24

   He'll be low, the gunslinger thought, knowing he could have to be lucky to hit his target with this untrustworthy little toy even if he had guessed right.
   When he saw the ruse of Balazar's soldier was going to draw Eddie out, Roland rose to his knees and steadied his left hand on his right fist, grimly ignoring the screech of pain making that fist caused. He would have one chance only. The pain didn't matter.
   Then the man with the red hair stepped into the doorway, smiling, and as always Roland's brain was gone; his eye saw, his hand shot, and suddenly the red-head was lying against the wall of the corridor with his eyes open and a small blue hole in his forehead. Eddie was standing over him, screaming and sobbing, dry-firing the big revolver with the sandalwood grips again and again, as if the man with the red hair could never be dead enough.
   The gunslinger waited for the deadly crossfire that would cut Eddie in half and when it didn't come he knew it was truly over. If there had been other soldiers, they had taken to their heels.
   He got wearily to his feet, reeled, and then walked slowly over to where Eddie Dean stood.
   "Stop it," he said.
   Eddie ignored him and went on dry-firing Roland's big gun at the dead man.
   "Stop it, Eddie, he's dead. They're all dead. Your feet are bleeding."
   Eddie ignored him and went on pulling the revolver's trigger. The babble of excited voices outside was closer. So were the sirens.
   The gunslinger reached for the gun and pulled on it. Eddie turned on him, and before Roland was entirely sure what was happening, Eddie struck him on the side of the head with his own gun. Roland felt a warm gush of blood and collapsed against the wall. He struggled to stay on his feet―they had to get out of here, quick. But he could feel himself sliding down the wall in spite of his every effort, and then the world was gone for a little while in a drift of grayness.

25

   He was out for no more than two minutes, and then he managed to get things back into focus and make it to his feet. Eddie was no longer in the hallway. Roland's gun lay on the chest of the dead man with the red hair. The gunslinger bent, fighting off a wave of dizziness, picked it up, and dropped it into its holster with an awkward, cross-body movement.
   I want my damned fingers back, he thought tiredly, and sighed.
   He tried to walk back into the ruins of the office, but the best he could manage was an educated stagger. He stopped, bent, and picked up all of Eddie's clothes that he could hold in the crook of his left arm. The howlers had almost arrived. Roland believed the men winding them were probably militia, a Marshall ’s posse, something of that sort … but there was always the possibility they might be more of Balazar's men.
   "Eddie," he croaked. His throat was sore and throbbing again, worse even than the swollen place on the side of his head where Eddie had struck him with the revolver.
   Eddie didn't notice. Eddie was sitting on the floor with his brother's head cradled against his belly. He was shuddering all over and crying. The gunslinger looked for the door, didn't see it, and felt a nasty jolt that was nearly terror. Then he remembered. With both of them on this side, the only way to create the door was for him to make physical contact with Eddie.
   He reached for him but Eddie shrank away, still weeping. "Don't touch me," he said.
   "Eddie, it's over. They're all dead, and your brother's dead, too."
   "Leave my brother out of this!" Eddie shrieked childishly, and another fit of shuddering went through him. He cradled the severed head to his chest and rocked it. He lifted his streaming eyes to the gunslinger's face.
   "All the times he took care of me, man," he said, sobbing so hard the gunslinger could barely understand him. "All the times. Why couldn't I have taken care of him, just this once, after all the times he took care of me?"
   He took care of you, all right, Roland thought grimly. Look at you, sitting there and shaking like a man who's eaten an apple from the fever tree. He took care of you just fine.
   "We have to go."
   "Go?" for the first time some vague understanding came into Eddie's face, and it was followed immediately by alarm. "I ain't going nowhere. Especially not back to that other place, where those big crabs or whatever they are ate Jack."
   Someone was hammering on the door, yelling to open up.
   "Do you want to stay here and explain all these bodies?" the gunslinger asked.
   "I don't care," Eddie said. "Without Henry, it doesn't matter. Nothing does."
   "Maybe it doesn't matter to you," Roland said, "but there are others involved, prisoner."
   "Don't call me that!" Eddie shouted.
   “I’llcall you that until you show me you can walk out of the cell you're in!" Roland shouted back. It hurt his throat to yell, but he yelled just the same. "Throw that rotten piece of meat away and stop puling!"
   Eddie looked at him, cheeks wet, eyes wide and frightened.
   "THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE!" an amplified voice said from outside. To Eddie the voice sounded eerily like the voice of a game-show host. "THE S.W.A.T. SQUAD HAS ARRIVED―I REPEAT: THE S.W.A.T. SQUAD HAS ARRIVED!"
   "What's on the other side of that door for me?" Eddie asked the gunslinger quietly. "Go on and tell me. If you can tell me, maybe I'll come. But if you lie, I'll know."
   "Probably death," the gunslinger said. "But before that happens, I don't think you'll be bored. I want you to join me on a quest. Of course, all will probably end in death―death for the four of us in a strange place. But if we should win through …" His eyes gleamed. "If we win through, Eddie, you'll see something beyond all the beliefs of all your dreams."
   "What thing?"
   "The Dark Tower ."
   "Where is this Tower?"
   "Far from the beach where you found me. How far I know not."
   "What is it?"
   "I don't know that, either―except that it may be a kind of … of a bolt. A central linchpin that holds all of existence together. All existence, all time, and all size."
   "You said four. Who are the other two?"
   "I know them not, for they have yet to be drawn."
   "As I was drawn. Or as you'd like to draw me."
   "Yes."
   From outside there was a coughing explosion like a mortar round. The glass of The Leaning Tower's front window blew in. The barroom began to fill with choking clouds of tear-gas.
   "Well?" Roland asked. He could grab Eddie, force the doorway into existence by their contact, and pummel them both through. But he had seen Eddie risk his life for him; he had seen this hag-ridden man behave with all the dignity of a born gunslinger in spite of his addiction and the fact that he had been forced to fight as naked as the day he was born, and he wanted Eddie to decide for himself.
   "Quests, adventures, towers, worlds to win," Eddie said, and smiled wanly. Neither of them turned as fresh tear-gas rounds flew through the windows to explode, hissing, on the floor. The first acrid tendrils of the gas were now slipping into Balazar's office. "Sounds better than one of those Edgar Rice Burroughs books about Mars Henry used to read me sometimes when we were kids. You only left out one thing."
   "What's that?"
   "The beautiful bare-breasted girls."
   The gunslinger smiled. "On the way to the Dark Tower ," he said, "anything is possible."
   Another shudder wracked Eddie's body. He raised Henry's head, kissed one cool, ash-colored cheek, and laid the gore-streaked relic gently aside. He got to his feet.
   "Okay," he said. "I didn't have anything else planned for tonight, anyway."
   "Take these," Roland said, and shoved the clothes at him. "Put on your shoes if nothing else. You've cut your feet."
   On the sidewalk outside, two cops wearing Plexiglas faceplates, flak jackets, and Kevlar vests smashed in The Leaning Tower's front door. In the bathroom, Eddie (dressed in his underpants, his Adidas sneakers, and nothing else) handed the sample packages of Keflex to Roland one by one, and Roland put them into the pockets of Eddie's jeans. When they were all safely stowed, Roland slid his right arm around Eddie's neck again and Eddie gripped Roland's left hand again. The door was suddenly there, a rectangle of darkness. Eddie felt the wind from that other world blow his sweaty hair back from his forehead. He heard the waves rolling up that stony beach. He smelled the tang of sour sea-salt. And in spite of everything, all his pain and sorrow, he suddenly wanted to see this Tower of which Roland spoke. He wanted to see it very much. And with Henry dead, what was there in this world for him? Their parents were dead, and there hadn't been a steady girl since he got heavily into the smack three years ago―just a steady parade of sluts, needlers, and nosers. None of them straight. Fuck that action.
   They stepped through, Eddie actually leading a little.
   On the other side he was suddenly wracked with fresh shudders and agonizing muscle-cramps―the first symptoms of serious heroin withdrawal. And with them he also had the first alarmed second thoughts.
   "Wait!" he shouted. "I want to go back for a minute! His desk! His desk, or the other office! The skag! If they were keeping Henry doped, there's gotta be junk! Heroin! I need it! I need it!"
   He looked pleadingly at Roland, but the gunslinger's face was stony.
   "That part of your life is over, Eddie," he said. He reached out with his left hand.
   "No!" Eddie screamed, clawing at him. "No, you don't get it, man, I need it! I NEED IT!"
   He might as well have been clawing stone.
   The gunslinger swept the door shut.
   It made a dull clapping sound that bespoke utter finality and fell backward onto the sand. A little dust puffed up from its edges. There was nothing behind the door, and now no word written upon it. This particular portal between the worlds had closed forever.
   "NO!" Eddie screamed, and the gulls screamed back at him as if in jeering contempt; the lobstrosities asked him questions, perhaps suggesting he could hear them a little better if he were to come a little closer, and Eddie fell over on his side, crying and shuddering and jerking with cramps.
   "Your need will pass," the gunslinger said, and managed to get one of the sample packets out of the pocket of Eddie's jeans, which were so like his own. Again, he could read some of these letters but not all. Cheeflet, the word looked like.
   Cheeflet.
   Medicine from that other world.
   "Kill or cure," Roland murmured, and dry-swallowed two of the capsules. Then he took the other three astin, and lay next to Eddie, and took him in his arms as well as he could, and after some difficult time, both of them slept.

