He got wearily to his feet, reeled, and then walked slowly over to where Eddie Dean stood.
"Stop it," he said.
Eddie ignored him and went on dry-firing Roland's big gun at the dead man.
"Stop it, Eddie, he's dead. They're all dead. Your feet are bleeding."
Eddie ignored him and went on pulling the revolver's trigger. The babble of excited voices outside was closer. So were the sirens.
The gunslinger reached for the gun and pulled on it. Eddie turned on him, and before Roland was entirely sure what was happening, Eddie struck him on the side of the head with his own gun. Roland felt a warm gush of blood and collapsed against the wall. He struggled to stay on his feet--they had to get out of here, quick. But he could feel himself sliding down the wall in spite of his every effort, and then the world was gone for a little while in a drift of grayness.
25
He was out for no more than two minutes, and then he managed to get things back into focus and make it to his feet. Eddie was no longer in the hallway. Roland's gun lay on the chest of the dead man with the red hair. The gunslinger bent, fighting off a wave of dizziness, picked it up, and dropped it into its holster with an awkward, cross-body movement.
I want my damned fingers back, he thought tiredly, and sighed.
He tried to walk back into the ruins of the office, but the best he could manage was an educated stagger. He stopped, bent, and picked up all of Eddie's clothes that he could hold in the crook of his left arm. The howlers had almost arrived. Roland believed the men winding them were probably militia, a marshall's posse, something of that sort . . . but there was always the possibility they might be more of Balazar's men.
"Eddie," he croaked. His throat was sore and throbbing again, worse even than the swollen place on the side of his head where Eddie had struck him with the revolver.
Eddie didn't notice. Eddie was sitting on the floor with his brother's head cradled against his belly. He was shuddering all over and crying. The gunslinger looked for the door, didn't see it, and felt a nasty jolt that was nearly terror. Then he remembered. With both of them on this side, the only way to create the door was for him to make physical contact with Eddie.
He reached for him but Eddie shrank away, still weeping. "Don't touch me," he said.
"Eddie, it's over. They're all dead, and your brother's dead, too."
"Leave my brother out of this!" Eddie shrieked childishly, and another fit of shuddering went through him. He cradled the severed head to his chest and rocked it. He lifted his streaming eyes to the gunslinger's face.
"All the times he took care of me, man," he said, sobbing so hard the gunslinger could barely understand him. "All the times. Why couldn't I have taken care of him, just this once, after all the times he took care of me?"
He took care of you, all right, Roland thought grimly. Look at you, sitting there and shaking like a man who's eaten an apple from the fever-tree. He took care of you just fine.
"We have to go."
"Go?" For the first time some vague understanding came into Eddie's face, and it was followed immediately by alarm. "I ain't going nowhere. Especially not back to that other place, where those big crabs or whatever they are ate Jack."
Someone was hammering on the door, yelling to open up.
"Do you want to stay here and explain all these bodies?" the gunslinger asked.
"I don't care," Eddie said. "Without Henry, it doesn't matter. Nothing does."
"Maybe it doesn't matter to you," Roland said, "but there are others involved, prisoner."
"Don't call me that!" Eddie shouted.
"I'll call you that until you show me you can walk out of the cell you're in!" Roland shouted back. It hurt his throat to yell, but he yelled just the same. "Throw that rotten piece of meat away and stop puling!"
Eddie looked at him, cheeks wet, eyes wide and frightened.
"THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE!" an amplified voice said from outside. To Eddie the voice sounded eerily like the voice of a game-show host. "THE S.W.A.T. SQUAD HAS ARRIVED--I REPEAT: THE S.W.A. T. SQUAD HAS ARRIVED!"
"What's on the other side of that door for me?" Eddie asked the gunslinger quietly. "Go on and tell me. If you can tell me, maybe I'll come. But if you lie, I'll know."
"Probably death," the gunslinger said. "But before that happens, I don't think you'll be bored. I want you to join me on a quest. Of course, all will probably end in death--death for the four of us in a strange place. But if we should win through . . ." His eyes gleamed. "If we win through, Eddie, you'll see something beyond all the beliefs of all your dreams."
"What thing?"
"The Dark Tower."
"Where is this Tower?"
"Far from the beach where you found me. How far I know not."
"What is it?"
"I don't know that, either--except that it may be a kind of . . . of a bolt. A central linchpin that holds all of existence together. All existence, all time, and all size."
"You said four. Who are the other two?"
"I know them not, for they have yet to be drawn."
"As I was drawn. Or as you'd like to draw me."
"Yes."
From outside there was a coughing explosion like a mortar round. The glass of The Leaning Tower's front window blew in. The barroom began to fill with choking clouds of teargas.
