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 f**king 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.