12
The stairs were choked with people who had reversed their downward course when the yelling and shooting started, obsessed with that morbid and somehow unique New Yorkers' curiosity to see how bad, how many, how much blood spilled on the dirty concrete. Yet somehow they still found a way to shrink back from the man in the blue suit who came plunging down the stairs. It wasn't much wonder. He was holding a gun, and another was strapped around his waist.
Also, he appeared to be on fire.
13
Roland ignored Mort's increasing shrieks of pain as his shirt, undershirt, and jacket began to burn more briskly, as the silver of the lighter began to melt and run down his midsection to his belly in burning tracks.
He could smell dirty moving air, could hear the roar of an oncoming train.
This was almost the time; the moment had almost come around, the moment when he would draw the three or lose it all. For the second time he seemed to feel worlds tremble and reel about his head.
He reached the platform level and tossed the .38 aside. He unbuckled Jack Mort's pants and pushed them casually down, revealing a pair of white underdrawers like a whore's panties. He had no time to reflect on this oddity. If he did not move fast, he could stop worrying about burning alive; the bullets he had purchased would get hot enough to go off and this body would simply explode.
The gunslinger stuffed the boxes of bullets into the underdrawers, took out the bottle of Keflex, and did the same with it. Now the underdrawers bulged grotesquely. He stripped off the flaming suit-jacket, but made no effort to take off the flaming shirt.
He could hear the train roaring toward the platform, could see its light. He had no way of knowing it was a train which kept the same route as the one which had run over Odetta, but all the same he did know. In matters of the Tower, fate became a thing as merciful as the lighter which had saved his life and as painful as the fire the miracle had ignited. Like the wheels of the oncoming train, it followed a course both logical and crushingly brutal, a course against which only steel and sweetness could stand.
He hoicked up Mort's pants and began to run again, barely aware of the people scattering out of his way. As more air fed the fire, first his shirt collar and then his hair began to burn. The heavy boxes in Mort's underdrawers slammed against his balls again and again, mashing them; excruciating pain rose into his gut. He jumped the turnstile, a man who was becoming a meteor. Put me out! Mort screamed. Put me out before I burn up!
You ought to burn, the gunslinger thought grimly. What's going to happen to you is more merciful than you deserve.
What do you mean? WHAT DO YOU MEAN?
The gunslinger didn't answer; in fact turned him off entirely as he pelted toward the edge of the platform. He felt one of the boxes of shells trying to slip out of Mort's ridiculous panties and held it with one hand.
He sent out every bit of his mental force toward the Lady. He had no idea if such a telepathic command could be heard, or if the hearer could be compelled to obey, but he sent it just the same, a swift, sharp arrow of thought:
THE DOOR! LOOK THROUGH THE DOOR! NOW! NOW!
Train-thunder filled the world. A woman screamed "Oh my God he's going to jump!" A hand slapped at his shoulder, trying to pull him back. Then Roland pushed the body of Jack Mort past the yellow warning line and dove over the edge of the platform. He fell into the path of the oncoming train with his hands cupping his crotch, holding the luggage he would bring back ... if, that was, he was fast enough to get out of Mort at just the right instant. As he fell he called her - them - again:
ODETTA HOLMES! DETTAWALKER! LOOK NOW!
As he called, as the train bore down upon him, its wheels turning with merciless silver speed, the gunslinger finally turned his head and looked back through the door.
And directly into her face.
Faces!
Both of them, I see both of them at the same time -
NOO - ! Mort shrieked, and in the last split second before the train ran him down, cutting him in two not above the knees but at the waist, Roland lunged at the door ... and through it.
Jack Mort died alone.
The boxes of ammunition and the bottle of pills appeared beside Roland's physical body. His hands clenched spasmodically at them, then relaxed. The gunslinger forced himself up, aware that he was wearing his sick, throbbing body again, aware that Eddie Dean was screaming, aware that Odetta was shrieking in two voices. He looked - only for a moment - and saw exactly what he had heard: not one woman but two. Both were legless, both dark-skinned, both women of great beauty. Nonetheless, one of them was a hag, her interior ugliness not hidden by her outer beauty but enhanced by it.
Roland stared at these twins who were not really twins at all but negative and positive images of the same woman. He stared with a feverish, hypnotic intensity.
Then Eddie screamed again and the gunslinger saw the lobstrosities tumbling out of the waves and strutting toward the place where Detta had left him, trussed and helpless.
The sun was down. Darkness had come.
14
Detta saw herself in the doorway, saw herself through her eyes, saw herself through the gunslinger's eyes, and her sense of dislocation was as sudden as Eddie's, but much more violent.
She was here.
She was there, in the gunslinger's eyes.
She heard the oncoming train.
Odetta! she screamed, suddenly understanding everything: what she was and when it had happened.
Detta! she screamed, suddenly understanding everything: what she was and who had done it.
A brief sensation of being turned inside out ... and then a much more agonizing one.
She was being torn apart.