SHUFFLE

   The time following that night was broken time for Roland, time that didn't really exist as time at all. What he remembered was only a series of images, moments, conversation without context; images flashing past like one-eyed jacks and treys and nines and the Bloody Black Bitch Queen of Spiders in a card-sharp's rapid shuffle.
   Later on he asked Eddie how long that time lasted, but Eddie didn't know either. Time had been destroyed for both of them. There is no time in hell, and each of them was in his own private hell: Roland the hell of the fever and infection, Eddie the hell of withdrawal.
   "It was less than a week," Eddie said. "That's all I know for sure."
   "How do you know that?"
   "A week's worth of pills was all I had to give you. After that, you were gonna have to do the one thing or the other on your own."
   "Get well or die."
   "Right."
   shuffle
   There's a gunshot as twilight draws down to dark, a dry crack impinging on the inevitable and ineluctable sound of the breakers dying on the desolate beach: KA-BLAM! He smells a whiff of gunpowder. Trouble, the gunslinger thinks weakly, and gropes for revolvers that aren't there. Oh no, it's the end, it's …
   But there's no more, as something starts to smell
   shuffle
   good in the dark. Something, after all this long dark dry time, something is cooking. It's not just the smell. He can hear the snap and pop of twigs, can see the faint orange flicker of a campfire. Sometimes, when the sea-breeze gusts, he smells fragrant smoke as well as that mouth-watering other smell. Food, he thinks. My God, am I hungry? If I'm hungry, maybeI'm getting well.
   Eddie, he tries to say, but his voice is all gone. His throat hurts, hurts so bad. We should have brought some astin, too, he thinks, and then tries to laugh: all the drugs for him, none for Eddie.
   Eddie appears. He's got a tin plate, one the gunslinger would know anywhere: it came, after all, from his own purse. On it are steaming chunks of whitish-pink meat.
   What? he tries to ask, and nothing comes out but a squeaky little farting sound.
   Eddie reads the shape of his lips. "I don't know," he says crossly. "All I know is it didn't kill me. Eat it, damn you."
   He sees Eddie is very pale, Eddie is shaking, and he smells something coming from Eddie that is either shit or death, and he knows Eddie is in a bad way. He reaches out a groping hand, wanting to give comfort. Eddie strikes it away.
   "I'll feed you," he says crossly. "Fucked if I know why. I ought to kill you. I would, if I didn't think that if you could get through into my world once, maybe you could do it again."
   Eddie looks around.
   "And if it wasn't that I'd be alone. Except for them."
   He looks back at Roland and a fit of shuddering runs through him―it is so fierce that he almost spills the chunks of meat on the tin plate. At last it passes.
   "Eat, God damn you."
   The gunslinger eats. The meat is more than not bad; the meat is delicious. He manages three pieces and then everything blurs into a new
   shuffle
   effort to speak, but all he can do is whisper. The cup of Eddie's ear is pressed against his lips, except every now and then it shudders away as Eddie goes through one of his spasms. He says it again. "North. Up … up the beach."
   "How do you know?"
   "Just know," he whispers.
   Eddie looks at him. "You're crazy," he says.
   The gunslinger smiles and tries to black out but Eddie slaps him, slaps him hard. Roland's blue eyes fly open and for a moment they are so alive and electric Eddie looks uneasy. Then his lips draw back in a smile that is mostly snarl.
   "Yeah, you can drone off," he said, "but first you gotta take your dope. It's time. Sun says it is, anyway. I guess. I was never no Boy Scout, so I don't know for sure. But I guess it's close enough for Government work. Open wide, Roland. Open wide for Dr. Eddie, you kidnapping fuck."
   The gunslinger opens his mouth like a baby for the breast. Eddie puts two of the pills in his mouth and then slops fresh water carelessly into Roland's mouth. Roland guesses it must be from a hill stream somewhere to the east. It might be poison; Eddie wouldn't know fair water from foul. On the other hand, Eddie seems fine himself, and there's really no choice, is there? No.
   He swallows, coughs, and nearly strangles while Eddie looks at him indifferently.
   Roland reaches for him.
   Eddie tries to draw away.
   The gunslinger's bullshooter eyes command him.
   Roland draws him close, so close he can smell the stink of Eddie's sickness and Eddie can smell the stink of his; the combination sickens and compels them both.
   "Only two choices here," Roland whispers. "Don't know how it is in your world, but only two choices here. Stand and maybe live, or die on your knees with your head down and the stink of your own armpits in your nose. Nothing …" He hacks out a cough. "Nothing to me."
   "Who are you?" Eddie screams at him.
   "Your destiny, Eddie," the gunslinger whispers.
   "Why don't you just eat shit and die?" Eddie asks him. The gunslinger tries to speak, but before he can he floats off as the cards
   shuffle
   KA-BLAM!
   Roland opens his eyes on a billion stars wheeling through the blackness, then closes them again.
   He doesn't know what's going on but he thinks everything's okay. The deck's still moving, the cards still
   shuffle
   More of the sweet, tasty chunks of meat. He feels better. Eddie looks better, too. But he also looks worried.
   "They're getting closer," he says. "They may be ugly, but they ain't completely stupid. They know what I been doing. Somehow they know, and they don't dig it. Every night they get a little closer. It might be smart to move on when daybreak comes, if you can. Or it might be the last daybreak we ever see."
   "What?" This is not exactly a whisper but a husk somewhere between a whisper and real speech.
   "Them," Eddie says, and gestures toward the beach. "Dad-a-chack, dum-a-chum, and all that shit. I think they're like us, Roland―all for eating, but not too big on getting eaten."
   Suddenly, in an utter blast of horror, Roland realizes what the whitish-pink chunks of meat Eddie has been feeding him have been. He cannot speak; revulsion robs him of what little voice he has managed to get back. But Eddie sees everything he wants to say on his face.
   "What did you think I was doing?" he nearly snarls. "Calling Red Lobster for take-out?"
   "They're poison," Roland whispers. "That's why―"
   "Yeah, that's why you're hors de combat. What I'm trying to keep from you being, Roland my friend, is h'ors d'oeuvres as well. As far as poison goes, rattlesnakes are poison, but people eat them. Rattlesnake tastes real good. Like chicken. I read that somewhere. They looked like lobsters to me, so I decided to take a chance. What else were we gonna eat? Dirt? I shot one of the fuckers and cooked the living Christ out of it. There wasn't anything else. And actually, they taste pretty good. I been shooting one a night just after the sun starts to go down. They're not real lively until it gets completely dark. I never saw you turning the stuff down."
   Eddie smiles.
   "I like to think maybe I got one of the ones that ate Jack. I like to think I'm eating that dink. It, like, eases my mind, you know?"
   "One of them ate part of me, too," the gunslinger husks out. "Two fingers, one toe."
   "That's also cool," Eddie keeps smiling. His face is pallid, sharklike … but some of that ill look has gone now, and the smell of shit and death which has hung around him like a shroud seems to be going away.
   "Fuck yourself," the gunslinger husks.
   "Roland shows a flash of spirit!" Eddie cries. "Maybe you ain't gonna die after all! Dahling! I think that's mahvellous!"
   "Live," Roland says. The husk has become a whisper again. The fishhooks are returning to his throat.
   "Yeah?" Eddie looks at him, then nods and answers his own question. "Yeah. I think you mean to. Once I thought you were going and once I thought you were gone. Now it looks like you're going to get better. The antibiotics are helping, I guess, but mostly I think you're hauling yourself up. What for? Why the fuck do you keep trying so hard to keep alive on this scuzzy beach?"
   Tower, he mouths, because now he can't even manage a husk.
   "You and your fucking Tower," Eddie says, starts to turn away, and then turns back, surprised, as Roland's hand clamps on his arm like a manacle.
   They look into each others' eyes and Eddie says, "All right. All right!"
   North, the gunslinger mouths. North, I told you. Has he told him that? He thinks so, but it's lost. Lost in the shuffle.
   "How do you know?" Eddie screams at him in sudden frustration. He raises his fists as if to strike Roland, then lowers them.
   I just know―so why do you waste my time and energy asking me foolish questions? he wants to reply, but before he can, the cards
   shuffle
   being dragged along, bounced and bumped, his head lolling helplessly from one side to the other, bound to some kind of a weird travois by his own gunbelts, and he can hear Eddie Dean singing a song which is so weirdly familiar he at first believes this must be a delirium dream:
   "Heyy Jude …don't make it bad …take a saaad song …and make it better …"
   Where did you hear that? he wants to ask. Did you hear mesinging it, Eddie? And where are we?
   But before he can ask anything
   shuffle
   Cort would bash the kid's head in if he saw that contraption, Roland thinks, looking at the travois upon which he has spent the day, and laughs. It isn't much of a laugh. It sounds like one of those waves dropping its load of stones on the beach. He doesn't know how far they have come, but it's far enough for Eddie to be totally bushed. He's sitting on a rock in the lengthening light with one of the gunslinger's revolvers in his lap and a half-full water-skin to one side. There's a small bulge in his shirt pocket. These are the bullets from the back of the gunbelts―the diminishing supply of "good" bullets. Eddie has tied these up in a piece of his own shirt. The main reason the supply of "good" bullets is diminishing so fast is because one of every four or five has also turned out to be a dud.
