6

   The 727 came in low and smooth over the salt marshes of Long Island , leaving sooty trails of spent fuel behind. The landing gear came down with a rumble and a thump

7

   3A, the man with the two-tone eyes, straightened up and Jane saw―actually saw―a snub-nosed Uzi in his hands before she realized it was nothing but his duty declaration card and a little zipper bag of the sort which men sometimes use to hold their passports.
   The plane settled like silk.
   Letting out a deep, shaking shudder, she tightened the red top on the Thermos.
   "Call me an asshole," she said in a low voice to Susy, buckling the cross-over belts now that it was too late. She had told Susy what she suspected on the final approach, so Susy would be ready. "You have every right."
   "No," Susy said. "You did the right thing."
   "I over-reacted. And dinner's on me."
   "Like hell it is. And don't look at him. Look at me. Smile, Janey."
   Jane smiled. Nodded. Wondered what in God's name was going on now.
   "You were watching his hands," Susy said, and laughed. Jane joined in. "I was watching what happened to his shirt when he bent over to get his bag. He's got enough stuff under there to stock a Woolworth's notions counter. Only I don't think he's carrying the kind of stuff you can buy at Woolworth's."
   Jane threw back her head and laughed again, feeling like a puppet. "How do we handle it?" Susy had five years' seniority on her, and Jane, who only a minute ago had felt she had the situation under some desperate kind of control, now only felt glad to have Susy beside her.
   "We don't. Tell the Captain while we're taxiing in. The Captain speaks to customs. Your friend there gets in line like everyone else, except then he gets pulled out of line by some men who escort him to a little room. It's going to be the first in a very long succession of little rooms for him, I think."
   "Jesus." Jane was smiling, but chills, alternately hot and cold, were racing through her.
   She hit the pop-release on her harness when the reverse thrusters began to wind down, handed the Thermos to Susy, then got up and rapped on the cockpit door.
   Not a terrorist but a drug-smuggler. Thank God for small favors. Yet in a way she hated it. He had been cute.
   Not much, but a little.

