“Quests, adventures, Towers, worlds to win,” Eddie said,and smiled wanly. Neither of
them turned as fresh tear-gasrounds flew through the windows to explode, hissing, on
thefloor. The first acrid tendrils of the gas were now slipping intoBalazar’s office. “Sounds better than one of those Edgar RiceBurroughs books about Mars Henry used to read me
some- times 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’shead, 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 any thing else planned fortonight, 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 Plexiglasfaceplates, flak jackets, and Kevlar
vests smashed in The Lean- ing Tower’s front door. In the bathroom, Eddie (dressed in
hisunderpants, his Adidas sneakers, and nothing else) handed thesample packages of
Keflex to Roland one by one, and Roland put them into the pockets of Eddie’s jeans. When
they were allsafely stowed, Roland slid his right arm around Eddie’s neckagain and Eddie
gripped Roland’s left hand again. The doorwas suddenly there, a rectangle of darkness.
Eddie felt the wind from that other world blow his sweaty hair back from hisforehead. He
heard the waves rolling up that stony beach. Hesmelled the tang of sour sea-salt. And in
spite of everything, allhis pain and sorrow, he suddenly wanted to see this Tower ofwhich
Roland spoke. He wanted to see it very much. And with Henry dead, what was there in this world for him? Theirparents were dead, and there hadn’t been a steady girl since he got
heavily into the smack three years ago—just a steadyparade 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 freshshudders and agonizing
muscle-cramps—the first symptomsof serious heroin withdrawal. And with them he also
had thefirst alarmed second thoughts.
“Wait!” he shouted. “I want to go back for a minute! Hisdesk! His desk, or the other office!
The skag! If they werekeeping Henry doped, there’s gotta be junk! Heroin! I need it! I need
it!”
He looked pleadingly at Roland, but the gunslinger’s facewas stony.
“That part of your life is over, Eddie,” he said. He reachedout with his left hand.
“No!”Eddie screamed, clawing at him. ‘Wo, 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 finalityand fell backward onto the sand. A
little dust puffed up fromits edges. There was nothing behind the door, and now no word
written upon it. This particular portal between theworlds had closed forever.
“NO!”Eddie screamed, and the gulls screamed back athim as if in jeering contempt; the
lobstrosities asked him questions, perhaps suggesting he could hear them a littlebetter if he
were to come a little closer, and Eddie fell over onhis side, crying and shuddering and
jerking with cramps.
“Your need will pass,” the gunslinger said, and managedto get one of the sample packets out of the pocket of Eddie’sjeans, which were so like his own. Again, he could read someof
these letters but not all. Cheeflet, the word looked like.
Cheeflet.
Medicine from that other world.
“Kill or cure,” Roland murmured, and dry-swallowedtwo of the capsules. Then he took the other three astin, and laynext 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 heremembered was only a series of images, moments, conversa- tion
without context; images flashing past like one-eyed jacks and treys and nines and the
Bloody Black Bitch Queen ofSpiders in a card-sharp’s rapid shuffle.
Later on he asked Eddie how long that time lasted, butEddie didn’t know either. Time had
been destroyed for both ofthem. There is no time in hell, and each of them was in hisown
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 knowfor sure.”
“How do you know that?”
“A week’s worth of pills was all I had to give you. Afterthat, you were gonna have to do the one thing or the other onyour 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 drytime, something is cooking. It’s not just the smell. He can hearthe snap and pop of twigs, can see the faint orange flicker of
acampfire. Sometimes, when the sea-breeze gusts, he smellsfragrant 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, nonefor Eddie.
Eddie appears. He’s got a tin plate, one the gunslingerwould 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 asqueaky little farting sound.
Eddie reads the shape of his lips. “I don’t know,” he sayscrossly. “All I know is it didn’t kill me. Eat it, damn you.”
He sees Eddie is very pale, Eddie is shaking, and he smellssomething coming from Eddie
that is either shit or death, andhe knows Eddie is in a bad way. He reaches out a
gropinghand, 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 getthrough 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 runsthrough him—it is so fierce that he
almost spills the chunks ofmeat 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 every- thing blurs into a new
shuffle
effort to speak, but all he can do is whisper. The cup ofEddie’s ear is pressed against his
lips, except every now andthen 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 Eddieslaps him, slaps him hard. Roland’s
blue eyes fly open and fora 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 gottatake your dope. It’s time. Sun says it is, anyway. I guess. I wasnever no Boy Scout, so I don’t know for sure. But I guess it’sclose
enough for Government work. Open wide, Roland.Open wide for Dr. Eddie, you
kidnapping fuck.”
The gunslinger opens his mouth like a baby for thebreast. Eddie puts two of the pills in his
mouth and then slopsfresh 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 theother hand, Eddie seems fine himself, and there’s really nochoice, is
there? No.
He swallows, coughs, and nearly strangles while Eddielooks 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 ofEddie’s sickness and Eddie can
smell the stink of his; thecombination 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 andmaybe live, or die on your knees with your head down and
thestink 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 asthe cards