   Eddie, who has been nearly dozing, now looks up. "What are you laughing about?" he asks.
   The gunslinger waves a dismissive hand and shakes his head. Because he's wrong, he realizes. Cort wouldn't bash Eddie for the travois, even though it was an odd, lame-looking thing. Roland thinks it might even be possible that Cort might grunt some word of compliment―such a rarity that the boy to whom it happened hardly ever knew how to respond; he was left gaping like a fish just pulled from a cook's barrel.
   The main supports were two cottonwood branches of approximately the same length and thickness. A blowdown, the gunslinger presumed. He had used smaller branches as supports, attaching them to the support poles with a crazy conglomeration of stuff: gunbelts, the glue-string that had held the devil-powder to his chest, even the rawhide thong from the gunslinger's hat and his, Eddie's, own sneaker laces. He had laid the gunslinger's bedroll over the supports.
   Cort would not have struck him because, sick as he was, Eddie had at least done more than squat on his hunkers and bewail his fate. He had made something. Had tried.
   And Cort might have offered one of his abrupt, almost grudging compliments because, crazy as the thing looked, it worked. The long tracks stretching back down the beach to a point where they seemed to come together at the rim of perspective proved that.
   "You see any of them?" Eddie asks. The sun is going down, beating an orange path across the water, and so the gunslinger reckons he has been out better than six hours this time. He feels stronger. He sits up and looks down to the water. Neither the beach nor the land sweeping to the western slope of the mountains have changed much; he can see small variations of landscape and detritus (a dead seagull, for instance, lying in a little heap of blowing feathers on the sand about twenty yards to the left and thirty or so closer to the water), but these aside, they might as well be right where they started.
   "No," the gunslinger says. Then: "Yes. There's one."
   He points. Eddie squints, then nods. As the sun sinks lower and the orange track begins to look more and more like blood, the first of the lobstrosities come tumbling out of the waves and begin crawling up the beach.
   Two of them race clumsily toward the dead gull. The winner pounces on it, rips it open, and begins to stuff the rotting remains into its maw. "Did-a-chick?" it asks.
   "Dum-a-chum?" responds the loser. "Dod-a―"
   KA-BLAM!
   Roland's gun puts an end to the second creature's questions. Eddie walks down to it and grabs it by the back, keeping a wary eye on its fellow as he does so. The other offers no trouble, however; it is busy with the gull. Eddie brings his kill back. It is still twitching, raising and lowering its claws, but soon enough it stops moving. The tail arches one final time, then simply drops instead of flexing downward. The boxers' claws hang limp.
   "Dinnah will soon be served, mawster," Eddie says. "You have your choice: filet of creepy-crawler or filet of creepy-crawler. Which strikes your fancy, mawster?"
   "I don't understand you," the gunslinger said.
   "Sure you do," Eddie said. "You just don't have any sense of humor. What happened to it?"
   "Shot off in one war or another, I guess."
   Eddie smiles at that. "You look and sound a little more alive tonight, Roland."
   "I am, I think."
   "Well, maybe you could even walk for awhile tomorrow. I'll tell you very frankly, my friend, dragging you is the pits and the shits."
   "I'll try."
   "You do that."
   "You look a little better, too," Roland ventures. His voice cracks on the last two words like the voice of a young boy. IfIdon't stop talking soon, he thought, I won't be able to talk atall again.
   "I guess I'll live." He looks at Roland expressionlessly. "You'll never know how close it was a couple of times, though. Once I took one of your guns and put it against my head. Cocked it, held it there for awhile, and then took it away. Eased the hammer down and shoved it back in your holster. Another night I had a convulsion. I think that was the second night, but I'm not sure." He shakes his head and says something the gunslinger both does and doesn't understand. " Michigan seems like a dream to me now."
   Although his voice is down to that husky murmur again and he knows he shouldn't be talking at all, the gunslinger has to know one thing. "What stopped you from pulling the trigger?"
   "Well, this is the only pair of pants I've got," Eddie says. "At the last second I thought that if I pulled the trigger and it was one of those dud shells, I'd never get up the guts to do it again … and once you shit your pants, you gotta wash 'em right away or live with the stink forever. Henry told me that. He said he learned it in Nam . And since it was nighttime and Lester the Lobster was out, not to mention all his friends―"
   But the gunslinger is laughing, laughing hard, although only an occasional cracked sound actually escapes his lips. Smiling a little himself, Eddie says: "I think maybe you only got your sense of humor shot off up to the elbow in that war.'' He gets up, meaning to go up the slope to where there will be fuel for a fire, Roland supposes.
   "Wait," he whispers, and Eddie looks at him. "Why, really?"
   "I guess because you needed me. If I'd killed myself, you would have died. Later on, after you're really on your feet again, I may, like, re-examine my options." He looks around and sighs deeply.
   "There may be a Disney land or Cony Island somewhere in your world, Roland, but what I've seen of it so far really doesn't interest me much."
   He starts away, pauses, and looks back again at Roland. His face is somber, although some of the sickly pallor has left it. The shakes have become no more than occasional tremors.
   "Sometimes you really don't understand me, do you?"
   "No," the gunslinger whispers. "Sometimes I don't."
   "Then I'll elucidate. There are people who need people to need them. The reason you don't understand is because you're not one of those people. You'd use me and then toss me away like a paper bag if that's what it came down to. God fucked you, my friend. You're just smart enough so it would hurt you to do that, and just hard enough so you'd go ahead and do it anyway. You wouldn't be able to help yourself. If I was lying on the beach there and screaming for help, you'd walk over me if I was between you and your goddam Tower. Isn't that pretty close to the truth?"
   Roland says nothing, only watches Eddie.
   "But not everyone is like that. There are people who need people to need them. Like the Barbara Streisand song. Corny, but true. It's just another way of being hooked through the bag."
   Eddie gazes at him.
   "But when it comes to that, you're clean, aren't you?"
   Roland watches him.
   "Except for your Tower." Eddie utters a short laugh. "You're a Tower junkie, Roland."
   "Which war was it?" Roland whispers.
   "What?"
   "The one where you got your sense of nobility and purpose shot off?"
   Eddie recoils as if Roland has reached out and slapped him.
   "I'm gonna go get some water," he says shortly. "Keep an eye on the creepy crawlers. We came a long way today, but I still don't know if they talk to each other or not."
   He turns away then, but not before Roland has seen the last red rays of sunset reflected on his wet cheeks.
   Roland turns back to the beach and watches. The lobstrosities crawl and question, question and crawl, but both activities seem aimless; they have some intelligence, but not enough to pass on information to others of their kind.
   God doesn't always dish it in your face, Roland thinks. Most times, but not always.
   Eddie returns with wood.
   "Well?" he asks. "What do you think?"
   "We're all right," the gunslinger croaks, and Eddie starts to say something but the gunslinger is tired now and lies back and looks at the first stars peeking through the canopy of violet sky and
   shuffle
   in the three days that followed, the gunslinger progressed steadily back to health. The red lines creeping up his arms first reversed their direction, then faded, then disappeared. On the next day he sometimes walked and sometimes let Eddie drag him. On the day following he didn't need to be dragged at all; every hour or two they simply sat for a period of time until the watery feeling went out of his legs. It was during these rests and in those times after dinner had been eaten but before the fire had burned all the way down and they went to sleep that the gunslinger heard about Henry and Eddie. He remembered wondering what had happened to make their brothering so difficult, but after Eddie had begun, haltingly and with that sort of resentful anger that proceeds from deep pain, the gunslinger could have stopped him, could have told him: Don'tbother, Eddie. I understand everything.
   Except that wouldn't have helped Eddie. Eddie wasn't talking to help Henry because Henry was dead. He was talking to bury Henry for good. And to remind himself that although Henry was dead, he, Eddie, wasn't.
   So the gunslinger listened and said nothing.
   The gist was simple: Eddie believed he had stolen his brother's life. Henry also believed this. Henry might have believed it on his own or he might have believed it because he so frequently heard their mother lecturing Eddie on how much both she and Henry had sacrificed for him, so Eddie could be as safe as anyone could be in this jungle of a city, so he could be happy, as happy as anyone could be in this jungle of a city, so he wouldn't end up like his poor sister that he didn't even hardly remember but she had been so beautiful, God love her. She was with the angels, and that was undoubtedly a wonderful place to be, but she didn't want Eddie to be with the angels just yet, run over in the road by some crazy drunken driver like his sister or cut up by some crazy junkie kid for the twenty-five cents in his pocket and left with his guts running out all over the sidewalk, and because she didn't think Eddie wanted to be with the angels yet, he just better listen to what his big brother said and do what his big brother said to do and always remember that Henry was making a love-sacrifice.