8

   He still doesn't see, the gunslinger thought with anger and dawning desperation. Gods!
   Eddie had bent to get the papers he needed for the ritual, and when he looked up the army woman was staring at him, her eyes bulging, her cheeks as white as the paper things on the backs of the seats. The silver tube with the red top, which he had at first taken for some kind of canteen, was apparently a weapon. She was holding it up between her breasts now. Roland thought that in a moment or two she would either throw it or spin off the red top and shoot him with it.
   Then she relaxed and buckled her harness even though the thump told both the gunslinger and the prisoner the aircarriage had already landed. She turned to the army woman she was sitting with and said something. The other woman laughed and nodded, but if that was a real laugh, the gunslinger thought, he was a river-toad.
   The gunslinger wondered how the man whose mind had become temporary home for the gunslinger's own ka, could be so stupid. Some of it was what he was putting into his body, of course … one of this world's versions of devil-weed. Some, but not all. He was not soft and unobservant like the others, but in time he might be.
   They are as they are because they live in the light, the gunslinger thought suddenly. That light of civilization you were taught to adore above all other things. They live in a world which has not moved on.
   If this was what people became in such a world, Roland was not sure he didn't prefer the dark. "That was before the world moved on," people said in his own world, and it was always said in tones of bereft sadness … but it was, perhaps, sadness without thought, without consideration.
   She thought I/he―meant to grab a weapon when I/he―bent down to get the papers. When she saw the papers she relaxed and did what everyone else did before the carriage came down to the ground again. Now she and her friend are talking and laughing but their faces―her face especially, the face of the woman with the metal tube―are not right. They are talking, all right, but they are only pretending to laugh …and that is because what they are talking about is I/him.
   The air-carriage was now moving along what seemed a long concrete road, one of many. Mostly he watched the women, but from the edges of his vision the gunslinger could see other air-carriages moving here and there along other roads. Some lumbered; some moved with incredible speed, not like carriages at all but like projectiles fired from guns or cannons, preparing to leap into the air. As desperate as his own situation had become, part of him wanted very much to come forward and turn his head so he could see these vehicles as they leaped into the sky. They were man-made but every bit as fabulous as the stories of the Grand Featherex which had supposedly once lived in the distant (and probably mythical) kingdom of Garlan―more fabulous, perhaps, simply because these were man-made.
   The woman who had brought him the popkin unfastened her harness (this less than a minute since she had fastened it) and went forward to a small door. That's where the driver sits, the gunslinger thought, but when the door was opened and she stepped in he saw it apparently took three drivers to operate the air-carriage, and even the brief glimpse he was afforded of what seemed like a million dials and levers and lights made him understand why.
   The prisoner was looking at all but seeing nothing―Cort would have first sneered, then driven him through the nearest wall. The prisoner's mind was completely occupied with grabbing the bag under the seat and his light jacket from the overhead bin … and facing the ordeal of the ritual.
   The prisoner saw nothing; the gunslinger saw everything.
   The woman thought him a thief or a madman. He―or perhaps it was I, yes, that's likely enough―did something tomake her think that. She changed her mind, and then the other woman changed it back …only now I think they know what's really wrong. They know he's going to try to profane the ritual.
   Then, in a thunderclap, he saw the rest of his problem. First, it wasn't just a matter of taking the bags into his world as he had the coin; the coin hadn't been stuck to the prisoner's body with the glue-string the prisoner had wrapped around and around his upper body to hold the bags tight to his skin. This glue-string was only part of his problem. The prisoner hadn't missed the temporary disappearance of one coin among many, but when he realized that whatever it was he had risked his life for was suddenly gone, he was surely going to raise the racks … and what then?
   It was more than possible that the prisoner would begin to behave in a manner so irrational that it would get him locked away in gaol as quickly as being caught in the act of profanation. The loss would be bad enough; for the bags under his arms to simply melt away to nothing would probably make him think he really had gone mad.
   The air-carriage, ox-like now that it was on the ground, labored its way through a left turn. The gunslinger realized that he had no time for the luxury of further thought. He had to do more than come forward; he must make contact with Eddie Dean.
   Right now.

