The drawing of the three - Stephen King [111]
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