“I believed you before,” Eddie said. “I told you that.”
“You believed you believed. You believed on the top of your mind. Do you believe it all the way down now? All the way to the bottom?”
Eddie looked at the shrieking, convulsing thing in the chair and then looked away, white
except for the slash on his jaw, which was still dripping a little. That side of his face was
beginning to look a little like a balloon.
“Yes, “he said. “God, yes.”
“This woman is a monster.”
Eddie began to cry.
The gunslinger wanted to comfort him, could not com- mit such a sacrilege (he
remembered Jake too well), and walked off into the dark with his new fever burning and
aching inside him.
6
Much earlier on that night, while Odetta still slept, Eddie said he thought he might
understand what was wrong with her. Might. The gunslinger asked what he meant.
“She could be a schizophrenic.”
Roland only shook his head. Eddie explained what he understood of schizophrenia,
gleanings from such films as The Three Faces of Eve and various TV programs (mostly the
soap operas he and Henry had often watched while stoned). Roland had nodded. Yes. The
disease Eddie described sounded about right. A woman with two faces, one light and one
dark. A face like the one the man in black had shown him on the fifth Tarot card.
“And they don’t know—these schizophrenes—that they have another?”
“No,” Eddie said. “But …” He trailed off, moodily watching the lobstrosities crawl and question, question and crawl.
“But what?”
“I’m no shrink,” Eddie said, “so I don’t really know—”
“Shrink?What is a shrink?”
Eddie tapped his temple. “A head-doctor. A doctor for your mind. They’re really called
psychiatrists.”
Roland nodded. He liked shrink better. Because this Lady’s mind was too large. Twice as
large as it needed to be.
“But I think schizos almost always know something is wrong with them,” Eddie said.
“Because there are blanks. Maybe I’m wrong, but I always got the idea that they were
usually two people who thought they had partial amnesia, because of the blank spaces in
their memories when the other personality was in control. She . . . she says she remembers everything. She really thinks she remembers everything.”
“I thought you said she didn’t believe any of this was happening.”
“Yeah,” Eddie said, “but forget that for now. I’m trying to say that, no matter what she believes, what she remembers goes right from her living room where she was sitting in her bathrobe watching the midnight news to here, with no break at all. She doesn’t have any
sense that some other person took over between then and when you grabbed her in Macy’s.
Hell, that might have been the next day or even weeks later. I know it was still winter,
because most of the shoppers in that store were wearing coats—”
The gunslinger nodded. Eddie’s perceptions were sharp- ening. That was good. He had
missed the boots and scarves, the gloves sticking out of coat pockets, but it was still a start.
“—but otherwise it’s impossible to tell how long Odetta was that other woman because she
doesn’t know. I think she’s in a situation she’s never been in before, and her way of
protecting both sides is this story about getting cracked over the head.”
Roland nodded.
“And the rings. Seeing those really shook her up. She tried not to show it, but it showed, all right.”
Roland asked: “If these two women don’t know they exist in the same body, and if they
don’t even suspect that something may be wrong, if each has her own separate chain of
memo- ries, partly real but partly made up to fit the times the other is there, what are we to
do with her? How are we even to live with her?”
Eddie had shrugged. “Don’t ask me. It’s your problem. You’re the one who says you need
her. Hell, you risked your neck to bring her here.” Eddie thought about this for a minute,
remembered squatting over Roland’s body with Roland’s knife held just above the
gunslinger’s throat, and laughed abruptly and without humor. LITERALLY risked your neck,
man, he thought.
A silence fell between them. Odetta had by then been breathing quietly. As the gunslinger was about to reiterate his warning for Eddie to be on guard and announce (loud enough for
the Lady to hear, if she was only shamming) that he was going to turn in, Eddie said the
thing which lighted Roland’s mind in a single sudden glare, the thing which made him
understand at least part of what he needed so badly to know.
At the end, when they came through.
She had changed at the end.
And he had seen something, some thing—
“Tell you what,” Eddie said, moodily stirring the remains of the fire with a split claw from this night’s kill, “when you brought her through, I felt like I was a schizo.”
“Why?”
Eddie thought, then shrugged. It was too hard to explain, or maybe he was just too tired.
“It’s not important.”
“Why?”
Eddie looked at Roland, saw he was asking a serious question for a serious reason—or
thought he was—and took a minute to think back. “It’s really hard to describe, man. It was
looking in that door. That’s what freaked me out. When you see someone move in that door,
it’s like you’re moving with them. You know what I’m talking about.”
Roland nodded.
“Well, I watched it like it was a movie—never mind, it’s not important—until the very end.
Then you turned her toward this side of the doorway and for the first time I was looking at myself. It was like …” He groped and could find nothing. “I dunno. It should have been like looking in a mirror, I guess, but it wasn’t, because . . . because it was like looking at another person. It was like being turned inside out. Like being in two places at the same time. Shit,
I don’t know.”
But the gunslinger was thunderstruck. That was what he had sensed as they came
through; that was what had happened to her, no, not just her, them: for a moment Detta and Odetta had looked at each other, not the way one would look at her reflection in a mirror
but as separate people; the mirror became a windowpane and for a moment Odetta had seen
Detta and Detta had seen Odetta and had been equally horror-struck.
They each know,the gunslinger thought grimly. They may not have known before, but they
do now. They can try to hide it from themselves, but for a moment they saw, they knew, and
that knowing must still be there.
“Roland?”
“What?”
“Just wanted to make sure you hadn’t gone to sleep with your eyes open. Because for a
minute you looked like you were, you know, long ago and far away.”
“If so, I’m back now,” the gunslinger said. “I’m going to turn in. Remember what I said, Eddie: be on your guard.”
“I’ll watch,” Eddie said, but Roland knew that, sick or not, he would have to be the one to do the watching tonight.
Everything else had followed from that.
7
Following the ruckus Eddie and Detta Walker eventually went to sleep again (she did not
so much fall asleep as drop into an exhausted state of unconsciousness in her chair, lol- ling
to one side against the restraining ropes).
The gunslinger, however, lay wakeful.
I will have to bring the two of them to battle, he thought, but he didn’t need one of Eddie’s
“shrinks” to tell him that such a battle might be to the death. Ifthe bright one, Odetta, were to win that battle, all might yet be well. If the dark one were to win it, all would surely be lost with her.
Yet he sensed that what really needed doing was not killing but joining. He had already
recognized much that would be of value to him— them— in Detta Walker’s gutter toughness,
and he wanted her—but he wanted her under con- trol. There was a long way to go. Detta
thought he and Eddie were monsters of some species she called Honk Mafahs. That was
only dangerous delusion, but there would be real mon- sters along the way—the
lobstrosities were not the first, nor would they be the last. The fight-until-you-drop woman
he had entered and who had come out of hiding again tonight might come in very handy in
a fight against such monsters, if she could be tempered by Odetta Holmes’s calm
humanity— especially now, with him short two fingers, almost out of bullets, and growing
more fever.
But that is a step ahead. I think if I can make them acknowledge each other, that would
bring them into confron- tation. How may it be done?
He lay awake all that long night, thinking, and although he felt the fever in him grow, he found no answer to his question.