9

   Eddie tucked his declaration card and passport in his breast pocket. The steel wire was now turning steadily around his guts, sinking in deeper and deeper, making his nerves spark and sizzle. And suddenly a voice spoke in his head.
   Not a thought; a voice.
   Listen to me, fellow. Listen carefully. And if you would remain safe, let your face show nothing which might further rouse the suspicions of those army women. God knows they're suspicious enough already.
   Eddie first thought he was still wearing the airline earphones and picking up some weird transmission from the cockpit. But the airline headphones had been picked up five minutes ago.
   His second thought was that someone was standing beside him and talking. He almost snapped his head to the left, but that was absurd. Like it or not, the raw truth was that the voice had come from inside his head.
   Maybe he was receiving some sort of transmission―AM, FM, or VHF on the fillings in his teeth. He had heard of such th―
   Straighten up, maggot! They're suspicious enough without you looking as if you've gone crazy!
   Eddie sat up fast, as if he had been whacked. That voice wasn't Henry's, but it was so much like Henry's when they had been just a couple of kids growing up in the Projects, Henry eight years older, the sister who had been between them now only a ghost of memory; Selina had been struck and killed by a car when Eddie was two and Henry ten. That rasping tone of command came out whenever Henry saw him doing something that might end with Eddie occupying a pine box long before his time … as Selina had.
   What in the blue fuck is going on here?
   You're not hearing voices that aren't there, the voice inside his head returned. No, not Henry's voice―older, dryer … stronger. But like Henry's voice … and impossible not to believe. That's the first thing. You're not going crazy. I AM another person.
   This is telepathy?
   Eddie was vaguely aware that his face was completely expressionless. He thought that, under the circumstances, that ought to qualify him for the Best Actor of the Year Academy Award. He looked out the window and saw the plane closing in on the Detta section of Kennedy's International Arrivals Building .
   Idon't know that word. But I do know that those army women know you are carrying. …
   There was a pause. A feeling―odder beyond telling―of phantom fingers rummaging through his brain as if he were a living card catalogue.
   … heroin or cocaine. I can't tell which except―except it must be cocaine because you're carrying the one you don't take to buy the one you do.
   "What army women?" Eddie muttered in a low voice. He was completely unaware that he was speaking aloud. "What in the hell are you talking ab―"
   That feeling of being slapped once more … so real he felt his head ring with it.
   Shut your mouth, you damned jackass!
   All right, all right! Christ!
   Now that feeling of rummaging fingers again.
   Army stewardesses, the alien voice replied. Do you understand me? I have no time to con your every thought, prisoner!
   "What did you―" Eddie began, then shut his mouth. What did you call me?
   Never mind. Just listen. Time is very, very short. They know. The army stewardesses know you have this cocaine.
   How could they? That's ridiculous!
   I don't know how they came by their knowledge, and it doesn't matter. One of them told the drivers. The drivers will tell whatever priests perform this ceremony, this Clearing of Customs―
   The language of the voice in his head was arcane, the terms so off-kilter they were almost cute … but the message came through loud and clear. Although his face remained expressionless, Eddie's teeth came together with a painful click and he drew a hot little hiss in through them.
   The voice was saying the game was over. He hadn't even gotten off the plane and the game was already over.
   But this wasn't real. No way this could be real. It was just his mind, doing a paranoid little jig at the last minute, that was all. He would ignore it. Just ignore it and it would go awa―
   You will NOT ignore it or you will go to jail and I will die! the voice roared.
   Who in the name of God are you? Eddie asked reluctantly, fearfully, and inside his head he heard someone or something let out a deep and gusty sigh of relief.

10

   He believes, the gunslinger thought. Thank all the gods that are or ever were, he believes!

11

   The plane stopped. The FASTEN SEATBELTS light went out. The jetway rolled forward and bumped against the forward port door with a gentle thump.
   They had arrived.

