by Stephen King
“Ow!”
The match had reached her fingers. She shook it out.
“Jane?” Paula asked. “You all right?”
“Fine. Daydreaming.”
She lit another match and this time did the job right. She had only taken a single drag when the perfectly reasonable explanation occurred to her. He wore contacts. Of course. The kind that changed the color of your eyes. He had gone into the bathroom. He had been in there long enough for her to worry about him being airsick—he had that pallid complexion, the look of a man who is not quite well. But he had only been taking out his contact lenses so he could nap more comfortably. Perfectly reasonable.
You may feel something, a voice from her own not-so-distant past spoke suddenly. Some little tickle. You may see something just a little bit wrong.
Colored contact lenses.
Jane Doming personally knew over two dozen people who wore contacts. Most of them worked for the airline. No one ever said anything about it, but she thought maybe one reason was they all sensed the passengers didn’t like to see flight personnel wearing glasses—it made them nervous.
Of all those people, she knew maybe four who had color-contacts. Ordinary contact lenses were expensive; colored ones cost the earth. All of the people of Jane’s acquaintance who cared to lay out that sort of money were women, all of them extremely vain.
So what? Guys can be vain, too. Why not? He’s good-looking.
No. He wasn’t. Cute, maybe, but that was as far as it went, and with the pallid complexion he only made it to cute by the skin of his teeth. So why the color-contacts?
Airline passengers are often afraid of flying.
In a world where hijacking and drug-smuggling had become facts of life, airline personnel are often afraid of passengers.
The voice that had initiated these thoughts had been that of an instructor at flight school, a tough old battle-axe who looked as if she could have flown the mail with Wiley Post, saying: Don’t ignore your suspicions. If you forget every thing else you’ve learned about coping with potential or actual terrorists, remember this: don’t ignore your suspicions. In some cases you’ll get a crew who’ll say during the debriefing that they didn’t have any idea until the guy pulled out a grenade and said hang a left for Cuba or everyone on the aircraft is going to join the jet-stream. But in most cases you get two or three different people—mostly flight attendants, which you women will be in less than a month—who say they felt something. Some little tickle. A sense that the guy in 91C or the young woman in 5A was a little wrong. They felt something, but they did nothing. Did they get fired for that? Christ, no! You can’t put a guy in restraints because you don’t like the way he scratches his pimples. The real problem is they felt something … and then forgot.
The old battle-axe had raised one blunt finger. Jane Doming, along with her fellow classmates, had listened raptly as she said, If you feel that little tickle, don’t do anything… but that includes not forgetting. Because there’s always that one little chance that you just might be able to stop something before it gets started … something like an unscheduled twelve-day layover on the tarmac of some shitpot Arab country.
Just colored contacts, but…
Thankee, sai.
Sleep-talk? Or a muddled lapse into some other language?
She would watch, Jane decided.
And she would not forget.
10
Now, the gunslinger thought. Now we’ll see, won’t we?
He had been able to come from his world into this body through the door on the beach. What he needed to find out was whether or not he could carry things back. Oh, not himself, he was confident that he could return through the door and reenter his own poisoned, sickening body at any time he should desire. But other things? Physical things? Here, for instance, in front of him, was food: something the woman in the uniform had called a tooter-fish sandwich. The gunslinger had no idea what tooter-fish was, but he knew a popkin when he saw it, although this one looked curiously uncooked.
His body needed to eat, and his body would need to drink, but more than either, his body needed some sort of medicine. It would die from the lobstrosity’s bite without it. There might be such medicine in this world; in a world where carriages rode through the air far above where even the strongest eagle could fly, anything seemed possible. But it would not matter how much powerful medicine there was here if he could carry nothing physical through the door.
You could live in this body, gunslinger, the voice of the man in black whispered deep inside his head. Leave that piece of breathing meat over there for the lobster-things. It’s only a husk, anyway.
He would not do that. For one thing it would be the most murderous sort of thievery, because he would not be content to be just a passenger for long, looking out of this man’s eyes like a traveller looking out of a coach window at the passing scenery.
For another, he was Roland. If dying was required, he intended to die as Roland. He would die crawling toward the Tower, if that was what was required.
Then the odd harsh practicality that lived beside the romantic in his nature like a tiger with a roe reasserted itself. There was no need to think of dying with the experiment not yet made.
He picked up the popkin. It had been cut in two halves. He held one in each hand. He opened the prisoner’s eyes and looked out of them. No one was looking at him (although, in the galley, Jane Doming was thinking about him, and very hard).
Roland turned toward the door and went through, holding the popkin-halves in his hands.
11
First he heard the grinding roar of an incoming wave; next he heard the argument of many seabirds arising from the closest rocks as he struggled to a sitting position (cowardly buggers were creeping up, he thought, and they would have been taking pecks out of me soon enough, still breathing or no—they’re nothing but vultures with a coat of paint); then he became aware that one popkin half—the one in his right hand—had tumbled onto the hard gray sand because he had been holding it with a whole hand when he came through the door and now was—or had been—holding it in a hand which had suffered a forty per cent reduction.
