by Stephen King
“What’s that?” she was smiling a little again. That was good. He liked it when he was able to make her smile.
“Give this a fair chance. That’s the condition.”
“Give what a fair chance?” She sounded slightly amused. Eddie might have bristled at that tone in someone else’s voice, might have felt he was getting boned, but with her it was different. With her it was all right. He supposed with her just about anything would have been.
“That there’s a third alternative. That this really is happening. I mean . . .” Eddie cleared his throat. “I’m not very good at this philosophical shit, or, you know, metamorphosis or whatever the hell you call it—”
“Do you mean metaphysics?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I think so. But I know you can’t go around disbelieving what your senses tell you. Why, if your idea about this all being a dream is right—”
“I didn’t say a dream—”
“Whatever you said, that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? A false reality?”
If there had been something faintly condescending in her voice a moment ago, it was gone now. “Philosophy and metaphysics may not be your bag, Eddie, but you must have been a hell of a debater in school.”
“I was never in debate. That was for gays and hags and wimps. Like chess club. What do you mean, my bag? What’s a bag?”
“Just something you like. What do you mean, gays? What are gays?”
He looked at her for a moment, then shrugged. “Homos. Fags. Never mind. We could swap slang all day. It’s not getting us anyplace. What I’m trying to say is that if it’s all a dream, it could be mine, not yours. You could be a figment of my imagination.”
Her smile faltered. “You . . . nobody bopped you.”
“Nobody bopped you, either.”
Now her smile was entirely gone. “No one that I remember,” she corrected with some sharpness.
“Me either!” he said. “You told me they’re rough in Oxford. Well, those Customs guys weren’t exactly cheery joy when they couldn’t find the dope they were after. One of them could have head-bopped me with the butt of his gun. I could be lying in a Bellevue ward right now, dreaming you and Roland while they write their reports, explaining how, while they were interrogating me, I became violent and had to be subdued.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Why? Because you’re this intelligent socially active black lady with no legs and I’m just a hype from Co-Op City?” He said it with a grin, meaning it as an amiable jape, but she flared at him.
“I wish you would stop calling me black!”
He sighed. “Okay, but it’s gonna take getting used to.”
“You should have been on the debate club anyway.”
“Fuck,” he said, and the turn of her eyes made him realize again that the difference between them was much wider than color; they were speaking to each other from separate islands. The water between was time. Never mind. The word had gotten her attention. “I don’t want to debate you. I want to wake you up to the fact that you are awake, that’s all.”
“I might be able to at least operate provisionally according to the dictates of your third alternative as long as this . . . this situation . . . continued to go on, except for one thing: There’s a fundamental difference between what happened to you and what happened to me. So fundamental, so large, that you haven’t seen it.”
“Then show it to me.”
“There is no discontinuity in your consciousness. There is a very large one in mine.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I mean you can account for all of your time,” Odetta said. “Your story follows from point to point: the airplane, the incursion by that . . . that . . . by him—”
She nodded toward the foothills with clear distaste.
“The stashing of the drugs, the officers who took you into custody, all the rest. It’s a fantastic story, it has no missing links.
“As for myself, I arrived back from Oxford, was met by Andrew, my driver, and brought back to my building. I bathed and I wanted sleep—I was getting a very bad headache, and sleep is the only medicine that’s any good for the really bad ones. But it was close on midnight, and I thought I would watch the news first. Some of us had been released, but a good many more were still in the jug when we left. I wanted to find out if their cases had been resolved.
“I dried off and put on my robe and went into the living room. I turned on the TV news. The newscaster started talking about a speech Krushchev had just made about the American advisors in Viet Nam. He said, ‘We have a film report from—’ and then he was gone and I was rolling down this beach. You say you saw me in some sort of magic doorway which is now gone, and that I was in Macy’s, and that I was stealing. All of this is preposterous enough, but even if it was so, I could find something better to steal than costume jewelry. I don’t wear jewelry.”
“You better look at your hands again, Odetta,” Eddie said quietly.
For a very long time she looked from the “diamond” on her left pinky, too large and vulgar to be anything but paste, to the large opal on the third finger of her right hand, which was too large and vulgar to be anything but real.
“None of this is happening,” she repeated firmly.
“You sound like a broken record!” He was genuinely angry for the first time. “Every time someone pokes a hole in your neat little story, you just retreat to that ‘none of this is happening’ shit. You have to wise up, ’Detta.”
“Don’t call me that! I hate that!” she burst out so shrilly that Eddie recoiled.
“Sorry. Jesus! I didn’t know.”
“I went from night to day, from undressed to dressed, from my living room to this deserted beach. And what really happened was that some big-bellied redneck deputy hit me upside the head with a club and that is all!”
“But your memories don’t stop in Oxford,” he said softly.
“W-What?” Uncertain again. Or maybe seeing and not wanting to. Like with the rings.
“If you got whacked in Oxford, how come your memories don’t stop there?”
