The Drawing of the Three

broke over them. Those rays lighted their stubbly cheeks like lamps. They made the gunslinger forty again, and Eddie no older than Roland had been when he went out to fight Cort with his hawk David as his weapon.

This door was exactly like the first, except for what was writ upon it:

THE LADY OF SHADOWS

' So,' Eddie said softly, looking at the door which simply stood here with its hinges grounded in some unknown jamb between one world and another, one universe and another. It stood with its graven message, real as rock and strange as starlight.

'So,' the gunslinger agreed.

'Ka.'

'Ka.'

'Here is where you draw the second of your three?'

'It seems so.'

The gunslinger knew what was in Eddie's mind before Eddie knew it himself. He saw Eddie make his move before Eddie knew he was moving. He could have turned and broken Eddie's arm in two places before Eddie knew it was happening, but he made no move. He let Eddie snake the revolver from his right holster. It was the first time in his life he had allowed one of his weapons to be taken from him without an offer of that weapon having first been made. Yet he made no move to stop it. He turned and looked at Eddie equably, even mildly.

Eddie's face was livid, strained. His eyes showed starey whites all the way around the irises. He held the heavy revolver in both hands and still the muzzle rambled from side to side, centering, moving off, centering again and then moving off again.

'Open it,' he said.

'You're being foolish,' the gunslinger said in the same mild voice. 'Neither of us has any idea where that door goes. It needn't open on your universe, let alone upon your world. For all either of us know, the Lady of Shadows might have eight eyes and nine arms, like Suvia. Even if it does open on your world, it might be on a time long before you were born or long after you would have died.'

Eddie smiled tightly. 'Tell you what, Monty: I'm more than willing to trade the rubber chicken and the shitty seaside vacation for what's behind Door #2.'

'I don't understand y?'

'I know you don't. It doesn't matter. Just open the fucker.'

The gunslinger shook his head.

They stood in the dawn, the door casting its slanted shadow toward the ebbing sea.

'Open it!' Eddie cried. 'I'm going with you! Don't you get it? I'm going with you! That doesn't mean I won't come back. Maybe I will. I mean, probably I will. I guess I owe you that much. You been square-John with me down the line, don't think I'm not aware of the fact. But while you get whoever this Shadow-Babe is, I'm gonna find the nearest Chicken Delight and pick me up some take-out. I think the Thirty-Piece Family Pak should do for starters.'

'You stay here.'

'You think I don't mean it?' Eddie was shrill now, close to the edge. The gunslinger could almost see him looking down into the drifty depths of his own damnation. Eddie thumbed back the revolver's ancient hammer. The wind had fallen with the break of the day and the ebb of the tide, and the click of the hammer as Eddie brought it to full cock was very clear. 'You just try me.'

'I think I will,' the gunslinger said.

'I'llshoot you!' Eddie screamed.

'Ka,' the gunslinger replied stolidly, and turned to the door. He was reaching for the knob, but his heart was waiting: waiting to see if he would live or die.

Ka.

THE LADY OF SHADOWS

CHAPTER 1 DETTA AND ODETTA

1

Stripped of jargon, what Adler said was this: the perfect schizophrenic?if there was such a person? would be a man or woman not only unaware of his other persona(e), but one unaware that anything at all was amiss in his or her life.

Adler should have met Detta Walker and Odetta Holmes.

'?last gunslinger,' Andrew said.

He had been talking for quite awhile, but Andrew always talked and Odetta usually just let it flow over her mind the way you let warm water flow over your hair and face in the shower. But this did more than catch her attention; it snagged it, as if on a thorn.

'I beg pardon?'

'Oh, it was just some column in the paper,' Andrew said. 'I dunno who wrote it. I didn't notice. One of those political fellas. Prob'ly you'd know, Miz Holmes. I loved him, and I cried the night he was elected?'

She smiled, touched in spite of herself. Andrew said his ceaseless chatter was something he couldn't stop, wasn't responsible for, that it was just the Irish in him coming out, and most of it was nothing?cluckings and chirrupings about relatives and friends she would never meet, half-baked political opinions, weird scientific commentary gleaned from any number of weird sources (among other things, Andrew was a firm believer in flying saucers, which he called you-foes)? but this touched her because she had also cried the night he was elected.

'But I didn't cry when that son of a bitch?pardon my French, Miz Holmes?when that son of a bitch Oswald shot him, and I hadn't cried since, and it's been?what, two months?'

Three months and two days, she thought.

'Something like that, I guess.'

Andrew nodded. 'Then I read this column?in The