The Drawing of the Three dt-2

by Стивен Кинг

  8

  The moment the gunslinger heard the dressing room door bang shut behind him, he rammed the wheelchair around in a half turn, looking for the doorway. If Eddie had done what he had promised, it would be gone.

  But the door was open. Roland wheeled the Lady of Shadows through it.

  CHAPTER 3

  ODETTA ON THE OTHER SIDE

  1

  Not long after, Roland would think: Any other woman, crippled or otherwise, suddenly shoved all the way down the aisle of the mart in which she was doing business—monkey-business, you may call it if you like—by a stranger inside her head, shoved into a little room while some man behind her yelled for her to stop, then suddenly turned, shoved again where there was by rights no room in which to shove, then finding herself suddenly in an entirely different world …I think any other woman, under those circumstances, would have most certainly have asked "Where am I?" before all else.

  Instead, Odetta Holmes asked almost pleasantly, "What exactly are you planning to do with that knife, young man?"

  2

  Roland looked up at Eddie, who was crouched with his knife held less than a quarter of an inch over the skin. Even with his uncanny speed, there was no way the gunslinger could move fast enough to evade the blade if Eddie decided to use it.

  "Yes," Roland said. "What are you planning to do with it?"

  "I don't know," Eddie said, sounding completely disgusted with himself. "Cut bait, I guess. Sure doesn't look like I came here to fish, does it?"

  He threw the knife toward the Lady's chair, but well to the right. It stuck, quivering, in the sand to its hilt.

  Then the Lady turned her head and began, "I wonder if you could please explain where you've taken m―"

  She stopped. She had said Iwonder if you before her head had gotten around far enough to see there was no one behind her, but the gunslinger observed with some real interest that she went on speaking for a moment anyway, because the fact of her condition made certain things elementary truths of her life—if she had moved, for instance, someone must have moved her. But there was no one behind her.

  No one at all.

  She looked back at Eddie and the gunslinger, her dark eyes troubled, confused, and alarmed, and now she asked. "Where am I? Who pushed me? How can I be here? How can I be dressed, for that matter, when I was home watching the twelve o'clock news in my robe? Who am I? Where is this? Who are you?"

  "Who am I?" she asked, the gunslinger thought. The dam broke and there was a flood of questions; that was to be expected. But that one question―"Who am I?"―even now I don't think she knows she asked it.

  Or when.

  Because she had asked before.

  Even before she had asked who they were, she had asked who she was.

  3

  Eddie looked from the lovely young/old face of the black woman in the wheelchair to Roland's face.

  "How come she doesn't know?"

  "I can't say. Shock, I suppose."

  "Shock took her all the way back to her living room, before she left for Macy's? You telling me the last thing she remembers is sitting in her bathrobe and listening to some blow-dried dude talk about how they found that gonzo down in the Florida Keys with Christa McAuliff's left hand mounted on his den wall next to his prize marlin?"

  Roland didn't answer.

  More dazed than ever, the Lady said, "Who is Christa McAuliff? Is she one of the missing Freedom Riders?"

  Now it was Eddie's turn not to answer. Freedom Riders? What the hell were they?

  The gunslinger glanced at him and Eddie was able to read his eyes easily enough: Can't you see she's in shock?

  I know what you mean, Roland old buddy, but it only washes up to a point. I felt a little shock myself when you came busting into my head like Walter Payton on crack, but it didn't wipe out my memory banks.

  Speaking of shock, he'd gotten another pretty good jolt when she came through. He had been kneeling over Roland's inert body, the knife just above the vulnerable skin of the throat … but the truth was Eddie couldn't have used the knife anyway―not then, anyway. He was staring into the doorway, hypnotized, as an aisle of Macy's rushed forward―he was reminded again of The Shining, where you saw what the little boy was seeing as he rode his trike through the hallways of that haunted hotel. He remembered the little boy had seen this creepy pair of dead twins in one of those hallways. The end of this aisle was much more mundane: a white door. The words ONLY TWO GARMENTS AT ONE TIME, PLEASE were printed on it in discreet lettering. Yeah, it was Macy's, all right. Macy's for sure.

  One black hand flew out and slammed the door open while the male voice (a cop voice if Eddie had ever heard one, and he had heard many in his time) behind yelled for her to quit it, that was no way out, she was only making things a helluva lot worse for herself, and Eddie caught a bare glimpse of the black woman in the wheelchair in the mirror to the left, and he remembered thinking Jesus, he's got her, all right, but she sure don't look happy about it.

  Then the view pivoted and Eddie was looking at himself. The view rushed toward the viewer and he wanted to put up the hand holding the knife to shield his eyes because all at once the sensation of looking through two sets of eyes was too much, too crazy, it was going to drive him crazy if he didn't shut it out, but it all happened too fast for him to have time.

