The drawing of the three - Stephen King [146]
Eddie had shaken his head, cold with the vision of it.
They called him a honey-pot, Henry had said. Something sweet. Something to draw flies. Or maybe even a bear.
That’s what Detta was doing: using him as a honeypot.
She left him some seven feet below the high-tide line, left him without a word, left him facing the ocean. It was not the tide coming in to drown him that the gunslinger, looking through the door, was supposed to see, because the tide was on the ebb and wouldn’t get up this far again for another six hours. And long before then . . .
Eddie rolled his eyes up a little and saw the sun striking a long gold track across the ocean. What was it? Four o’clock? About that. Sunset would come around seven.
It would be dark long before he had to worry about the tide.
And when dark came, the lobstrosities would come rolling out of the waves; they would crawl their questioning way up the beach to where he lay helplessly trussed, and then they would tear him apart.
7
That time stretched out interminably for Eddie Dean. The idea of time itself became a joke. Even his horror of what was going to happen to him when it got dark faded as his legs began to throb with a discomfort which worked its way up the scale of feeling to pain and finally to shrieking agony. He would relax his muscles, all the knots would pull tight, and when he was on the verge of strangling he would manage somehow to pull his ankles up again, releasing the pressure, allowing some breath to return. He was no longer sure he could make it to dark. There might come a time when he would simply be unable to bring his legs back up.
CHAPTER 3
Roland Takes His Medicine
1
Now Jack Mort knew the gunslinger was here. If he had been another person—an Eddie Dean or an Odetta Walker, for instance—Roland would have held palaver with the man, if only to ease his natural panic and confusion at suddenly finding one’s self shoved rudely into the passenger seat of the body one’s brain had driven one’s whole life.
But because Mort was a monster—worse than Detta Walker ever had been or could be—he made no effort to explain or speak at all. He could hear the man’s clamorings—Who are you? What’s happening to me?—but disregarded them. The gunslinger concentrated on his short list of necessities, using the man’s mind with no compunction at all. The clamorings became screams of terror. The gunslinger went right on disregarding them.
The only way he could remain in the worm-pit which was this man’s mind was to regard him as no more than a combination atlas and encyclopedia. Mort had all the information Roland needed. The plan he made was rough, but rough was often better than smooth. When it came to planning, there were no creatures in the universe more different than Roland and Jack Mort.
When you planned rough, you allowed room for improvisation. And improvisation at short notice had always been one of Roland’s strong points.
2
A fat man with lenses over his eyes, like the bald man who had poked his head into Mort’s office five minutes earlier (it seemed that in Eddie’s world many people wore these, which his Mortcypedia identified as “glasses”), got into the elevator with him. He looked at the briefcase in the hand of the man who he believed to be Jack Mort and then at Mort himself.
“Going to see Dorfman, Jack?”
The gunslinger said nothing.
“If you think you can talk him out of sub-leasing, I can tell you it’s a waste of time,” the fat man said, then blinked as his colleague took a quick step backward. The doors of the little box closed and suddenly they were falling.
He clawed at Mort’s mind, ignoring the screams, and found this was all right. The fall was controlled.
“If I spoke out of turn, I’m sorry,” the fat man said. The gunslinger thought: This one is afraid, too. “You’ve handled the jerk better