by Stephen King
“Amazing,” he heard her say softly. “How utterly amazing.”
It was exactly where he had begun to surmise it would be, in the angle that marked the end of any easy northward progress. It stood just above the high tide line and less than nine yards from the place where the hills suddenly leaped out of the ground like a giant hand coated with gray-green brush instead of hair.
The tide came full as the sun swooned toward the water; and at what might have been four o’clock—Odetta said so, and since she had said she was good at telling the sun (and because she was his beloved), Eddie believed her—they reached the door.
9
They simply looked at it, Odetta in her chair with her hands in her lap, Eddie on the sea-side. In one way they looked at it as they had looked at the evening star the previous night—which is to say, as children look at things—but in another they looked differently. When they wished on the star they had been children of joy. Now they were solemn, wondering, like children looking at the stark embodiment of a thing which only belonged in a fairy tale.
Two words were written on this door.
“What does it mean?” Odetta asked finally.
“I don’t know,” Eddie said, but those words had brought a hopeless chill; he felt an eclipse stealing across his heart.
“Don’t you?” she asked, looking at him more closely.
“No. I . . .” He swallowed. “No.”
She looked at him a moment longer. “Push me behind it, please. I’d like to see that. I know you want to get back to him, but would you do that for me?”
He would.
They started around, on the high side of the door.
“Wait!” she cried. “Did you see it?”
“What?”
“Go back! Look! Watch!”
This time he watched the door instead of what might be ahead to trip them up. As they went above it he saw it narrow in perspective, saw its hinges, hinges which seemed to be buried in nothing at all, saw its thickness . . .
Then it was gone.
The thickness of the door was gone.
His view of the water should have been interrupted by three, perhaps even four inches of solid wood (the door looked extraordinarily stout), but there was no such interruption.
The door was gone.
Its shadow was there, but the door was gone.
He rolled the chair back two feet, so he was just south of the place where the door stood, and the thickness was there.
“You see it?” he asked in a ragged voice.
“Yes! It’s there again!”
He rolled the chair forward a foot. The door was still there. Another six inches. Still there. Another two inches. Still there. Another inch . . . and it was gone. Solid gone.
“Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus Christ.”
“Would it open for you?” she asked. “Or me?”
He stepped forward slowly and grasped the knob of the door with those two words upon it.
He tried clockwise; he tried anti-clockwise.
The knob moved not an iota.
“All right.” Her voice was calm, resigned. “It’s for him, then. I think we both knew it. Go for him, Eddie. Now.”
“First I’ve got to see to you.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“No you won’t. You’re too close to the high-tide line. If I leave you here, the lobsters are going to come out when it gets dark and you’re going to be din—”
Up in the hills, a cat’s coughing growl suddenly cut across what he was saying like a knife cutting thin cord. It was a good distance away, but closer than the other had been.
Her eyes flicked to the gunslinger’s revolver shoved into the waistband of his pants for just a moment, then back to his face. He felt a dull heat in his cheeks.
“He told you not to give it to me, didn’t he?” she said softly. “He doesn’t want me to have it. For some reason he doesn’t want me to have it.”
“The shells got wet,” he said awkwardly. “They probably wouldn’t fire, anyway.”
“I understand. Take me a little way up the slope, Eddie, can you? I know how tired your back must be, Andrew calls it Wheelchair Crouch, but if you take me up a little way, I’ll be safe from the lobsters. I doubt if anything else comes very close to where they are.”
Eddie thought, When the tide’s in, she’s probably right . . . but what about when it starts to go out again?
“Give me something to eat and some stones,” she said, and her unknowing echo of the gunslinger made Eddie flush again. His cheeks and forehead felt like the sides of a brick oven.
She looked at him, smiled faintly, and shook her head as if he had spoken out loud. “We’re not going to argue about this. I saw how it is with him. His time is very, very short. There is no time for discussion. Take me up a little way, give me food and some stones, then take the chair and go.”
10
He got her fixed as quickly as he could, then pulled the gunslinger’s revolver and held it out to her butt-first. But she shook her head.
“He’ll be angry with both of us. Angry with you for giving, angrier at me for taking.”
“Crap!” Eddie yelled. “What gave you that idea?”
“I know,” she said, and her voice was impervious.
“Well, suppose that’s true. Just suppose. I’ll be angry with you if you don’t take it.”
“Put it back. I don’t like guns. I don’t know how to use them. If something came at me in the dark the first thing I’d do is wet my pants. The second thing I’d do is point it the wrong way and shoot myself.” She paused, looking at Eddie solemnly. “There’s something else, and you might as well know it. I don’t want to touch anything that belongs to him. Not anything. For me, I think his things might have what my Ma used to call a hoodoo. I like to think of myself as a modern woman . . . but I don’t want any hoodoo on me when you’re gone and the dark lands on top of me.”
He looked from the gun to Odetta, and his eyes still questioned.
“Put it back,” she said, stern as a schoolteacher. Eddie burst out laughing and obeyed.
“Why are you laughing?”
“Because when you said that you sounded like Miss Hathaway. She was my third-grade teacher.”
