The sallow thing sat down. Eddie sat by the motel room desk with the little pile of white powder nearby (the D-Con or whatever it had been had long since gone down the john). On TV the Braves were getting shellacked by the Mets, courtesy of WTBS and the big satellite dish on the Aquinas Hotel's roof. Eddie felt a faint sensation of calm which seemed to come from the back of his mind . . . except where it was really coming from, he knew from what he had read in the medical journals, was from the bunch of living wires at the base of his spine, that place where heroin addiction takes place by causing an unnatural thickening of the nerve stem.
Want to take a quick cure? he had asked Henry once. Break your spine, Henry. Your legs stop working, and so does your cock, but you stop needing the needle right away.
Henry hadn't thought it was funny.
In truth, Eddie hadn't thought it was that funny either. When the only fast way you could get rid of the monkey on your back was to snap your spinal cord above that bunch of nerves, you were dealing with one heavy monkey. That was no capuchin, no cute little organ grinder's mascot; that was a big mean old baboon.
Eddie began to sniffle.
"Okay," he said at last. "It'll do. You can vacate the premises, scuzz."
The sallow thing got up. "I have friends," he said. "They could come in here and do things to you. You'd beg to tell me where that key is."
"Not me, champ," Eddie said. "Not this kid." And smiled. He didn't know how the smile looked, but it must not have looked all that cheery because the sallow thing vacated the premises, vacated them fast, vacated them without looking back.
When Eddie Dean was sure he was gone, he cooked.
Fixed.
Slept.
8
As he was sleeping now.
The gunslinger, somehow inside this man's mind (a man whose name he still did not know; the lowling the prisoner thought of as "the sallow thing" had not known it, and so had never spoken it), watched this as he had once watched plays as a child, before the world had moved on . . . or so he thought he watched, because plays were all he had ever seen. If he had ever seen a moving picture, he would have thought of that first. The things he did not actually see he had been able to pluck from the prisoner's mind because the associations were close. It was odd about the name, though. He knew the name of the prisoner's brother, but not the name of the man himself. But of course names were secret things, full of power.
And neither of the things that mattered was the man's name. One was the weakness of the addiction. The other was the steel buried inside that weakness, like a good gun sinking in quicksand.
This man reminded the gunslinger achingly of Cuthbert.
Someone was coming. The prisoner, sleeping, did not hear. The gunslinger, not sleeping, did, and came forward again.
9
Great, Jane thought. He tells me how hungry he is and I fix something up for him because he's a little bit cute, and then he falls asleep on me.
Then the passenger--a guy of about twenty, tall, wearing clean, slightly faded blue jeans and a paisley shirt--opened his eyes a little and smiled at her.
"Thankee sai," he said--or so it sounded. Almost archaic . . . or foreign. Sleep-talk, that's all, Jane thought.
"You're welcome." She smiled her best stewardess smile, sure he would fall asleep again and the sandwich would still be there, uneaten, when it was time for the actual meal service.
Well, that was what they taught you to expect, wasn't it?
She went back to the galley to catch a smoke.
She struck the match, lifted it halfway to her cigarette, and there it stopped, unnoticed, because that wasn't all they taught you to expect.
I thought he was a little bit cute. Mostly because of his eyes. His hazel eyes.
But when the man in 3A had opened his eyes a moment ago, they hadn't been hazel; they had been blue. Not sweet-sexy blue like Paul Newman's eyes, either, but the color of icebergs. They--
"Ow!"
The match had reached her fingers. She shook it out.
"Jane?" Paula asked. "You all right?"
"Fine. Daydreaming."
She lit another match and this time did the job right. She had only taken a single drag when the perfectly reasonable explanation occurred to her. He wore contacts. Of course. The kind that changed the color of your eyes. He had gone into the bathroom. He had been in there long enough for her to worry about him being airsick--he had that pallid complexion, the look of a man who is not quite well. But he had only been taking out his contact lenses so he could nap more comfortably. Perfectly reasonable.
You may feel something, a voice from her own not-so-distant past spoke suddenly. Some little tickle. You may see something just a little bit wrong.
Colored contact lenses.
Jane Dorning personally knew over two dozen people who wore contacts. Most of them worked for the airline. No one ever said anything about it, but she thought maybe one reason was they all sensed the passengers didn't like to see flight personnel wearing glasses--it made them nervous.
