hands several times while we were talking. Those rings were there then, but it was as if you
couldn’t see them until I called your attention to them and made you see them.”
“I don’t want to talk about it!” she shouted. “My head hurts!”
“All right. But you know where you lost track of time, and it wasn’t in Oxford.”
“Leave me alone,” she said dully.
Eddie saw the gunslinger toiling his way back with two full water-skins, one tied around
his waist and the other slung over his shoulders. He looked very tired.
“I wish I could help you,” Eddie said, “but to do that, I guess I’d have to be real.”
He stood by her for a moment, but her head was bowed, the tips of her fingers steadily
massaging her temples.
Eddie went to meet Roland.
8
“Sit down.” Eddie took the bags. “You look all in.”
“I am. I’m getting sick again.”
Eddie looked at the gunslinger’s flushed cheeks and brow, his cracked lips, and nodded. “I hoped it wouldn’t happen, but I’m not that surprised, man. You didn’t bat for the cycle.
Balazar didn’t have enough Keflex.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“If you don’t take a penicillin drug long enough, you don’t kill the infection. You just drive it underground. A few days go by and it comes back. We’ll need more, but at least there’s a
door to go. In the meantime you’ll just have to take it easy.” But Eddie was thinking
unhappily of Odetta’s missing legs and the longer and longer treks it took to find water. He
wondered if Roland could have picked a worse time to have a relapse. He supposed it was
possible; he just didn’t see how.
“I have to tell you something about Odetta.”
“That’s her name?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s very lovely,” the gunslinger said.
“Yeah. I thought so, too. What isn’t so lovely is the way she feels about this place. She
doesn’t think she’s here.”
“I know. And she doesn’t like me much, does she?”
No,Eddie thought, but that doesn’t keep her from think-ing you’re one booger of a
hallucination. He didn’t say it, only nodded.
“The reasons are almost the same,” the gunslinger said. “She’s not the woman I brought through, you see. Not at all.”
Eddie stared, then suddenly nodded, excited. That blurred glimpse in the mirror . . . that
snarling face . . . the man was right. Jesus Christ, of course he was! That hadn’t been Odetta
at all.
Then he remembered the hands which had gone pawing carelessly through the scarves and
had just as carelessly gone about the business of stuffing the junk jewelry into her big
purse—almost, it had seemed, as if she wanted to be caught.
The rings had been there.
Same rings.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean the samehands, he thought wildly, but that would only
hold for a second. He had studied her hands. They were the same, long-fingered and
delicate.
“No,” the gunslinger continued. “She is not.” His blue eyes studied Eddie carefully.
“Her hands—”
“Listen,” the gunslinger said, “and listen carefully. Our lives may depend on it—mine because I’m getting sick again, and yours because you have fallen in love with her.”
Eddie said nothing.
“She is two women in the same body. She was one woman when I entered her, and another when I returned here.”
Now Eddie could say nothing.
“There was something else, something strange, but either I didn’t understand it or I did and it’s slipped away. It seemed important.”
Roland looked past Eddie, looked to the beached wheel-chair, standing alone at the end of
its short track from no- where. Then he looked back at Eddie.
“I understand very little of this, or how such a thing can be, but you must be on your guard.
Do you understand that?”
“Yes.” Eddie’s lungs felt as if they had very little wind in them. He understood—or had, at least, a moviegoer’s under- standing of the sort of thing the gunslinger was speaking
of—but he didn’t have the breath to explain, not yet. He felt as if Roland had kicked all his
breath out of him.
“Good. Because the woman I entered on the other side of the door was as deadly as those
lobster-things that come out at night.”
CHAPTER 4
DETTA ON THE
OTHER SIDE
1
You must be on your guard,the gunslinger said, and Eddie had agreed, but the gunslinger knew Eddie didn’t know what he was talking about; the whole back half of Eddie’s mind,
where survival is or isn’t, didn’t get the message.
The gunslinger saw this.
It was a good thing for Eddie he did.
2
In the middle of the night, Detta Walker’s eyes sprang open. They were full of starlight and
clear intelligence.
She remembered everything: how she had fought them, how they had tied her into her
chair, how they had taunted her, calling her niggerbitch, niggerbitch.
She remembered monsters coming out of the waves, and she remembered how one of the
men—the older—had killed one of them. The younger had built a fire and cooked it and
then had offered her smoking monster-meat on a stick, grin- ning. She remembered spitting
at his face, remembered his grin turning into an angry honky scowl. He had hit her upside
the face, and told her Well, that’s all right, you’ll come around, niggerbitch. Wait and see if you don’t. Then he and the Really Bad Man—had laughed and the Really Bad Man had
brought out a haunch of beef which he spitted and slowly cooked overthe fire on the beach
of this alien place to which they had brought her.
The smell of the slowly roasting beef had been seductive, but she had made no sign. Even
when the younger one had waved a chunk of it near her face, chanting Bite for it,
nigger-bitch, go on and bite for it, she had sat like stone, holding herself in.
Then she had slept, and now she was awake, and the ropes they had tied her with were
gone. She was no longer in her chair but lying on one blanket and under another, far above
the high-tide line, where the lobster-things still wandered and questioned and snatched the
odd unfortunate gull out of the air.
She looked to her left and saw nothing.
She looked to her right and saw two sleeping men wrapped in two piles of blankets. The
younger one was closer, and the Really Bad Man had taken off his gunbelts and laid them
by him.
The guns were still in them.
You made a bad mistake, mahfah,Delta thought, and rolled to her right. The gritty crunch
and squeak of her body on the sand was inaudible under the wind, the waves, the
questioning creatures. She crawled slowly along the sand (like one of the lobstrosities
herself), her eyes glittering.
She reached the gunbelts and pulled one of the guns.
It was very heavy, the grip smooth and somehow independently deadly in her hand. The
heaviness didn’t bother her. She had strong arms, did Delta Walker.
She crawled a little further.
The younger man was no more than a snoring rock, but the Really Bad Man stirred a littlie
in his sleep and she froze with a snarl tattooed on her face until he quieted again.
He be one sneaky sumbitch. You check, Delta. You check, be sho.
She found the worn chamber release, tried to shove it forward, got nothing, and pulled it
instead. The chamber swung open.
Loaded! Fucker be loaded! You goan do this young cocka-de-walk first, and dat Really
Bad Man be wakin up and yougoan give him one big grin—smile honeychile so I kin see
where you is—and den you goan clean his clock somethin righteous.
She swung the chamber back, started to pull the hammer . . . and then waited.
When the wind kicked up a gust, she pulled the hammer to full cock.
Delta pointed Roland’s gun at Eddie’s temple.
3
The gunslinger watched all this from one half-open eye. The fever was back, but not bad
yet, not so bad that he must mistrust himself. So he waited, that one half-open eye the
finger on the trigger of his body, the body which had always been his revolver when there
was no revolver at hand.
She pulled the trigger.
Click.
Of course click.
When he and Eddie had come back with the waterskins from their palaver, Odetta Holmes
had been deeply asleep in her wheelchair, slumped to one side. They had made her the best
bed they could on the sand and carried her gently from her wheelchair to the spread
blankets. Eddie had been sure she would awake, but Roland knew better.
He had killed, Eddie had built a fire, and they had eaten, saving a portion aside for Odetta
in the morning.
Then they had talked, and Eddie had said something which burst upon Roland like a
sudden flare of lightning. It was too bright and too brief to be total understanding, but he