15
Eddie made the kill.
Detta refused to eat, as before. Eddie ate half a piece so she could see, then offered her the other half.
“Nossuh!” she said, eyes sparking at him. “No SUH! You done put de poison in t’other end. One you trine to give me.”
Without saying anything, Eddie took the rest of the piece, put it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed.
“Doan mean a thing,” Detta said sulkily. “Leave me alone, graymeat.”
Eddie wouldn’t.
He brought her another piece.
“You tear it in half. Give me whichever you want. I’ll eat it, then you eat the rest.”
“Ain’t fallin fo none o yo honky tricks, Mist’ Chahlie. Git away f’um me is what I said, and git away f’um me is what I meant.”
16
She did not scream in the night . . . but she was still there the next morning.
17
That day they made only two miles, although Detta made no effort to upset her chair; Eddie thought she might be growing too weak for acts of attempted sabotage. Or perhaps she had seen there was really no need for them. Three fatal factors were drawing inexorably together: Eddie’s weariness, the terrain, which after endless days of endless days of sameness, was finally beginning to change, and Roland’s deteriorating condition.
There were fewer sandtraps, but that was cold comfort. The ground was becoming grainier, more and more like cheap and unprofitable soil and less and less like sand （in places bunches of weeds grew, looking almost ashamed to be there）， and there were so many large rocks now jutting from this odd combination of sand and soil that Eddie found himself detouring around them as he had previously tried to detour the Lady’s chair around the sandtraps. And soon enough, he saw, there would be no beach left at all. The hills, brown and cheerless things, were drawing steadily closer. Eddie could see the ravines which curled between them, looking like chops made by an awkward giant wielding a blunt cleaver. That night, before falling asleep, he heard what sounded like a very large cat squalling far up in one of them.
The beach had seemed endless, but he was coming to realize it had an end after all. Somewhere up ahead, those hills were simply going to squeeze it out of existence. The eroded hills would march down to the sea and then into it, where they might become first a cape or peninsula of sorts, and then a series of archipelagoes.
That worried him, but Roland’s condition worried him more.
This time the gunslinger seemed not so much to be burning as fading, losing himself, becoming transparent.
The red lines had appeared again, marching relentlessly up the underside of his right arm toward the elbow.
For the last two days Eddie had looked constantly ahead, squinting into the distance, hoping to see the door, the door, the magic door. For the last two days he had waited for Odetta to reappear.
Neither had appeared.
Before falling asleep that night two terrible thoughts came to him, like some joke with a double punchline:
What if there was no door?
What if Odetta Holmes was dead?
18
“Rise and shine, mahfah!” Detta screeched him out of unconsciousness. “I think it jes be you and me now, honeychile. Think yo frien done finally passed on. I think yo frien be pokin the devil down in hell.”
Eddie looked at the rolled huddled shape of Roland and for one terrible moment he thought the bitch was right. Then the gunslinger stirred, moaned furrily, and pawed himself into a sitting position.
“Well looky yere!” Detta had screamed so much that now there were moments when her voice disappeared almost entirely, becoming no more than a weird whisper, like winter wind under a door. “I thought you was dead, Mister Man!”