"What does it mean?" Odetta asked finally.
"I don't know," Eddie said, but those words had brought a hopeless chill; he felt an eclipse stealing across his heart.
"Don't you?" she asked, looking at him more closely.
"No. I . . ." He swallowed. "No."
She looked at him a moment longer. "Push me behind it, please. I'd like to see that. I know you want to get back to him, but would you do that for me?"
He would.
They started around, on the high side of the door.
"Wait!" she cried. "Did you see it?"
"What?"
"Go back! Look! Watch!"
This time he watched the door instead of what might be ahead to trip them up. As they went above it he saw it narrow in perspective, saw its hinges, hinges which seemed to be buried in nothing at all, saw its thickness . . .
Then it was gone.
The thickness of the door was gone.
His view of the water should have been interrupted by three, perhaps even four inches of solid wood (the door looked extraordinarily stout), but there was no such interruption.
The door was gone.
Its shadow was there, but the door was gone.
He rolled the chair back two feet, so he was just south of the place where the door stood, and the thickness was there.
"You see it?" he asked in a ragged voice.
"Yes! It's there again!"
He rolled the chair forward a foot. The door was still there. Another six inches. Still there. Another two inches. Still there. Another inch . . . and it was gone. Solid gone.
"Jesus," he whispered. "Jesus Christ."
"Would it open for you?" she asked. "Or me?"
He stepped forward slowly and grasped the knob of the door with those two words upon it.
He tried clockwise; he tried anti-clockwise.
The knob moved not an iota.
"All right." Her voice was calm, resigned. "It's for him, then. I think we both knew it. Go for him, Eddie. Now."
"First I've got to see to you."
"I'll be fine."
"No you won't. You're too close to the high-tide line. If I leave you here, the lobsters are going to come out when it gets dark and you're going to be din--"
Up in the hills, a cat's coughing growl suddenly cut across what he was saying like a knife cutting thin cord. It was a good distance away, but closer than the other had been.
Her eyes flicked to the gunslinger's revolver shoved into the waistband of his pants for just a moment, then back to his face. He felt a dull heat in his cheeks.
"He told you not to give it to me, didn't he?" she said softly. "He doesn't want me to have it. For some reason he doesn't want me to have it."
"The shells got wet," he said awkwardly. "They probably wouldn't fire, anyway."
"I understand. Take me a little way up the slope, Eddie, can you? I know how tired your back must be, Andrew calls it Wheelchair Crouch, but if you take me up a little way, I'll be safe from the lobsters. I doubt if anything else comes very close to where they are."
Eddie thought, When the tide's in, she's probably right . . . but what about when it starts to go out again?
"Give me something to eat and some stones," she said, and her unknowing echo of the gunslinger made Eddie flush again. His cheeks and forehead felt like the sides of a brick oven.
She looked at him, smiled faintly, and shook her head as if he had spoken out loud. "We're not going to argue about this. I saw how it is with him. His time is very, very short. There is no time for discussion. Take me up a little way, give me food and some stones, then take the chair and go."
10
He got her fixed as quickly as he could, then pulled the gunslinger's revolver and held it out to her butt-first. But she shook her head.
"He'll be angry with both of us. Angry with you for giving, angrier at me for taking."
"Crap!" Eddie yelled. "What gave you that idea?"
"I know," she said, and her voice was impervious.
"Well, suppose that's true. Just suppose. I'll be angry with you if you don't take it."
"Put it back. I don't like guns. I don't know how to use them. If something came at me in the dark the first thing I'd do is wet my pants. The second thing I'd do is point it the wrong way and shoot myself." She paused, looking at Eddie solemnly. "There's something else, and you might as well know it. I don't want to touch anything that belongs to him. Not anything. For me, I think his things might have what my Ma used to call a hoodoo. I like to think of myself as a modern woman . . . but I don't want any hoodoo on me when you're gone and the dark lands on top of me."
He looked from the gun to Odetta, and his eyes still questioned.
"Put it back," she said, stern as a schoolteacher. Eddie burst out laughing and obeyed.
"Why are you laughing?"
"Because when you said that you sounded like Miss Hathaway. She was my third-grade teacher."
She smiled a little, her luminous eyes never leaving his. She sang softly, sweetly: "Heavenly shades of night are falling . . . it's twilight time . . ." She trailed off and they both looked west, but the star they had wished on the previous evening had not yet appeared, although their shadows had drawn long.
"Is there anything else, Odetta?" He felt an urge to delay and delay. He thought it would pass once he was actually headed back, but now the urge to seize any excuse to remain, seemed very strong.
"A kiss. I could do with that, if you don't mind."
He kissed her long and when their lips no longer touched, she caught his wrist and stared at him intently. "I never made love with a white man before last night," she said. "I don't know if that's important to you or not. I don't even know if it's important to me. But I thought you should know."
He considered.
"Not to me," he said. "In the dark, I think we were both gray. I love you, Odetta."
She put a hand over his.
"You're a sweet young man and perhaps I love you, too, although it's too early for either of us--"
At that moment, as if given a cue, a wildcat growled in what the gunslinger had called the brakes. It still sounded four or five miles away, but that was still four or five miles closer than the last time they heard it, and it sounded big.
They turned their heads toward the sound. Eddie felt hackles trying to stand up on his neck. They couldn't quite make it. Sorry, hackles, he thought stupidly. I guess my hair's just a little too long now.
The growl rose to a tortured scream that sounded like a cry of some being suffering a horrid death (it might actually have signalled no more than a successful mating). It held for a moment, almost unbearable, and then it wound down, sliding through lower and lower registers until it was gone or buried beneath the ceaseless cry of the wind. They waited for it to come again, but the cry was not repeated. As far as Eddie was concerned, that didn't matter. He pulled the revolver out of his waistband again and held it out to her.
"Take it and don't argue. If you should need to use it, it won't do shit--that's how stuff like this always works--but take it anyway."
"Do you want an argument?"
"Oh, you can argue. You can argue all you want."
After a considering look into Eddie's almost-hazel eyes, she smiled a little wearily. "I won't argue, I guess." She took the gun. "Please be as quick as you can."
"I will." He kissed her again, hurriedly this time, and almost told her to be careful . . . but seriously, folks, how careful could she be, with the situation what it was?
He picked his way back down the slope through the deepening shadows (the lobstrosities weren't out yet, but they would be putting in their nightly appearance soon), and looked at the words written upon the door again. The same chill rose in his flesh. They were apt, those words. God, they were so apt. Then he looked back up the slope. For a moment he couldn't see her, and then he saw something move. The lighter brown of one palm. She was waving.
He waved back, then turned the wheelchair and began to ru
n with it tipped up in front of him so the smaller, more delicate front wheels would be off the ground. He ran south, back the way he had come. For the first half-hour or so his shadow ran with him, the improbable shadow of a scrawny giant tacked to the soles of his sneakers and stretching long yards to the east. Then the sun went down, his shadow was gone, and the lobstrosities began to tumble out of the waves.
It was ten minutes or so after he heard the first of their buzzing cries when he looked up and saw the evening star glowing calmly against the dark blue velvet of the sky.