12

   There is a place where you can put it while you perform the Clearing of Customs, the voice said. A safe place. Then, when you are away, you can get it again and take it to this man Balazar.
   People were standing up now, getting things out of the overhead bins and trying to deal with coats which were, according to the cockpit announcement, too warm to wear.
   Get your bag. Get your jacket. Then go into the privy again.
   Pr―
   Oh. Bathroom. Head.
   Ifthey think I've got dope they'll think I'm trying to dump it.
   But Eddie understood that part didn't matter. They wouldn't exactly break down the door, because that might scare the passengers. And they'd know you couldn't flush two pounds of coke down an airline toilet and leave no trace. Not unless the voice was really telling the truth … that there was some safe place. But how could there be?
   Never mind, damn you! MOVE!
   Eddie moved. Because he had finally come alive to the situation. He was not seeing all Roland, with his many years and his training of mingled torture and precision, could see, but he could see the faces of the stews―the real faces, the ones behind the smiles and the helpful passing of garment bags and cartons stowed in the forward closet. He could see the way their eyes flicked to him, whiplash quick, again and again.
   He got his bag. He got his jacket. The door to the jetway had been opened, and people were already moving up the aisle. The door to the cockpit was open, and here was the Captain, also smiling … but also looking at the passengers in first class who were still getting their things together, spotting him―no, targeting him―and then looking away again, nodding to someone, tousling a youngster's head.
   He was cold now. Not cold turkey, just cold. He didn't need the voice in his head to make him cold. Cold―sometimes that was okay. You just had to be careful you didn't get so cold you froze.
   Eddie moved forward, reached the point where a left turn would take him into the jetway―and then suddenly put his hand to his mouth.
   "I don't feel well," he murmured. "Excuse me." He moved the door to the cockpit, which slightly blocked the door to the first class head, and opened the bathroom door on the right.
   "I'm afraid you'll have to exit the plane," the pilot said sharply as Eddie opened the bathroom door. "It's―"
   "I believe I'm going to vomit, and I don't want to do it on your shoes," Eddie said, "or mine, either."
   A second later he was in with the door locked. The Captain was saying something. Eddie couldn't make it out, didn't want to make it out. The important thing was that it was just talk, not yelling, he had been right, no one was going to start yelling with maybe two hundred and fifty passengers still waiting to deplane from the single forward door. He was in, he was temporarily safe … but what good was it going to do him?
   If you're there, he thought, you better do something very quick, whoever you are.
   For a terrible moment there was nothing at all. That was a short moment, but in Eddie Dean's head it seemed to stretch out almost forever, like the Bonomo's Turkish Taffy Henry had sometimes bought him in the summer when they were kids; if he were bad, Henry beat the shit out of him, if he were good, Henry bought him Turkish Taffy. That was the way Henry handled his heightened responsibilities during summer vacation.
   God, oh Christ, I imagined it all, oh Jesus, how crazy could I have b―
   Get ready, a grim voice said. Ican't do it alone. I can COME FORWARD but I can't make you COME THROUGH. You have to do it with me. Turn around.
   Eddie was suddenly seeing through two pairs of eyes, feeling with two sets of nerves (but not all the nerves of this other person were here; parts of the other were gone, freshly gone, screaming with pain), sensing with ten senses, thinking with two brains, his blood beating with two hearts.
   He turned around. There was a hole in the side of the bathroom, a hole that looked like a doorway. Through it he could see a gray, grainy beach and waves the color of old athletic socks breaking upon it.
   He could hear the waves.
   He could smell salt, a smell as bitter as tears in his nose.
   Go through.
   Someone was thumping on the door to the bathroom, telling him to come out, that he must deplane at once.
   Go through, damn you!
   Eddie, moaning, stepped toward the doorway … stumbled … and fell into another world.

