The Drawing of the Three

uglier than the lobstrosities by far because of the greater intelligence which informed it, but he knew it could also be beautiful. He did not want to harm the other person the vessel held somewhere inside it (like a live dove deep inside one of the secret compartments in a magician's magic box).

Odetta Holmes was somewhere inside that screaming screeching thing.

5

Although his last mount?a mule?had died too long ago to remember, the gunslinger still had a piece of its tether-rope (which, in turn, had once been a fine gunslinger's lariat). They used this to bind her in her wheelchair, as she had imagined (or falsely remembered, and in the end they both came to the same thing, didn't they?) they had done already. Then they drew away from her.

If not for the crawling lobster-things, Eddie would have gone down to the water and washed his hands.

'I feel like I'm going to vomit,' he said in a voice that jig-jagged up and down the scale like the voice of an adolescent boy.

'Why don't you go on and eat each other's COCKS?' the struggling thing in the chair screeched. 'Why don't you jus go on and do dat if you fraid of a black woman's cunny? You just go on! Sho! Suck on yo each one's candles! Do it while you got a chance, causeDetta Walker goan get outen dis chair and cut dem skinny ole white candles off and feed em to those walkm buzzsaws down there!'

'She's the woman I was in. Do you believe me now?'

'I believed you before,' Eddie said. 'I told you that.'

'You believed you believed. You believed on the top of your mind. Do you believe it all the way down now? All the way to the bottom?'

Eddie looked at the shrieking, convulsing thing in the chair and then looked away, white except for the slash on his jaw, which was still dripping a little. That side of his face was beginning to look a little like a balloon.

'Yes, 'he said. 'God, yes.'

'This woman is a monster.'

Eddie began to cry.

The gunslinger wanted to comfort him, could not commit such a sacrilege (he remembered Jake too well), and walked off into the dark with his new fever burning and aching inside him.

6

Much earlier on that night, while Odetta still slept, Eddie said he thought he might understand what was wrong with her. Might. The gunslinger asked what he meant.

'She could be a schizophrenic.'

Roland only shook his head. Eddie explained what he understood of schizophrenia, gleanings from such films as The Three Faces of Eve and various TV programs (mostly the soap operas he and Henry had often watched while stoned). Roland had nodded. Yes. The disease Eddie described sounded about right. A woman with two faces, one light and one dark. A face like the one the man in black had shown him on the fifth Tarot card.

'And they don't know?these schizophrenes?that they have another?'

'No,' Eddie said. 'But …' He trailed off, moodily watching the lobstrosities crawl and question, question and crawl.

'But what?'

'I'm no shrink,' Eddie said, 'so I don't really know?'

'Shrink? What is a shrink?'

Eddie tapped his temple. 'A head-doctor. A doctor for your mind. They're really called psychiatrists.'

Roland nodded. He liked shrink better. Because this Lady's mind was too large. Twice as large as it needed to be.

'But I think schizos almost always know something is wrong with them,' Eddie said. 'Because there are blanks. Maybe I'm wrong, but I always got the idea that they were usually two people who thought they had partial amnesia, because of the blank spaces in their memories when the other personality was in control. She … she says she remembers everything. She really thinks she remembers everything.'

'I thought you said she didn't believe any of this was happening.'

'Yeah,' Eddie said, 'but forget that for now. I'm trying to say that, no matter what she believes, what she remembers goes right from her living room where she was sitting in her bathrobe watching the midnight news to here, with no break at all. She doesn't have any sense that some other person took over between then and when you grabbed her in Macy's. Hell, that might have been the next day or even weeks later. I know it was still winter, because most of the shoppers in that store were wearing coats?'

The gunslinger nodded. Eddie's perceptions were sharpening. That was good. He had missed the boots and scarves, the gloves sticking out of coat pockets, but it was still a start.

'?but otherwise it's impossible to tell how long Odetta was that other woman because she doesn't know. I think she's in a situation she's never been in before, and her way of protecting both sides is this story about getting cracked over the head.'

Roland nodded.

'And the rings. Seeing those really shook her up. She tried not to show it, but it showed, all right.'

Roland asked: 'If these two women don't know they exist in the same body, and if they don't even suspect that something may be wrong, if each has her own separate chain of memories, partly real but partly made up to fit the times the other is there, what are we to do with her? How are we even to live with her?'

Eddie had shrugged. 'Don't ask me. It's your problem. You're the one who says you need her. Hell, you risked your neck to bring her here.'' Eddie thought about this for a minute, remembered squatting over Roland's body with Roland's knife held just above the gunslinger's throat, and laughed abruptly and without humor. LITERALLY risked your neck, man, he thought.

A silence fell between them. Odetta had by then been breathing quietly. As the gunslinger was about to reiterate his warning for Eddie to be on guard and announce (loud enough for the Lady to hear, if she was only shamming) that he was going to turn in, Eddie said the thing which lighted Roland's mind in a single sudden glare, the thing which made him understand at least part of what he needed so badly to know.

At the end, when they came through.

She had changed at the end.

And he had seen something, some thing?

'Tell you what,' Eddie said, moodily stirring the remains of the fire with a split claw from this night's kill, 'when you brought her through, I felt like I was a schizo.'

'Why?'

Eddie thought, then shrugged. It was too hard to explain, or maybe he was just too tired. 'It's not important.'