he could—across to where Eddie crouched. “Let it go when I tell you, Susannah!” Roland shouted. “Do you understand? When I tell you!”
Eddie saw and heard none of this. He heard only Jake, screaming faintly on the other side
of the door.
The time had come to use the key.
He pulled it out of his shirt and slid it into the keyhole he had drawn. He tried to turn it.
The key would not turn. Not so much as a millimeter. Eddie lifted his face to the pelting
hail, oblivious to the iceballs which struck his forehead and cheeks and lips, leaving welts
and red blotches.
“NO!” he howled. “OH GOD, PLEASE! NO!”
But there was no answer from God; only another crash of thunder and a streak of lightning
across a sky now filled with racing clouds.
36
JAKE LUNGED UPWARD, CRABBED the chain of the lamp which hung above him,
and ripped free of the doorkeeper’s clutching fingers. He swung backward, used the packed
earth in the doorway to push off, and then swung forward again like Tarzan on a vine. He
raised his legs and kicked out at the clutching fingers as he closed on them. Plaster
exploded in chunks, revealing a crudely jointed skeleton of lathing beneath. The
plaster-man roared, a sound of intermingled hunger and rage. Beneath that cry, Jake could
hear the whole house collapsing, like the one in that story of Edgar Allan Poe.
He pendulumed back on the chain, struck the wall of packed earth which blocked the
doorway, then swung forward again. The hand reached up for him and he kicked at it
wildly, legs scissoring. He felt a stab of pain in his foot as those wooden fingers clutched.
When he swung back again, he was minus a sneaker.
He tried for a higher grip on the chain, found it, and began to shinny up toward the ceiling.
There was a muffled, creaking thud above him. Fine plaster dust had begun to sift down on
his upturned, sweating face. The ceiling had begun to sag; the lamp-chain was pulling out
of it a link at a time. There was a thick crunching sound from the end of the hallway as the
plaster-man finally pushed its hungry face through the opening.
Jake swung helplessly back toward that face, screaming.
37
EDDIE’S TERROR AND PANIC suddenly fell away. The cloak of coldness dropped over
him—a cloak Roland of Gilead had worn many times. It was the only armor the true
gunslinger possessed . . . and all such a one needed. At the same moment, a voice spoke in
his mind. He had been haunted by such voices over the last three months; his mother’s
voice, Roland’s voice, and, of course, Henry’s. But this one, he recognized with relief, was
his own, and it was at last calm and rational and courageous.
You saw the shape of the key in the fire, you saw it again in the wood, and both times you
saw it perfectly. Later on, you put a blindfold of fear over your eyes. Take it off. Take it off and look again. It may not be too late, even now.
He was faintly aware that the gunslinger was staring at him grimly; faintly aware that
Susannah was shrieking at the demon in a fading but still defiant voice; faintly aware that, on the other side of the door, Jake was screaming in terror—or was it now agony?
Eddie ignored them all. He pulled the wooden key out of the key-hole he had drawn, out of
the door which was now real, and looked at it fixedly, trying to recapture the innocent
delight he had sometimes known as a child—the delight of seeing a coherent shape hidden
in senselessness. And there it was, the place he’d gone wrong, so clearly visible he couldn’t
understand how he’d missed it in the first place. I really must have been wearing a blindfold,
he thought. It was the s-shape at the end of the key, of course. The second curve was a bit
too fat. Just a tiny bit.
“Knife,” he said, and held out his hand like a surgeon in an operating room. Roland
slapped it into his palm without a word.
Eddie gripped the top of the blade between the thumb and first finger of his right hand. He
bent over the key, unmindful of the hail which pelted his unprotected neck, and the shape in
the wood stood out more clearly—stood out with its own lovely and undeniable reality.
He scraped.
Once.
Delicately.
A single sliver of ash, so thin it was almost transparent, curled up from the belly of the
s-shape at the end of the key.
On the other side of the door, Jake Chambers shrieked again.
38
THE CHAIN LET GO with a rattling crash and Jake fell heavily, landing on his knees.
The doorkeeper roared in triumph. The plaster hand seized Jake about his hips and began to
drag him down the hall. He stuck his legs out in front of him and planted his feet, but it did
no good. He felt splinters and rust-blunted nails digging into his skin as the hand tightened
its grip and continued to drag him forward.
The face appeared to be stuck just inside the entrance to the hallway like a cork in a bottle.
The pressure it had exerted to get in that far had squeezed the rudimentary features into a
new shape, that of some mon- strous, malformed troll. The mouth yawned open to receive
him. Jake groped madly for the key, wanting to use it as some last-ditch talisman, but of
course he had left it in the door.
‘”You son of a bitch!” he screamed, and threw himself backward with all his strength, bowing his back like an Olympic diver, unmindful of the broken boards which dug into
him like a belt of nails. He felt his jeans slide down on his hips, and the grip of the hand
slipped momentarily.
Jake lunged again. The hand clenched brutally, but Jake’s jeans slid down to his knees and
his back slammed to the floor, with the pack to cushion the blow. The hand loosened,
perhaps wanting to secure a firmer grip upon its prey. Jake was able to draw his knees up a
little, and when the hand tightened again, Jake drove his legs forward. The hand yanked
backward at the same time, and what Jake had hoped for happened: his jeans (and his
remaining sneaker) were peeled from his body, leaving him free again, at least for the
moment. He saw the hand rotate on his wrist of boards and disintegrating plaster and jam
his dungarees into his mouth. Then he was crawling back toward the blocked doorway on
his hands and knees, oblivious of the glass fragments from the fallen lamp, wanting only to
get his key again.
He had almost reached the door when the hand closed over his naked legs and began to
pull him back once more.
39
THE SHAPE WAS THERE now, finally all there.
Eddie put the key back into the keyhole and applied pressure. For a moment there was
resistance . . . and then it revolved beneath his hand. He heard the locking mechanism turn,
heard the bar pull back, felt the key crack in two the moment it had served its purpose. He
grasped the dark, polished knob with both hands and pulled. There was a sense of great
weight wheeling on an unseen pivot. A feeling that his arm had been gifted with boundless
strength. And a clear knowledge that two worlds had suddenly come in contact, and a way
had been opened between them.
He felt a moment of dizziness and disorientation, and as he looked through the doorway he
realized why: although he was looking down—vertically—he was seeing horizontally. It
was like a strange optical illusion created with prisms and mirrors. Then he saw Jake being
pulled backward down the glass- and plaster-littered hallway, elbows dragging, calves
pinned-together by a giant hand. And he saw the monstrous mouth which awaited him,
fuming some white fog that might have been either smoke or dust.
“Roland!” Eddie shouted. “Roland, it’s got h—”
Then he was knocked aside.
40
SUSANNAH WAS AWARE OF being hauled up and whirled around. The world was a
carousel blur: standing stones, gray sky, hailstone-littered ground… and a rectangular hole
that looked like a trapdoor in the ground. Screams drifted up from it. Within her, the demon
raved and struggled, wanting only to escape but helpless to do so until she allowed it.
“Now!” Roland was shouting. “Let it go now, Susannah! For your father’s sake, let it go NOW!”
And she did.
She had (with Detta’s help) constructed* a trap for it in her mind, something like a net of
woven rushes, and now she cut them. She felt the demon fly back from her at once, and