When the gunslinger came forward, Jack thought some sort of bug had landed on the back
of his neck. Not a wasp or a bee, nothing that actually stung, but something that bit and itched. Mosquito, maybe. It was on this that he blamed his lapse in concentration at the
crucial moment. He slapped at it and returned to the boy.
He thought all this happened in a bare wink; actually, seven seconds passed. He sensed
neither the gunslinger’s swift advance nor his equally swift retreat, and none of the people
around him (going-to-work people, most from the subway station on the next block, their
faces still puffy with sleep, their half-dreaming eyes turned inward) noticed Jack’s eyes
turn from their usual deep blue to a lighter blue behind the prim gold-rimmed glasses he
wore. No one noticed those eyes darken to their normal cobalt color either, but when it
hap- pened and he refocused on the boy, he saw with frustrated fury as sharp as a thorn that
his chance was gone. The light had changed.
He watched the boy crossing with the rest of the sheep, and then Jack himself turned back
the way he had come and began shoving himself upstream against the tidal flow of
pedestrians.
“Hey, mister! Watch ou—”
Some curd-faced teenaged girl he barely saw. Jack shoved her aside, hard, not looking
back at her caw of anger as her own armload of schoolbooks went flying. He went walking
on down Fifth Avenue and away from Forty-Third, where he had meant for the boy to die
today. His head was bent, his lips pressed together so tightly he seemed to have no mouth at
all but only the scar of a long-healed wound above his chin. Once clear of the bottleneck at
the corner, he did not slow down but strode even more rapidly along, crossing
Forty-Second, Forty-First, Fortieth. Somewhere in the middle of the next block he passed
the building where the boy lived. He gave it barely a glance, although he had followed the
boy from it every school-morning for the last three weeks, followed him from the building
to the corner three and a half blocks further up Fifth, the corner he thought of simply as the
Pushing Place.
The girl he bumped was screaming after him, but Jack Mort didn’t notice. An amateur
lepidopterist would have taken no more notice of a common butterfly.
Jack was, in his way, much like an amateur lepidopterist.
By profession, he was a successful C.P.A.
Pushing was only his hobby.
4
The gunslinger returned to the back of the man’s mind and fainted there. If there was relief,
it was simply that this man was not the man in black, was not Walter.
All the rest was utter horror . . . and utter realization.
Divorced of his body, his mind—his ka— was as healthy and acute as ever, but the
sudden knowing struck him like a chisel-blow to the temple.
The knowing didn’t come when he went forward but when he was sure the boy was safe
and slipped back again. He saw the connection between this man and Odetta, too fantastic
and yet too hideously apt to be coincidental, and understood what the real drawing of the
three might be, and who they might be.
The third was not this man, this Pusher; the third named by Walter had been Death.
Death. . . but not for you.That was what Walter, clever as Satan even at the end, had said.
A lawyer’s answer… so close to the truth that the truth was able to hide in its shadow. Death
was not for him; death was become him.
The Prisoner, the Lady.
Death was the third.
He was suddenly filled with the certainty that he himself was the third.
5
Roland came forward as nothing but a projectile, a brain- less missile programmed to
launch the body he was in at the man in black the instant he saw him.
Thoughts of what might happen if he stopped the man in black from murdering Jake did
not come until later—the possible paradox, the fistula in time and dimension which might
cancel out everything that had happened after he had arrived at the way station. . . for surely
if he saved Jake in this world, there would have been no Jake for him to meet there, and
everything which had happened thereafter would change.
What changes? Impossible even to speculate on them. That one might have been the end
of his quest never entered the gunslinger’s mind. And surely such after-the-fact
specula- tions were moot; if he had seen the man in black, no conse- quence, paradox, or
ordained course of destiny could have stopped him from simply lowering the head of this
body he inhabited and pounding it straight through Walter’s chest. Roland would have been
as helpless to do otherwise as a gun is helpless to refuse the finger that squeezes the trigger
and flings the bullet on its flight.
If it sent all to hell, the hell with it.
He scanned the people clustered on the corner quickly, seeing each face (he scanned the
women as closely as the men, making sure there wasn’t one only pretending to be a
woman).
Walter wasn’t there.
Gradually he relaxed, as a finger curled around a trigger may relax at the last instant. No;
Walter was nowhere around the boy, and the gunslinger somehow felt sure that this wasn’t the right when. Not quite. That when was close—two weeks away, a week, maybe even a single day—but it was not quite yet.
So he went back.
On the way he saw . . .
6
. . .and fell senseless with shock: this man into whose mind the third door opened, had once
sat waiting just inside the window of a deserted tenement room in a building full of
abandoned rooms—abandoned, that was, except for the winos and crazies who often spent
their nights here. You knew about the winos because you could smell their desperate sweat
and angry piss. You knew about the crazies because you could smell the stink of their
deranged thoughts. The only furniture in this room was two chairs. Jack Mort was using
both: one to sit in, one as a prop to keep the door opening on the hallway closed. He
expected no sudden interruptions, but it was best not to take chances. He was close enough
to the window to look out, but far enough behind the slanted shadow-line to be safe from
any casual viewer.
He had a crumbly red brick in his hand.
He had pried it from just outside the window, where a good many were loose. It was old,
eroded at the corners, but heavy. Chunks of ancient mortar clung to it like barnacles.
The man meant to drop the brick on someone.
He didn’t care who; when it came to murder, Jack Mort was an equal-opportunity
employer.
After a bit, a family of three came along the sidewalk below: man, woman, little girl. The
girl had been walking on the inside, presumably to keep her safely away from the traffic.
There was quite a lot of it this close to the railway station but Jack Mort didn’t care about
the auto traffic. What he cared about was the lack of buildings directly opposite him; these
had already been demolished, leaving a jumbled wasteland of splintered board, broken
brick, glinting glass.
He would only lean out for a few seconds, and he was wearing sunglasses over his eyes
and an out-of-season knit cap over his blonde hair. It was like the chair under the doorknob.
Even when you were safe from expected risks, there was no harm in reducing those
unexpected ones which remained.
He was also wearing a sweatshirt much too big for him— one that came almost down to mid-thigh. This bag of a gar- ment would help confuse the actual size and shape of his body
(he was quite thin) should he be observed. It served another purpose as well: whenever he
“depth-charged” someone (for that was how he always thought of it: as “depth-charging”), he came in his pants. The baggy sweatshirt also covered the wet spot which invariably
formed on his jeans.
Now they were closer.
Don’t jump the gun, wait, just wait. . .
He shivered at the edge of the window, brought the brick forward, drew it back to his
stomach, brought it forward again, withdrew it again (but this time only halfway), and then
leaned out, totally cool now. He always was at the penul- timate moment.
He dropped the brick and watched it fall.
It went down, swapping one end for the other. Jack saw the clinging barnacles of mortar
clearly in the sun. At these moments as at no others everything was clear, everything stood
out with exact and geometrically perfect substance; here was a thing which he had pushed
into reality, as a sculptor swings a hammer against a chisel to change stone and create some