by Stephen King
The chair.
The chair was the hope, the whole hope, and nothing but the hope.
So help them God.
2
The gunslinger had regained consciousness shortly after Eddie dragged him into the shade of a rock outcropping. His face, where it was not ashy, was a hectic red. His chest rose and fell rapidly. His right arm was a network of twisting red lines.
“Feed her,” he croaked at Eddie.
“You—”
“Never mind me. I’ll be all right. Feed her. She’ll eat now, I think. And you’ll need her strength.”
“Roland, what if she’s just pretending to be—”
The gunslinger gestured impatiently.
“She’s not pretending to be anything, except alone in her body. I know it and you do, too. It’s in her face. Feed her, for the sake of your father, and while she eats, come back to me. Every minute counts now. Every second.”
Eddie got up, and the gunslinger pulled him back with his left hand. Sick or not, his strength was still there.
“And say nothing about the other. Whatever she tells you, however she explains, don’t contradict her.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just know it’s wrong. Now do as I say and don’t waste any more time!”
Odetta had been sitting in her chair, looking out at the sea with an expression of mild and bemused amazement. When Eddie offered her the chunks of lobster left over from the previous night, she smiled ruefully. “I would if I could,” she said, “but you know what happens.”
Eddie, who had no idea what she was talking about, could only shrug and say, “It wouldn’t hurt to try again, Odetta. You need to eat, you know. We’ve got to go as fast as we can.”
She laughed a little and touched his hand. He felt something like an electric charge jump from her to him. And it was her; Odetta. He knew it as well as Roland did.
“I love you, Eddie. You have tried so hard. Been so patient. So has he—” She nodded toward the place where the gunslinger lay propped against the rocks, watching. “—but he is a hard man to love.”
“Yeah. Don’t I know it.”
“I’ll try one more time.
“For you.”
She smiled and he felt all the world move for her, because of her, and he thought Please God, I have never had much, so please don’t take her away from me again. Please.
She took the chunks of lobster-meat, wrinkled her nose in a rueful comic expression, and looked up at him.
“Must I?”
“Just give it a shot,” he said.
“I never ate scallops again,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“I thought I told you.”
“You might have,” he said, and gave a little nervous laugh. What the gunslinger had said about not letting her know about the other loomed very large inside his mind just then.
“We had them for dinner one night when I was ten or eleven. I hated the way they tasted, like little rubber balls, and later I vomited them up. I never ate them again. But . . .” She sighed. “As you say, I’ll ‘give it a shot.’ ”
She put a piece in her mouth like a child taking a spoonful of medicine she knows will taste nasty. She chewed slowly at first, then more rapidly. She swallowed. Took another piece. Chewed, swallowed. Another. Now she was nearly wolfing it.
“Whoa, slow down!” Eddie said.
“It must be another kind! That’s it, of course it is!” She looked at Eddie shiningly. “We’ve moved further up the beach and the species has changed! I’m no longer allergic, it seems! It doesn’t taste nasty, like it did before . . . and I did try to keep it down, didn’t I?” She looked at him nakedly. “I tried very hard.”
“Yeah.” To himself he sounded like a radio broadcasting a very distant signal. She thinks she’s been eating every day and then up-chucking everything. She thinks that’s why she’s so weak. Christ Almighty. “Yeah, you tried like hell.”
“It tastes—” These words were hard to pick up because her mouth was full. “It tastes so good!” She laughed. The sound was delicate and lovely. “It’s going to stay down! I’m going to take nourishment! I know it! I feel it!”
“Just don’t overdo it,” he cautioned, and gave her one of the water-skins. “You’re not used to it. All that—” He swallowed and there was an audible (audible to him, at least) click in his throat. “All that throwing up.”
“Yes. Yes.”
“I need to talk to Roland for a few minutes.”
“All right.”
But before he could go she grasped his hand again.
“Thank you, Eddie. Thank you for being so patient. And thank him.” She paused gravely. “Thank him, and don’t tell him that he scares me.”
“I won’t,” Eddie had said, and went back to the gunslinger.
3
Even when she wasn’t pushing, Odetta was a help. She navigated with the prescience of a woman who has spent a long time weaving a wheelchair through a world that would not acknowledge handicapped people such as she for years to come.
“Left,” she’d call, and Eddie would gee to the left, gliding past a rock snarling out of the pasty grit like a decayed fang. On his own, he might have seen it . . . or maybe not.
“Right,” she called, and Eddie hawed right, barely missing one of the increasingly rare sandtraps.
They finally stopped and Eddie lay down, breathing hard.
“Sleep,” Odetta said. “An hour. I’ll wake you.”
Eddie looked at her.
“I’m not lying. I observed your friend’s condition, Eddie—”
“He’s not exactly my friend, you kn—”
“—and I know how important time is. I won’t let you sleep longer than an hour out of a misguided sense of mercy. I can tell the sun quite well. You won’t do that man any good by wearing yourself out, will you?”