She smiled a little, her luminous eyes never leaving his. She sang softly, sweetly: “Heavenly shades of night are falling . . . it’s twilight time . . .” She trailed off and they both looked west, but the star they had wished on the previous evening had not yet appeared, although their shadows had drawn long.
“Is there anything else, Odetta?” He felt an urge to delay and delay. He thought it would pass once he was actually headed back, but now the urge to seize any excuse to remain, seemed very strong.
“A kiss. I could do with that, if you don’t mind.”
He kissed her long and when their lips no longer touched, she caught his wrist and stared at him intently. “I never made love with a white man before last night,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s important to you or not. I don’t even know if it’s important to me. But I thought you should know.”
He considered.
“Not to me,” he said. “In the dark, I think we were both gray. I love you, Odetta.”
She put a hand over his.
“You’re a sweet young man and perhaps I love you, too, although it’s too early for either of us—”
At that moment, as if given a cue, a wildcat growled in what the gunslinger had called the brakes. It still sounded four or five miles away, but that was still four or five miles closer than the last time they heard it, and it sounded big.
They turned their heads toward the sound. Eddie felt hackles trying to stand up on his neck. They couldn’t quite make it. Sorry, hackles, he thought stupidly. I guess my hair’s just a little too long now.
The growl rose to a tortured scream that sounded like a cry of some being suffering a horrid death (it might actually have signalled no more than a successful mating). It held for a
moment, almost unbearable, and then it wound down, sliding through lower and lower registers until it was gone or buried beneath the ceaseless cry of the wind. They waited for it to come again, but the cry was not repeated. As far as Eddie was concerned, that didn’t matter. He pulled the revolver out of his waistband again and held it out to her.
“Take it and don’t argue. If you should need to use it, it won’t do shit—that’s how stuff like this always works—but take it anyway.”
“Do you want an argument?”
“Oh, you can argue. You can argue all you want.”
After a considering look into Eddie’s almost-hazel eyes, she smiled a little wearily. “I won’t argue, I guess.” She took the gun. “Please be as quick as you can.”
“I will.” He kissed her again, hurriedly this time, and almost told her to be careful . . . but seriously, folks, how careful could she be, with the situation what it was?
He picked his way back down the slope through the deepening shadows (the lobstrosities weren’t out yet, but they would be putting in their nightly appearance soon), and looked at the words written upon the door again. The same chill rose in his flesh. They were apt, those words. God, they were so apt. Then he looked back up the slope. For a moment he couldn’t see her, and then he saw something move. The lighter brown of one palm. She was waving.
He waved back, then turned the wheelchair and began to run with it tipped up in front of him so the smaller, more delicate front wheels would be off the ground. He ran south, back the way he had come. For the first half-hour or so his shadow ran with him, the improbable shadow of a scrawny giant tacked to the soles of his sneakers and stretching long yards to the east. Then the sun went down, his shadow was gone, and the lobstrosities began to tumble out of the waves.
It was ten minutes or so after he heard the first of their buzzing cries when he looked up and saw the evening star glowing calmly against the dark blue velvet of the sky.
Heavenly shades of night are falling . . . it’s twilight time . . .
Let her be safe. His legs were already aching, his breath too hot and heavy in his lungs, and there was still a third trip to make, this time with the gunslinger as his passenger, and although he guessed Roland must outweigh Odetta by a full hundred pounds and knew he should conserve his strength, Eddie kept running anyway. Let her be safe, that’s my wish, let my beloved be safe.
And, like an ill omen, a wildcat screeched somewhere in the tortured ravines that cut through the hills . . . only this wildcat sounded as big as a lion roaring in an African jungle.
Eddie ran faster, pushing the untenanted gantry of the wheelchair before him. Soon the wind began to make a thin, ghastly whine through the freely turning spokes of the raised front wheels.
11
The gunslinger heard a reedy wailing sound approaching him, tensed for a moment, then heard panting breath and relaxed. It was Eddie. Even without opening his eyes he knew that.
When the wailing sound faded and the running footsteps slowed, Roland opened his eyes. Eddie stood panting before him with sweat running down the sides of his face. His shirt was plastered against his chest in a single dark blotch. Any last vestiges of the college-boy look Jack Andolini had insisted upon were gone. His hair hung over his forehead. He had split his pants at the crotch. The bluish-purple crescents under his eyes completed the picture. Eddie Dean was a mess.
“I made it,” he said. “I’m here.” He looked around, then back at the gunslinger, as if he could not believe it. “Jesus Christ, I’m really here.”
“You gave her the gun.”
Eddie thought the gunslinger looked bad—as bad as he’d looked before the first abbreviated round of Keflex, maybe a trifle worse. Fever-heat seemed to be coming off him in waves, and he knew he should have felt sorry for him, but for the moment all he could seem to feel was mad as hell.
“I bust my ass getting back here in record time and all you can say is ‘You gave her the gun.’ Thanks, man. I mean, I expected some expression of gratitude, but this is just over-fucking-whelming.”
“I think I said the only thing that matters.”