“There isn’t always a lot of logic to things like this.” She was rubbing her temples again. “And now, if it’s all the same to you, Eddie, I’d just as soon end the conversation. My headache is back. It’s quite bad.”
“I guess whether or not logic figures in all depends on what you want to believe. I saw you in Macy’s, Odetta. I saw you stealing. You say you don’t do things like that, but you also told me you don’t wear jewelry. You told me that even though you’d looked down at your hands several times while we were talking. Those rings were there then, but it was as if you couldn’t see them until I called your attention to them and made you see them.”
“I don’t want to talk about it!” she shouted. “My head hurts!”
“All right. But you know where you lost track of time, and it wasn’t in Oxford.”
“Leave me alone,” she said dully.
Eddie saw the gunslinger toiling his way back with two full water-skins, one tied around his waist and the other slung over his shoulders. He looked very tired.
“I wish I could help you,” Eddie said, “but to do that, I guess I’d have to be real.”
He stood by her for a moment, but her head was bowed, the tips of her fingers steadily massaging her temples.
Eddie went to meet Roland.
8
“Sit down.” Eddie took the bags. “You look all in.”
“I am. I’m getting sick again.”
Eddie looked at the gunslinger’s flushed cheeks and brow, his cracked lips, and nodded. “I hoped it wouldn’t happen, but I’m not that surprised, man. You didn’t bat for the cycle. Balazar didn’t have enough Keflex.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“If you don’t take a penicillin drug long enough, you don’t kill the infection. You just drive it underground. A few days go by and it comes back. We’ll need more, but at least there’s
a door to go. In the meantime you’ll just have to take it easy.” But Eddie was thinking unhappily of Odetta’s missing legs and the longer and longer treks it took to find water. He wondered if Roland could have picked a worse time to have a relapse. He supposed it was possible; he just didn’t see how.
“I have to tell you something about Odetta.”
“That’s her name?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s very lovely,” the gunslinger said.
“Yeah. I thought so, too. What isn’t so lovely is the way she feels about this place. She doesn’t think she’s here.”
“I know. And she doesn’t like me much, does she?”
No, Eddie thought, but that doesn’t keep her from thinking you’re one booger of a hallucination. He didn’t say it, only nodded.
“The reasons are almost the same,” the gunslinger said. “She’s not the woman I brought through, you see. Not at all.”
Eddie stared, then suddenly nodded, excited. That blurred glimpse in the mirror . . . that snarling face . . . the man was right. Jesus Christ, of course he was! That hadn’t been Odetta at all.
Then he remembered the hands which had gone pawing carelessly through the scarves and had just as carelessly gone about the business of stuffing the junk jewelry into her big purse—almost, it had seemed, as if she wanted to be caught.
The rings had been there.
Same rings.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean the same hands, he thought wildly, but that would only hold for a second. He had studied her hands. They were the same, long-fingered and delicate.
“No,” the gunslinger continued. “She is not.” His blue eyes studied Eddie carefully.
“Her hands—”
“Listen,” the gunslinger said, “and listen carefully. Our lives may depend on it—mine because I’m getting sick again, and yours because you have fallen in love with her.”
Eddie said nothing.
“She is two women in the same body. She was one woman when I entered her, and another when I returned here.”
Now Eddie could say nothing.
“There was something else, something strange, but either I didn’t understand it or I did and it’s slipped away. It seemed important.”
Roland looked past Eddie, looked to the beached wheelchair, standing alone at the end of its short track from nowhere. Then he looked back at Eddie.
“I understand very little of this, or how such a thing can be, but you must be on your guard. Do you understand that?”
“Yes.” Eddie’s lungs felt as if they had very little wind in them. He understood—or had, at least, a moviegoer’s understanding of the sort of thing the gunslinger was speaking of—but he didn’t have the breath to explain, not yet. He felt as if Roland had kicked all his breath out of him.
“Good. Because the woman I entered on the other side of the door was as deadly as those lobster-things that come out at night.”
CHAPTER 4
Detta on the Other Side
1
You must be on your guard, the gunslinger said, and Eddie had agreed, but the gunslinger knew Eddie didn’t know what he was talking about; the whole back half of Eddie’s mind, where survival is or isn’t, didn’t get the message.
The gunslinger saw this.
It was a good thing for Eddie he did.
2
In the middle of the night, Detta Walker’s eyes sprang open. They were full of starlight and clear intelligence.
She remembered everything: how she had fought them, how they had tied her into her chair, how they had taunted her, calling her niggerbitch, niggerbitch.
She remembered monsters coming out of the waves, and she remembered how one of the men—the older—had killed one of them. The younger had built a fire and cooked it and then had offered her smoking monster-meat on a stick, grinning. She remembered spitting at his face, remembered his grin turning into an angry honky scowl. He had hit her upside the face, and told her Well, that’s all right, you’ll come around, niggerbitch. Wait and see if you don’t. Then he and the Really Bad Man—had laughed and the Really Bad Man had brought out a haunch of beef which he spitted and slowly cooked over the fire on the beach of this alien place to which they had brought her.