   Eddie told the gunslinger he doubted if his mother knew some of the things they had done―filching comic books from the candy store on Rincon Avenue or smoking cigarettes behind the Bonded Electroplate Factory on Cohoes Street .
   Once they saw a Chevrolet with the keys in it and although Henry barely knew how to drive―he was sixteen then, Eddie eight―he had crammed his brother into the car and said they were going to New York City . Eddie was scared, crying, Henry scared too and mad at Eddie, telling him to shut up, telling him to stop being such a fuckin baby, he had ten bucks and Eddie had three or four, they could go to the movies all fuckin day and then catch a Pelham train and be back before their mother had time to put supper on the table and wonder where they were. But Eddie kept crying and near the Queensboro Bridge they saw a police car on a side street and although Eddie was pretty sure the cop in it hadn't even been looking their way, he said Yeah when Henry asked him in a harsh, quavering voice if Eddie thought that bull had seen them. Henry turned white and pulled over so fast that he had almost amputated a fire hydrant. He was running down the block while Eddie, now in a panic himself, was still struggling with the unfamiliar doorhandle. Henry stopped, came back, and hauled Eddie out of the car. He also slapped him twice. Then they had walked―well, actually they slunk― all the way back to Brooklyn . It took them most of the day, and when their mother asked them why they looked so hot and sweaty and tired out, Henry said it was because he'd spent most of the day teaching Eddie how to go one-on-one on the basketball court at the playground around the block. Then some big kids came and they had to run. Their mother kissed Henry and beamed at Eddie. She asked him if he didn't have the bestest big brother in the world. Eddie agreed with her. This was honest agreement, too. He thought he did.
   "He was as scared as I was that day," Eddie told Roland as they sat and watched the last of the day dwindle from the water, where soon the only light would be that reflected from the stars. "Scareder, really, because he thought that cop saw us and I knew he didn't. That's why he ran. But he came back. That's the important part. He came back."
   Roland said nothing.
   "You see that, don't you?" Eddie was looking at Roland with harsh, questioning eyes.
   "I see."
   "He was always scared, but he always came back."
   Roland thought it would have been better for Eddie, maybe better for both of them in the long run, if Henry had just kept showing his heels that day … or on one of the others. But people like Henry never did. People like Henry always came back, because people like Henry knew how to use trust. It was the only thing people like Henry did know how to use. First they changed trust into need, then they changed need into a drug, and once that was done, they―what was Eddie's word for it?―push. Yes. They pushed it.
   "I think I'll turn in," the gunslinger said.
   The next day Eddie went on, but Roland already knew it all. Henry hadn't played sports in high school because Henry couldn't stay after for practice. Henry had to take care of Eddie. The fact that Henry was scrawny and uncoordinated and didn't much care for sports in the first place had nothing to do with it, of course; Henry would have made a wonderful baseball pitcher or one of those basketball jumpers, their mother assured them both time and again. Henry's grades were bad and he needed to repeat a number of subjects―but that wasn't because Henry was stupid; Eddie and Mrs. Dean both knew Henry was just as smart as lickety-split. But Henry had to spend the time he should have spent studying or doing homework taking care of Eddie (the fact that this usually took place in the Dean living room, with both boys sprawled on the sofa watching TV or wrestling around on the floor somehow seemed not to matter). The bad grades meant Henry hadn't been able to be accepted into anything but NYU, and they couldn't afford it because the bad grades precluded any scholarships, and then Henry got drafted and then it was Viet Nam, where Henry got most of his knee blown off, and the pain was bad, and the drug they gave him for it had a heavy morphine base, and when he was better they weaned him from the drug, only they didn't do such a good job because when Henry got back to New York there was still a monkey on his back, a hungry monkey waiting to be fed, and after a month or two he had gone out to see a man, and it had been about four months later, less than a month after their mother died, when Eddie first saw his brother snorting some white powder off a mirror. Eddie assumed it was coke. Turned out it was heroin. And if you traced it all the way back, whose fault was it?
   Roland said nothing, but heard the voice of Cort in his mind: Fault always lies in the same place, my fine babies: withhim weak enough to lay blame.
   When he discovered the truth, Eddie had been shocked, then angry. Henry had responded not by promising to quit snorting but by telling Eddie he didn't blame him for being mad, he knew Nam had turned him into a worthless shitbag, he was weak, he would leave, that was the best thing, Eddie was right, the last thing he needed was a filthy junkie around, messing up the place. He just hoped Eddie wouldn't blame him too much. He had gotten weak, he admitted it; something in Nam had made him weak, had rotted him out the same way the moisture rotted the laces of your sneakers and the elastic of your underwear. There was also something in Nam that apparently rotted out your heart, Henry told him tearily. He just hoped that Eddie would remember all the years he had tried to be strong.
   For Eddie.
   For Mom.
   So Henry tried to leave. And Eddie, of course, couldn't let him. Eddie was consumed with guilt. Eddie had seen the scarred horror that had once been an unmarked leg, a leg that was now more Teflon than bone. They had a screaming match in the hall, Henry standing there in an old pair of khakis with his packed duffle bag in one hand and purple rings under his eyes, Eddie wearing nothing but a pair of yellowing jockey shorts, Henry saying you don't need me around, Eddie, I'm poison to you and I know it, and Eddie yelling back You ain't going nowhere, get your ass back inside, and that's how it went until Mrs. McGursky came out of her place and yelled Go orstay, it's nothing to me, but you better decide one way or the other pretty quick or I'm calling the police. Mrs. McGursky seemed about to add a few more admonishments, but just then she saw that Eddie was wearing nothing but a pair of skivvies. She added: And you're not decent, Eddie Dean! before popping back inside. It was like watching a Jack-in-the-box in reverse. Eddie looked at Henry. Henry looked at Eddie. Looklike Angel-Baby done put on a few pounds, Henry said in a low voice, and then they were howling with laughter, holding onto each other and pounding each other and Henry came back inside and about two weeks later Eddie was snorting the stuff too and he couldn't understand why the hell he had made such a big deal out of it, after all, it was only snorting, shit, it got you off, and as Henry (who Eddie would eventually come to think of as the great sage and eminent junkie) said, in a world that was clearly going to hell head-first, what was so low about getting high?
   Time passed. Eddie didn't say how much. The gunslinger didn't ask. He guessed that Eddie knew there were a thousand excuses for getting high but no reasons, and that he had kept his habit pretty well under control. And that Henry had also managed to keep his under control. Not as well as Eddie, but enough to keep from coming completely unravelled. Because whether or not Eddie understood the truth (down deep Roland believed Eddie did), Henry must have: their positions had reversed themselves. Now Eddie held Henry's hand crossing streets.
   The day came when Eddie caught Henry not snorting but skin-popping. There had been another hysterical argument, an almost exact repeat of the first one, except it had been in Henry's bedroom. It ended in almost exactly the same way, with Henry weeping and offering that implacable, inarguable defense that was utter surrender, utter admission: Eddie was right, he wasn't fit to live, not fit to eat garbage from the gutter. He would go. Eddie would never have to see him again. He just hoped he would remember all the …
   It faded into a drone that wasn't much different from the rocky sound of the breaking waves as they trudged up the beach. Roland knew the story and said nothing. It was Eddie who didn't know the story, an Eddie who was really clearheaded for the first time in maybe ten years or more. Eddie wasn't telling the story to Roland; Eddie was finally telling the story to himself.
   That was all right. So far as the gunslinger could see, time was something they had a lot of. Talk was one way to fill it.
   Eddie said he was haunted by Henry's knee, the twisted scar tissue up and down his leg (of course that was all healed now, Henry barely even limped … except when he and Eddie were quarrelling; then the limp always seemed to get worse); he was haunted by all the things Henry had given up for him, and haunted by something much more pragmatic: Henry wouldn't last out on the streets. He would be like a rabbit let loose in a jungle filled with tigers. On his own, Henry would wind up in jail or Bellevue before a week was out.
   So he begged, and Henry finally did him the favor of consenting to stick around, and six months after that Eddie also had a golden arm. From that moment things had begun to move in the steady and inevitable downward spiral which had ended with Eddie's trip to the Bahamas and Roland's sudden intervention in his life.
   Another man, less pragmatic and more introspective than Roland, might have asked (to himself, if not right out loud), Why this one? Why this man to start? Why a man who seems topromise weakness or strangeness or even outright doom?
