The drawing of the three - Stephen King [39]
This meant there was a possibility that the pizza truck just might pull up in the lane next to the taxi, someone just might stick an automatic weapon out of the pizza truck’s window, and then the back of the cab would become something that looked like a bloody cheese-grater. Eddie would have been more worried about that if they held him for four hours instead of two, and seriously worried if it had been six hours instead of four. But only two . . . he thought Balazar would trust him to have hung on to his lip at least that long. He would want to know about his goods.
The real reason Eddie kept looking back was the door.
It fascinated him.
As the Customs agents had half-carried, half-dragged him down the stairs to Kennedy’s administration section, he had looked back over his shoulder and there it had been, improbable but indubitably, inarguably real, floating along at a distance of about three feet. He could see the waves rolling steadily in, crashing on the sand; he saw that the day over there was beginning to darken.
The door was like one of those trick pictures with a hidden image in them, it seemed; you couldn’t see that hidden part for the life of you at first, but once you had, you couldn’t unsee it, no matter how hard you tried.
It had disappeared on the two occasions when the gunslinger went back without him, and that had been scary—Eddie had felt like a child whose nightlight has burned out. The first time had been during the customs interrogation.
I have to go, Roland’s voice had cut cleanly through whatever question they were currently throwing at him. I’ll only be a few moments. Don’t be afraid.
Why? Eddie asked. Why do you have to go?
“What’s wrong?” one of the Customs guys had asked him. “All of a sudden you look scared.”
All of a sudden he had felt scared, but of nothing this yo-yo would understand.
He looked over his shoulder, and the Customs men had also turned. They saw nothing but a blank white wall covered with white panels drilled with holes to damp sound; Eddie saw the door, its usual three feet away (now it was embedded in the room’s wall, an escape hatch none of his interrogators could see). He saw more. He saw things coming out of the waves, things that looked like refugees from a horror movie where the effects are just a little more special than you want them to be, special enough so everything looks real. They looked like a hideous cross-breeding of prawn, lobster, and spider. They were making some weird sound.
“You getting the jim-jams?” one of the Customs guys had asked. “Seeing a few bugs crawling down the wall, Eddie?”
That was so close to the truth that Eddie had almost laughed. He understood why the man named Roland had to go back, though; Roland’s mind was safe enough—at least for the time being—but the creatures were moving toward his body, and Eddie had a suspicion that if Roland did not soon vacate it from the area it currently occupied, there might not be any body left to go back to.
Suddenly in his head he heard David Lee Roth bawling: Oh Iyyyyy . . . ain’t got nobody . . . and this time he did laugh. He couldn’t help it.
“What’s so funny?” the Customs agent who had wanted to know if he was seeing bugs asked him.
“This whole situation,” Eddie had responded. “Only in the sense of peculiar, not hilarious. I mean, if it was a movie it would be more like Fellini than Woody Allen, if you get what I mean.”
You’ll be all right? Roland asked.
Yeah, fine. TCB, man.
I don’t understand.
Go take care of business.
Oh. All right. I’ll not be long.
And suddenly that other had been gone. Simply gone. Like a wisp of smoke so thin that the slightest vagary of wind could blow it away. Eddie looked around again, saw nothing but drilled white panels, no door, no ocean, no weird monstrosities, and he felt his gut begin to tighten. There was no question of believing that it had all been a hallucination