The Drawing of the Three

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. Not 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