   Not only did the gunslinger never ask the question; it never even formulated itself in his mind. Cuthbert would have asked; Cuthbert had questioned everything, had been poisoned with questions, had died with one in his mouth. Now they were gone, all gone. Cort's last gunslingers, the thirteen survivors of a beginning class that had numbered fifty-six, were all dead. All dead but Roland. He was the last gunslinger, going steadily on in a world that had grown stale and sterile and empty.
   Thirteen, he remembered Cort saying on the day before the Presentation Ceremonies. This is an evil number. And on the following day, for the first time in thirty years, Cort had not been present at the Ceremonies. His final crop of pupils had gone to his cottage to first kneel at his feet, presenting defenseless necks, then to rise and receive his congratulatory kiss and to allow him to load their guns for the first time. Nine weeks later, Cort was dead. Of poison, some said. Two years after his death, the final bloody civil war had begun. The red slaughter had reached the last bastion of civilization, light, and sanity, and had taken away what all of them had assumed was so strong with the casual ease of a wave taking a child's castle of sand.
   So he was the last, and perhaps he had survived because the dark romance in his nature was overset by his practicality and simplicity. He understood that only three things mattered: mortality, ka, and the Tower.
   Those were enough things to think about.
   Eddie finished his tale around four o'clock on the third day of their northward journey up the featureless beach. The beach itself never seemed to change. If a sign of progress was wanted, it could only be obtained by looking left, to the east. There the jagged peaks of the mountains had begun to soften and slump a bit. It was possible that if they went north far enough, the mountains would become rolling hills.
   With his story told, Eddie lapsed into silence and they walked without speaking for a half an hour or longer. Eddie kept stealing little glances at him. Roland knew Eddie wasn't aware that he was picking these glances up; he was still too much in himself. Roland also knew what Eddie was waiting for: a response. Some kind of response. Any kind. Twice Eddie opened his mouth only to close it again. Finally he asked what the gunslinger had known he would ask.
   "So? What do you think?"
   "I think you're here."
   Eddie stopped, fisted hands planted on his hips. "That's all? That's it?"
   "That's all I know," the gunslinger replied. His missing fingers and toe throbbed and itched. He wished for some of the astin from Eddie's world.
   "You don't have any opinion on what the hell it all means?"
   The gunslinger might have held up his subtracted right hand and said, Think about what this means, you silly idiot, but it no more crossed his mind to say this than it had to ask why it was Eddie, out of all the people in all the universes that might exist. "It's ka," he said, facing Eddie patiently.
   "What's ka?" Eddie's voice was truculent. "I never heard of it. Except if you say it twice you come out with the baby word for shit."
   "I don't know about that," the gunslinger said. "Here it means duty, or destiny, or, in the vulgate, a place you must go."
   Eddie managed to look dismayed, disgusted, and amused all at the same time. "Then say it twice, Roland, because words like that sound like shit to this kid."
   The gunslinger shrugged. "I don't discuss philosophy. I don't study history. All I know is what's past is past, and what's ahead is ahead. The second is ka, and takes care of itself."
   "Yeah?" Eddie looked northward. "Well all I see ahead is about nine billion miles of this same fucking beach. If that's what's ahead, ka and kaka are the same thing. We might have enough good shells to pop five or six more of those lobster dudes, but then we're going to be down to chucking rocks at them. So where are we going?"
   Roland did wonder briefly if this was a question Eddie had ever thought to ask his brother, but to ask such a question would only be an invitation to a lot of meaningless argument. So he only cocked a thumb northward and said, "There. To begin with."
   Eddie looked and saw nothing but the same reach of shell– and rock-studded gray shingle. He looked back at Roland, about to scoff, saw the serene certainty on his face, and looked again. He squinted. He shielded the right side of his face from the westering sun with his right hand. He wanted desperately to see something, anything, shit, even a mirage would do, but there was nothing.
   "Crap on me all you want to," Eddie said slowly, "but I say it's a goddam mean trick. I put my life on the line for you at Balazar's."
   "I know you did." The gunslinger smiled―a rarity that lit his face like a momentary flash of sunlight on a dismal luring day. "That's why I've done nothing but square-deal you, Eddie. It's there. I saw it an hour ago. At first I thought it was only a mirage or wishful thinking, but it's there, all right."
   Eddie looked again, looked until water ran from the corners of his eyes. At last he said, "I don't see anything up ahead but more beach. And I got twenty-twenty vision."
   "I don't know what that means."
   "It means if there was something there to see, I'd see it!" But Eddie wondered. Wondered how much further than his own the gunslinger's blue bullshooter's eyes could see. Maybe a little.
   Maybe a lot.
   "You'll see it," the gunslinger said.
   "See what?"
   "We won't get there today, but if you see as well as you say, you'll see it before the sun hits the water. Unless you just want to stand here chin-jawing, that is."
   "Ka," Eddie said in a musing voice.
   Roland nodded. "Ka."
   "Kaka," Eddie said, and laughed. "Come on, Roland. Let's take a hike. And if I don't see anything by the time the sun hits the water, you owe me a chicken dinner. Or a Big Mac. Or anything that isn't lobster."
   "Come on."
   They started walking again, and it was at least a full hour before the sun's lower arc touched the horizon when Eddie Dean began to see the shape in the distance―vague, shimmering, indefinable, but definitely something. Something new.
   "Okay," he said. "I see it. You must have eyes like Superman."
   "Who?"
   "Never mind. You've got a really incredible case of culture lag, you know it?"
   "What?"
   Eddie laughed. "Never mind. What is it?"
   "You'll see." The gunslinger started walking again before Eddie could ask anything else.
   Twenty minutes later Eddie thought he did see. Fifteen minutes after that he was sure. The object on the beach was still two, maybe three miles away, but he knew what it was. A door, of course. Another door.
   Neither of them slept well that night, and they were up and walking an hour before the sun cleared the eroding shapes of the mountains. They reached the door just as the morning sun's first rays, so sublime and so still, broke over them. Those rays lighted their stubbly cheeks like lamps. They made the gunslinger forty again, and Eddie no older than Roland had been when he went out to fight Cort with his hawk David as his weapon.
   This door was exactly like the first, except for what was writ upon it:
   THE LADY OF SHADOWS
   " So," Eddie said softly, looking at the door which simply stood here with its hinges grounded in some unknown jamb between one world and another, one universe and another. It stood with its graven message, real as rock and strange as starlight.
   "So," the gunslinger agreed.
   "Ka."
   "Ka."
   "Here is where you draw the second of your three?"
   "It seems so."
   The gunslinger knew what was in Eddie's mind before Eddie knew it himself. He saw Eddie make his move before Eddie knew he was moving. He could have turned and broken Eddie's arm in two places before Eddie knew it was happening, but he made no move. He let Eddie snake the revolver from his right holster. It was the first time in his life he had allowed one of his weapons to be taken from him without an offer of that weapon having first been made. Yet he made no move to stop it. He turned and looked at Eddie equably, even mildly.
   Eddie's face was livid, strained. His eyes showed starey whites all the way around the irises. He held the heavy revolver in both hands and still the muzzle rambled from side to side, centering, moving off, centering again and then moving off again.
   "Open it," he said.
   "You're being foolish," the gunslinger said in the same mild voice. "Neither of us has any idea where that door goes. It needn't open on your universe, let alone upon your world. For all either of us know, the Lady of Shadows might have eight eyes and nine arms, like Suvia. Even if it does open on your world, it might be on a time long before you were born or long after you would have died."
   Eddie smiled tightly. "Tell you what, Monty: I'm more than willing to trade the rubber chicken and the shitty seaside vacation for what's behind Door #2."
   "I don't understand y―"
   "I know you don't. It doesn't matter. Just open the fucker."
   The gunslinger shook his head.
   They stood in the dawn, the door casting its slanted shadow toward the ebbing sea.
   "Open it!" Eddie cried. "I'm going with you! Don't you get it? I'm going with you! That doesn't mean I won't come back. Maybe I will. I mean, probably I will. I guess I owe you that much. You been square-John with me down the line, don't think I'm not aware of the fact. But while you get whoever this Shadow-Babe is, I'm gonna find the nearest Chicken Delight and pick me up some take-out. I think the Thirty-Piece Family Pak should do for starters."
   "You stay here."
   "You think I don't mean it?" Eddie was shrill now, close to the edge. The gunslinger could almost see him looking down into the drifty depths of his own damnation. Eddie thumbed back the revolver's ancient hammer. The wind had fallen with the break of the day and the ebb of the tide, and the click of the hammer as Eddie brought it to full cock was very clear. "You just try me."
   "I think I will," the gunslinger said.
   "I'llshoot you!" Eddie screamed.
   "Ka," the gunslinger replied stolidly, and turned to the door. He was reaching for the knob, but his heart was waiting: waiting to see if he would live or die.
   Ka.

