The Drawing of the Three

were so determined I was gonna stay behind you were willing to take a chance on me cutting your throat. This time you want to take a chance on something ripping hers right out.'

'That may have already happened,' Roland said, although he knew it hadn't. The Lady might be hurt, but he knew she wasn't dead.

Unfortunately, Eddie did, too. A week or ten days without his drug had sharpened his mind remarkably. He pointed at the door. 'You know she's not. If she was, that goddam thing would be gone. Unless you were lying when you said it wasn't any good without all three of us.'

Eddie tried to turn back to the slope, but Roland's eyes held him nailed.

'All right,' the gunslinger said. His voice was almost as soft as it had been when he spoke past the hateful face and screaming voice of Detta to the woman trapped somewhere behind it. 'She's alive. That being so, why does she not answer your calls?'

'Well … one of those cats-things may have carried her away.' But Eddie's voice was weak.

'A cat would have killed her, eaten what it wanted, and left the rest. At most, it might have dragged her body into the shade so it could come back tonight and eat meat the sun perhaps hadn't yet spoiled. But if that was the case, the door would be gone. Cats aren't like some insects, who paralyze their prey and carry them off to eat later, and you know it.'

'That isn't necessarily true,' Eddie said. For a moment he heard Odetta saying You should have been on the debate team, Eddie and pushed the thought aside. 'Could be a cat came for her and she tried to shoot it but the first couple of shells in your gun were misfires. Hell, maybe even the first four or five. The cat gets to her, mauls her, and just before it can kill her … BANG!' Eddie smacked a fist against his palm, seeing all this so vividly that he might have witnessed it. 'The bullet kills the cat, or maybe just wounds it, or maybe just scares it off. What about that?'

Mildly, Roland said: 'We would have heard a gunshot.'

For a moment Eddie could only stand, mute, able to think of no counter-argument. Of course they would have heard it. The first time they had heard one of the cats yowling, it had to have been fifteen, maybe twenty miles away. A pistol-shot—

He looked at Roland with sudden cunning. 'Maybe you did,' he said. 'Maybe you heard a gunshot while I was asleep.'

'It would have woken you.'

'Not as tired as I am, man. I fall asleep, it's like—'

'Like being dead,' the gunslinger said in that same mild voice. 'I know the feeling.'

'Then you understand—'

'But it's not being dead. Last night you were out just like that, but when one of those cats screeched, you were awake and on your feet in seconds. Because of your concern for her. There was no gunshot, Eddie, and you know it. You would have heard it. Because of your concern for her.'

'So maybe she brained it with a rock!' Eddie shouted. 'How the hell do I know when I'm standing here arguing with you instead of checking out the possibilities? I mean, she could be lying up there someplace hurt, man! Hurt or bleeding to death! How'd you like it if I did come through that door with you and she died while we were on the other side? How'd you like to look around once and see that doorway there, then look around twice and see it gone, just like it never was, because she was gone? Then you'd be trapped in my world instead of the other way around!' He stood panting and glaring at the gunslinger, his hands balled into fists.

Roland felt a tired exasperation. Someone—it might have been Cort but he rather thought it had been his father—had had a saying: Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover. If any proof of the saying were needed, there it stood above him, in a posture that was all defiance and defense. Go on, the set of Eddie Dean's body said. Go on, I can answer any question you throw at me.

'Might not have been a cat that found her,' he said now. 'This may be your world, but I don't think you've ever been to this part of it any more than I've ever been to Borneo . You don't know what might be running around up in those hills, do you? Could be an ape grabbed her, or something like that.'

'Something grabbed her, all right,' the gunslinger said.

'Well thank God getting sick hasn't driven all the sense out of your m—'

'And we both know what it was. Detta Walker. That's what grabbed her. Detta Walker.'

Eddie opened his mouth, but for some little time—only seconds, but enough of them so both acknowledged the truth—the gunslinger's inexorable face bore all his arguments to silence.

14

'It doesn't have to be that way.'

'Come a little closer. If we're going to talk, let's talk. Every time I have to shout at you over the waves, it rips another piece of my throat out. That's how it feels, anyway.'

'What big eyes you have, grandma,' Eddie said, not moving.

'What in hell's name are you talking about?'

'A fairy tale.' Eddie did descend a short way back down the slope—four yards, no more. 'And fairy tales are what you're thinking about if you believe you can coax me close enough to that wheelchair.'

'Close enough for what? I don't understand,' Roland said, although he understood perfectly.

Nearly a hundred and fifty yards above them and perhaps a full quarter of a mile to the east, dark eyes— eyes as full of intelligence as they were lacking in human mercy—watched this tableau intently. It was impossible to tell what they were saying; the wind, the waves, and the hollow crash of the surf digging its underground channel saw to that, but Detta didn't need to hear what they were saying to know what they were talking about. She didn't need a telescope to see that the Really Bad Man was now also the Really Sick Man, and maybe the Really Bad Man was willing to spend a few days or even a few weeks torturing a legless Negro woman—way things looked around here, entertainment was mighty hard to come by—but she thought the Really Sick Man only wanted one thing, and that was to get his whitebread ass out of here. Just use that magic doorway to haul the fucker out. But before, he hadn't been hauling no ass. Before, he hadn't been hauling nothing. Before, the Really Bad Man hadn't been nowhere but inside her own head. She still didn't like to think of how that had been, how it had felt, how easily he had overridden all her clawing efforts to push him out, away, to take control of herself again. That had been awful. Terrible. And what made it worse was her lack of understanding. What, exactly, was the real source of her terror? That it wasn't the invasion itself was frightening enough. She knew she might understand if she examined herself more closely, but she didn't want to do that. Such examination might lead her to a place like the one sailors had feared in the ancient days, a place which was no more or less than the edge of the world, a place the cartographers had marked with the legend HERE THERE BE SARPENTS. The hideous thing about the Really Bad Man's invasion had been the sense of familiarity that came with it, as if this amazing thing had happened before—not once, but many times. But, frightened or not, she had denied panic. She had observed even as she fought, and she remembered looking into that door when the gunslinger used her hands to pivot the wheelchair toward it. She remembered seeing the body of the Really Bad Man lying on the sand with Eddie crouched above it, a knife in his hand.

Would that Eddie had plunged that knife into the Really Bad Man's throat! Better than a pig-slaughtering! Better by a country mile!

He hadn't, but she had seen the Really Bad Man's body. It had been breathing, but body was the right word just the same; it had only been a worthless thing, like a cast-off towsack which some idiot had stuffed full of weeds or cornshucks.

Detta's mind might have been as ugly as a rat's ass, but it was even quicker and sharper than Eddie's.