by Stephen King
His eyes saw nothing; his ears brought not the faintest returning cry.
The gunslinger, meanwhile, had been studying the third door. He had expected a single word, the word the man in black had used as he turned the sixth Tarot card at the dusty Golgotha where they had held palaver. Death, Walter had said, but not for you, gunslinger.
There was not one word writ upon this door but two . . . and neither of them was DEATH. He read it again, lips moving soundlessly:
THE PUSHER
Yet it means death, Roland thought, and knew it was so.
What made him look around was the sound of Eddie’s voice moving away. Eddie had begun to climb the first slope, still calling Odetta’s name.
For a moment Roland considered just letting him go.
He might find her, might even find her alive, not too badly hurt, and still herself. He supposed the two of them might even make a life of sorts for themselves here, that Eddie’s love for Odetta and hers for him might somehow smother the nightshade who called herself Detta Walker. Yes, between the two of them he supposed it was possible that Detta might simply be squeezed to death. He was a romantic in his own harsh way . . . yet he was also realist enough to know that sometimes love actually did conquer all. As for himself? Even if he was able to get the drugs from Eddie’s world which had almost cured him before, would they be able to cure him this time, or even make a start? He was now very sick, and he found himself wondering if perhaps things hadn’t gone too far. His arms and legs ached, his head thudded, his chest was heavy and full of snot. When he coughed there was a painful grating in his left side, as if ribs were broken there. His left ear flamed. Perhaps, he thought, the time had come to end it; to just cry off.
At this, everything in him rose up in protest.
“Eddie!” he cried, and there was no cough now. His voice was deep and powerful.
Eddie turned, one foot on raw dirt, the other braced on a jutting spar of rock.
“Go on,” he said, and made a curious little sweeping gesture with his hand, a gesture that said he wanted to be rid of the gunslinger so he could be about his real business, the important business, the business of finding Odetta and rescuing her if rescue were necessary. “It’s all right. Go on through and get the stuff you need. We’ll both be here when you get back.”
“I doubt that.”
“I have to find her.” Eddie looked at Roland and his gaze was very young and completely naked. “I mean, I really have to.”
“I understand your love and your need,” the gunslinger said, “but I want you to come with me this time, Eddie.”
Eddie stared at him for a long time, as if trying to credit what he was hearing.
“Come with you,” he said at last, bemused. “Come with you! Holy God, now I think I really have heard everything. Deedle-deedle-dumpkin everything. Last time you were so determined I was gonna stay behind you were willing to take a chance on me cutting your throat. This time you want to take a chance on something ripping hers right out.”
“That may have already happened,” Roland said, although he knew it hadn’t. The Lady might be hurt, but he knew she wasn’t dead.
Unfortunately, Eddie did, too. A week or ten days without his drug had sharpened his mind remarkably. He pointed at the door. “You know she’s not. If she was, that goddam thing would be gone. Unless you were lying when you said it wasn’t any good without all three of us.”
Eddie tried to turn back to the slope, but Roland’s eyes held him nailed.
“All right,” the gunslinger said. His voice was almost as soft as it had been when he spoke past the hateful face and screaming voice of Detta to the woman trapped somewhere behind it. “She’s alive. That being so, why does she not answer your calls?”
“Well . . . one of those cats-things may have carried her away.” But Eddie’s voice was weak.
“A cat would have killed her, eaten what it wanted, and left the rest. At most, it might have dragged her body into the shade so it could come back tonight and eat meat the sun perhaps hadn’t yet spoiled. But if that was the case, the door would be gone. Cats aren’t like some insects, who paralyze their prey and carry them off to eat later, and you know it.”
“That isn’t necessarily true,” Eddie said. For a moment he heard Odetta saying You should have been on the debate team, Eddie and pushed the thought aside. “Could be a cat came for her and she tried to shoot it but the first couple of shells in your gun were misfires. Hell, maybe even the first four or five. The cat gets to her, mauls her, and just before it can kill her . . . BANG!” Eddie smacked a fist against his palm, seeing all this so vividly that he might have witnessed it. “The bullet kills the cat, or maybe just wounds it, or maybe just scares it off. What about that?”
Mildly, Roland said: “We would have heard a gunshot.”
For a moment Eddie could only stand, mute, able to think of no counter-argument. Of course they would have heard it. The first time they had heard one of the cats yowling, it had to have been fifteen, maybe twenty miles away. A pistol-shot—
He looked at Roland with sudden cunning. “Maybe you did,” he said. “Maybe you heard a gunshot while I was asleep.”
“It would have woken you.”
“Not as tired as I am, man. I fall asleep, it’s like—”
“Like being dead,” the gunslinger said in that same mild voice. “I know the feeling.”
“Then you understand—”
“But it’s not being dead. Last night you were out just like that, but when one of those cats screeched, you were awake and on your feet in seconds. Because of your concern for her. There was no gunshot, Eddie, and you know it. You would have heard it. Because of your concern for her.”
