37
EDDIE’s TERROR AND PANIC suddenly fell away. The cloak of coldness dropped over him-a cloak Roland of Gilead had worn many times. It was the only armor the true gunslinger possessed… and all such a one needed. At the same moment, a voice spoke in his mind. He had been haunted by such voices over the last three months; his mother’s voice, Roland’s voice, and, of course, Henry’s. But this one, he recognized with relief, was his own, and it was at last calm and rational and courageous.
You saw the shape of the key in the fire, you saw it again in the wood, and both times you saw it perfectly. Later on, you put a blindfold of fear over your eyes. Take it off. Take it off and look again. It may not be too late, even now.
He was faintly aware that the gunslinger was staring at him grimly; faintly aware that Susannah was shrieking at the demon in a fading but still defiant voice; faintly aware that, on the other side of the door, Jake was screaming in terror-or was it now agony?
Eddie ignored them all. He pulled the wooden key out of the key-hole he had drawn, out of the door which was now real, and looked at it fixedly, trying to recapture the innocent delight he had sometimes known as a child-the delight of seeing a coherent shape hidden in senselessness. And there it was, the place he’d gone wrong, so clearly visible he couldn’t understand how he’d missed it in the first place. I really must have been wearing a blindfold, he thought. It was the s-shape at the end of the key, of course. The second curve was a bit too fat. Just a tiny bit.
“Knife,” he said, and held out his hand like a surgeon in an operating room. Roland slapped it into his palm without a word.
Eddie gripped the top of the blade between the thumb and first finger of his right hand. He bent over the key, unmindful of the hail which pelted his unprotected neck, and the shape in the wood stood out more clearly-stood out with its own lovely and undeniable reality.
He scraped.
Once.
Delicately.
A single sliver of ash, so thin it was almost transparent, curled up from the belly of the s-shape at the end of the key.
On the other side of the door, Jake Chambers shrieked again.
38
THE CHAIN LET GO with a rattling crash and Jake fell heavily, landing on his knees. The doorkeeper roared in triumph. The plaster hand seized Jake about his hips and began to drag him down the hall. He stuck his legs out in front of him and planted his feet, but it did no good. He felt splinters and rust-blunted nails digging into his skin as the hand tightened its grip and continued to drag him forward.
The face appeared to be stuck just inside the entrance to the hallway like a cork in a bottle. The pressure it had exerted to get in that far had squeezed the rudimentary features into a new shape, that of some monstrous, malformed troll. The mouth yawned open to receive him. Jake groped madly for the key, wanting to use it as some last-ditch talisman, but of course he had left it in the door.
’'You son of a bitch!” he screamed, and threw himself backward with all his strength, bowing his back like an Olympic diver, unmindful of the broken boards which dug into him like a belt of nails. He felt his jeans slide down on his hips, and the grip of the hand slipped momentarily.
Jake lunged again. The hand clenched brutally, but Jake’s jeans slid down to his knees and his back slammed to the floor, with the pack to cushion the blow. The hand loosened, perhaps wanting to secure a firmer grip upon its prey. Jake was able to draw his knees up a little, and when the hand tightened again, Jake drove his legs forward. The hand yanked backward at the same time, and what Jake had hoped for happened: his jeans (and his remaining sneaker) were peeled from his body, leaving him free again, at least for the moment. He saw the hand rotate on his wrist of boards and disintegrating plaster and jam his dungarees into his mouth. Then he was crawling back toward the blocked doorway on his hands and knees, oblivious of the glass fragments from the fallen lamp, wanting only to get his key again.
He had almost reached the door when the hand closed over his naked legs and began to pull him back once more.
39
THE SHAPE WAS THERE now, finally all there.
Eddie put the key back into the keyhole and applied pressure. For a moment there was resistance… and then it revolved beneath his hand. He heard the locking mechanism turn, heard the bar pull back, felt the key crack in two the moment it had served its purpose. He grasped the dark, polished knob with both hands and pulled. There was a sense of great weight wheeling on an unseen pivot. A feeling that his arm had been gifted with boundless strength. And a clear knowledge that two worlds had suddenly come in contact, and a way had been opened between them.
