The gunslinger staggered back, almost knocked off his feet by the unseen weight of the demon. Then he rocked forward again with an armload of nothing. Clutching it, he jumped through the doorway and was gone.
SUDDEN WHITE LIGHT FLOODED the hallway of The Mansion; hailstones struck the walls and bounced up from the broken boards of the floor. Jake heard confused shouts, then saw the gunslinger come through. He seemed to leap through, as if he had come from above. His arms were held far out in front of him, the tips of the fingers locked.
Jake felt his feet slide into the doorkeeper’s mouth. “Roland!” he shrieked. “Roland, help me!” The gunslinger’s hands parted and his arms were immediately thrown wide. He staggered backward. Jake felt serrated teeth touch his skin, ready to tear flesh and grind bone, and then something huge rushed over his head like a gust of wind. A moment later the teeth were gone. The hand which had pinned his legs together relaxed. He heard an unearthly shriek of pain and surprise begin to issue from the doorkeeper’s dusty throat, and then it was muffled, crammed back. Roland grabbed Jake and hauled him to his feet. “You came!” Jake shouted. “You really came!” “I came, yes. By the grace of the gods and the courage of my friends, I came.” As the doorkeeper roared again, Jake burst into tears of relief and terror. Now the house sounded like a ship foundering in a heavy sea. Chunks of wood and plaster fell all around them. Roland swept Jake into his arms and ran for the door. The plaster hand, groping wildly, struck one of his booted feet and spun him into the wall, which again tried to bite. Roland pushed forward, turned, and drew his gun. He fired twice into the aimlessly thrashing hand, vaporizing one of the crude plaster fingers. Behind them, the face of the doorkeeper had gone from white to a dingy purplish-black, as if it were choking on something—something which had been fleeing so rapidly that it had entered the monster’s mouth and jammed in its gullet before it realized what it was doing. Roland turned again and ran through the doorway. Although there was now no visible barrier, he was stopped cold for a moment, as if an unseen meshwork had been drawn across the chair.
Then he felt Eddie’s hands in his hair and he was yanked not for-ward but upward.
THEY EMERGED INTO WET air and slackening hail like babies being born. Eddie was the midwife, as die gunslinger had told him he must be. He was sprawled forward on his chest and belly, his arms out of sight in the doorway, his hands clutching fistfuls of Roland’s hair.
“Suze! Help me!”
She wriggled forward, reached through, and groped a hand under Roland’s chin. He came up to her with his head cocked backward and his lips parted in a snarl of pain and effort.
Eddie felt a tearing sensation and one of his hands came free holding a thick lock of the gunslinger’s gray-streaked hair. “He’s slipping!”
“This motherfucker . . . ain’t . . . nowhere!” Susannah gasped, and gave a terrific wrench, as if she meant to snap Roland’s neck. Two small hands shot out of the doorway in the center of the circle and clutched one of the edges. Freed of Jake’s weight, Roland got an elbow up, and a moment later he was boosting himself out. As he did it, Eddie grabbed Jake’s wrists and hauled him up.
Jake rolled onto his back and lay there, panting. Eddie turned to Susannah, took her in his arms, and began to rain kisses on her forehead, cheeks, and neck. He was laughing and crying at the same time. She clung to him, breathing hard . . . but there was a small, satisfied smile on her lips and one hand slipped over Eddie’s wet hair in slow, contented strokes. From below them came a cauldron of black sounds: squeals, grunts, thuds, crashes.
Roland crawled away from the hole with his head down. His hair stood up in a wild wad. Threads of blood trickled down his cheeks. “Shut it!” he gasped at Eddie. “Shut it, for your father’s sake!” Eddie got the door moving, and those vast, unseen hinges did the rest. The door fell with a gigantic, toneless bang, cutting off all sound from below. As Eddie watched, the lines that had marked its edges faded back to smudged marks in the dirt. The doorknob lost its dimension and was once more only a circle he’d drawn with a stick. Where the keyhole had been there was only a crude shape with a chunk of wood sticking out of it, like the hilt of a sword from a stone. Susannah went to Jake and pulled him gently to a sitting position. “You all right, sugar?”
He looked at her dazedly. “Yes, I think so. Where is he? The gunslinger? There’s something I have to ask him.”
“I’m here, Jake,” Roland said. He got to his feet, drunk-walked over to Jake, and hunkered beside him. He touched the boy’s smooth cheek almost unbelievingly. “You won’t let me drop this time?”