  The wheelchair came through the door. It was a tight fit; Eddie heard its hubs squeal on the sides. At the same moment he heard another sound: a thick tearing sound that made him think of some word

  (placental)

  that he couldn't quite think of because he didn't know he knew it. Then the woman was rolling toward him on the hard-packed sand, and she no longer looked mad as hell―hardly looked like the woman Eddie had glimpsed in the mirror at all, for that matter, but he supposed that wasn't surprising; when you all at once went from a changing-room at Macy's to the seashore of a godforsaken world where some of the lobsters were the size of small Collie dogs, it left you feeling a little winded. That was a subject on which Eddie Dean felt he could personally give testimony.

  She rolled about four feet before stopping, and only went that far because of the slope and the gritty pack of the sand. Her hands were no longer pumping the wheels, as they must have been doing (when you wake up with sore shoulders tomorrow you can blame them on Sir Roland, lady, Eddie thought sourly). Instead they went to the arms of the chair and gripped them as she regarded the two men.

  Behind her, the doorway had already disappeared. Disappeared? That was not quite right. It seemed to fold in on itself, like a piece of film run backward. This began to happen just as the store dick came slamming through the other, more mundane door―the one between the store and the dressing room. He was coming hard, expecting the shoplifter would have locked the door, and Eddie thought he was going to take one hell of a splat against the far wall, but Eddie was never going to see it happen or not happen. Before the shrinking space where the door between that world and this disappeared entirely, Eddie saw everything on that side freeze solid.

  The movie had become a still photograph.

  All that remained now were the dual tracks of the wheel-chair, starting in sandy nowhere and running four feet to where it and its occupant now sat.

  "Won't somebody please explain where I am and how I got here?" the woman in the wheelchair asked―almost pleaded.

  "Well, I'll tell you one thing, Dorothy," Eddie said. "You ain't in Kansas anymore."

  The woman's eyes brimmed with tears. Eddie could see her trying to hold them in but it was no good. She began to sob.

  Furious (and disgusted with himself as well), Eddie turned on the gunslinger, who had staggered to his feet. Roland moved, but not toward the weeping Lady. Instead he went to pick up his knife.

  "Tell her!" Eddie shouted. "You brought her, so go on and tell her, man!" And after a moment he added in a lower tone, "And then tell me how come she doesn't remember herself."

  4

  Roland did not respond. N
ot at once. He bent, pinched the hilt of the knife between the two remaining fingers of his right hand, transferred it carefully to his left, and slipped it into the scabbard at the side of one gunbelt. He was still trying to grapple with what he had sensed in the Lady's mind. Unlike Eddie, she had fought him, fought him like a cat, from the moment he came forward until they rolled through the door. The fight had begun the moment she sensed him. There had been no lapse, because there had been no surprise. He had experienced it but didn't in the least understand it. No surprise at the invading stranger in her mind, only the instant rage, terror, and the commencement of a battle to shake him free. She hadn't come close to winning that battle―could not, he suspected―but that hadn't kept her from trying like hell. He had felt a woman insane with fear and anger and hate.

  He had sensed only darkness in her―this was a mind entombed in a cave-in.

  Except―

  Except that in the moment they burst through the doorway and separated, he had wished―wished desperately― that he could tarry a moment longer. One moment would have told so much. Because the woman before them now wasn't the woman in whose mind he had been. Being in Eddie's mind had been like being in a room with jittery, sweating walls. Being in the Lady's had been like lying naked in the dark while venomous snakes crawled all over you.

  Until the end.

  She had changed at the end.

  And there had been something else, something he believed was vitally important, but he either could not understand it or remember it. Something like

  (a glance)

  the doorway itself, only in her mind. Something about

  (you broke the forspecial it was you)

  some sudden burst of understanding. As at studies, when you finally saw―

  "Oh, fuck you," Eddie said disgustedly. "You're nothing but a goddam machine."

  He strode past Roland, went to the woman, knelt beside her, and when she put her arms around him, panic-tight, like the arms of a drowning swimmer, he did not draw away but put his own arms around her and hugged her back.

  "It's okay," he said. "I mean, it's not great, but it's okay."

  "Where are we?" she wept. "Iwas sitting home watching TV so I could hear if my friends got out ofOxfordalive and now I'm here and I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHERE HERE IS!"

  "Well, neither do I," Eddie said, holding her tighter, beginning to rock her a little, "but I guess we're in it together. I'm from where you're from, little old New York City , and I've been through the same thing―well, a little different, but same principle―and you're gonna be just fine." As an afterthought he added: "As long as you like lobster."

  She hugged him and wept and Eddie held her and rocked her and Roland thought, Eddie will be all right now. His brother is dead but he has someone else to take care of so Eddie will be all right now.

  But he felt a pang: a deep reproachful hurt in his heart. He was capable of shooting―with his left hand, anyway―of killing, of going on and on, slamming with brutal relentlessness through miles and years, even dimensions, it seemed, in search of the Tower. He was capable of survival, sometimes even of protection―he had saved the boy Jake from a slow death at the way station, and from sexual consumption by the Oracle at the foot of the mountains―but in the end, he had let Jake die. Nor had this been by accident; he had committed a conscious act of damnation. He watched the two of them, watched Eddie hug her; assure her it was going to be all right. He could not have done that, and now the rue in his heart was joined by stealthy fear.

