had only written on the top half of one side and not at all on the other. The gunslinger was
not too sick to feel a twinge of horror and outrage at such unnatural profligacy.
Beyond the men was a curved white wall and a row of windows. A few of these were
covered by some sort of shutters, but he could see blue sky beyond others.
Now a woman approached the doorway, a woman wear- ing what looked like a uniform,
but of no sort Roland had ever seen. It was bright red, and part of it was pants. He could see the place where her legs became her crotch. This was nothing he had ever seen on a woman
who was not undressed.
She came so close to the door that Roland thought she would walk through, and he
blundered back a step, lucky not to fall. She looked at him with the practiced solicitude of a
woman who is at once a servant and no one’s mistress but her own. This did not interest the
gunslinger. What interested him was that her expression never changed. It was not the way
you expected a woman—anybody, for that matter—to look at a dirty, swaying, exhausted
man with revolvers crisscrossed on his hips, a blood-soaked rag wrapped around his right
hand, and jeans which looked as if they’d been worked on with some kind of buzzsaw.
“Would you like. . .” the woman in red asked. There was more, but the gunslinger didn’t understand exactly what it meant. Food or drink, he thought. That red cloth—it was not
cotton. Silk? It looked a little like silk, but—
“Gin,” a voice answered, and the gunslinger understood that. Suddenly he understood
much more:
It wasn’t a door.
It was eyes.
Insane as it might seem, he was looking at part of a carriage that flew through the sky. He
was looking through someone’s eyes.
Whose?
But he knew. He was looking through the eyes of the prisoner.
CHAPTER 2
EDDIE DEAN
1
As if to confirm this idea, mad as it was, what the gun-slinger was looking at through the
doorway suddenly rose and slid sidewards. The view turned (that feeling of vertigo again, a feeling of standing still on a plate with wheels under it, a plate which hands he could not
see moved this way and that), and then the aisle was flowing past the edges of the doorway.
He passed a place where several women, all dressed in the same red uniforms, stood. This
was a place of steel things, and he would have liked to make the moving view stop in spite
of his pain and exhaustion so he could see what the steel things were—machines of some
sort. One looked a bit like an oven. The army woman he had already seen was pouring the
gin which the voice had requested. The bottle she poured from was very small. It was glass.
The vessel she was pouring it into looked like glass but the gunslinger didn’t think it
actually was.
What the doorway showed had moved along before he could see more. There was another
of those dizzying turns and he was looking at a metal door. There was a lighted sign in a
small oblong. This word the gunslinger could read. VACANT, it said.
The view slid down a little. A hand entered it from the right of the door the gunslinger was
looking through and grasped the knob of the door the gunslinger was looking at. He saw
the cuff of a blue shirt, slightly pulled back to reveal crisp curls of black hair. Long fingers.
A ring on one of them, with a jewel set into it that might have been a ruby or a firedimor a
piece of trumpery trash. The gunslinger rather thought it this last—it was too big and
vulgar to be real.
The metal door swung open and the gunslinger was looking into the strangest privy he had ever seen. It was all metal.
The edges of the metal door flowed past the edges of the door on the beach. The gunslinger
heard the sound of it being closed and latched. He was spared another of those giddy spins,
so he supposed the man through whose eyes he was watching must have reached behind
himself to lock himself in.
Then the view did turn—not all the way around but half—and he was looking into a mirror,
seeing a face he had seen once before… on a Tarot card. The same dark eyes and spill of
dark hair. The face was calm but pale, and in the eyes—eyes through which he saw now
reflected back at him— Roland saw some of the dread and horror of that baboon-ridden
creature on the Tarot card.
The man was shaking.
He’s sick, too.
Then he remembered Nort, the weed-eater in Tull.
He thought of the Oracle.
A demon has infested him.
The gunslinger suddenly thought he might know what HEROIN was after all: something
like the devil-grass.
A trifle upsetting, isn’t he?
Without thought, with the simple resolve that had made him the last of them all, the last to
continue marching on and on long after Cuthbert and the others had died or given up,
committed suicide or treachery or simply recanted the whole idea of the Tower; with the
single-minded and incurious resolve that had driven him across the desert and all the years
before the desert in the wake of the man in black, the gunsling- er stepped through the
doorway.
2
Eddie ordered a gin and tonic—maybe not such a good idea to be going into New York
Customs drunk, and he knewonce he got started he would just keep on going—but he had
to have something.
When you got to get down and you can’t find the elevator,Henry had told him once, you got to do it any way you can. Even if it’s only with a shovel.
Then, after he’d given his order and the stewardess had left, he started to feel like he was
maybe going to vomit. Not for sure going to vomit, only maybe, but it was better to be safe.
Going through Customs with a pound of pure cocaine under each armpit with gin on your
breath was not so good; going through Customs that way with puke drying on your pants
would be disaster. So better to be safe. The feeling would probably pass, it usually did, but
better to be safe.
Trouble was, he was going cool turkey. Cool, not cold. More words of wisdom from that
great sage and eminent junkie Henry Dean.
They had been sitting on the penthouse balcony of the Regency Tower, not quite on the
nod but edging toward it, the sun warm on their faces, done up so good. . . back in the good
old days, when Eddie had just started to snort the stuff and Henry himself had yet to pick up
his first needle.
Everybody talks about going cold turkey,Henry had said, but before you get there, you
gotta go cool turkey.
And Eddie, stoned out of his mind, had cackled madly, because he knew exactly what
Henry was talking about. Henry, however, had not so much as cracked a smile.
In some ways cool turkey’s worse than cold turkey,Henry said. At least when you make it to
cold turkey, you KNOW you’re gonna puke, you KNOW you’re going to shake, you KNOW
you’re gonna sweat until it feels like you’re drowning in it. Cool turkey is, like, the curse of expectation.
Eddie remembered asking Henry what you called it when a needle-freak (which, in those
dim dead days which must have been all of sixteen months ago, they had both solemnly
assured themselves they would never become) got a hot shot.
You call thatbaked turkey, Henry had replied promptly, and then had looked surprised, the way a person does when he’s said something that turned out to be a lot funnier than he
actually thought it would be, and they looked at each other,and then they were both
howling with laughter and clutching each other. Baked turkey, pretty funny, not so funny
now.
Eddie walked up the aisle past the galley to the head, checked the sign—VACANT—and
opened the door.
Hey Henry, o great sage if eminent junkie big brother, while we’re on the subject of our
feathered friends, you want to hear my definition of cooked goose? That’s when the
Customs guy at Kennedy decides there’s something a little funny about the way you look,
or it’s one of the days when they got the dogs with the PhD noses out there instead of at Port
Authority and they all start to bark and pee all over the floor and it’s you they’re all just about strangling themselves on their choke-chains trying to get to, and after the Customs
guys toss all your luggage they take you into the little room and ask you if you’d mind