“So maybe she brained it with a rock!” Eddie shouted. “How the hell do I know when I’m standing here arguing with you instead of checking out the possibilities? I mean, she could be lying up there someplace hurt, man! Hurt or bleeding to death! How’d you like it if I did come through that door with you and she died while we were on the other side? How’d you like to look around once and see that doorway there, then look around twice and see it gone, just like it never was, because she was gone? Then you’d be trapped in my world instead of the other way around!” He stood panting and glaring at the gunslinger, his hands balled into fists.
Roland felt a tired exasperation. Someone—it might have been Cort but he rather thought it had been his father—had had a saying: Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover. If any proof of the saying were needed, there it stood above him, in a posture that was all defiance and defense. Go on, the set of Eddie Dean’s body said. Go on, I can answer any question you throw at me.
“Might not have been a cat that found her,” he said now. “This may be your world, but I don’t think you’ve ever been to this part of it any more than I’ve ever been to Borneo. You don’t know what might be running around up in those hills, do you? Could be an ape grabbed her, or something like that.”
“Something grabbed her, all right,” the gunslinger said.
“Well thank God getting sick hasn’t driven all the sense out of your m—”
“And we both know what it was. Detta Walker. That’s what grabbed her. Detta Walker.”
Eddie opened his mouth, but for some little time—only seconds, but enough of them so both acknowledged the truth—the gunslinger’s inexorable face bore all his arguments to silence.
14
“It doesn’t have to be that way.”
“Come a little closer. If we’re going to talk, let’s talk. Every time I have to shout at you over the waves, it rips another piece of my throat out. That’s how it feels, anyway.”
“What big eyes you have, grandma,” Eddie said, not moving.
“What in hell’s name are you talking about?”
“A fairy tale.” Eddie did descend a short way back down the slope—four yards, no more. “And fairy tales are what you’re thinking about if you believe you c
an coax me close enough to that wheelchair.”
“Close enough for what? I don’t understand,” Roland said, although he understood perfectly.
Nearly a hundred and fifty yards above them and perhaps a full quarter of a mile to the east, dark eyes—eyes as full of intelligence as they were lacking in human mercy—watched this tableau intently. It was impossible to tell what they were saying; the wind, the waves, and the hollow crash of the surf digging its underground channel saw to that, but Detta didn’t need to hear what they were saying to know what they were talking about. She didn’t need a telescope to see that the Really Bad Man was now also the Really Sick Man, and maybe the Really Bad Man was willing to spend a few days or even a few weeks torturing a legless Negro woman—way things looked around here, entertainment was mighty hard to come by—but she thought the Really Sick Man only wanted one thing, and that was to get his whitebread ass out of here. Just use that magic doorway to haul the fucker out. But before, he hadn’t been hauling no ass. Before, he hadn’t been hauling nothing. Before, the Really Bad Man hadn’t been nowhere but inside her own head. She still didn’t like to think of how that had been, how it had felt, how easily he had overridden all her clawing efforts to push him out, away, to take control of herself again. That had been awful. Terrible. And what made it worse was her lack of understanding. What, exactly, was the real source of her terror? That it wasn’t the invasion itself was frightening enough. She knew she might understand if she examined herself more closely, but she didn’t want to do that. Such examination might lead her to a place like the one sailors had feared in the ancient days, a place which was no more or less than the edge of the world, a place the cartographers had marked with the legend HERE THERE BE SARPENTS. The hideous thing about the Really Bad Man’s invasion had been the sense of familiarity that came with it, as if this amazing thing had happened before—not once, but many times. But, frightened or not, she had denied panic. She had observed even as she fought, and she remembered looking into that door when the gunslinger used her hands to pivot the wheelchair toward it. She remembered seeing the body of the Really Bad Man lying on the sand with Eddie crouched above it, a knife in his hand.
Would that Eddie had plunged that knife into the Really Bad Man’s throat! Better than a pig-slaughtering! Better by a country mile!
He hadn’t, but she had seen the Really Bad Man’s body. It had been breathing, but body was the right word just the same; it had only been a worthless thing, like a cast-off towsack which some idiot had stuffed full of weeds or cornshucks.
Detta’s mind might have been as ugly as a rat’s ass, but it was even quicker and sharper than Eddie’s. Really Bad Man there used to be full of piss an vinegar. Not no mo. He know I’m up here and doan want to do nothin but git away befo I come down an kill his ass. His little buddy, though—he still be pretty strong, and he ain’t had his fill of hurting on me just yet. Want to come up here and hunt me down no matter how that Really Bad Man be. Sho. He be thinkin, One black bitch widdout laigs no match fo a big ole swingin dick like me. I doan wan t’run. I want to be huntin that black quiff down. I give her a poke or two, den we kin go like you want. That what he be thinkin, and that be all right. That be jes fine, graymeat. You think you can take Detta Walker, you jes come on up here in these Drawers and give her a try. You goan find out when you fuckin with me, you fuckin wit the best, honeybunch! You goan find out—
But she was jerked from the rat-run of her thoughts by a sound that came to her clearly in spite of the surf and wind: the heavy crack of a pistol-shot.