He picked it up clumsily, pinching it between his thumb and ring finger, brushed as much of the sand from it as he could, and took a tentative bite. A moment later he was wolfing it, not noticing the few bits of sand which ground between his teeth. Seconds later he turned his attention to the other half. It was gone in three bites.
The gunslinger had no idea what tooter-fish was—only that it was delicious. That seemed enough.
12
In the plane, no one saw the tuna sandwich disappear. No one saw Eddie Dean’s hands grasp the two halves of it tightly enough to make deep thumb-indentations in the white bread.
No one saw the sandwich fade to transparency, then disappear, leaving only a few crumbs.
About twenty seconds after this had happened, Jane Doming snuffed her cigarette and crossed the head of the cabin. She got her book from her totebag, but what she really wanted was another look at 3A.
He appeared to be deeply asleep… but the sandwich was gone.
Jesus, Jane thought. He didn’t eat it; he swallowed it whole. And now he’s asleep again? Are you kidding?
Whatever was tickling at her about 3A, Mr. Now-They’re-Hazel-Now-They’re-Blue, kept right on tickling. Something about him was not right.
Something.
CHAPTER 3
CONTACT AND LANDING
1
Eddie was awakened by an announcement from the copilot that they should be landing at Kennedy International, where the visibility was unlimited, the winds out of the west at ten miles an hour, and the temperature a jolly seventy degrees, in forty-five minutes or so. He told them that, if he didn’t get another chance, he wanted to thank them one and all for choosing Delta.
He looked around and saw people checking their duty declaration cards and their proofs of citizenship—coming in from Nassau your driver’s
license and a credit card with a stateside bank listed on it was supposed to be enough, but most still carried passports—and Eddie felt a steel wire start to tighten inside him. He still couldn’t believe he had gone to sleep, and so soundly.
He got up and went to the restroom. The bags of coke under his arms felt as if they were resting easily and firmly, fitting as nicely to the contours of his sides as they had in the hotel room where a soft-spoken American named William Wilson had strapped them on. Following the strapping operation, the man whose name Poe had made famous (Wilson had only looked blankly at Eddie when Eddie made some allusion to this) handed over the shirt. Just an ordinary paisley shirt, a little faded, the sort of thing any frat-boy might wear back on the plane following a short pre-exams holiday … except this one was specially tailored to hide unsightly bulges.
”You check everything once before you set down just to be sure,” Wilson said, “but you’re gonna be fine.”
Eddie didn’t know if he was going to be fine or not, but he had another reason for wanting to use the John before the FASTEN SEATBELTS light came on. In spite of all temptation— and most of last night it hadn’t been temptation but raging need—he had managed to hold onto the last little bit of what the sallow thing had had the temerity to call China White.
Clearing customs from Nassau wasn’t like clearing customs from Haiti or Quincon or Bogota, but there were still people watching. Trained people. He needed any and every edge he could get. If he could go in there a little cooled out, just a little, it might be the one thing that put him over the top.
He snorted the powder, flushed the little twist of paper it had been in down the John, then washed his hands.
Of course, if you make it, you’ll never know, will you? he thought. No. He wouldn’t. And wouldn’t care.
On his way back to his seat he saw the stewardess who had brought him the drink he hadn’t finished. She smiled at him. He smiled back, sat down, buckled his seat-belt, took out the flight magazine, turned the pages, and looked at pictures and words. Neither made any impression on them. That steel wire continued to tighten around his gut, and when the FASTEN SEATBELTS light did come on, it took a double turn and cinched tight.
The heroin had hit—he had the sniffles to prove it—but he sure couldn’t feel it.
One thing he did feel shortly before landing was another of those unsettling periods of blankness … short, but most definitely there.
The 727 banked over the water of Long Island Sound and started in.
2
Jane Doming had been in the business class galley, helping Peter and Anne stow the last of the after-meal drinks glasses when the guy who looked like a college kid went into the first class bathroom.
He was returning to his seat when she brushed aside the curtain between business and first, and she quickened her step without even thinking about it, catching him with her smile, making him look up and smile back.
His eyes were hazel again.
All right, all right. He went into the John and took them out before his nap; he went into the John and put them in again afterwards. For Christ’s sake, Janey! You’re being a goose!
She wasn’t, though. It was nothing she could put her finger on, but she was not being a goose.
He’s too pale.
So what? Thousands of people are too pale, including your own mother since her gall bladder went to hell.
He had very arresting blue eyes—maybe not as cute as the hazel contacts—but certainly arresting. So why the bother and expense?
Because he likes designer eyes. Isn’t that enough?
No.
Shortly before FASTEN SEAT BELTS and final cross-check, she did something she had never done before; she did it with that tough old battle-axe of an instructor in mind. She filled a Thermos bottle with hot coffee and put on the red plastic top without first pushing the stopper into the bottle’s throat. She screwed the top on only until she felt it catch the first thread.
Susy Douglas was making the final approach announcement, telling the geese to extinguish their cigarettes, telling them they would have to stow what they had taken out, telling them a Delta gate agent would meet the flight, telling them to check and make sure they had their duty-declaration cards and proofs of citizenship, telling them it would now be necessary to pick up all cups, glasses and speaker sets.