15
Roland shambled down the short slope to the place where Eddie lay. He moved like a man who has lost his bones. One of the lobster-things clawed at Eddie's face. Eddie screamed. The gunslinger booted it away. He bent rustily and grabbed Eddie's arms. He began to drag him backwards, but it was too late, his strength was too little, they were going to get Eddie, hell, both of them -
Eddie screamed again as one of the lobstrosities asked him did-a-chick? and then tore a swatch of his pants and a chunk of meat to go along with it. Eddie tried another scream, but nothing came out but a choked gargle. He was strangling in Detta's knots.
The things were all around them, closing in, claws clicking eagerly. The gunslinger threw the last of his strength into a final yank ... and tumbled backwards. He heard them coming, them with their hellish questions and clicking claws. Maybe it wasn't so bad, he thought. He had staked everything, and that was all he had lost.
The thunder of his own guns filled him with stupid wonder.
16
The two women lay face to face, bodies raised like snakes about to strike, fingers with identical prints locked around throats marked with identical lines.
The woman was trying to kill her but the woman was not real, no more than the girl had been real; she was a dream created by a falling brick ...but now the dream was real, the dream was clawing her throat and trying to kill her as the gunslinger tried to save his friend. The dream-made-real was screeching obscenities and raining hot spittle into her face. "I took the blue plate because that woman landed me in the hospital and besides Ididn't get no forspecial plate an I bust it cause it needed bustin an when I saw a white boy I could bust why I bust him too I hurt the white boys because they needed hurtin I stole from the stores that only sell things that are forspecial to whitefolks while the brothers and sisters go hungry in Harlem and the rats eat their babies, I'm the one, you bitch, I'm the one, I ...I ...I!
Kill her, Odetta thought, and knew she could not.
She could no more kill the hag and survive than the hag could kill her and walk away. They could choke each other to death while Eddie and the
(Roland)/(Really Bad Man)
one who had called them were eaten alive down there by the edge of the water. That would finish all of them. Or she could
(love)/(hate)
let go.
Odetta let go of Detta's throat, ignored the fierce hands throttling her, crushing her windpipe. Instead of using her own hands to choke, she used them to embrace the other.
"No, you bitch!" Detta screamed, but that scream was infinitely complex, both hateful and grateful. "N o, you leave me lone, you jes leave me - "
Odetta had no voice with which to reply. As Roland kicked the first attacking lobstrosity away and as the second moved in to lunch on a chunk of Eddie's arm, she could only whisper in the witch-woman's ear: "I love you."
For a moment the hands tightened into a killing noose ... and then loosened.
Were gone.
She was being turned inside out again ... and then, suddenly, blessedly, she was whole. For the first time since a man named Jack Mort had dropped a brick on the head of a child who was only there to be hit because a white taxi driver had taken one look and driven away (and had not her father, in his pride, refused to try again for fear of a second refusal), she was whole. She was Odetta Holmes, but the other - ?
Hurry up, bitch! Detta yelled ... but it was still her own voice; she and Detta had merged. She had been one; she had been two; now the gunslinger had drawn a third from her. Hurry up or they gonna be dinner!
She looked at the shells. There was no time to use them; by the time she had his guns reloaded it would be over. She could only hope.
But is there anything else? she asked herself, and drew.
And suddenly her brown hands were full of thunder.
17
Eddie saw one of the lobstrosities loom over his face, its rugose eyes dead yet hideously sparkling with hideous life. Its claws descended toward his face.
Dod-a - , it began, and then it was smashed backward in chunks and splatters.
Roland saw one skitter toward his flailing left hand and thought There goes the other hand ... and then the lobstrosity was a splatter of shell and green guts flying into the dark air.
He twisted around and saw a woman whose beauty was heart stopping, whose fury was heart-freezing. "COME ON, MAHFAHS!" she screamed. "YOU JUST COME ON! YOU JUST COME FOR EM! I'M GONNA BLOW YO EYES RIGHT BACK THROUGH YO FUCKIN ASSHOLES!"
She blasted a third one that was crawling rapidly between Eddie's spraddled legs, meaning to eat on him and neuter him at the same time. It flew like a tiddly-wink.
Roland had suspected they had some rudimentary intelligence; now he saw the proof.
The others were retreating.
The hammer of one revolver fell on a dud, and then she blew one of the retreating monsters into gobbets.
The others ran back toward the water even faster. It seemed they had lost their appetite.
Meanwhile, Eddie was strangling.
Roland fumbled at the rope digging a deep furrow into his neck. He could see Eddie's face melting slowly from purple to black. Eddie's strugglings were weakening.
Then his hands were pushed away by stronger ones.
"I'll take care of it. "There was a knife in her hand ... his knife.
Take care of what? he thought as his consciousness faded. What is it you'll take care of, now that we're both at your mercy?
"Who are you?" he husked, as darkness deeper than night began to take him down.
''I am three women,'' he heard her say, and it was as if she were speaking to him from the top of a deep well into which he was falling. "I who was; I who had no right to be but was; I am the woman who you have saved.
"I thank you, gunslinger."
She kissed him, he knew that, but for a long time after, Roland knew only darkness.