"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."
"Why?"
Eddie looked at Roland, saw he was asking a serious question for a serious reason--or thought he was--and took a minute to think back. "It's really hard to describe, man. It was looking in that door. That's what freaked me out. When you see someone move in that door, it's like you're moving with them. You know what I'm talking about."
Roland nodded.
"Well, I watched it like it was a movie--never mind, it's not important--until the very end. Then you turned her toward this side of the doorway and for the first time I was looking at myself. It was like . . ." He groped and could find nothing. "I dunno. It should have been like looking in a mirror, I guess, but it wasn't, because . . . because it was like looking at another person. It was like being turned inside out. Like being in two places at the same time. Shit, I don't know."
But the gunslinger was thunderstruck. That was what he had sensed as they came through; that was what had happened to her, no, not just her, them: for a moment Detta and Odetta had looked at each other, not the way one would look at her reflection in a mirror but as separate people; the mirror became a windowpane and for a moment Odetta had seen Detta and Detta had seen Odetta and had been equally horror-struck.
They each know, the gunslinger thought grimly. They may not have known before, but they do now. They can try to hide it from themselves, but for a moment they saw, they knew, and that knowing must still be there.
"Roland?"
"What?"
"Just wanted to make sure you hadn't gone to sleep with your eyes open. Because for a minute you looked like you were, you know, long ago and far away."
"If so, I'm back now," the gunslinger said. "I'm going to turn in. Remember what I said, Eddie: be on your guard."
"I'll watch," Eddie said, but Roland knew that, sick or not, he would have to be the one to do the watching tonight.
Everything else had followed from that.
7
Following the ruckus Eddie and Detta Walker eventually went to sleep again (she did not so much fall asleep as drop into an exhausted state of unconsciousness in her chair, lolling to one side against the restraining ropes).
The gunslinger, however, lay wakeful.
I will have to bring the two of them to battle, he thought, but he didn't need one of Eddie's "shrinks" to tell him that such a battle might be to the death. If the bright one, Odetta, were to win that battle, all might yet be well. If the dark one were to win it, all would surely be lost with her.
Yet he sensed that what really needed doing was not killing but joining. He had already recognized much that would be of value to him--them--in Detta Walker's gutter toughness, and he wanted her--but he wanted her under control. There was a long way to go. Detta thought he and Eddie were monsters of some species she called Honk Mafahs. That was only dangerous delusion, but there would be real monsters along the way--the lobstrosities were not the first, nor would they be the last. The fight-until-you-drop woman he had entered and who had come out of hiding again tonight might come in very handy in a fight against such monsters, if she could be tempered by Odetta Holmes's calm humanity--especially now, with him short two fingers, almost out of bullets, and growing more fever.
But that is a step ahead. I think if I can make them acknowledge each other, that would bring them into confrontation. How may it be done?
He lay awake all that long night, thinking, and although he felt the fever in him grow, he found no answer to his question.
8
Eddie woke u
p shortly before daybreak, saw the gunslinger sitting near the ashes of last night's fire with his blanket wrapped around him Indian-fashion, and joined him.
"How do you feel?" Eddie asked in a low voice. The Lady still slept in her crisscrossing of ropes, although she occasionally jerked and muttered and moaned.
"All right."
Eddie gave him an appraising glance. "You don't look all right."
"Thank you, Eddie," the gunslinger said dryly.
"You're shivering."
"It will pass."
The Lady jerked and moaned again--this time a word that was almost understandable. It might have been Oxford.
"God, I hate to see her tied up like that," Eddie murmured. "Like a goddam calf in a barn."
"She'll wake soon. Mayhap we can unloose her when she does."
It was the closest either of them came to saying out loud that when the Lady in the chair opened her eyes, the calm, if slightly puzzled gaze of Odetta Holmes might greet them.
Fifteen minutes later, as the first sunrays struck over the hills, those eyes did open--but what the men saw was not the calm gaze of Odetta Holmes but the mad glare of Detta Walker.
"How many times you done rape me while I was buzzed out?" she asked. "My cunt feel all slick an tallowy, like somebody done been at it with a couple them little bitty white candles you graymeat mahfahs call cocks."
Roland sighed.
"Let's get going," he said, and gained his feet with a grimace.
"I ain't goan nowhere wit choo, mahfah," Detta spat.
"Oh yes you are," Eddie said. "Dreadfully sorry, my dear."
"Where you think I'm goan?"
"Well," Eddie said, "what was behind Door Number One wasn't so hot, and what was behind Door Number Two was even worse, so now, instead of quitting like sane people, we're going to go right on ahead and check out Door Number Three. The way things have been going, I think it's likely to be something like Godzilla or Ghidra the Three-Headed Monster, but I'm an optimist. I'm still hoping for the stainless steel cookware."
"I ain't goan."
"You're going, all right," Eddie said, and walked behind her chair. She began struggling again, but the gunslinger had made these knots, and her struggles only drew them tighter. Soon enough she saw this and ceased. She was full of poison but far from stupid. But she looked back over her shoulder at Eddie with a grin which made him recoil a little. It seemed to him the most evil expression he had ever seen on a human face.