13

   He got slowly to his feet, aware that he had cut his right palm on an edge of shell. He looked stupidly at the blood welling across his lifeline, then saw another man rising slowly to his feet on his right.
   Eddie recoiled, his feelings of disorientation and dreamy dislocation suddenly supplanted by sharp terror: this man was dead and didn't know it. His face was gaunt, the skin stretched over the bones of his face like strips of cloth wound around slim angles of metal almost to the point where the cloth must tear itself open. The man's skin was livid save for hectic spots of red high on each cheekbone, on the neck below the angle of jaw on either side, and a single circular mark between the eyes like a child's effort to replicate a Hindu caste symbol.
   Yet his eyes―blue, steady, sane―were alive and full of terrible and tenacious vitality. He wore dark clothes of some homespun material; the shirt, its sleeves rolled up, was a black faded almost to gray, the pants something that looked like bluejeans. Gunbelts crisscrossed his hips, but the loops were almost all empty. The holsters held guns that looked like .45s―but .45s of an incredibly antique vintage. The smooth wood of their handgrips seemed to glow with their own inner light.
   Eddie, who didn't know he had any intention of speaking―anything to say―heard himself saying something nevertheless. "Are you a ghost?"
   "Not yet," the man with the guns croaked. "The devil-weed. Cocaine. Whatever you call it. Take off your shirt."
   "Your arms―" Eddie had seen them. The arms of the man who looked like the extravagant sort of gunslinger one would only see in a spaghetti western were glowing with lines of bright, baleful red. Eddie knew well enough what lines like that meant. They meant blood-poisoning. They meant the devil was doing more than breathing up your ass; he was already crawling up the sewers that led to your pumps.
   "Never mind my fucking arms!" the pallid apparition told him. "Take off your shirt and get rid of it!"
   He heard waves; he heard the lonely hoot of a wind that knew no obstruction; he saw this mad dying man and nothing else but desolation; yet from behind him he heard the murmuring voices of deplaning passengers and a steady muffled pounding.
   "Mr. Dean!" That voice, he thought, is in another world. Not really doubting it; just trying to pound it through his head the way you'd pound a nail through a thick piece of mahogany. "You'll really have to―"
   "You can leave it, pick it up later," the gunslinger croaked. "Gods, don't you understand I have to talk here? It hurts! And there is no time, you idiot!"
   There were men Eddie would have killed for using such a word … but he had an idea that he might have a job killing this man, even though the man looked like killing might do him good.
   Yet he sensed the truth in those blue eyes; all questions were canceled in their mad glare.
   Eddie began to unbutton his shirt. His first impulse was to simply tear it off, like Clark Kent while Lois Lane was tied to a railroad track or something, but that was no good in real life; sooner or later you had to explain those missing buttons. So he slipped them through the loops while the pounding behind him went on.
   He yanked the shirt out of his jeans, pulled it off, and dropped it, revealing the strapping tape across his chest. He looked like a man in the last stages of recovery from badly fractured ribs.
   He snapped a glance behind him and saw an open door … its bottom jamb had dragged a fan shape in the gray grit of the beach when someone―the dying man, presumably―had opened it. Through the doorway he saw the first-class head, the basin, the mirror … and in it his own desperate face, black hair spilled across his brow and over his hazel eyes. In the background he saw the gunslinger, the beach, and soaring seabirds that screeched and squabbled over God knew what.
   He pawed at the tape, wondering how to start, how to find a loose end, and a dazed sort of hopelessness settled over him. This was the way a deer or a rabbit must feel when it got halfway across a country road and turned its head only to be fixated by the oncoming glare of headlights.
   It had taken William Wilson, the man whose name Poe had made famous, twenty minutes to strap him up. They would have the door to the first-class bathroom open in five, seven at most.
   "I can't get this shit off," he told the swaying man in front of him. "I don't know who you are or where I am, but I'm telling you there's too much tape and too little time.

14

   Deere, the co-pilot, suggested Captain McDonald ought to lay off pounding on the door when McDonald, in his frustration at 3A's lack of response, began to do so.
   "Where's he going to go?" Deere asked. "What's he going to do? Flush himself down the John? He's too big."
   "But if he's carrying―" McDonald began.
   Deere, who had himself used cocaine on more than a few occasions, said: "If he's carrying, he's carrying heavy. He can't get rid of it."
   "Turn off the water," McDonald snapped suddenly.
   "Already have," the navigator (who had also tooted more than his flute on occasion) said. "But I don't think it matters. You can dissolve what goes into the holding tanks but you can't make it not there." They were clustered around the bathroom door, with its OCCUPIED sign glowing jeerily, all of them speaking in low tones. "The DEA guys drain it, draw off a sample, and the guy's hung."
   "He could always say someone came in before him and dumped it," McDonald replied. His voice was gaining a raw edge. He didn't want to be talking about this; he wanted to be doing something about it, even though he was acutely aware that the geese were still filing out, many looking with more than ordinary curiosity at the flight-deck crew and stewardesses gathered around the bathroom door. For their part, the crew were acutely aware that an act that was―well, overly overt―could provoke the terrorist boogeyman that now lurked in the back of every air-traveler’s mind. McDonald knew his navigator and flight engineer were right, he knew that the stuff was apt to be in plastic bags with the scuzzball's prints on them, and yet he felt alarm bells going off in his mind. Something was not right about this. Something inside of him kept screaming Fast one! Fast one! as if the fellow from 3A were a riverboat gambler with palmed aces he was all ready to play.
   "He's not trying to flush the John," Susy Douglas said. "He's not even trying to run the basin faucets. We'd hear them sucking air if he was. I hear something, but―"
   "Leave," McDonald said curtly. His eyes flicked to Jane Dorning. "You too. We'll take care of this."
   Jane turned to go, cheeks burning.
   Susy said quietly: "Jane bird-dogged him and I spotted the bulges under his shirt. I think we'll stay, Captain McDonald. If you want to bring charges of insubordination, you can. But I want you to remember that you may be raping the hell out of what could be a really big DEA bust."
   Their eyes locked, flint sparking off steel.
   Susy said, "I've flown with you seventy, eighty times, Mac. I'm trying to be your friend."
   McDonald looked at her a moment longer, then nodded. "Stay, then. But I want both of you back a step toward the cockpit."
   He stood on his toes, looked back, and saw the end of the line now just emerging from tourist class into business. Two minutes, maybe three.
   He turned to the gate agent at the mouth of the hatch, who was watching them closely. He must have sensed some sort of problem, because he had unholstered his walkie-talkie and was holding it in his hand.
   "Tell him I want customs agents up here," McDonald said quietly to the navigator. "Three or four. Armed. Now."
   The navigator made his way through the line of passengers, excusing himself with an easy grin, and spoke quietly to the gate agent, who raised his walkie-talkie to his mouth and spoke quietly into it.
   McDonald―who had never put anything stronger than aspirin into his system in his entire life and that only rarely―turned to Deere. His lips were pressed into a thin white line like a scar.
   "As soon as the last of the passengers are off, we're breaking that shithouse door open," he said. "I don't care if Customs is here or not. Do you understand?"
   "Roger," Deere said, and watched the tail of the line make its way into first class.