"Well?" Roland asked. He could grab Eddie, force the doorway into existence by their contact, and pummel them both through. But he had seen Eddie risk his life for him; he had seen this hag-ridden man behave with all the dignity of a born gunslinger in spite of his addiction and the fact that he had been forced to fight as naked as the day he was born, and he wanted Eddie to decide for himself.
"Quests, adventures, Towers, worlds to win," Eddie said, and smiled wanly. Neither of them turned as fresh teargas rounds flew through the windows to explode, hissing, on the floor. The first acrid tendrils of the gas were now slipping into Balazar's office. "Sounds better than one of those Edgar Rice Burroughs books about Mars Henry used to read me sometimes when we were kids. You only left out one thing."
"What's that?"
"The beautiful bare-breasted girls."
The gunslinger smiled. "On the way to the Dark Tower," he said, "anything is possible."
Another shudder wracked Eddie's body. He raised Henry's head, kissed one cool, ash-colored cheek, and laid the gore-streaked relic gently aside. He got to his feet.
"Okay," he said. "I didn't have anything else planned for tonight, anyway."
"Take these," Roland said, and shoved the clothes at him. "Put on your shoes if nothing else. You've cut your feet."
On the sidewalk outside, two cops wearing plexiglass faceplates, flak-jackets, and Kelvar vests smashed in The Leaning Tower's front door. In the bathroom, Eddie (dressed in his underpants, his Adidas sneakers, and nothing else) handed the sample packages of Keflex to Roland one by one, and Roland put them into the pockets of Eddie's jeans. When they were all safely stowed, Roland slid his right arm around Eddie's neck again and Eddie gripped Roland's left hand again. The door was suddenly there, a rectangle of darkness. Eddie felt the wind from that other world blow his sweaty hair back from his forehead. He heard the waves rolling up that stony beach. He smelled the tang of sour sea-salt. And in spite of everything, all his pain and sorrow, he suddenly wanted to see this Tower of which Roland spoke. He wanted to see it very much. And with Henry dead, what was there in this world for him? Their parents were dead, and there hadn't been a steady girl since he got heavily into the smack three years ago--just a steady parade of sluts, needlers, and nosers. None of them straight. Fuck that action.
They stepped through, Eddie actually leading a little.
On the other side he was suddenly wracked with fresh shudders and agonizing muscle-cramps--the first symptoms of serious heroin withdrawal. And with them he also had the first alarmed second thoughts.
"Wait!" he shouted. "I want to go back for a minute! His desk! His desk, or the other office! The scag! If
they were keeping Henry doped, there's gotta be junk! Heroin! I need it! I need it!"
He looked pleadingly at Roland, but the gunslinger's face was stony.
"That part of your life is over, Eddie," he said. He reached out with his left hand.
"No!" Eddie screamed, clawing at him. "No, you don't get it, man, I need it! I NEED IT!"
He might as well have been clawing stone.
The gunslinger swept the door shut.
It made a dull clapping sound that bespoke utter finality and fell backward onto the sand. A little dust puffed up from its edges. There was nothing behind the door, and now no word written upon it. This particular portal between the worlds had closed forever.
"No!" Eddie screamed, and the gulls screamed back at him as if in jeering contempt; the lobstrosities asked him questions, perhaps suggesting he could hear them a little better if he were to come a little closer, and Eddie fell over on his side, crying and shuddering and jerking with cramps.
"Your need will pass," the gunslinger said, and managed to get one of the sample packets out of the pocket of Eddie's jeans, which were so like his own. Again, he could read some of these letters but not all. Cheeflet, the word looked like.
Cheeflet.
Medicine from that other world.
"Kill or cure," Roland murmured, and dry-swallowed two of the capsules. Then he took the other three astin, and lay next to Eddie, and took him in his arms as well as he could, and after some difficult time, both of them slept.
SHUFFLE
shuffle
The time following that night was broken time for Roland, time that didn't really exist as time at all. What he remembered was only a series of images, moments, conversation without context; images flashing past like one-eyed jacks and treys and nines and the Bloody Black Bitch Queen of Spiders in a card-sharp's rapid shuffle.
Later on he asked Eddie how long that time lasted, but Eddie didn't know either. Time had been destroyed for both of them. There was no time in hell, and each of them was in his own private hell: Roland the hell of the fever and infection, Eddie the hell of withdrawal.
"It was less than a week," Eddie said. "That's all I know for sure."
"How do you know that?"
"A week's worth of pills was all I had to give you. After that, you were gonna have to do the one thing or the other on your own."
"Get well or die."
"Right."
shuffle