looked as if it were made of gold, and it was filigreed with a design which the gunslinger
finally recognized: it was the grinning face of the baboon.
There was no keyhole in the knob, above it, or below it.
The door had hinges, but they were fastened to nothing— or so it seems, the gunslinger
thought. This is a mystery, a most marvellous mystery, but does it really matter? You are
dying. Your own mystery—the only one that really matters to any man or woman in the
end—approaches.
All the same, it did seem to matter.
This door. This door where no door should be. It simply stood there on the gray strand
twenty feet above the high tide line, seemingly as eternal as the sea itself, now casting the
slanted shadow of its thickness toward the east as the sun westered.
Written upon it in black letters two-thirds of the way up, written in the high speech, were
two words:
THE PRISONER
A demon has infested him. The name of the demon is HEROIN.
The gunslinger could hear a low droning noise. At first he thought it must be the wind or a
sound in his own feverish head, but he became more and more convinced that the sound
was the sound of motors . . . and that it was coming from behind the door.
Open it then. It’s not locked. You know it’s not locked.
Instead he tottered gracelessly to his feet and walked above the door and around to the
other side.
There was no other side.
Only the dark gray strand, stretching back and back. Only the waves, the shells, the
high-tide line, the marks of his own approach—bootprints and holes that had been made by
his elbows. He looked again and his eyes widened a little. The door wasn’t here, but its
shadow was.
He started to put out his right hand—oh, it was so slow learning its new place in what was
left of his life—dropped it, and raised his left instead. He groped, feeling for hard
resistance.
If I feel it I’ll knock on nothing,the gunslinger thought. That would be an interesting thing to do before dying!
His hand encountered thin air far past the place where the door—even if invisible—should
have been.
Nothing to knock on.
And the sound of motors—if that’s what it really had been—was gone. Now there was just
the wind, the waves, and the sick buzzing inside his head.
The gunslinger walked slowly back to the other side of what wasn’t there, already thinking
it had been a hallucina- tion to start with, a—
He stopped.
At one moment he had been looking west at an uninter- rupted view of a gray, rolling wave,
and then his view was interrupted by the thickness of the door. He could see its keyplate,
which also looked like gold, with the latch protrud- ing from it like a stubby metal tongue.
Roland moved his head an inch to the north and the door was gone. Moved it back to where
it had been and it was there again. It did not appear; it was just there.
He walked all the way around and faced the door, swaying.
He could walk around on the sea side, but he was con- vinced that the same thing would happen, only this time he would fall down.
I wonder if I could gothrough it from the nothing side?
Oh, there were all sorts of things to wonder about, but the truth was simple: here stood this
door alone on an endless stretch of beach, and it was for only one of two things: opening or
leaving closed.
The gunslinger realized with dim humor that maybe he wasn’t dying quite as fast as he
thought. If he had been, would he feel this scared?
He reached out and grasped the doorknob with his left hand. Neither the deadly cold of the
metal or the thin, fiery heat of the runes engraved upon it surprised him.
He turned the knob. The door opened toward him when he pulled.
Of all the things he might have expected, this was not any of them.
The gunslinger looked, froze, uttered the first scream of terror in his adult life, and
slammed the door. There was nothing for it to bang shut on, but it banged shut just the same,
sending seabirds screeching up from the rocks on which they had perched to watch him.
5
What he had seen was the earth from some high, impossi- ble distance in the sky—miles up,
it seemed. He had seen the shadows of clouds lying upon that earth, floating across it like
dreams. He had seen what an eagle might see if one could flythrice as high as any eagle
could.
To step through such a door would be to fall, screaming, for what might be minutes, and to
end by driving one’s self deep into the earth.
No, you saw more.
He considered it as he sat stupidly on the sand in front of the closed door with his wounded
hand in his lap. The first faint traceries had appeared above his elbow now. The infec- tion
would reach his heart soon enough, no doubt about that.
It was the voice of Cort in his head.
Listen to me, maggots. Listen for your lives, for that’s what it could mean some day. You
never see all that you see. One of the things they send you to me for is to show you what you don’t see in what you see—what you don’t see when you’re scared, or fighting, or
running, or fucking. No man sees all that he sees, but before you’re gunslingers—those of
you who don’t go west, that is—you’ll see more in one single glance than some men see in
a lifetime. And some of what you don’t see in that glance you’ll see afterwards, in the eye of
your memory—if you live long enough to remember, that is. Because the difference
between seeing and not seeing can be the difference between living and dying.
He had seen the earth from this huge height (and it had somehow been more dizzying and
distorting than the vision of growth which had come upon him shortly before the end of his
time with the man in black, because what he had seen through the door had been no vision),
and what little remained of his attention had registered the fact that the land he was seeing
was neither desert nor sea but some green place of incredible lushness with interstices of
water that made him think it was a swamp, but—
What little remained of your attention, the voice of Cort mimicked savagely. You saw
more!
Yes.
He had seen white.
White edges.
Bravo, Roland!Cort cried in his mind, and Roland seemed to feel the swat of that hard,
callused hand. He winced.
He had been looking through a window.
The gunslinger stood with an effort, reached forward, felt cold and burning lines of thin
heat against his palm. He opened the door again.
6
The view he had expected—that view of the earth from some horrendous, unimaginable
height—was gone. He was looking at words he didn’t understand. He almost understood
them; it was as if the Great Letters had been twisted. . . .
Above the words was a picture of a horseless vehicle, a motor-car of the sort which had
supposedly filled the world before it moved on. Suddenly he thought of the things Jake had
said when, at the way station, the gunslinger had hypno- tized him.
This horseless vehicle with a woman wearing a fur stole laughing beside it, could be whatever had run Jake over in that strange other world.
Thisis that other world, the gunslinger thought.
Suddenly the view . . .
It did not change; it moved. The gunslinger wavered on his feet, feeling vertigo and a touch of nausea. The words and the picture descended and now he saw an aisle with a double row
of seats on the far side. A few were empty, but there were men in most of them, men in
strange dress. He supposed they were suits, but he had never seen any like them before.
The things around their necks could likewise be ties or cravats, but he had seen none like
these, either. And, so far as he could tell, not one of them was armed—he saw no dagger
nor sword, let alone a gun. What kind of trusting sheep were these? Some read papers
covered with tiny words—words broken here and there with pictures—while others wrote
on papers with pens of a sort the gunslinger had never seen. But the pens mattered little to
him. It was the paper. He lived in a world where paper and gold were valued in rough
equivalency. He had never seen so much paper in his life. Even now one of the men tore a
sheet from the yellow pad which lay upon his lap and crumpled it into a ball, although he