"Well?" Roland asked. He could grab Eddie, force the doorway into existence by their contact, and pummel them both through. But he had seen Eddie risk his life for him; he had seen this hag-ridden man behave with all the dignity of a born gunslinger in spite of his addiction and the fact that he had been forced to fight as naked as the day he was born, and he wanted Eddie to decide for himself.
"Quests, adventures, towers, worlds to win," Eddie said, and smiled wanly. Neither of them turned as fresh tear-gas rounds flew through the windows to explode, hissing, on the floor. The first acrid tendrils of the gas were now slipping into Balazar's office. "Sounds better than one of those Edgar Rice Burroughs books about Mars Henry used to read me sometimes when we were kids. You only left out one thing."
"What's that?"
"The beautiful bare-breasted girls."
The gunslinger smiled. "On the way to the Dark Tower ," he said, "anything is possible."
Another shudder wracked Eddie's body. He raised Henry's head, kissed one cool, ash-colored cheek, and laid the gore-streaked relic gently aside. He got to his feet.
"Okay," he said. "I didn't have anything else planned for tonight, anyway."
"Take these," Roland said, and shoved the clothes at him. "Put on your shoes if nothing else. You've cut your feet."
On the sidewalk outside, two cops wearing Plexiglas faceplates, flak jackets, and Kevlar vests smashed in The Leaning Tower's front door. In the bathroom, Eddie (dressed in his underpants, his Adidas sneakers, and nothing else) handed the sample packages of Keflex to Roland one by one, and Roland put them into the pockets of Eddie's jeans. When they were all safely stowed, Roland slid his right arm around Eddie's neck again and Eddie gripped Roland's left hand again. The door was suddenly there, a rectangle of darkness. Eddie felt the wind from that other world blow his sweaty hair back from his forehead. He heard the waves rolling up that stony beach. He smelled the tang of sour sea-salt. And in spite of everything, all his pain and sorrow, he suddenly wanted to see this Tower of which Roland spoke. He wanted to see it very much. And with Henry dead, what was there in this world for him? Their parents were dead, and there hadn't been a steady girl since he got heavily into the smack three years ago―just a steady parade of sluts, needlers, and nosers. None of them straight. Fuck that action.
They stepped through, Eddie actually leading a little.
On the other side he was suddenly wracked with fresh shudders and agonizing muscle-cramps―the first symptoms of serious heroin withdrawal. And with them he also had the first alarmed second thoughts.
"Wait!" he shouted. "I want to go back for a minute! His desk! His desk, or the other office! The skag! If they were keeping Henry doped, there's gotta be junk! Heroin! I need it! I need it!"
He looked pleadingly at Roland, but the gunslinger's face was stony.
"That part of your life is over, Eddie," he said. He reached out with his left hand.
"No!" Eddie screamed, clawing at him. "No, you don't get it, man, I need it! I NEED IT!"
He might as well have been clawing stone.
The gunslinger swept the door shut.
It made a dull clapping sound that bespoke utter finality and fell backward onto the sand. A little dust puffed up from its edges. There was nothing behind the door, and now no word written upon it. This particular portal between the worlds had closed forever.
"NO!" Eddie screamed, and the gulls screamed back at him as if in jeering contempt; the lobstrosities asked him questions, perhaps suggesting he could hear them a little better if he were to come a little closer, and Eddie fell over on his side, crying and shuddering and jerking with cramps.
"Your need will pass," the gunslinger said, and managed to get one of the sample packets out of the pocket of Eddie's jeans, which were so like his own. Again, he could read some of these letters but not all. Cheeflet, the word looked like.
Cheeflet.
Medicine from that other world.
"Kill or cure," Roland murmured, and dry-swallowed two of the capsules. Then he took the other three astin, and lay next to Eddie, and took him in his arms as well as he could, and after some difficult time, both of them slept.
SHUFFLE
The time following that night was broken time for Roland, time that didn't really exist as time at all. What he remembered was only a series of images, moments, conversation without context; images flashing past like one-eyed jacks and treys and nines and the Bloody Black Bitch Queen of Spiders in a card-sharp's rapid shuffle.
Later on he asked Eddie how long that time lasted, but Eddie didn't know either. Time had been destroyed for both of them. There is no time in hell, and each of them was in his own private helclass="underline" Roland the hell of the fever and infection, Eddie the hell of withdrawal.
"It was less than a week," Eddie said. "That's all I know for sure."
"How do you know that?"
"A week's worth of pills was all I had to give you. After that, you were gonna have to do the one thing or the other on your own."
"Get well or die."
"Right."
shuffle
There's a gunshot as twilight draws down to dark, a dry crack impinging on the inevitable and ineluctable sound of the breakers dying on the desolate beach: KA-BLAM! He smells a whiff of gunpowder. Trouble, the gunslinger thinks weakly, and gropes for revolvers that aren't there. Oh no, it's the end, it's …
But there's no more, as something starts to smell
shuffle
good in the dark. Something, after all this long dark dry time, something is cooking. It's not just the smell. He can hear the snap and pop of twigs, can see the faint orange flicker of a campfire. Sometimes, when the sea-breeze gusts, he smells fragrant smoke as well as that mouth-watering other smell. Food, he thinks. My God, am I hungry? If I'm hungry, maybeI'm getting well.
Eddie, he tries to say, but his voice is all gone. His throat hurts, hurts so bad. We should have brought some astin, too, he thinks, and then tries to laugh: all the drugs for him, none for Eddie.
Eddie appears. He's got a tin plate, one the gunslinger would know anywhere: it came, after all, from his own purse. On it are steaming chunks of whitish-pink meat.
What? he tries to ask, and nothing comes out but a squeaky little farting sound.
Eddie reads the shape of his lips. "I don't know," he says crossly. "All I know is it didn't kill me. Eat it, damn you."
He sees Eddie is very pale, Eddie is shaking, and he smells something coming from Eddie that is either shit or death, and he knows Eddie is in a bad way. He reaches out a groping hand, wanting to give comfort. Eddie strikes it away.
"I'll feed you," he says crossly. "Fucked if I know why. I ought to kill you. I would, if I didn't think that if you could get through into my world once, maybe you could do it again."
Eddie looks around.
"And if it wasn't that I'd be alone. Except for them."
He looks back at Roland and a fit of shuddering runs through him―it is so fierce that he almost spills the chunks of meat on the tin plate. At last it passes.
"Eat, God damn you."
The gunslinger eats. The meat is more than not bad; the meat is delicious. He manages three pieces and then everything blurs into a new
shuffle
effort to speak, but all he can do is whisper. The cup of Eddie's ear is pressed against his lips, except every now and then it shudders away as Eddie goes through one of his spasms. He says it again. "North. Up … up the beach."