“No,” he said, thinking: But you don’t understand. If I sleep and Detta Walker comes back—
“Sleep, Eddie,” she said, and since Eddie was too weary (and too much in love) to do other than trust her, he did. He slept and she woke him when she said she would and she was still Odetta, and they went on, and now she was pumping again, helping. They raced up the diminishing beach toward the door Eddie kept frantically looking for and kept not seeing.
4
When he left Odetta eating her first meal in days and went back to the gunslinger, Roland seemed a little better.
“Hunker down,” he said to Eddie.
Eddie hunkered.
“Leave me the skin that’s half full. All I need. Take her to the door.”
“What if I don’t—”
“Find it? You’ll find it. The first two were there; this one will be, too. If you get there before sundown tonight, wait for dark and then kill double. You’ll need to leave her food and make sure she’s sheltered as well as she can be. If you don’t reach it tonight, kill triple. Here.”
He handed over one of his guns.
Eddie took it with respect, surprised as before by how heavy it was.
“I thought the shells were all losers.”
“Probably are. But I’ve loaded with the ones I believe were wetted least—three from the buckle side of the left belt, three from the buckle side of the right. One may fire. Two, if you’re lucky. Don’t try them on the crawlies.” His eyes considered Eddie briefly. “There may be other things out there.”
“You heard it too, didn’t you?”
“If you mean something yowling in the hills, yes. If you mean the Bugger-Man, as your eyes say, no. I heard a wildcat in the brakes, that’s all, maybe with a voice four times the size of its body. It may be nothing you can’t drive off with a stick. But there’s her to think about. If her other comes back, you may have to—”
“I won’t kill her, if that’s what you’re thinking!”
“You may have to wing her. You understand?”
Eddie gave a reluctant nod. Goddam shells probably wouldn’t
fire anyway, so there was no sense getting his panties in a bunch about it.
“When you get to the door, leave her. Shelter her as well as you can, and come back to me with the chair.”
“And the gun?”
The gunslinger’s eyes blazed so brightly that Eddie snapped his head back, as if Roland had thrust a flaming torch in his face. “Gods, yes! Leave her with a loaded gun, when her other might come back at any time? Are you insane?”
“The shells—”
“Fuck the shells!” the gunslinger cried, and a freak drop in the wind allowed the words to carry. Odetta turned her head, looked at them for a long moment, then looked back toward the sea. “Leave it with her not!”
Eddie kept his voice low in case the wind should drop again. “What if something comes down from the brakes while I’m on my way back here? Some kind of cat four times bigger than its voice, instead of the other way around? Something you can’t drive off with a stick?”
“Give her a pile of stones,” the gunslinger said.
“Stones! Jesus wept! Man, you are such a fucking shit!”
“I am thinking,” the gunslinger said. “Something you seem unable to do. I gave you the gun so you could protect her from the sort of danger you’re talking about for half of the trip you must make. Would it please you if I took the gun back? Then perhaps you could die for her. Would that please you? Very romantic . . . except then, instead of just her, all three of us would go down.”
“Very logical. You’re still a fucking shit, however.”
“Go or stay. Stop calling me names.”
“You forgot something,” Eddie said furiously.
“What was that?”
“You forgot to tell me to grow up. That’s what Henry always used to say. ‘Oh grow up, kid.’ ”
The gunslinger had smiled, a weary, oddly beautiful smile. “I think you have grown up. Will you go or stay?”
“I’ll go,” Eddie said. “What are you going to eat? She scarfed the left-overs.”
“The fucking shit will find a way. The fucking shit has been finding one for years.”
Eddie looked away. “I . . . I guess I’m sorry I called you that, Roland. It’s been—” He laughed suddenly, shrilly. “It’s been a very trying day.”
Roland smiled again. “Yes,” he said. “It has.”
5
They made the best time of the entire trek that day, but there was still no door in sight when the sun began to spill its gold track across the ocean. Although she told him she was perfectly capable of going on for another half an hour, he called a halt and helped her out of the chair. He carried her to an even patch of ground that looked fairly smooth, got the cushions from the back of the chair and the seat, and eased them under her.
“Lord, it feels so good to stretch out,” she sighed. “But . . .” Her brow clouded. “I keep thinking of that man back there, Roland, all by himself, and I can’t really enjoy it. Eddie, who is he? What is he?” And, almost as an afterthought: “And why does he shout so much?”
“Just his nature, I guess,” Eddie said, and abruptly went off to gather rocks. Roland hardly ever shouted. He guessed some of it was this morning—FUCK the shells!—but that the rest of it was false memory: the time she thought she had been Odetta.
He killed triple, as the gunslinger had instructed, and was so intent on the last that he skipped back from a fourth which had been closing in on his right with only an instant to spare. He saw the way its claws clicked on the empty place which had been occupied by his foot and leg a moment before, and thought of the gunslinger’s missing fingers.
He cooked over a dry wood fire—the encroaching hills and increasing vegetation made the search for good fuel quicker and easier, that was one thing—while the last of the daylight faded from the western sky.
“Look, Eddie!” she cried, pointing up.