THE LADY OF SHADOWS

CHAPTER 1
DETTA AND ODETTA

1

   Stripped of jargon, what Adler said was this: the perfect schizophrenic―if there was such a person―would be a man or woman not only unaware of his other persona(e), but one unaware that anything at all was amiss in his or her life.
   Adler should have met Detta Walker and Odetta Holmes.



   "―last gunslinger," Andrew said.
   He had been talking for quite awhile, but Andrew always talked and Odetta usually just let it flow over her mind the way you let warm water flow over your hair and face in the shower. But this did more than catch her attention; it snagged it, as if on a thorn.
   "I beg pardon?"
   "Oh, it was just some column in the paper," Andrew said. "I dunno who wrote it. I didn't notice. One of those political fellas. Prob'ly you'd know, Miz Holmes. I loved him, and I cried the night he was elected―"
   She smiled, touched in spite of herself. Andrew said his ceaseless chatter was something he couldn't stop, wasn't responsible for, that it was just the Irish in him coming out, and most of it was nothing―cluckings and chirrupings about relatives and friends she would never meet, half-baked political opinions, weird scientific commentary gleaned from any number of weird sources (among other things, Andrew was a firm believer in flying saucers, which he called you-foes)― but this touched her because she had also cried the night he was elected.
   "But I didn't cry when that son of a bitch―pardon my French, Miz Holmes―when that son of a bitch Oswald shot him, and I hadn't cried since, and it's been―what, two months?"
   Three months and two days, she thought.
   "Something like that, I guess."
   Andrew nodded. "Then I read this column―in The DailyNews, it mighta been―yesterday, about how Johnson's probably gonna do a pretty good job, but it won't be the same. The guy said America had seen the passage of the world's last gunslinger."
   "I don't think John Kennedy was that at all," Odetta said, and if her voice was sharper than the one Andrew was accustomed to hearing (which it must have been, because she saw his eyes give a startled blink in the rear-view mirror, a blink that was more like a wince), it was because she felt herself touched by this, too. It was absurd, but it was also a fact. There was something about that phrase―America has seen the passage of the world's last gunslinger― that rang deeply in her mind. It was ugly, it was untrue―John Kennedy had been a peacemaker, not a leather-slapping Billy the Kid type, that was more in the Goldwater line―but it had also for some reason given her goosebumps.
   "Well, the guy said there would be no shortage of shooters in the world," Andrew went on, regarding her nervously in the rear-view mirror. "He mentioned Jack Ruby for one, and Castro, and this fellow in Haiti―"
   "Duvalier," she said. "Poppa Doc."
   "Yeah, him, and Diem―"
   "The Diem brothers are dead."
   "Well, he said Jack Kennedy was different, that's all. He said he would draw, but only if someone weaker needed him to draw, and only if there was nothing else to do. He said Kennedy was savvy enough to know that sometimes talking don't do no good. He said Kennedy knew if it's foaming at the mouth you have to shoot it."
   His eyes continued to regard her apprehensively.
   "Besides, it was just some column I read."
   The limo was gliding up Fifth Avenue now, headed toward Central Park West, the Cadillac emblem on the end of the hood cutting the frigid February air.
   "Yes," Odetta said mildly, and Andrew's eyes relaxed a trifle. "I understand. I don't agree, but I understand."
   You are a liar; a voice spoke up in her mind. This was a voice she heard quite often. She had even named it. It was the voice of The Goad. You understand perfectly and agree completely. Lie to Andrew if you feel it necessary, but for God's sake don't lie to yourself, woman.
   Yet part of her protested, horrified. In a world which had become a nuclear powder keg upon which nearly a billion people now sat, it was a mistake―perhaps one of suicidal proportions―to believe there was a difference between good shooters and bad shooters. There were too many shaky hands holding lighters near too many fuses. This was no world for gunslingers. If there had ever been a time for them, it had passed.
   Hadn't it?
   She closed her eyes briefly and rubbed at her temples. She could feel one of her headaches coming on. Sometimes they threatened, like an ominous buildup of thunderheads on a hot summer afternoon, and then blew away … as those ugly summer brews sometimes simply slipped away in one direction or another, to stomp their thunders and lightnings into the ground of some other place.
   She thought, however, that this time the storm was going to happen. It would come complete with thunder, lightning, and hail the size of golf-balls.
   The streetlights marching up Fifth Avenue seemed much too bright.
   "So how was Oxford , Miz Holmes?" Andrew asked tentatively.
   "Humid. February or not, it was very humid." She paused, telling herself she wouldn't say the words that were crowding up her throat like bile, that she would swallow them back down. To say them would be needlessly brutal. Andrew's talk of the world's last gunslinger had been just more of the man's endless prattling. But on top of everything else it was just a bit too much and it came out anyway, what she had no business saying. Her voice sounded as calm and as resolute as ever, she supposed, but she was not fooled: she knew a blurt when she heard one. "The bail bondsman came very promptly, of course; he had been notified in advance. They held onto us as long as they could nevertheless, and I held on as long as I could, but I guess they won that one, because I ended up wetting myself.'' She saw Andrew's eyes wince away again and she wanted to stop and couldn't stop. "It's what they want to teach you, you see. Partly because it frightens you, I suppose, and a frightened person may not come down to their precious Southland and bother them again. But I think most of them―even the dumb ones and they are by all means not all dumb―know the change will come in the end no matter what they do, and so they take the chance to degrade you while they still can. To teach you you can be degraded. You can swear before God, Christ, and the whole company of Saints that you will not, will not, will not soil yourself, but if they hold onto you long enough of course you do. The lesson is that you're just an animal in a cage, no more than that, no better than that. Just an animal in a cage. So I wet myself. I can still smell dried urine and that damned holding cell. They think we are descended from the monkeys, you know. And that's exactly what I smell like to myself right now.
   "A monkey."
   She saw Andrew's eyes in the rear-view mirror and was sorry for the way his eyes looked. Sometimes your urine wasn't the only thing you couldn't hold.
   "I'm sorry, Miz Holmes."
   "No," she said, rubbing at her temples again. "I am the one who is sorry. It's been a trying three days, Andrew."
   "I should think so," he said in a shocked old-maidish voice that made her laugh in spite of herself. But most of her wasn't laughing. She thought she had known what she was getting into, that she had fully anticipated how bad it could get. She had been wrong.
   A trying three days. Well, that was one way to put it. Another might be that her three days in Oxford , Mississippi had been a short season in hell. But there were some things you couldn't say. Some things you would die before saying … unless you were called upon to testify to them before the Throne of God the Father Almighty, where, she supposed, even the truths that caused the hellish thunderstorms in that strange gray jelly between your ears (the scientists said that gray jelly was nerveless, and if that wasn't a hoot and a half she didn't know what was) must be admitted.
   "I just want to get home and bathe, bathe, bathe, and sleep, sleep, sleep. Then I reckon I will be as right as rain."
   "Why, sure! That's just what you're going to be!" Andrew wanted to apologize for something, and this was as close as he could come. And beyond this he didn't want to risk further conversation. So the two of them rode in unaccustomed silence to the gray Victorian block of apartments on the corner of Fifth and Central Park South, a very exclusive gray Victorian block of apartments, and she supposed that made her a blockbuster, and she knew there were people in those poshy-poshy flats who would not speak to her unless they absolutely had to, and she didn't really care. Besides, she was above them, and they knew she was above them. It had occurred to her on more than one occasion that it must have galled some of them mightily, knowing there was a nigger living in the penthouse apartment of this fine staid old building where once the only black hands allowed had been clad in white gloves or perhaps the thin black leather ones of a chauffeur. She hoped it did gall them mightily, and scolded herself for being mean, for being unchristian, but she did wish it, she hadn't been able to stop the piss pouring into the crotch of her fine silk imported underwear and she didn't seem to be able to stop this other flood of piss, either. It was mean, it was unchristian, and almost as bad―no, worse, at least as far as the Movement was concerned, it was counterproductive. They were going to win the rights they needed to win, and probably this year: Johnson, mindful of the legacy which had been left him by the slain President (and perhaps hoping to put another nail in the coffin of Barry Goldwater), would do more than oversee the passage of the Civil Rights Act; if necessary he would ram it into law. So it was important to minimize the scarring and the hurt. There was more work to be done. Hate would not help do that work. Hate would, in fact, hinder it.
   But sometimes you went on hating just the same.
   Oxford Town had taught her that, too.

2

   Detta Walker had absolutely no interest in the Movement and much more modest digs. She lived in the loft of a peeling Greenwich Village apartment building. Odetta didn't know about the loft and Detta didn't know about the penthouse and the only one left who suspected something was not quite right was Andrew Feeny, the chauffeur. He had begun working for Odetta's father when Odetta was fourteen and Detta Walker hardly existed at all.
   Sometimes Odetta disappeared. These disappearances might be a matter of hours or of days. Last summer she had disappeared for three weeks and Andrew had been ready to call the police when Odetta called him one evening and asked him to bring the car around at ten the next day―she planned to do some shopping, she said.
   It trembled on his lips to cry out Miz Holmes! Where haveyou been? But he had asked this before and had received only puzzled stares―truly puzzled stares, he was sure―in return. Right here, she would say. Why, right here, Andrew―you've been driving me two or three places every day, haven't you? You aren't starting to go a little mushy in the head, are you? Then she would laugh and if she was feeling especially good (as she often seemed to feel after her disappearances), she would pinch his cheek.
   "Very good, Miz Holmes," he had said. "Ten it is."
   That scary time she had been gone for three weeks, Andrew had put down the phone, closed his eyes, and said a quick prayer to the Blessed Virgin for Miz Holmes's safe return. Then he had rung Howard, the doorman at her building.
   "What time did she come in?"
   "Just about twenty minutes ago," Howard said.
   "Who brought her?"
   "Dunno. You know how it is. Different car every time. Sometimes they park around the block and I don't see em at all, don't even know she's back until I hear the buzzer and look out and see it's her." Howard paused, then added: "She's got one hell of a bruise on her cheek."
   Howard had been right. It sure had been one hell of a bruise, and now it was getting better. Andrew didn't like to think what it might have looked like when it was fresh. Miz Holmes appeared promptly at ten the next morning, wearing a silk sundress with spaghetti-thin straps (this had been late July), and by then the bruise had started to yellow. She had made only a perfunctory effort to cover it with make-up, as if knowing that too much effort to cover it would only draw further attention to it.
   "How did you get that, Miz Holmes?" he asked.
   She laughed merrily. "You know me, Andrew―clumsy as ever. My hand slipped on the grab-handle while I was getting out of the tub yesterday―I was in a hurry to catch the national news. I fell and banged the side of my face." She gauged his face. "You're getting ready to start blithering about doctors and examinations, aren't you? Don't bother answering; after all these years I can read you like a book. I won't go, so you needn't bother asking. I'm just as fine as paint. Onward, Andrew! I intend to buy half of Saks', all of Gimbels, and eat everything at Four Seasons in between."
   "Yes, Miz Holmes," he had said, and smiled. It was a forced smile, and forcing it was not easy. That bruise wasn't a day old; it was a week old, at least … and he knew better, anyway, didn't he? He had called her every night at seven o'clock for the last week, because if there was one time when you could catch Miz Holmes in her place, it was when the Huntley-Brinkley Report came on. A regular junkie for her news was Miz Holmes. He had done it every night, that was, except last night. Then he had gone over and wheedled the passkey from Howard. A conviction had been growing on him steadily that she had had just the sort of accident she had described … only instead of getting a bruise or a broken bone, she had died, died alone, and was lying up there dead right now. He had let himself in, heart thumping, feeling like a cat in a dark room criss-crossed with piano wires. Only there had been nothing to be nervous about. There was a butter-dish on the kitchen counter, and although the butter had been covered it had been out long enough to be growing a good crop of mould. He got there at ten minutes of seven and had left by five after. In the course of his quick examination of the apartment, he had glanced into the bathroom. The tub had been dry, the towels neatly―even austerely―arrayed, the room's many grab-handles polished to a bright steel gleam that was unspotted with water.
   He knew the accident she had described had not happened.
   But Andrew had not believed she was lying, either. She had believed what she had told him.
   He looked in the rear-view mirror again and saw her rubbing her temples lightly with the tips of her fingers. He didn't like it. He had seen her do that too many times before one of her disappearances.