15

   "Get my knife," the gunslinger said. "It's in my purse."
   He gestured toward a cracked leather bag lying on the sand. It looked more like a big packsack than a purse, the kind of thing you expected to see hippies carrying as they made their way along the Appalachian Trail, getting high on nature (and maybe a bomber joint every now and then), except this looked like the real thing, not just a prop for some airhead's self-image; something that had done years and years of hard―maybe desperate―travelling.
   Gestured, but did not point. Couldn't point. Eddie realized why the man had a swatch of dirty shirting wrapped around his right hand: some of his fingers were gone.
   "Get it," he said. "Cut through the tape. Try not to cut yourself. It's easy to do. You'll have to be careful, but you'll have to move fast just the same. There isn't much time."
   "I know that," Eddie said, and knelt on the sand. None of this was real. That was it, that was the answer. As Henry Dean, the great sage and eminent junkie would have put it, Flip-flop, hippety-hop, offa your rocker and over the top, life's a fiction and the world's a lie, so put on some Creedence and let's get high.
   None of it was real, it was all just an extraordinarily vivid nodder, so the best thing was just to ride low and go with the flow.
   It sure was a vivid nodder. He was reaching for the zipper―or maybe it would be a velcro strip―on the man's "purse" when he saw it was held together by a crisscross pattern of rawhide thongs, some of which had broken and been carefully reknotted—reknotted small enough so they would still slide through the grommetted eyelets.
   Eddie pulled the drag-knot at the top, spread the bag's opening, and found the knife beneath a slightly damp package that was the piece of shirting tied around the bullets. Just the handle was enough to take his breath away … it was the true mellow gray-white of pure silver, engraved with a complex series of patterns that caught the eye, drew it―
   Pain exploded in his ear, roared across his head, and momentarily puffed a red cloud across his vision. He fell clumsily over the open purse, struck the sand, and looked up at the pale man in the cut-down boots. This was no nodder. The blue eyes blazing from that dying face were the eyes of all truth.
   "Admire it later, prisoner," the gunslinger said. "For now just use it."
   He could feel his ear throbbing, swelling.
   "Why do you keep calling me that?"
   "Cut the tape," the gunslinger said grimly. "If they break into yon privy while you're still over here, I've got a feeling you're going to be here for a very long time. And with a corpse for company before long."
   Eddie pulled the knife out of the scabbard. Not old; more than old, more than ancient. The blade, honed almost to the point of invisibility, seemed to be all age caught in metal.
   "Yeah, it looks sharp," he said, and his voice wasn't steady.