He looked, and saw a single star gleaming on the breast of the night.
“Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Yes,” he said, and suddenly, for no reason, his eyes filled with tears. Just where had he been all of his goddamned life? Where had he been, what had he been doing, who had been with him while he did it, and why did he suddenly feel so grimy and abysmally beshitted?
Her lifted face was terrible in its beauty, irrefutable in this light, but the beauty was unknown to its possessor, who only looked at the star with wide wondering eyes, and laughed softly.
“Star light, star bright,” she said, and stopped. She looked at him. “Do you know it, Eddie?”
“Yeah.” Eddie kept his head down. His voice sounded clear enough, but if he looked up she would see he was weeping.
“Then help me. But you have to look.”
“Okay.”
He wiped the tears into the palm of one hand and looked up at the star with her.
“Star light—” she looked at him and he joined her. “Star bright—”
Her hand reached out, groping, and he clasped it, one the delicious brown of light chocolate, the other the delicious white of a dove’s breast.
“First star I see tonight,” they spoke solemnly in unison, boy and girl for this now, not man and woman as they would be later, when the dark was full and she called to ask him if he was asleep and he said no and she asked if he would hold her because she was cold; “Wish I may, wish I might—”
They looked at each other, and he saw that tears were streaming down her cheeks. His own came again, and he let them fall in her sight. This was not a shame but an inexpressible relief.
They smiled at each other.
“Have the wish I wish tonight,” Eddie said, and thought: Please, always you.
“Have the wish I wish tonight,” she echoed, and thought If I must die in this odd place, please let it not be too hard and let this good young man be with me.
“I’m sorry I cried,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I don’t usually, but it’s been—”
“A very trying day,” he finished for her.
“Yes. And you need to eat, Eddie.”
“You do, too.”
“I just hope it doesn’t make me sick again.”
He smiled at her.
“I don’t think it will.”
6
Later, with strange galaxies turning in slow gavotte overhead, neither thought the act of love had ever been so sweet, so full.
7
They were off with the dawn, racing, and by nine Eddie was wishing he had asked Roland what he should do if they came to the place where the hills cut off the beach and there was still no door in sight. It seemed a question of some importance, because the end of the beach was coming, no doubt about that. The hills marched ever closer, running in a diagonal line toward the water.
The beach itself was no longer a beach at all, not really; the soil was now firm and quite smooth. Something—run-off, he supposed, or flooding at some rainy season (there had been none since he had been in this world, not a drop; the sky had clouded over a few times, but then the clouds had blown away again)—had worn most of the jutting rocks away.
At nine-thirty, Odetta cried: “Stop, Eddie! Stop!”
He stopped so abruptly that she had to grab the arms of the chair to keep from tumbling out. He was around to her in a flash.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“Fine.” He saw he had mistaken excitement for distress. She pointed. “Up there! Do you see something?”
He shaded his eyes and saw nothing. He squinted. For just a moment he thought . . . no, it was surely just heat-shimmer rising from the packed ground.
“I don’t think so,” he said, and smiled. “Except maybe your wish.”
“I think I do!” She turned her excited, smiling face to him. “Standing all by itself! Near where the beach ends.”
He looked again, squinting so hard this time that his eyes watered. He thought again for just a moment that he saw something. You did, he thought, and smiled. You saw her wish.
“Maybe,�
� he said, not because he believed it but because she did.
“Let’s go!”
Eddie went behind the chair again, taking a moment to massage his lower back where a steady ache had settled. She looked around.
“What are you waiting for?”
“You really think you’ve got it spotted, don’t you?”
“Yes!”
“Well then, let’s go!”
Eddie started pushing again.
8
Half an hour later he saw it, too. Jesus, he thought, her eyes are as good as Roland’s. Maybe better.
Neither wanted to stop for lunch, but they needed to eat. They made a quick meal and then pushed on again. The tide was coming in and Eddie looked to the right—west—with rising unease. They were still well above the tangled line of kelp and seaweed that marked high water, but he thought that by the time they reached the door they would be in an uncomfortably tight angle bounded by the sea on one side and the slanting hills on the other. He could see those hills very clearly now. There was nothing pleasant about the view. They were rocky, studded with low trees that curled their roots into the ground like arthritic knuckles, keeping a grim grip, and thorny-looking bushes. They weren’t really steep, but too steep for the wheelchair. He might be able to carry her up a way, might, in fact, be forced to, but he didn’t fancy leaving her there.
For the first time he was hearing insects. The sound was a little like crickets, but higher pitched than that, and with no swing of rhythm—just a steady monotonous riiiiiiii sound like power-lines. For the first time he was seeing birds other than gulls. Some were biggies that circled inland on stiff wings. Hawks, he thought. He saw them fold their wings from time to time and plummet like stones. Hunting. Hunting what? Well, small animals. That was all right.
Yet he kept thinking of that yowl he’d heard in the night.
By mid-afternoon they could see the third door clearly. Like the other two, it was an impossibility which nonetheless stood as stark as a post.
