The Drawing of the Three

immediately by alarm. 'I ain't going nowhere. Especially not back to that other place, where those big crabs or whatever they are ate Jack.'

Someone was hammering on the door, yelling to open up.

'Do you want to stay here and explain all these bodies?' the gunslinger asked.

'I don't care,' Eddie said. 'Without Henry, it doesn't matter. Nothing does.'

'Maybe it doesn't matter to you,' Roland said, 'but there are others involved, prisoner.'

'Don't call me that!' Eddie shouted.

“I’ll call you that until you show me you can walk out of the cell you're in!' Roland shouted back. It hurt his throat to yell, but he yelled just the same. 'Throw that rotten piece of meat away and stop puling!'

Eddie looked at him, cheeks wet, eyes wide and frightened.

'THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE!' an amplified voice said from outside. To Eddie the voice sounded eerily like the voice of a game-show host. 'THE S.W.A.T. SQUAD HAS ARRIVED?I REPEAT: THE S.W.A.T. SQUAD HAS ARRIVED!'

'What's on the other side of that door for me?' Eddie asked the gunslinger quietly. 'Go on and tell me. If you can tell me, maybe I'll come. But if you lie, I'll know.'

'Probably death,' the gunslinger said. 'But before that happens, I don't think you'll be bored. I want you to join me on a quest. Of course, all will probably end in death?death for the four of us in a strange place. But if we should win through …' His eyes gleamed. 'If we win through, Eddie, you'll see something beyond all the beliefs of all your dreams.'

'What thing?'

'The Dark Tower .'

'Where is this Tower?'

'Far from the beach where you found me. How far I know not.'

'What is it?'

'I don't know that, either?except that it may be a kind of … of a bolt. A central linchpin that holds all of existence together. All existence, all time, and all size.'

'You said four. Who are the other two?'

'I know them not, for they have yet to be drawn.'

'As I was drawn. Or as you'd like to draw me.'

'Yes.'

From outside there was a coughing explosion like a mortar round. The glass of The Leaning Tower's front window blew in. The barroom began to fill with choking clouds of tear-gas.

'Well?' Roland asked. He could grab Eddie, force the doorway into existence by their contact, and pummel them both through. But he had seen Eddie risk his life for him; he had seen this hag-ridden man behave with all the dignity of a born gunslinger in spite of his addiction and the fact that he had been forced to fight as naked as the day he was born, and he wanted Eddie to decide for himself.

'Quests, adventures, towers, worlds to win,' Eddie said, and smiled wanly. Neither of them turned as fresh tear-gas rounds flew through the windows to explode, hissing, on the floor. The first acrid tendrils of the gas were now slipping into Balazar's office. 'Sounds better than one of those Edgar Rice Burroughs books about Mars Henry used to read me sometimes when we were kids. You only left out one thing.'

'What's that?'

'The beautiful bare-breasted girls.'

The gunslinger smiled. 'On the way to the Dark Tower ,' he said, 'anything is possible.'

Another shudder wracked Eddie's body. He raised Henry's head, kissed one cool, ash-colored cheek, and laid the gore-streaked relic gently aside. He got to his feet.

'Okay,' he said. 'I didn't have anything else planned for tonight, anyway.'

'Take these,' Roland said, and shoved the clothes at him. 'Put on your shoes if nothing else. You've cut your feet.'

On the sidewalk outside, two cops wearing Plexiglas faceplates, flak jackets, and Kevlar vests smashed in The Leaning Tower's front door. In the bathroom, Eddie (dressed in his underpants, his Adidas sneakers, and nothing else) handed the sample packages of Keflex to Roland one by one, and Roland put them into the pockets of Eddie's jeans. When they were all safely stowed, Roland slid his right arm around Eddie's neck again and Eddie gripped Roland's left hand again. The door was suddenly there, a rectangle of darkness. Eddie felt the wind from that other world blow his sweaty hair back from his forehead. He heard the waves rolling up that stony beach. He smelled the tang of sour sea-salt. And in spite of everything, all his pain and sorrow, he suddenly wanted to see this Tower of which Roland spoke. He wanted to see it very much. And with Henry dead, what was there in this world for him? Their parents were dead, and there hadn't been a steady girl since he got heavily into the smack three years ago?just a steady parade of sluts, needlers, and nosers. None of them straight. Fuck that action.

They stepped through, Eddie actually leading a little.

On the other side he was suddenly wracked with fresh shudders and agonizing muscle-cramps?the first symptoms of serious heroin withdrawal. And with them he also had the first alarmed second thoughts.

'Wait!' he shouted. 'I want to go back for a minute! His desk! His desk, or the other office! The skag! If they were keeping Henry doped, there's gotta be junk! Heroin! I need it! I need it!'

He looked pleadingly at Roland, but the gunslinger's face was stony.

'That part of your life is over, Eddie,' he said. He reached out with his left hand.

'No!' Eddie screamed, clawing at him. 'No, you don't get it, man, I need it! I NEED IT!'

He might as well have been clawing stone.

The gunslinger swept the door shut.

It made a dull clapping sound that bespoke utter finality and fell backward onto the sand. A little dust puffed up from its edges. There was nothing behind the door, and now no word written upon it. This particular portal between the worlds had closed forever.

'NO!' Eddie screamed, and the gulls screamed back at him as if in jeering contempt; the lobstrosities asked him questions, perhaps suggesting he could hear them a little better if he were to come a little closer, and Eddie fell over on his side, crying and shuddering and jerking with cramps.

'Your need will pass,' the gunslinger said, and managed to get one of the sample packets out of the pocket of Eddie's jeans, which were so like his own. Again, he could read some of these letters but not all. Cheeflet, the word looked like.

Cheeflet.

Medicine from that other world.

'Kill or cure,' Roland murmured, and dry-swallowed two of the capsules. Then he took the other three astin, and lay next to Eddie, and took him in his arms as well as he could, and after some difficult time, both of them slept.