He felt a moment of dizziness and disorientation, and as he looked through the doorway he realized why: although he was looking down-vertically-he was seeing horizontally. It was like a strange optical illusion created with prisms and mirrors. Then he saw Jake being pulled backward down the glass- and plaster-littered hallway, elbows dragging, calves pinned-together by a giant hand. And he saw the monstrous mouth which awaited him, fuming some white fog that might have been either smoke or dust.
“Roland!” Eddie shouted. “Roland, it’s got h-”
Then he was knocked aside.
40
SUSANNAH WAS AWARE OF being hauled up and whirled around. The world was a carousel blur: standing stones, gray sky, hailstone-littered ground… and a rectangular hole that looked like a trapdoor in the ground. Screams drifted up from it. Within her, the demon raved and struggled, wanting only to escape but helpless to do so until she allowed it.
“Now!” Roland was shouting. “Let it go now, Susannah! For your father’s sake, let it go NOW!”
And she did.
She had (with Detta’s help) constructed* a trap for it in her mind, something like a net of woven rushes, and now she cut them. She felt the demon fly back from her at once, and there was an instant of terrible hollowness, terrible emptiness. These feelings were at once overshadowed by relief and a grim sense of nastiness and defilement.
As its invisible weight fell away, she glimpsed it-an inhuman shape like a manta-ray with huge, curling wings and something that looked like a cruel baling hook curving out and up from beneath. She saw/sensed the thing flash above the open hole in the ground. Saw Eddie looking up with wide eyes. Saw Roland spread his arms wide to catch the demon.
The gunslinger staggered back, almost knocked off his feet by the unseen weight of the demon. Then he rocked forward again with an armload of nothing.
Clutching it, he jumped through the doorway and was gone.
41
SUDDEN WHITE LIGHT FLOODED the hallway of The Mansion; hailstones struck the walls and bounced up from the broken boards of the floor. Jake heard confused shouts, then saw the gunslinger come through. He seemed to leap through, as if he had come from above. His arms were held far out in front of him, the tips of the fingers locked.
Jake felt his feet slide into the doorkeeper’s mouth.
“Roland!” he shrieked. “Roland, help me!”
The gunslinger’s hands parted and his arms were immediately thrown wide. He staggered backward. Jake felt serrated teeth touch his skin, ready to tear flesh and grind bone, and then something huge rushed over his head like a gust of wind. A moment later the teeth were gone. The hand which had pinned his legs together relaxed. He heard an unearthly shriek of pain and surprise begin to issue from the doorkeeper’s dusty throat, and then it was muffled, crammed back.
Roland grabbed Jake and hauled him to his feet.
“You came!” Jake shouted. “You really came!”
“I came, yes. By the grace of the gods and the courage of my friends, I came.”
As the doorkeeper roared again, Jake burst into tears of relief and terror. Now the house sounded like a ship foundering in a heavy sea. Chunks of wood and plaster fell all around them. Roland swept Jake into his arms and ran for the door. The plaster hand, groping wildly, struck one of his booted feet and spun him into the wall, which again tried to bite. Roland pushed forward, turned, and drew his gun. He fired twice into the aimlessly thrashing hand, vaporizing one of the crude plaster fingers. Behind them, the face of the doorkeeper had gone from white to a dingy purplish-black, as if it were choking on something-something which had been fleeing so rapidly that it had entered the monster’s mouth and jammed in its gullet before it realized what it was doing.
Roland turned again and ran through the doorway. Although there was now no visible barrier, he was stopped cold for a moment, as if an unseen meshwork had been drawn across the chair.
Then he felt Eddie’s hands in his hair and he was yanked not forward but upward.
42
THEY EMERGED INTO WET air and slackening hail like babies being born. Eddie was the midwife, as die gunslinger had told him he must be. He was sprawled forward on his chest and belly, his arms out of sight in the doorway, his hands clutching fistfuls of Roland’s hair.