“Well, now that you mention it, I did,” Eddie said, putting his hands on his hips and staring truculently down at the gunslinger. “Now you have your choice. You can get in this chair or I can fold it and try to jam it up your ass. Which do you prefer, mawster?”
“Neither.” Roland was smiling a little, the smile of a man who doesn’t want to smile but can’t help it. “First you’re going to take some sleep, Eddie. We’ll see what we’ll see when the time for seeing comes, but for now you need sleep. You’re done in.”
“I want to get back to her.”
“I do, too. But if you don’t rest, you’re going to fall down in the traces. Simple as that. Bad for you, worse for me, and worst of all for her.”
Eddie stood for a moment, undecided.
“You made good time,” the gunslinger conceded. He squinted at the sun. “It’s four, maybe a quarter-past. You sleep five, maybe seven hours, and it’ll be full dark—”
“Four. Four hours.”
“All right. Until after dark; I think that’s the important thing. Then you eat. Then we move.”
“You eat, too.”
That faint smile again. “I’ll try.” He looked at Eddie calmly. “Your life is in my hands now; I suppose you know that.”
“Yes.”
“I kidnapped you.”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to kill me? If you do, do it now rather than subject any of us to . . .” His breath whistled out softly. Eddie heard his chest rattling and cared very little for the sound. “. . . to any further discomfort,” he finished.
“I don’t want to kill you.”
“Then—” he was interrupted by a sudden harsh burst of coughing “—lie down,” he finished.
Eddie did. Sleep did not drift upon him as it sometimes did but seized him with the rough hands of a lover who is awkward in her eagerness. He heard (or perhaps this was only a dream) Roland saying, But you shouldn’t have given her the gun, and then he was simply in the dark for an unknown time and then Roland was shaking him awake and when he finally sat up all there seemed to be in his body was pain: pain and weight. His muscles had turned into rusty winches and pullies in a deserted building. His first effort to get to his feet didn’t work. He thumped heavily back to the sand. He managed it on the second try, but he felt as if it might take him twenty minutes just to perform such a simple act as turning around. And it would hurt to do it.
Roland’s eyes were on him, questioning. “Are you ready?”
Eddie nodded. “Yes. Are you?”
“Yes.”
“Can you?”
“Yes.”
So they ate . . . and then Eddie began his third and last trip along this cursed stretch of beach.
12
They rolled a good stretch that night, but Eddie was still dully disappointed when the gunslinger called a halt. He offered no disagreement because he was simply too weary to go on without rest, but he had hoped to get further. The weight. That was the big problem. Compared to Odetta, pushing Roland was like pushing a load of iron bars. Eddie slept four more hours before dawn, woke with the sun coming over the eroding hills which were all that remained of the mountains, and listened to the gunslinger coughing. It was a weak cough, full of rales, the cough of an old man who may be coming down with pneumonia.
Their eyes met. Roland’s coughing spasm turned into a laugh.
“I’m not done yet, Eddie, no matter how I sound. Are you?”
Eddie thought of Odetta’s eyes and shook his head.
“Not done, but I could use a cheeseburger and a Bud.”
“Bud?” the gunslinger said doubtfully, thinking of apple trees and the spring flowers in the Royal Court Gardens.
“Never mind. Hop in, my man. No four on the floor, no T-top, but we’re going to roll some miles just the same.”
And they did, but when sunset
came on the second day following his leave-taking of Odetta, they were still only drawing near the place of the third door. Eddie lay down, meaning to crash for another four hours, but the screaming cry of one of those cats jerked him out of sleep after only two hours, his heart thumping. God, the thing sounded fucking huge.
He saw the gunslinger up on one elbow, his eyes gleaming in the dark.
“You ready?” Eddie asked. He got slowly to his feet, grinning with pain.
“Are you?” Roland asked again, very softly.
Eddie twisted his back, producing a series of pops like a string of tiny firecrackers. “Yeah. But I could really get behind that cheeseburger.”
“I thought chicken was what you wanted.”
Eddie groaned. “Cut me a break, man.”
The third door was in plain view by the time the sun cleared the hills. Two hours later, they reached it.
All together again, Eddie thought, ready to drop to the sand.
But that was apparently not so. There was no sign of Odetta Holmes. No sign at all.
13
“Odetta!” Eddie screamed, and now his voice was broken and hoarse as the voice of Odetta’s other had been.
There wasn’t even an echo in return, something he might at least have mistaken for Odetta’s voice. These low, eroded hills would not bounce sound. There was only the crash of the waves, much louder in this tight arrowhead of land, the rhythmic, hollow boom of surf crashing to the end of some tunnel it had dug in the friable rock, and the steady keening of the wind.
“Odetta!”
This time he screamed so loudly his voice broke and for a moment something sharp, like a jag of fishbone, tore at his vocal cords. His eyes scanned the hills frantically, looking for the lighter patch of brown that would be her palm, looking for movement as she stood up . . . looking (God forgive him) for bright splashes of blood on roan-colored rock.
He found himself wondering what he would do if he saw that last, or found the revolver, now with deep toothmarks driven into the smooth sandalwood of the grips. The sight of something like that might drive him into hysteria, might even run him crazy, but he looked for it—or something—just the same.
