The Drawing of the Three

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