3

   Andrew left the motor running so she could have the benefit of the heater, then went around to the trunk. He looked at her two suitcases with another wince. They looked as if petulant men with small minds and large bodies had kicked them relentlessly back and forth, damaging the bags in a way they did not quite dare damage Miz Holmes herself―the way they might have damaged him, for instance, if he had been there. It wasn't just that she was a woman; she was a nigger, an uppity northern nigger messing where she had no business messing, and they probably figured a woman like that deserved just what she got. Thing was, she was also a rich nigger. Thing was, she was almost as well-known to the American public as Medgar Evers or Martin Luther King. Thing was, she'd gotten her rich nigger face on the cover of Time magazine and it was a little harder to get away with sticking someone like that in the 'toolies and then saying What? No sir, boss, we sho dint see nobody looked like that down here, did we, boys? Thing was, it was a little harder to work yourself up to hurting a woman who was the only heir to Holmes Dental Industries when there were twelve Holmes plants in the sunny South, one of them just one county over from Oxford Town, Oxford Town.
   So they'd done to her suitcases what they didn't dare do to her.
   He looked at these mute indications of her stay in Oxford Town with shame and fury and love, emotions as mute as the scars on the luggage that had gone away looking smart and had come back looking dumb and thumped. He looked, temporarily unable to move, and his breath puffed out on the frosty air.
   Howard was coming out to help, but Andrew paused a moment longer before grasping the handles of the cases. Whoare you, Miz Holmes? Who are you really? Where do you go sometimes, and what do you do that seems so bad that you have to make up a false history of the missing hours or days even to yourself? And he thought something else in the moment before Howard arrived, something weirdly apt: Where's the rest of you?
   You want to quit thinking like that. If anyone around here was going to do any thinking like that it would be Miz Holmes, but she doesn't and so you don't need to, either.
   Andrew lifted the bags out of the trunk and handed them to Howard, who asked in a low voice: "Is she all right?"
   "I think so," Andrew replied, also pitching his voice low. "Just tired is all. Tired all the way down to her roots."
   Howard nodded, took the battered suitcases, and started back inside. He paused only long enough to tip his cap to Odetta Holmes―who was almost invisible behind the smoked glass windows―in a soft and respectful salute.
   When he was gone, Andrew took out the collapsed stainless steel scaffolding at the bottom of the trunk and began to unfold it. It was a wheelchair.
   Since August 19th, 1959 , some five and a half years before, the part of Odetta Holmes from the knees down had been as missing as those blank hours and days.

4

   Before the subway incident, Detta Walker had had only been conscious a few times―those were like coral islands which look isolated to one above them but are, in fact, only nodes in the spine of a long archipelago which is mostly underwater. Odetta suspected Detta not at all, and Detta had no idea that there was such a person as Odetta … but Detta at least had a clear understanding that something was wrong, that someone was fucking with her life. Odetta's imagination novelized all sorts of things which had happened when Detta was in charge of her body; Detta was not so clever. She thought she remembered things, some things, at least, but a lot of the time she didn't.
   Detta was at least partially aware of the blanks.
   She could remember the china plate. She could remember that. She could remember slipping it into the pocket of her dress, looking over her shoulder all the while to make sure the Blue Woman wasn't there, peeking. She had to make sure because the china plate belonged to the Blue Woman. The china plate was, Detta understood in some vague way, a forspecial. Detta took it for that why. Detta remembered taking it to a place she knew (although she didn't know how she knew) as The Drawers, a smoking trash-littered hole in the earth where she had once seen a burning baby with plastic skin. She remembered putting the plate carefully down on the gravelly ground and then starting to step on it and stopping, remembered taking off her plain cotton panties and putting them into the pocket where the plate had been, and then carefully slipping the first finger of her left hand carefully against the cut in her at the place where Old Stupid God had joined her and all other girls and women imperfectly, but something about that place must be right, because she remembered the jolt, remembered wanting to press, remembered not pressing, remembered how delicious her vagina had been naked, without the cotton panties in the way of it and the world, and she had not pressed, not until her shoe pressed, her black patent leather shoe, not until her shoe pressed down on the plate, then she pressed on the cut with her finger the way she was pressing on the Blue Woman's forspecial china plate with her foot, she remembered the way the black patent leather shoe covered the delicate blue webbing on the edge of the plate, she remembered the press, yes, she remembered pressing in The Drawers, pressing with finger and foot, remembered the delicious promise of finger and cut, remembered that when the plate snapped with a bitter brittle snap a similar brittle pleasure had skewered upward from that cut into her guts like an arrow, she remembered the cry which had broken from her lips, an unpleasant cawing like the sound of a crow scared up from a cornpatch, she could remember staring dully at the fragments of the plate and then taking the plain white cotton panties slowly out of her dress pocket and putting them on again, step-ins, so she had heard them called in some time unhoused in memory and drifting loose like turves on a flood-tide, step-ins, good, because first you stepped out to do your business and then you stepped back in, first one shiny patent leather shoe and then the other, good, panties were good, she could remember drawing them up her legs so clearly, drawing them past her knees, a scab on the left one almost ready to fall off and leave clean pink new babyskin, yes, she could remember so clearly it might not have been a week ago or yesterday but only one single moment ago, she could remember how the waistband had reached the hem of her party dress, the clear contrast of white cotton against brown skin, like cream, yes, like that, cream from a pitcher caught suspended over coffee, the texture, the panties disappearing under the hem of the dress, except then the dress was burnt orange and the panties were not going up but down but they were still white but not cotton, they were nylon, cheap see-through nylon panties, cheap in more ways than one, and she remembered stepping out of them, she remembered how they glimmered on the floormat of the '46 Dodge DeSoto, yes, how white they were, how cheap they were, not anything dignified like underwear but cheap panties, the girl was cheap and it was good to be cheap, good to be on sale, to be on the block not even like a whore but like a good breedsow; she remembered no round china plate but the round white face of a boy, some surprised drunk fraternity boy, he was no china plate but his face was as round as the Blue Woman's china plate had been, and there was webbing on his cheeks, and this webbing looked as blue as the webbing on the Blue Woman's forspecial china plate had been, but that was only because the neon was red, the neon was garish, in the dark the neon from the roadhouse sign made the spreading blood from the places on his cheeks where she had clawed him look blue, and he had said Why did youwhy did you why did you do, and then he unrolled the window so he could get his face outside to puke and she remembered hearing Dodie Stevens on the jukebox, singing about tan shoes with pink shoelaces and a big Panama with a purple hatband, she remembered the sound of his puking was like gravel in a cement mixer, and his penis, which moments before had been a livid exclamation point rising from the tufted tangle of his pubic hair, was collapsing into a weak white question mark; she remembered the hoarse gravel sounds of his vomiting stopped and then started again and she thought Well I guess he ain't made enough to lay this foundation yet and laughing and pressing her finger (which now came equipped with a long shaped nail) against her vagina which was bare but no longer bare because it was overgrown with its own coarse briared tangle, and there had been the same brittle breaking snap inside her, and it was still as much pain as it was pleasure (but better, far better, than nothing at all), and then he was grabbing blindly for her and saying in a hurt breaking tone Oh you goddamned nigger cunt and she went on laughing just the same, dodging him easily and snatching up her panties and opening the door on her side of the car, feeling the last blind thud of his fingers on the back of her blouse as she ran into a May night that was redolent of early honeysuckle, red-pink neon light stuttering off the gravel of some postwar parking lot, stuffing her panties, her cheap slick nylon panties not into the pocket of her dress but into a purse jumbled with a teenager's cheerful conglomeration of cosmetics, she was running, the light was stuttering, and then she was twenty-three and it was not panties but a rayon scarf, and she was casually slipping it into her purse as she walked along a counter in the Nice Notions section of Macy's―a scarf which sold at that time for $1.99.
   Cheap.
   Cheap like the white nylon panties.
   Cheap.
   Like her.
   The body she inhabited was that of a woman who had inherited millions, but that was not known and didn't matter―the scarf was white, the edging blue, and there was that same little breaking sense of pleasure as she sat in the back seat of the taxi, and, oblivious of the driver, held the scarf in one hand, looking at it fixedly, while her other hand crept up under her tweed skirt and beneath the leg-band of her white panties, and that one long dark finger took care of the business that needed to be taken care of in a single merciless stroke.
   So sometimes she wondered, in a distracted sort of way, where she was when she wasn't here, but mostly her needs were too sudden and pressing for any extended contemplation, and she simply fulfilled what needed to be fulfilled, did what needed to be done.
   Roland would have understood.

5

   Odetta could have taken a limo everywhere, even in 1959―although her father was still alive and she was not as fabulously rich as she would become when he died in 1962, the money held in trust for her had become hers on her twenty-fifth birthday, and she could do pretty much as she liked. But she cared very little for a phrase one of the conservative columnists had coined a year or two before―the phrase was "limosine liberal,'' and she was young enough not to want to be seen as one even if she really was one. Not young enough (or stupid enough!) to believe that a few pairs of faded jeans and the khaki shirts she habitually wore in any real way changed her essential status, or riding the bus or the subway when she could have used the car (but she had been self-involved enough not to see Andrew's hurt and deep puzzlement; he liked her and thought it must be some sort of personal rejection), but young enough to still believe that gesture could sometimes overcome (or at least overset) truth.
   On the night of August 19th, 1959 , she paid for the gesture with half her legs … and half her mind.