Of all those people, she knew maybe four who had color-contacts. Ordinary contact lenses were expensive; colored ones cost the earth. All of the people of Jane's acquaintance who cared to lay out that sort of money were women, all of them extremely vain.
So what? Guys can be vain, too. Why not? He's goodlooking.
No. He wasn't. Cute, maybe, but that was as far as it went, and with the pallid complexion he only made it to cute by the skin of his teeth. So why the color-contacts?
Airline passengers are often afraid of flying.
In a world where hijacking and drug-smuggling had become facts of life, airline personnel are often afraid of passengers.
The voice that had initiated these thoughts had been that of an instructor at flight school, a tough old battle-axe who looked as if she could have flown the mail with Wiley Post, saying: Don't ignore your suspicions. If you forget everything else you've learned about coping with potential or actual terrorists, remember this: don't ignore your suspicions. In some cases you'll get a crew who'll say during the debriefing that they didn't have any idea until the guy pulled out a grenade and said hang a left for Cuba or everyone on the aircraft is going to join the jet-stream. But in most cases you get two or three different people--mostly flight attendants, which you women will be in less than a month--who say they felt something. Some little tickle. A sense that the guy in 91C or the young woman in 5A was a little wrong. They felt something, but they did nothing. Did they get fired for that? Christ, no! You can't put a guy in restraints because you don't like the way he scratches his pimples. The real problem is they felt something . . . and then forgot.
The old battle-axe had raised one blunt finger. Jane Dorning, along with her fellow classmates, had listened raptly as she said, If you feel that little tickle, don't do anything . . . but that includes not forgetting. Because there's always that one little chance that you just might be able to stop something before it gets started . . . something like an unscheduled twelve-day layover on the tarmac of some shitpot Arab country.
Just colored contacts, but . . .
Thankee, sai.
Sleep-talk? Or a muddled lapse into some other language?
She would watch, Jane decided.
And she would not forget.
10
Now, the gunslinger thought. Now we'll see, won't we?
He had been able to come from his world into this body through the door on the beach. What he needed to find out was whether or not he could carry things back. Oh, not himself; he was confident that he could return th
rough the door and reenter his own poisoned, sickening body at any time he should desire. But other things? Physical things? Here, for instance, in front of him, was food: something the woman in the uniform had called a tooter-fish sandwhich. The gunslinger had no idea what tooter-fish was, but he knew a popkin when he saw it, although this one looked curiously uncooked.
His body needed to eat, and his body would need to drink, but more than either, his body needed some sort of medicine. It would die from the lobstrosity's bite without it. There might be such medicine in this world; in a world where carriages rode through the air far above where even the strongest eagle could fly, anything seemed possible. But it would not matter how much powerful medicine there was here if he could carry nothing physical through the door.
You could live in this body, gunslinger, the voice of the man in black whispered deep inside his head. Leave that piece of breathing meat over there for the lobster-things. It's only a husk, anyway.
He would not do that. For one thing it would be the most murderous sort of thievery, because he would not be content to be just a passenger for long, looking out of this man's eyes like a traveller looking out of a coach window at the passing scenery.
For another, he was Roland. If dying was required, he intended to die as Roland. He would die crawling toward the Tower, if that was what was required.
Then the odd harsh practicality that lived beside the romantic in his nature like a tiger with a roe reasserted itself. There was no need to think of dying with the experiment not yet made.
He picked up the popkin. It had been cut in two halves. He held one in each hand. He opened the prisoner's eyes and looked out of them. No one was looking at him (although, in the galley, Jane Dorning was thinking about him, and very hard).
Roland turned toward the door and went through, holding the popkin-halves in his hands.
11
First he heard the grinding roar of an incoming wave; next he heard the argument of many sea-birds arising from the closest rocks as he struggled to a sitting position (cowardly buggers were creeping up, he thought, and they would have been taking pecks out of me soon enough, still breathing or no--they're nothing but vultures with a coat of paint); then he became aware that one popkin half--the one in his right hand--had tumbled onto the hard gray sand because he had been holding it with a whole hand when he came through the door and now was--or had been--holding it in a hand which had suffered a forty per cent reduction.