“Maybe,” he said, not because he believed it but because she did.
“Let’s go!”
Eddie went behind the chair again, taking a moment to massage his lower back where a steady ache had settled. She looked around.
“What are you waiting for?”
“You really think you’ve got it spotted, don’t you?”
“Yes!”
“Well then, let’s go!”
Eddie started pushing again.
8
Half an hour later he saw it, too. Jesus, he thought, her eyes are as good as Roland’s. Maybe better.
Neither wanted to stop for lunch, but they needed to eat. They made a quick meal and then pushed on again. The tide was coming in and Eddie looked to the right—west—with rising unease. They were still well above the tangled line of kelp and seaweed that marked high water, but he thought that by the time they reached the door they would be in an uncomfortably tight angle bounded by the sea on one side and the slanting hills on the other. He could see those hills very clearly now. There was nothing pleasant about the view. They were rocky, studded with low trees that curled their roots into the ground like arthritic knuckles, keeping a grim grip, and thorny-looking bushes. They weren’t really steep, but too steep for the wheelchair. He might be able to carry her up a way, might, in fact, be forced to, but he didn’t fancy leaving her there.
For the first time he was hearing insects. The sound was a little like crickets, but higher pitched than that, and with no swing of rhythm—just a steady monotonous riiiiiiii sound like power-lines. For the first time he was seeing birds other than gulls. Some were biggies that circled inland on stiff wings. Hawks, he thought. He saw them fold their wings from time to time and plummet like stones. Hunting. Hunting what? Well, small animals. That was all right.
Yet he kept thinking of that yowl he’d heard in the night.
By mid-afternoon they could see the third door clearly. Like the other two, it was an impossibility which nonetheless stood as stark as a post.
“Amazing,” he heard her say softly. “How utterly amazing.”
It was exactly where he had begun to surmise it would be, in the angle that marked the end of any easy northward progress. It stood just above the high tide line and less than nine yards from the place where the hills suddenly leaped out of the ground like a giant hand coated with gray-green brush instead of hair.
The tide came full as the sun swooned toward the water; and at what might have been four o’clock—Odetta said so, and since she had said she was good at telling the sun （and because she was his beloved）， Eddie believed her—they reached the door.
9
They simply looked at it, Odetta in her chair with her hands in her lap, Eddie on the sea-side. In one way they looked at it as they had looked at the evening star the previous night—which is to say, as children look at things—but in another they looked differently. When they wished on the star they had been children of joy. Now they were solemn, wondering, like children looking at the stark embodiment of a thing which only belonged in a fairy tale.
Two words were written on this door.
“What does it mean?” Odetta asked finally.
“I don’t know,” Eddie said, but those words had brought a hopeless chill; he felt an eclipse stealing across his heart.
“Don’t you?” she asked, looking at him more closely.
“No. I . . .” He swallowed. “No.”
She looked at him a moment longer. “Push me behind it, please. I’d like to see that. I know you want to get back to him, but would you do that for me?”
He would.