The smell of the slowly roasting beef had been seductive, but she had made no sign. Even when the younger one had waved a chunk of it near her face, chanting Bite for it, niggerbitch, go on and bite for it, she had sat like stone, holding herself in.
Then she had slept, and now she was awake, and the ropes they had tied her with were gone. She was no longer in her chair but lying on one blanket and under another, far above the high-tide line, where the lobster-things still wandered and questioned and snatched the odd unfortunate gull out of the air.
She looked to her left and saw nothing.
She looked to her right and saw two sleeping men wrapped in two piles of blankets. The younger one was closer, and the Really Bad Man had taken off his gunbelts and laid them by him.
The guns were still in them.
You made a bad mistake, mahfah, Detta thought, and rolled to her right. The gritty crunch and squeak of her body on the sand was inaudible under the wind, the waves, the questioning creatures. She crawled slowly along the sand (like one of the lobstrosities herself), her eyes glittering.
She reached the gunbelts and pulled one of the guns.
It was very heavy, the grip smooth and somehow independently deadly in her hand. The heaviness didn’t bother her. She had strong arms, did Detta Walker.
She crawled a little further.
The younger man was no more than a snoring rock, but the Really Bad Man stirred a little in his sleep and she froze with a snarl tattooed on her face until he quieted again.
He be one sneaky sumbitch. You check, Detta. You check, be sho.
She found the worn chamber release, tried to shove it forward, got nothing, and pulled it instead. The chamber swung open.
Loaded! Fucker be loaded! You goan do this young cocka-de-walk first, and dat Really Bad Man be wakin up and you goan give him one big grin—smile honeychile so I kin see where you is—and den you goan clean his clock somethin righteous.
She swung the chamber back, started to pull the hammer . . . and then waited.
When the wind kicked up a gust, she pulled the hammer to full cock.
Detta pointed Roland’s gun at Eddie’s temple.
3
The gunslinger watched all this from one half-open eye. The fever was back, but not bad yet, not so bad that he must mistrust himself. So he waited, that one half-open eye the finger on the trigger of his body, the body which had always been his revolver when there was no revolver at hand.
She pulled the trigger.
Click.
Of course click.
When he and Eddie had come back with the waterskins from their palaver, Odetta Holmes had been deeply asleep in her wheelchair, slumped to one side. They had made her the best bed they could on the sand and carried her gently from her wheelchair to the spread blankets. Eddie had been sure she would awake, but Roland knew better.
He had killed, Eddie had built a fire, and they had eaten, saving a portion aside for Odetta in the morning.
Then they had talked, and Eddie had said something which burst upon Roland like a sudden flare of lightning. It was too bright and too brief to be total understanding, but he saw much, the way one may discern the lay of the land in a single lucky stroke of lightning.
He could have told Eddie then, but did not. He understood that he must be Eddie’s Cort, and when one of Cort’s pupils was left hurt and bleeding by some unexpected blow, Cort’s response had always been the same: A child doesn’t understand a hammer until he’s mashed his finger at a nail. Get up and stop whining, maggot! You have forgotten the face of your father!
So Eddie had fallen asleep, even though Roland had told him he must be on his guard, and when Roland was sure they both slept (he had waited longer for the Lady, who cou
ld, he thought, be sly), he had reloaded his guns with spent casings, unstrapped them (that caused a pang), and put them by Eddie.
Then he waited.
One hour; two; three.
Halfway through the fourth hour, as his tired and feverish body tried to drowse, he sensed rather than saw the Lady come awake and came fully awake himself.
He watched her roll over. He watched her turn her hands into claws and pull herself along the sand to where his gunbelts lay. He watched her take one of them out, come closer to Eddie, and then pause, her head cocking, her nostrils swelling and contracting, doing more than smelling the air; tasting it.
Yes. This was the woman he had brought across.
When she glanced toward the gunslinger he did more than feign sleep, because she would have sensed sham; he went to sleep. When he sensed her gaze shift away he awoke and opened that single eye again. He saw her begin to raise the gun—she did this with less effort than Eddie had shown the first time Roland saw him do the same thing—and point it toward Eddie’s head. Then she paused, her face filled with an inexpressible cunning.
In that moment she reminded him of Marten.
She fiddled with the cylinder, getting it wrong at first, then swinging it open. She looked at the heads of the shells. Roland tensed, waiting first to see if she would know the firing pins had already been struck, waiting next to see if she would turn the gun, look into the other end of the cylinder, and see there was only emptiness there instead of lead (he had thought of loading the guns with cartridges which had already misfired, but only briefly; Cort had taught them that every gun is ultimately ruled by Old Man Splitfoot, and a cartridge which misfires once may not do so a second time). If she did that, he would spring at once.
But she swung the cylinder back in, began to cock the hammer . . . and then paused again. Paused for the wind to mask the single low click.
He thought: Here is another. God, she’s evil, this one, and she’s legless, but she’s a gunslinger as surely as Eddie is one.
