“I don’t want to talk about it!” she shouted. “My head hurts!”
“All right. But you know where you lost track of time, and it wasn’t in Oxford.”
“Leave me alone,” she said dully.
Eddie saw the gunslinger toiling his way back with two full water-skins, one tied around his waist and the other slung over his shoulders. He looked very tired.
“I wish I could help you,” Eddie said, “but to do that, I guess I’d have to be real.”
He stood by her for a moment, but her head was bowed, the tips of her fingers steadily massaging her temples.
Eddie went to meet Roland.
8
“Sit down.” Eddie took the bags. “You look all in.”
“I am. I’m getting sick again.”
Eddie looked at the gunslinger’s flushed cheeks and brow, his cracked lips, and nodded. “I hoped it wouldn’t happen, but I’m not that surprised, man. You didn’t bat for the cycle. Balazar didn’t have enough Keflex.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“If you don’t take a penicillin drug long enough, you don’t kill the infection. You just drive it underground. A few days go by and it comes back. We’ll need more, but at least there’s a door to go. In the meantime you’ll just have to take it easy.” But Eddie was thinking unhappily of Odetta’s missing legs and the longer and longer treks it took to find water. He wondered if Roland could have picked a worse time to have a relapse. He supposed it was possible; he just didn’t see how.
“I have to tell you something about Odetta.”
“That’s her name?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s very lovely,” the gunslinger said.
“Yeah. I thought so, too. What isn’t so lovely is the way she feels about this place. She doesn’t think she’s here.”
“I know. And she doesn’t like me much, does she?”
No, Eddie thought, but that doesn’t keep her from thinking you’re one booger of a hallucination. He didn’t say it, only nodded.
“The reasons are almost the same,” the gunslinger said. “She’s not the woman I brought through, you see. Not at all.”
Eddie stared, then suddenly nodded, excited. That blurred glimpse in the mirror . . . that snarling face . . . the man was right. Jesus Christ, of course he was! That hadn’t been Odetta at all.
Then he remembered the hands which had gone pawing carelessly through the scarves and had just as carelessly gone about the business of stuffing the junk jewelry into her big purse—almost, it had seemed, as if she wanted to be caught.
The rings had been there.
Same rings.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean the same hands, he thought wildly, but that would only hold for a second. He had studied her hands. They were the same, long-fingered and delicate.
“No,” the gunslinger continued. “She is not.” His blue eyes studied Eddie carefully.
“Her hands—”
“Listen,” the gunslinger said, “and listen carefully. Our lives may depend on it—mine because I’m getting sick again, and yours because you have fallen in love with her.”
Eddie said nothing.
“She is two women in the same body. She was one woman when I entered her, and another when I returned here.”
Now Eddie could say nothing.