I’m surprised we don’t have to check to make sure they’re dry, Jane thought distractedly. She felt her own steel wire wrapping itself around her guts, cinching them tight.
“Get my side,” Jane said as Susy hung up the mike.
Susy glanced at the Thermos, then at Jane’s face. “Jane? Are you sick? You look as white as a—”
“I’m not sick. Get my side. I’ll explain when you get back.” Jane glanced briefly at the jump-seats beside the left-hand exit door. “I want to ride shotgun.”
“Jane-”
“Get my side.”
“All right,” Susy said. “All right, Jane. No problem.”
Jane Doming sat down in the jump-seat closest to the aisle. She held the Thermos in her hands and made no move to fasten the web-harness. She wanted to keep the Thermos in complete control, and that meant both hands.
Susy thinks I’ve flipped out.
Jane hoped she had.
If Captain McDonald lands hard, I’m going to have blisters all over my hands.
She would risk it.
The plane was dropping. The man in 3A, the man with the two-tone eyes and the pale face, suddenly leaned down and pulled his travelling bag from under the seat.
This is it, Jane thought. This is where he brings out the grenade or the automatic weapon or whatever the hell he’s got.
And the moment she saw it, the very moment, she was going to flip the red top off the Thermos in her slightly trembling hands, and there was going to be one very surprised Friend of Allah rolling around on the aisle floor of Delta Flight 901 while his skin boiled on his face.
3A unzipped the bag.
Jane got ready.
3
The gunslinger thought this man, prisoner or not, was probably better at the fine art of survival than any of the other men he had seen in the aircarriage. The others were fat things, for the most part, and even those who looked reasonably fit also looked open, unguarded, their faces those of spoiled and cosseted children, the faces of men who would fight— eventually—but who would whine almost endlessly before they did; you could let their guts out onto their shoes and their last expressions would not be rage or agony but stupid surprise.
The prisoner was better… but not good enough. Not at all.
The army woman. She saw something. I don’t know what, but she saw something wrong. She’s awake to him in a way she’s not to the others.
The prisoner sat down. Looked at a limp-covered book he thought of as a “Magda-Seen,” although who Magda might have been or what she might have seen mattered not a whit to Roland. The gunslinger did not want to look at a book, amazing as such things were; he wanted to look at the woman in the army uniform. The urge to come forward and take control was very great. But he held against it… at least for the time being.
The prisoner had gone somewhere and gotten a drug. Not the drug he himself took, nor one that would help cure the gunslinger’s sick body, but one that people paid a lot of money for because it was against the law. He would give this drug to his brother, who would in turn give it to a man named Balazar. The deal would be complete when Balazar traded them the kind of drug they took for this one—if, that was, the prisoner was able to correctly perform a ritual unknown to the gunslinger (and a world as strange as this must of necessity have many strange rituals); it was called Clearing the Customs.
But the woman sees him.
Could she keep him from Clearing the Customs? Roland thought the answer was probably yes. And then? Gaol. And if the prisoner were gaoled, there would be no place to get the sort of medicine his infected, dying body needed.
He
must Clear the Customs, Roland thought. He must. And he must go with his brother to this man Balazar. It’s not in the plan, the brother won’t like it, but he must.
Because a man who dealt in drugs would either know a man or be a man who also cured the sick. A man who could listen to what was wrong and then … maybe …
He must Clear the Customs, the gunslinger thought.
The answer was so large and simple, so close to him, that he very nearly did not see it at all. It was the drug the prisoner meant to smuggle in that would make Clearing the Customs so difficult, of course; there might be some sort of Oracle who might be consulted in the cases of people who seemed suspicious. Otherwise, Roland gleaned, the Clearing ceremony would be simplicity itself, as crossing a friendly border was in his own world. One made the sign of fealty to that kingdom’s monarch—a simple token gesture—and was allowed to pass.
He was able to take things from the prisoner’s world to his own. The tooter-fish popkin proved that. He would take the bags of drugs as he had taken the popkin. The prisoner would Clear the Customs. And then Roland would bring the bags of drugs back.
Can you?
Ah, here was a question disturbing enough to distract him from the view of the water below … they had gone over what looked like a huge ocean and were now turning back toward the coastline. As they did, the water grew steadily closer. The aircarriage was coming down (Eddie’s glance was brief, cursory; the gunslinger’s as rapt as the child seeing his first snowfall). He could take things from this world, that he knew. But bring them back again? That was a thing of which he as yet had no knowing. He would have to find out.
The gunslinger reached into the prisoner’s pocket and closed the prisoner’s fingers over a coin.
Roland went back through the door.
4
The birds flew away when he sat up. They hadn’t dared come as close this time. He ached; he was woozy, feverish … yet it was amazing how much even a little bit of nourishment had revived him.
He looked at the coin he had brought back with him this time. It looked like silver, but the reddish tint at the edge suggested it was really made of some baser metal. On one side was a profile of a man whose face suggested nobility, courage, stubbornness. His hair, both curled at the base of the skull and pigged at the nape of the neck, suggested a bit of vanity as well. He turned the coin over and saw something so startling it caused him to cry out in a rusty, croaking voice.