15
“I think you understand better than you let on,” Eddie said. “A whole hell of a lot better. You’d like for me to get in grabbing distance, that’s what I think.” He jerked his head toward the door without taking his eyes from Roland’s face. Unaware that not far away someone was thinking exactly the same thing, he added: “I know you’re sick, all right, but it could be you’re pretending to be a lot weaker than you really are. Could be you’re laying back in the tall grass just a little bit.”
“Could be I am,” Roland said, unsmiling, and added: “But I’m not.”
He was, though . . . a little.
“A few more steps wouldn’t hurt, though, would it? I’m not going to be able to shout much longer.” The last syllable turned into a frog’s croak as if to prove his point. “And I need to make you think about what you’re doing—planning to do. If I can’t persuade you to come with me, maybe I can at least put you on your guard . . . again.”
“For your precious Tower,” Eddie sneered, but he did come skid-ding halfway down the slope of ground he had climbed, his tattered tennies kicking up listless clouds of maroon dust.
“For my precious Tower and your precious health,” the gunslinger said. “Not to mention your precious life.”
He slipped the remaining revolver from the left holster and looked at it with an expression both sad and strange.
“If you think you can scare me with that—”
“I don’t. You know I can’t shoot you, Eddie. But I think you do need an object lesson in how things have changed. How much things have changed.”
Roland lifted the gun, its muzzle pointing not toward Eddie but toward the empty surging ocean, and thumbed the hammer. Eddie steeled himself against the gun’s heavy crack.
No such thing. Only a dull click.
Roland thumbed the hammer back again. The cylinder rotated. He squeezed the trigger, and again there was nothing but a dull click.
“Never mind,” Eddie said. “Where I come from, the Defense Department would have hired you after the first misfire. You might as well qui—”
But the heavy KA-BLAM of the revolver cut off the word’s end as neatly as Roland had cut small branches from trees as a target-shooting exercise when he had been a student. Eddie jumped. The gunshot momentarily silenced the constant riiiiii of the insects in the hills. They only began to tune up again slowly, cautiously, after Roland had put the gun in his lap.
“What in hell does that prove?”
“I suppose that all depends on what you’ll listen to and what you refuse to hear,” Roland said a trifle sharply. “It’s supposed to prove that not all the shells are duds. Furthermore, it suggests—strongly suggests—that some, maybe even all, of the shells in the gun you gave Odetta may be live.”
“Bullshit!” Eddie paused. “Why?”
“Because I loaded the gun I just fired with shells from the backs of my gunbelts—with shells that took the worst wetting, in other words. I did it just to pass the time while you were gone. Not that it takes much time to load a gun, even shy a pair of fingers, you understand!” Roland laughed a little, and the laugh turned into a cough he muzzled with an abridged fist. When the cough had subsided he went on: “But after you’ve tried to fire wets, you have to break the machine and clean the machine. Break the machine, clean the machine, you maggots—it was the first thing Cort, our teacher, drummed into us. I didn’t know how long it would take me to break down my gun, clean it, and put it back together with only a hand and a half, but I thought that if I intended to go on living—and I do, Eddie, I do—I’d better find out. Find out and then learn to do it faster, don’t you think so? Come a little closer, Eddie! Come a little closer for your father’s sake!”
“All the better to see you with, my child,” Eddie said, but did take a couple of steps closer to Roland. Only a couple.
“When the first slug I pulled the trigger on fired, I almost filled my pants,” the gunslinger said. He laughed again. Shocked, Eddie realized the gunslinger had reached the edge of delirium. “The first slug, but believe me when I say it was the last thing I had expected.”
Eddie tried to decide if the gunslinger was lying, lying about the gun, and lying about his condition as well. Cat was sick, yeah. But was he really this sick? Eddie didn’t know. If Roland was acting, he was doing a great job; as for guns, Eddie had no way of telling because he had no experience with them. He had shot a pistol maybe th
ree times in his life before suddenly finding himself in a firefight at Balazar’s place. Henry might have known, but Henry was dead—a thought which had a way of constantly surprising Eddie into grief.
“None of the others fired,” the gunslinger said, “so I cleaned the machine, re-loaded, and fired around the chamber again. This time I used shells a little further toward the belt buckles. Ones which would have taken even less of a wetting. The loads we used to kill our food, the dry loads, were the ones closest to the buckles.”
He paused to cough dryly into his hand, then went on.
“Second time around I hit two live rounds. I broke my gun down again, cleaned it again, then loaded a third time. You just watched me drop the trigger on the first three chambers of that third loading.” He smiled faintly. “You know, after the first two clicks I thought it would be my damned luck to have filled the cylinder with nothing but wets. That wouldn’t 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 Detta, 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.”