  If you have given up your heart for the Tower, Roland, you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast. To be a beast is perhaps bearable, although the man who has become one will surely pay hell's own price in the end, but what if you should gain your object? What if you should, heartless, actually storm the Dark Tower and win it? If there is naught but darkness in your heart, what could you do except degenerate from beast to monster? To gain one's object as a beast would only be bitterly comic, like giving a magnifying glass to an elephaunt. But to gain one's object as a monster …

  To pay hell is one thing. But do you want to own it?

  He thought of Allie, and of the girl who had once waited for him at the window, thought of the tears he had shed over Cuthbert's lifeless corpse. Oh, then he had loved. Yes. Then.

  I do want to love! he cried, but although Eddie was also crying a little now with the woman in the wheelchair, the gunslinger's eyes remained as dry as the desert he had crossed to reach this sunless sea.

  5

  He would answer Eddie's question later. He would do that because he thought Eddie would do well to be on guard. The reason she didn't remember was simple. She wasn't one woman but two.

  And one of them was dangerous.

  6

  Eddie told her what he could, glossing over the shoot-out but being truthful about everything else.

  When he was done, she remained perfectly silent for some time, her hands clasped together on her lap.

  Little streamlets coursed down from the shallowing mountains, petering out some miles to the east. It was from these that Roland and Eddie had drawn their water as they hiked north. At first Eddie had gotten it because Roland was too weak. Later they had taken turns, always having to go a little further and search a little longer before finding a stream. They grew steadily more listless as the mountains slumped, but the water hadn't made them sick.

  So far.

  Roland had gone yesterday, and although that made today Eddie's turn, the gunslinger had gone again, shouldering the hide water-skins and walking off without a word. Eddie found this queerly discreet. He didn't want to be touched by the gesture―by anything about Roland, for that matter―and found he was, a little, just the same.

  She listened attentively to Eddie, not speaking at all, her eyes fixed on his. At one moment Eddie would guess she was five years older than he, at another he would guess fifteen. There was one thing he didn't have to guess about: he was falling in love with her.

  When he had finished, she sat for a moment without saying anything, now not looking at him but beyond him, looking at the waves which would, at nightfall, bring the lobsters and with their alien, lawyerly questions. He had been particularly careful to describe them. Better for her to be a little scared now than a lot scared when they came out to play. He supposed she wouldn't want to eat them, not after hearing what they had done to Roland's hand and foot, not after she got a good close look at them. But eventually hunger would win out over did-a-chick and dum-a-chum.

  Her eyes were far and distant.

  "Odetta?" he asked after perhaps five minutes had gone by. She had told him her name. Odetta Holmes. He thought it was a gorgeous name.

  She looked back at him, startled out of her revery. She smiled a little. She said one word.

  "No."

  He only looked at her, able to think of no suitable reply. He thought he had never understood until that moment how illimitable a simple negative could be.

  "I don't understand," he said finally. "What are you no-ing?"

  "All this." Odetta swept an arm (she had, he'd noticed, very strong arms―smooth but very strong), indicating the sea, the sky, the beach, the scruffy foothills where the gunslinger was now presumably searching for water (or maybe getting eaten alive by some new and interesting monster, something Eddie didn't really care to think about). Indicating, in short, this entire world.

  "I understand how you feel. I had a pretty good case of the unrealities myself at first."

  But had he? Looking back, it seemed he had simply accepted, perhaps because he was sick, shaking himself apart in his need for junk.

  "You get over it."

  "No," she said again. "I believe one of two things has happened, and no matter which one it is, I am still in Oxford , Mississippi . None of this is real."

  She went on. If her voice had been louder (or perhaps if he had not been falling in love) it would almost have been a lecture. As it was, it so
unded more like lyric than lecture.

  Except, he had to keep reminding himself, bullshit's what it really is, and you have to convince her of that. For her sake.

  "I may have sustained a head injury," she said. "They are notorious swingers of axe-handles and billy-clubs in Oxford Town ."

  Oxford Town .

  That produced a faint chord of recognition far back in Eddie's mind. She said the words in a kind of rhythm that he for some reason associated with Henry … Henry and wet diapers. Why? What? Didn't matter now.

  "You're trying to tell me you think this is all some sort of dream you're having while you're unconscious?"

  "Or in a coma," she said. "And you needn't look at me as though you thought it was preposterous, because it isn't. Look here."

  She parted her hair carefully on the left, and Eddie could see she wore it to one side not just because she liked the style. The old wound beneath the fall of her hair was scarred and ugly, not brown but a grayish-white.

  "I guess you've had a lot of hard luck in your time," he said.

  She shrugged impatiently. "A lot of hard luck and a lot of soft living," she said. "Maybe it all balances out. I only showed you because I was in a coma for three weeks when I was five. I dreamed a lot then. I can't remember what the dreams were, but I remember my mamma said they knew I wasn't going to die just as long as I kept talking and it seemed like I kept talking all the time, although she said they couldn't make out one word in a dozen. I do remember that the dreams were very vivid."

  She paused, looking around.

  "As vivid as this place seems to be. And you, Eddie."

  When she said his name his arms prickled. Oh, he had it, all right. Had it bad.