Fever, gunslinger, the man in black tittered. What’s left inside you has been touched afire.
The red lines of infection were more pronounced now; they had marched upward from his right wrist halfway to his elbow.
He made another mile and drained his waterbag dry. He tied it around his waist with the other. The landscape was monotonous and unpleasing. The sea to his right, the mountains to his left, the gray, shell-littered sand under the feet of his cut-down boots. The waves came and went. He looked for the lobstrosities and saw none. He walked out of nowhere toward nowhere, a man from another time who, it seemed, had reached a point of pointless ending.
Shortly before noon he fell again and knew he could not get up. This was the place, then. Here. This was the end, after all.
On his hands and knees, he raised his head like a groggy fighter . . . and some distance ahead, perhaps a mile, perhaps three （it was difficult to judge distances along the unchanging reach of the strand with the fever working inside him, making his eyeballs pulse in and out）， he saw something new. Something which stood upright on the beach.
What was it?
（three）
Didn’t matter.
（three is the number of your fate）
The gunslinger managed to get to his feet again. He croaked something, some plea which only the circling seabirds heard （and how happy they would be to gobble my eyes from my head, he thought, how happy to have such a tasty bit!）， and walked on, weaving more seriously now, leaving tracks behind him that were weird loops and swoops.
He kept his eyes on whatever it was that stood on the strand ahead. When his hair fell in his eyes he brushed it aside. It seemed to grow no closer. The sun reached the roof of the sky, where it seemed to remain far too long. Roland imagined he was in the desert again, somewhere between the last outlander’s hut （the musical fruit the more you eat the more you toot） and the way-station where the boy （your Isaac） had awaited his coming.
His knees buckled, straightened, buckled, straightened again. When his hair fell in his eyes once more he did not bother to push it back; did not have the strength to push it back. He looked at the object, which now cast a narrow shadow back toward the upland, and kept walking.
He could make it out now, fever or no fever.
It was a door.
Less than a quarter of a mile from it, Roland’s knees buckled again and this time he could not stiffen their hinges. He fell, his right hand dragged across gritty sand and shells, the stumps of his fingers screamed as fresh scabs were scored away. The stumps began to bleed again.
So he crawled. Crawled with the steady rush, roar, and retreat of the Western Sea in his ears. He used his elbows and his knees, digging grooves in the sand above the twist of dirty green kelp which marked the high-tide line. He supposed the wind was still blowing—it must be, for the chills continued to whip through his body—but the only wind he could hear was the harsh gale which gusted in and out of his own lungs.
The door grew closer.
Closer.
At last, around three o’clock of that long delirious day, with his shadow beginning to grow long on his left, he reached it. He sat back on his haunches and regarded it wearily.
It stood six and a half feet high and appeared to be made of solid ironwood, although the nearest ironwood tree must grow seven hundred miles or more from here. The doorknob looked as if it were made of gold, and it was filigreed with a design which the gunslinger finally recognized: it was the grinning face of the baboon.
There was no keyhole in the knob, above it, or below it.
The door had hinges, but they were fastened to nothing—or so it seems, the gunslinger thought. This is a mystery, a most marvellous mystery, but does it really matter? You are dying. Your own mystery—the only one that really matters to any man or woman in the end—approaches.