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 some- thing 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.
8
Roland watched Eddie carefully, and although he could have killed him six times over at
almost any time he wanted, he had elected to remain still and silent and let Eddie work the
situation out for himself. Eddie was a lot of things, and a lot of them were not nice (as a
fellow who had consciously let a child drop to his death, the gunslinger knew the difference
between nice and not quite well), but one thing Eddie wasn’t was stupid.
He was a smart kid.
He would figure it out.
So he did.
He looked back at Roland, smiled without showing his teeth, twirled the gunslinger’s
revolver once on his finger, clumsily, burlesquing a show-shooter’s fancy coda, and then he
held it out to Roland, butt first.
“This thing might as well be a piece of shit for all the good it can do me, isn’t that right?”
You can talk bright when you want to,Roland thought. Why do you so often choose to talk
stupid, Eddie? Is it because you think that’s the way they talked in the place where your
brother went with his guns?
“Isn’t that right?” Eddie repeated.
Roland nodded.
“If I had plugged you, what would have happened to that door?”
“I don’t know. I suppose the only way to find out would be to try it and see.”
“Well, what do you think would happen?”
“I think it would disappear.”
Eddie nodded. That was what he thought, too. Poof! Gone like magic! Now ya see it, my
friends, now ya don’t. It was really no different than what would happen if the
projec- tionist in a movie-theater were to draw a six-shooter and plug the projector, was it?
If you shot the projector, the movie stopped.
Eddie didn’t want the picture to stop.
Eddie wanted his money’s worth.
“You can go through by yourself,” Eddie said slowly.
“Yes.”
“Sort of.”
“Yes.”
“You wind up in her head. Like you wound up in mine.”
“Yes.”
“So you can hitchhike into my world, but that’s all.”
Roland said nothing. Hitchhike was one of the words Eddie sometimes used that he didn’t
exactly understand . . . but he caught the drift.
“But you could go through in your body. Like at Balazar’s.” He was talking out loud but really talking to himself. “Except you’d need me for that, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then take me with you.”
The gunslinger opened his mouth, but Eddie was already rushing on.
“Not now, I don’t mean now,” he said. “I know it would cause a riot or some goddam thing if we just. . . popped out over there.” He laughed rather wildly. “Like a magician pull- ing rabbits out of a hat, except without any hat, sure I did. We’ll wait until she’s alone, and—”
“No.”
“I’ll come back with you,” Eddie said. “I swear it, Roland. I mean, I know you got a job to do, and I know I’m a part of it. I know you saved my ass at Customs, but I think I saved
yours at Balazar’s—now what do you think?”
“I think you did,” Roland said. He remembered the way Eddie had risen up from behind
the desk, regardless of the risk, and felt an instant of doubt.
But only an instant.
“So? Peter pays Paul. One hand washes the other. All I want to do is go back for a few
hours. Grab some take-out chicken, maybe a box of Dunkin Donuts.” Eddie nodded toward
the doorway, where things had begun to move again. “So what do you say?”
“No,” the gunslinger said, but for a moment he was hardly thinking about Eddie. That
movement up the aisle— the Lady, whoever she was, wasn’t moving the way an ordi- nary
person moved—wasn’t moving, for instance, the way Eddie had moved when Roland
looked through his eyes, or (now that he stopped to think of it, which he never had before,
any more than he had ever stopped and really noticed the constant presence of his own nose
in the lower range of his peripheral vision) the way he moved himself. When one walked,
vision became a mild pendulum: left leg, right leg, left leg, right leg, the world rocking
back and forth so mildly and gently that after awhile—shortly after you began to walk, he
supposed—you simply ignored it. There was none of that pendulum movement in the
Lady’s walk—she simply moved smoothly up the aisle, as if riding along tracks. Ironically,
Eddie had had this same perception . . . only to Eddie it had looked like a SteadiCam shot.
He had found this perception comforting because it was familiar.
To Roland it was alien . . . but then Eddie was breaking in, his voice shrill.
“Well why not? Just why the fuck not?”
“Because you don’t want chicken,” the gunslinger said.
“I know what you call the things you want, Eddie. You want to ‘fix.’ You want to ‘score.’ “