"I went from night to day, from undressed to dressed, from my living room to this deserted beach. And what really happened was that some big-bellied redneck deputy hit me upside the head with a club and that is all!"
"But your memories don't stop in Oxford ," he said softly.
"W-What?" Uncertain again. Or maybe seeing and not wanting to. Like with the rings.
"If you got whacked in Oxford , how come your memories don't stop there?"
"There isn't always a lot of logic to things like this." She was rubbing her temples again. "And now, if it's all the same to you, Eddie, I'd just as soon end the conversation. My headache is back. It's quite bad."
"I guess whether or not logic figures in all depends on what you want to believe. I saw you in Macy's, Odetta. I saw you stealing. You say you don't do things like that, but you also told me you don't wear jewelry. You told me that even though you'd looked down at your hands several times while we were talking. Those rings were there then, but it was as if you couldn't see them until I called your attention to them and made you see them."
"I don't want to talk about it!" she shouted. "My head hurts!"
"All right. But you know where you lost track of time, and it wasn't in Oxford ."
"Leave me alone," she said dully.
Eddie saw the gunslinger toiling his way back with two full water-skins, one tied around his waist and the other slung over his shoulders. He looked very tired.
"I wish I could help you," Eddie said, "but to do that, I guess I'd have to be real."
He stood by her for a moment, but her head was bowed, the tips of her fingers steadily massaging her temples.
Eddie went to meet Roland.
8
"Sit down." Eddie took the bags. "You look all in."
"I am. I'm getting sick again."
Eddie looked at the gunslinger's flushed cheeks and brow, his cracked lips, and nodded. "I hoped it wouldn't happen, but I'm not that surprised, man. You didn't bat for the cycle. Balazar didn't have enough Keflex."
"I don't understand you."
"If you don't take a penicillin drug long enough, you don't kill the infection. You just drive it underground. A few days go by and it comes back. We'll need more, but at least there's a door to go to. In the meantime you'll just have to take it easy." But Eddie was thinking unhappily of Odetta's missing legs and the longer and longer treks it took to find water. He wondered if Roland could have picked a worse time to have a relapse. He supposed it was possible; he just didn't see how.
"I have to tell you something about Odetta."
"That's her name?"
"Uh-huh."
"It's very lovely," the gunslinger said.
"Yeah. I thought so, too. What isn't so lovely is the way she feels about this place. She doesn't think she's here."
"I know. And she doesn't like me much, does she?"
No, Eddie thought, but that doesn't keep her from think-ing you're one booger of a hallucination. He didn't say it, only nodded.
"The reasons are almost the same," the gunslinger said. "She's not the woman I brought through, you see. Not at all.''
Eddie stared, then suddenly nodded, excited. That blurred glimpse in the mirror … that snarling face … the man was right. Jesus Christ, of course he was! That hadn't been Odetta at all.
Then he remembered the hands which had gone pawing carelessly through the scarves and had just as carelessly gone about the business of stuffing the junk jewelry into her big purse―almost, it had seemed, as if she wanted to be caught.
The rings had been there.
Same rings.
But that doesn't necessarily mean the same hands, he thought wildly, but that would only hold for a second. He had studied her hands. They were the same, long-fingered and delicate.
"No," the gunslinger continued. "She is not." His blue eyes studied Eddie carefully.
"Her hands―"
"Listen," the gunslinger said, "and listen carefully. Our lives may depend on it―mine because I'm getting sick again, and yours because you have fallen in love with her."
Eddie said nothing.
"She is two women in the same body. She was one woman when I entered her, and another when I returned here."
Now Eddie could say nothing.
"There was something else, something strange, but either I didn't understand it or I did and it's slipped away. It seemed important."
Roland looked past Eddie, looked to the beached wheel-chair, standing alone at the end of its short track from nowhere. Then he looked back at Eddie.
"I understand very little of this, or how such a thing can be, but you must be on your guard. Do you understand that?"
"Yes." Eddie's lungs felt as if they had very little wind in them. He understood―or had, at least, a moviegoer's understanding of the sort of thing the gunslinger was speaking of―but he didn't have the breath to explain, not yet. He felt as if Roland had kicked all his breath out of him.
"Good. Because the woman I entered on the other side of the door was as deadly as those lobster-things that come out at night."
CHAPTER 4
DETTA ON THE OTHER SIDE
1
You must be on your guard, the gunslinger said, and Eddie had agreed, but the gunslinger knew Eddie didn't know what he was talking about; the whole back half of Eddie's mind, where survival is or isn't, didn't get the message.
The gunslinger saw this.
It was a good thing for Eddie he did.
2
In the middle of the night, Detta Walker's eyes sprang open. They were full of starlight and clear intelligence.
She remembered everything: how she had fought them, how they had tied her into her chair, how they had taunted her, calling her niggerbitch, niggerbitch.
She remembered monsters coming out of the waves, and she remembered how one of the men―the older―had killed one of them. The younger had built a fire and cooked it and then had offered her smoking monster-meat on a stick, grinning. She remembered spitting at his face, remembered his grin turning into an angry honky scowl. He had hit her upside the face, and told her Well, that's all right, you'll come around, niggerbitch. Wait and see if you don't. Then he and the Really Bad Man―had laughed and the Really Bad Man had brought out a haunch of beef which he spitted and slowly cooked over the fire on the beach of this alien place to which they had brought her.
The smell of the slowly roasting beef had been seductive, but she had made no sign. Even when the younger one had waved a chunk of it near her face, chanting Bite for it, niggerbitch, go on and bite for it, she had sat like stone, holding herself in.
Then she had slept, and now she was awake, and the ropes they had tied her with were gone. She was no longer in her chair but lying on one blanket and under another, far above the high-tide line, where the lobster-things still wandered and questioned and snatched the odd unfortunate gull out of the air.
She looked to her left and saw nothing.
She looked to her right and saw two sleeping men wrapped in two piles of blankets. The younger one was closer, and the Really Bad Man had taken off his gunbelts and laid them by him.
The guns were still in them.
You made a bad mistake, mahfah, Detta thought, and rolled to her right. The gritty crunch and squeak of her body on the sand was inaudible under the wind, the waves, the questioning creatures. She crawled slowly along the sand (like one of the lobstrosities herself), her eyes glittering.