have been very convincing, would it? Can you come a little closer, Eddie?”
“Not very convincing at all,” Eddie said, “and I think I’m just as close to you as I’m going to come, thanks. What lesson am I supposed to take from all this, Roland?”
Roland looked at him as one might look at an imbecile. “I didn’t send you out here to die,
you know. I didn’t send either of you out here to die. Great gods, Eddie, where are your
brains? She’s packing live iron!” His eyes regarded Eddie closely. “She’s someplace up in those hills. Maybe you think you can track her, but you’re not going to have any luck if the
ground is as stony as it looks from here. She’s lying up there, Eddie, not Odetta but Delta,
lying up there with live iron in her hand. If I leave you and you go after her, she’ll blow
your guts out of your asshole.”
Another spasm of coughing set in.
Eddie stared at the coughing man in the wheelchair and the waves pounded and the wind
blew its steady idiot’s note.
At last he heard his voice say, “You could have held back one shell you knew was live. I wouldn’t put it past you.” And with that said he knew it to be true: he wouldn’t put that or anything else past Roland.
His Tower.
His goddamned Tower.
And the slyness of putting the saved shell in the third cylinder! It provided just the right touch of reality, didn’t it? Made it hard not to believe.
“We’ve got a saying in my world,” Eddie said. ” ‘That guy could sell Frigidaires to the Eskimos.’ That’s the saying.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means go pound sand.”
The gunslinger looked at him for a long time and then nodded. “You mean to stay. All
right. As Delta she’s safer from . . . from whatever wildlife there may be around here. . .
than she would have been as Odetta, and you’d be safer away from her—at least for the
time being—but I can see how it is. I don’t like it, but I’ve no time to argue with a fool.”
“Does that mean,” Eddie asked politely, “that no one ever tried to argue with you about this Dark Tower you’re so set on getting to?”
Roland smiled tiredly. “A great many did, as a matter of fact. I suppose that’s why I
recognize you’ll not be moved. One fool knows another. At any rate, I’m too weak to catch
you, you’re obviously too wary to let me coax you close enough to grab you, and time’s grown too short to argue. All I can do is go and hope for the best. I’m going to tell you one
last time before I do go, and hear me, Eddie: Be on your guard.”
Then Roland did something that made Eddie ashamed of all his doubts (although no less
solidly set in his own deci-sion): he flicked open the cylinder of the revolver with a
practiced flick of his wrist, dumped all the loads, and replaced them with fresh loads from
the loops closest to the buckles. He snapped the cylinder back into place with another flick
of his wrist.
“No time to clean the machine now,” he said, “but ‘twont matter, I reckon. Now catch, and catch clean—don’t dirty the machine any more than it is already. There aren’t many
machines left in my world that work anymore.”
He threw the gun across the space between them. In his anxiety, Eddie almost did drop it.
Then he had it safely tucked into his waistband.
The gunslinger got out of the wheelchair, almost fell when it slid backward under his
pushing hands, then tottered to the door. He grasped its knob; in his hand it turned easily.
Eddie could not see the scene the door opened upon, but he heard the muffled sound of
traffic.
Roland looked back at Eddie, his blue bullshooter’s eyes gleaming out of a face which was
ghastly pale.
16
Delta watched all of this from her hiding place with hungrily gleaming eyes.
17
“Remember, Eddie,” he said in a hoarse voice, and then stepped forward. His body
collapsed at the edge of the doorway, as if it had struck a stone wall instead of empty space.
Eddie felt an almost insatiable urge to go to the doorway, to look through and see
where—and to what when— it led. Instead he turned and scanned the hills again, his hand
on the gun-butt.
I’m going to tell you one last time.
Suddenly, scanning the empty brown hills, Eddie was scared.
Be on your guard.
Nothing up there was moving.
Nothing he could see, at least.
He sensed her all the same.
Not Odetta; the gunslinger was right about that.
It was Delta he sensed.
He swallowed and heard a click in his throat.
On your guard.
Yes. But never in his life had he felt such a deadly need for sleep. It would take him soon
enough; if he didn’t give in willingly, sleep would rape him.
And while he slept, Delta would come.
Delta.
Eddie fought the weariness, looked at the unmoving hills with eyes which felt swollen and
heavy, and wondered how long it might be before Roland came back with the third—The
Pusher, whoever he or she was.
“Odetta?” he called without much hope.
Only silence answered, and for Eddie the lime of wailing began.
CHAPTER 1
BITTER MEDICINE
1
When the gunslinger entered Eddie, Eddie had expe- rienced a moment of nausea and he
had had a sense of being watched (this Roland hadn’t felt; Eddie had told him later). He’d had, in other words, some vague sense of the gunslinger’s presence. With Delta, Roland
had been forced to come forward immediately, like it or not. She hadn’t just sensed him; in a queer way it seemed that she had been waiting for him—him or another, more frequent,
visitor. Either way, she had been totally aware of his presence from the first moment he had
been in her.
Jack Mort didn’t feel a thing.
He was too intent on the boy.
He had been watching the boy for the last two weeks.
Today he was going to push him.
2
Even with the back to the eyes from which the gunslinger now looked, Roland recognized
the boy. It was the boy he had met at the way station in the desert, the boy he had rescued
from the Oracle in the Mountains, the boy whose life he had sacrificed when the choice
between saving him or finally catching up with the man in black finally came; the boy who
had said Go then—there are other worlds than these before plunging into the abyss. And
sure enough, the boy had been right.
The boy was Jake.
He was holding a plain brown paper bag in one hand and a blue canvas bag by its
drawstring top in the other. From the angles poking against the sides of the canvas, the
gunslinger thought it must contain books.
Traffic flooded the street the boy was waiting to cross—a street in the same city from
which he had taken the Prisoner and the Lady, he realized, but for the moment none of that
mattered. Nothing mattered but what was going to happen or not happen in the next few
seconds.
Jakehad not been brought into the gunslinger’s world through any magic door; he had
come through a cruder, more understandable portal: he had been born into Roland’s world by dying in his own.
He had been murdered.
More specifically, he had been pushed.
Pushed into the street; run over by a car while on his way to school, his lunch-sack in one
hand and his books in the other.
Pushed by the man in black.
He’s going to do it! He’s going to do it right now! That’s to be my punishment for
murdering him in my world—to see him murdered in this one before I can stop it!
But the rejection of brutish destiny had been the gunsling- er’s work all his life—it had
been his ka, if you pleased—and so he came forward without even thinking, acting with reflexes so deep they had nearly become instincts.
And as he did a thought both horrible and ironic flashed into his mind: What if the body he
had entered was itself that of the man in black? What if, as he rushed forward to save the boy, he saw his own hands reach out and push? What if this sense of control was only an illusion, and Walter’s final gleeful joke that Roland himself should murder the boy?
3
For one single moment Jack Mort lost the thin strong arrow of his concentration. On the
edge of leaping forward and shoving the kid into the traffic, he felt something which his
mind mistranslated just as the body may refer pain from one part of itself to another.