when he put out his hands, the clawed creature moved with a speed of which its previous
movements had not even hinted.
The gunslinger felt a bright flare of pain in his right hand, but there was no time to think
about that now. He pushed with the heels of his soggy boots, clawed with his hands, and
managed to get away from the wave.
“Did-a-chick?”the monstrosity enquired in its plaintive Won’t you help me? Can’t you see I am desperate? voice, and Roland saw the stumps of the first and second fingers of his right hand disappearing into the creature’s jagged beak. It lunged again and Roland lifted his
dripping right hand just in time to save his remaining two fingers.
“Dum-a-chum? Dad-a-cham?”
The gunslinger staggered to his feet. The thing tore open his dripping jeans, tore through a
boot whose old leather was soft but as tough as iron, and took a chunk of meat from
Roland’s lower calf.
He drew with his right hand, and realized two of the fingers needed to perform this ancient
killing operation were gone only when the revolver thumped to the sand.
The monstrosity snapped at it greedily.
“No, bastard!” Roland snarled, and kicked it. It was like kicking a block of rock. . . one that bit. It tore away the end of Roland’s right boot, tore away most of his great toe, tore the boot
itself from his foot.
The gunslinger bent, picked up his revolver, dropped it, cursed, and finally managed.
What had once been a thing so easy it didn’t even bear thinking about had suddenly become
a trick akin to juggling.
The creature was crouched on the gunslinger’s boot, tear- ing at it as it asked its garbled
questions. A wave rolled toward the beach, the foam which curdled its top looking pallid
and dead in the netted light of the half-moon. The lobstrosity stopped working on the boot
and raised its claws in that boxer’s pose.
Roland drew with his left hand and pulled the trigger three times. Click, click, click.
Now he knew about the shells in the chambers, at least.
He bolstered the left gun. To holster the right he had to turn its barrel downward with his
left hand and then let it drop into its place. Blood slimed the worn ironwood handgrips;
blood spotted the holster and the old jeans to which the holster was thong-tied. It poured
from the stumps where his fingers used to be.
His mangled right foot was still too numb to hurt, but his right hand was a bellowing fire.
The ghosts of talented and long-trained fingers which were already decomposing in the
digestive juices of that thing’s guts screamed that they were still there, that they were
burning.
I see serious problems ahead, the gunslinger thought remotely.
The wave retreated. The monstrosity lowered its claws, tore a fresh hole in the gunslinger’s
boot, and then decided the wearer had been a good deal more tasty than this bit of skin it
had somehow sloughed off.
“Dud-a-chum?”it asked, and scurried toward him with ghastly speed. The gunslinger
retreated on legs he could barely feel, realizing that the creature must have some
intelli- gence; it had approached him cautiously, perhaps from a long way down the strand,
not sure what he was or of what he might be capable. If the dousing wave hadn’t wakened
him, the thing would have torn off his face while he was still deep in his dream. Now it had
decided he was not only tasty but vulnera- ble; easy prey.
It was almost upon him, a thing four feet long and a foot high, a creature which might
weigh as much as seventy pounds and which was as single-mindedly carnivorous as David,
the hawk he had had as a boy—but without David’s dim vestige of loyalty.
The gunslinger’s left bootheel struck a rock jutting from the sand and he tottered on the
edge of falling.
“Dod-a-chock?”the thing asked, solicitously it seemed, and peered at the gunslinger from its stalky, waving eyes as its claws reached . . . and then a wave came, and the claws went
up again in the Honor Stance. Yet now they wavered the slightest bit, and the gunslinger
realized that it responded to the sound of the wave, and now the sound was—for it, at
least—fading a bit.
He stepped backward over the rock, then bent down as the wave broke upon the shingle with its grinding roar. His head was inches from the insectile face of the creature. One of its
claws might easily have slashed the eyes from his face, but its trembling claws, so like
clenched fists, remained raised to either side of its parrotlike beak.
The gunslinger reached for the stone over which he had nearly fallen. It was large,
half-buried in the sand, and his mutilated right hand howled as bits of dirt and sharp edges
of pebble ground into the open bleeding flesh, but he yanked the rock free and raised it, his
lips pulled away from his teeth.
“Dad-a—”the monstrosity began, its claws lowering and opening as the wave broke and its sound receded, and the gunslinger swept the rock down upon it with all his strength.
There was a crunching noise as the creature’s segmented back broke. It lashed wildly
beneath the rock, its rear half lifting and thudding, lifting and thudding. Its interrogatives
became buzzing exclamations of pain. Its claws opened and shut upon nothing. Its maw of
a beak gnashed up clots of sand and pebbles.
And yet, as another wave broke, it tried to raise its claws again, and when it did the
gunslinger stepped on its head with his remaining boot. There was a sound like many small
dry twigs being broken. Thick fluid burst from beneath the heel of Roland’s boot, splashing
in two directions. It looked black.
The thing arched and wriggled in a frenzy. The gunslinger planted his boot harder.
A wave came.
The monstrosity’s claws rose an inch . . . two inches . . . trembled and then fell, twitching
open and shut.
The gunslinger removed his boot. The thing’s serrated beak, which had separated two
fingers and one toe from his living body, slowly opened and closed. One antenna lay
broken on the sand. The other trembled meaninglessly.
The gunslinger stamped down again. And again.
He kicked the rock aside with a grunt of effort and marched along the right side of the
monstrosity’s body, stamp- ing methodically with his left boot, smashing its shell,
squeez- ing its pale guts out onto dark gray sand. It was dead, but he meant to have his way
with it all the same; he had never, in all his long strange time, been so fundamentally hurt,
and it had all been so unexpected.
He kept on until he saw the tip of one of his own fingers in the dead thing’s sour mash, saw
the white dust beneath the nail from the golgotha where he and the man in black had held
their long palaver, and then he looked aside and vomited.
The gunslinger walked back toward the water like a drunken man, holding his wounded hand against his shirt, looking back from time to time to make sure the thing wasn’t still
alive, like some tenacious wasp you swat again and again and still twitches, stunned but not
dead; to make sure it wasn’t following, asking its alien questions in its deadly despairing
voice.
Halfway down the shingle he stood swaying, looking at the place where he had been,
remembering. He had fallen asleep, apparently, just below the high tide line. He grabbed
his purse and his torn boot.
In the moon’s glabrous light he saw other creatures of the same type, and in the caesura
between one wave and the next, heard their questioning voices.
The gunslinger retreated a step at a time, retreated until he reached the grassy edge of the
shingle. There he sat down, and did all he knew to do: he sprinkled the stumps of fingers
and toe with the last of his tobacco to stop the bleeding, sprinkled it thick in spite of the
new stinging (his missing great toe had joined the chorus), and then he only sat, sweating in
the chill, wondering about infection, wondering how he would make his way in this world
with two fingers on his right hand gone (when it came to the guns both hands had been
equal, but in all other things his right had ruled), won- dering if the thing had some poison
in its bite which might already be working its way into him, wondering if morning would
ever come.
CHAPTER 1
THE DOOR
1
Three. This is the number of your fate.
Three?
Yes, three is mystic. Three stands at the heart of the mantra.
Which three?
The first is dark-haired. He stands on the brink of robbery and murder. A demon has
infested him. The name of the demon is HEROIN.