inexpressible cunning.
In that moment she reminded him of Marten.
She fiddled with the cylinder, getting it wrong at first, then swinging it open. She looked at the heads of the shells. Roland tensed, waiting first to see if she would know the firing pins had already been struck, waiting next to see if she would turn the gun, look into the other end of the cylinder, and see there was only emptiness there instead of lead (he had thought of loading the guns with cartridges which had already misfired, but only briefly; Cort had taught them that every gun is ultimately ruled by Old Man Splitfoot, and a cartridge which misfires once may not do so a second time). If she did that, he would spring at once.
But she swung the cylinder back in, began to c**k the hammer ... and then paused again. Paused for the wind to mask the single low click.
He thought: Here is another. God, she's evil, this one, and she's legless, but she's a gunslinger as surely as Eddie is one.
He waited with her.
The wind gusted.
She pulled the hammer to full c**k and placed it half an inch from Eddie's temple. With a grin that was a ghoul's grimace, she pulled the trigger.
Click.
He waited.
She pulled it again. And again. And again.
Click-Click-Click.
"MahFAH!" she screamed, and reversed the gun with liquid grace.
Roland coiled but did not leap. A child doesn't understand a hammer until he's mashed his finger at a nail.
If she kills him, she kills you.
Doesn't matter, the voice of Cort answered inexorably.
Eddie stirred. And his reflexes were not bad; he moved fast enough to avoid being driven unconscious or killed. Instead of coming down on the vulnerable temple, the heavy gun-butt cracked the side of his jaw.
"What ... Jesus!"
"MAHFAH! HONKY MAHFUH!" Detta screamed, and Roland saw her raise the gun a second time. And even though she was legless and Eddie was rolling away, it was as much as he dared. If Eddie hadn't learned the lesson now, he never would. The next time the gunslinger told Eddie to be on his guard, Eddie would be, and besides―the bitch was quick. It would not be wise to depend further than this on either Eddie's quickness or the Lady's infirmity.
He uncoiled, flying over Eddie and knocking her backward, ending up on top of her.
"You want it, mahfah?" she screamed at him, simultaneously rolling her crotch against his groin and raising the arm which still held the gun above his head. "You want it? I goan give you what you want, sho!"
"Eddie!" he shouted again, not just yelling now but commanding. For a moment Eddie just went on squalling there, eyes wide, blood dripping from his jaw (it had already begun to swell), staring, eyes wide. Move, can't you move? he thought, or is it that you don't want to? His strength was fading now, and the next time she brought that heavy gunbutt down she was going to break his arm with it ... that was if he got his arm up in time. If he didn't, she was going to break his head with it.
Then Eddie moved. He caught the gun on the downswing and she shrieked, turning toward him, biting at him like a vampire, cursing him in a gutter patois so darkly southern that even Eddie couldn't understand it; to Roland it sounded as if the woman had suddenly begun to speak in a foreign language. But Eddie was able to yank the gun out of her hand and with the impending bludgeon gone, Roland was able to pin her.
She did not quit even then but continued to buck and heave and curse, sweat standing out all over her dark face.
Eddie stared, mouth opening and closing like the mouth of a fish. He touched tentatively at his jaw, winced, pulled his fingers back, examined them and the blood on them.
She was screaming that she would kill them both; they could try and rape her but she would kill them with her cunt, they would see, that was one bad son of a bitching cave with teeth around the entrance and if they wanted to try and explore it they would find out.
"What in the hell―" Eddie said stupidly.
"One of my gunbelts," the gunslinger panted harshly at him. "Get it. I'm going to roll her over on top of me and you're going to grab her arms and tie her hands behind her."
"You ain't NEVAH!" Detta shrieked, and sunfished her legless body with such sudden force that she almost bucked Roland off. He felt her trying to bring the remainder of her right thigh up again and again, wanting to drive it into his balls.
"I ... I ... she ..."
"Move, God curse your father's face!" Roland roared, and at last Eddie moved.
4
They almost lost control of her twice during the tying and binding. But Eddie was at last able to slip-knot one of Roland's gunbelts around her wrists when Roland―using all his force―finally brought them together behind her (all the time drawing back from her lunging bites like a mongoose from a snake; the bites he avoided but before Eddie had finished, the gunslinger was drenched with spittle) and then Eddie dragged her off, holding the short leash of the makeshift slip-knot to do it. He did not want to hurt this thrashing screaming cursing thing. It was uglier than the lobstrosities by far because of the greater intelligence which informed it, but he knew it could also be beautiful. He did not want to harm the other person the vessel held somewhere inside it (like a live dove deep inside one of the secret compartments in a magician's magic box).
Odetta Holmes was somewhere inside that screaming screeching thing.