6

   Odetta had been first tugged, then pulled, and finally caught up in the swell which would eventually turn into a tidal wave. In 1957, when she became involved, the thing which eventually became known as the Movement had no name. She knew some of the background, knew the struggle for equality had gone on not since the Emancipation Proclamation but almost since the first boatload of slaves had been brought to America (to Georgia, in fact, the colony the British founded to get rid of their criminals and debtors), but for Odetta it always seemed to begin in the same place, with the same three words: I'm not movin.
   The place had been a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and the words had been spoken by a black woman named Rosa Lee Parks, and the place from which Rosa Lee Parks was not movin was from the front of the city bus to the back of the city bus, which was, of course, the Jim Crow part of the city bus. Much later, Odetta would sing "We Shall Not Be Moved" with the rest of them, and it always made her think of Rosa Lee Parks, and she never sang it without a sense of shame. It was so easy to sing we with your arms linked to the arms of a whole crowd; that was easy even for a woman with no legs. So easy to sing we, so easy to be we. There had been no we on that bus, that bus that must have stank of ancient leather and years of cigar and cigarette smoke, that bus with the curved ad cards saying things like LUCKY STRIKE L.S.M.F.T. and ATTEND THE CHURCH OF YOUR CHOICE FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE and DRINK OVALTINE! YOU'LL SEE WHAT WE MEAN! and CHESTERFIELD , TWENTY-ONE GREAT TOBACCOS MAKE TWENTY WONDERFUL SMOKES, no we under the disbelieving gazes of the motorman, the white passengers among whom she sat, the equally disbelieving stares of the blacks at the back.
   No we.
   No marching thousands.
   Only Rosa Lee Parks starting a tidal wave with three words: I'm not movin.
   Odetta would think If I could do something like that―if I could be that brave—I think I could be happy for the rest of my life. But that sort of courage is not in me.
   She had read of the Parks incident, but with little interest at first. That came little by little. It was hard to say exactly when or how her imagination had been caught and fired by that at first almost soundless racequake which had begun to shake the south.
   A year or so later a young man she was dating more or less regularly began taking her down to the Village, where some of the young (and mostly white) folk-singers who performed there had added some new and startling songs to their repetoire―suddenly, in addition to all those old wheezes about how John Henry had taken his hammer and outraced the new steam-hammer (killing himself in the process, lawd, lawd) and how Bar'bry Allen had cruelly rejected her lovesick young suitor (and ended up dying of shame, lawd, lawd), there were songs about how it felt to be down and out and ignored in the city, how it felt to be turned away from a job you could do because your skin was the wrong color, how it felt to be taken into a jail cell and whipped by Mr. Charlie because your skin was dark and you had dared, lawd, lawd, to sit in the white folks' section of the lunch-counter at an F.W. Woolworths' in Montgomery, Alabama.
   Absurdly or not, it was only then that she had become curious about her own parents, and their parents, and their parents before them. She would never read Roots― she was in another world and time long before that book was written, perhaps even thought of, by Alex Haley, but it was at this absurdly late time in her life when it first dawned upon her that not so many generations back her progenitors had been taken in chains by white men. Surely the fact had occurred to her before, but only as a piece of information with no real temperature gradient, like an equation, never as something which bore intimately upon her own life.
   Odetta totted up what she knew, and was appalled by the smallness of the sum. She knew her mother had been born in Odetta , Arkansas , the town for which she (the only child) had been named. She knew her father had been a small-town dentist who had invented and patented a capping process which had lain dormant and unremarked for ten years and which had then, suddenly, made him a moderately wealthy man. She knew that he had developed a number of other dental processes during the ten years before and the four years after the influx of wealth, most of them either orthodontic or cosmetic in nature, and that, shortly after moving to New York with his wife and daughter (who had been born four years after the original patent had been secured), he had founded a company called Holmes Dental Industries, which was now to teeth what Squibb was to antibiotics.
   But when she asked him what life had been like during all the years between―the years when she hadn't been there, and the years when she had, her father wouldn't tell her. He would say all sorts of things, but he wouldn't tell her anything. He closed that part of himself off to her. Once her ma, Alice―he called her ma or sometimes Allie if he'd had a few or was feeling good―said, "Tell her about the time those men shot at you when you drove the Ford through the covered bridge, Dan," and he gave Odetta's ma such a gray and forbidding look that her ma, always something of a sparrow, had shrunk back in her seat and said no more.
   Odetta had tried her mother once or twice alone after that night, but to no avail. If she had tried before, she might have gotten something, but because he wouldn't speak, she wouldn't speak either―and to him, she realized, the past―those relatives, those red dirt roads, those stores, those dirt floor cabins with glassless windows ungraced by a single simple curtsey of a curtain, those incidents of hurt and harassment, those neighbor children who went dressed in smocks which had begun life as flour sacks―all of that was for him buried away like dead teeth beneath perfect blinding white caps. He would not speak, perhaps could not, had perhaps willingly afflicted himself with a selective amnesia; the capped teeth was their life in the Greymarl Apartments on Central Park South. All else was hidden beneath that impervious outer cover. His past was so well-protected that there had been no gap to slide through, no way past that perfect capped barrier and into the throat of revelation.
   Detta knew things, but Detta didn't know Odetta and Odetta didn't know Detta, and so the teeth lay as smooth and closed as a redan gate there, also.
   She had some of her mother's shyness in her as well as her father's unblinking (if unspoken) toughness, and the only time she had dared pursue him further on the subject, to suggest that what he was denying her was a deserved trust fund never promised and apparenily never to mature, had been one night in his library. He had shaken his Wall Street Journal carefully, closed it, folded it, and laid it aside on the deal table beside the standing lamp. He had removed his rimless steel spectacles and had laid them on top of the paper. Then he had looked at her, a thin black man, thin almost to the point of emaciation, tightly kinked gray hair now drawing rapidly away from the deepening hollows of his temples where tender clocksprings of veins pulsed steadily, and he had said only, Idon't talk about that part of my life, Odetta, or think about it. It would be pointless. The world had moved on since then.
   Roland would have understood.

7

   When Roland opened the door with the words THE LADY OF THE SHADOWS written upon it, he saw things he did not understand at all―but he understood they didn't matter.
   It was Eddie Dean's world, but beyond that it was only a confusion of lights, people and objects―more objects than he had ever seen in his life. Lady-things, from the look of them, and apparently for sale. Some under glass, some arranged in tempting piles and displays. None it mattered any more than the movement as that world flowed past the edges of the doorway before them. The doorway was the Lady's eyes. He was looking through them just as he had looked through Eddie's eyes when Eddie had moved up the aisle of the sky-carriage.
   Eddie, on the other hand, was thunderstruck. The revolver in his hand trembled and dropped a little. The gunslinger could have taken it from him easily but did not. He only stood quietly. It was a trick he had learned a long time ago.
   Now the view through the doorway made one of those turns the gunslinger found so dizzying―but Eddie found this same abrupt swoop oddly comforting. Roland had never seen a movie. Eddie had seen thousands, and what he was looking at was like one of those moving point-of-view shots they did in ones like Halloween and The Shining. He even knew what they called the gadget they did it with. Steadi-Cam. That was it.
   "Star Wars, too," he muttered. "Death Star. That fuckin crack, remember?"
   Roland looked at him and said nothing.
   Hands―dark brown hands―entered what Roland saw as a doorway and what Eddie was already starting to think of as some sort of magic movie screen … a movie screen which, under the right circumstances, you might be able to walk into the way that guy had just walked out of the screen and into the real world in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Bitchin movie.
   Eddie hadn't realized how bitchin until just now.
   Except that movie hadn't been made yet on the other side of the door he was looking through. It was New York, okay―somehow the very sound of the taxi-cab horns, as mute and faint as they were―proclaimed that―and it was some New York department store he had been in at one time or another, but it was … was …
   "It's older," he muttered.
   "Before your when?" the gunslinger asked.
   Eddie looked at him and laughed shortly. "Yeah. If you want to put it that way, yeah."
   "Hello, Miss Walker ," a tentative voice said. The view in the doorway rose so suddenly that even Eddie was a bit dizzied and he saw a saleswoman who obviously knew the owner of the black hands―knew her and either didn't like her or feared her. Or both. "Help you today?"
   "This one." The owner of the black hands held up a white scarf with a bright blue edge. "Don't bother to wrap it up, babe, just stick it in a bag."
   "Cash or ch―"
   "Cash, it's always cash, isn't it?"
   "Yes, that's fine, Miss Walker."
   "I'm so glad you approve, dear."
   There was a little grimace on the salesgirl's face―Eddie just caught it as she turned away. Maybe it was something as simple as being talked to that way by a woman the salesgirl considered an "uppity nigger" (again it was more his experience in movie theaters than any knowledge of history or even life on the streets as he had lived it that caused this thought, because this was like watching a movie either set or made in the '60s, something like that one with Sidney Steiger and Rod Poitier, In the Heat of the Night ), but it could also be something even simpler: Roland's Lady of the Shadows was, black or white, one rude bitch.
   And it didn't really matter, did it? None of it made a damned bit of difference. He cared about one thing and one thing only and that was getting the fuck out.
   That was New York , he could almost smell New York .
   And New York meant smack.
   He could almost smell that, too.
   Except there was a hitch, wasn't there?
   One big motherfucker of a hitch.