They started around, on the high side of the door.
“Wait!” she cried. “Did you see it?”
“What?”
“Go back! Look! Watch!”
This time he watched the door instead of what might be ahead to trip them up. As they went above it he saw it narrow in perspective, saw its hinges, hinges which seemed to be buried in nothing at all, saw its thickness . . .
Then it was gone.
The thickness of the door was gone.
His view of the water should have been interrupted by three, perhaps even four inches of solid wood （the door looked extraordinarily stout）， but there was no such interruption.
The door was gone.
Its shadow was there, but the door was gone.
He rolled the chair back two feet, so he was just south of the place where the door stood, and the thickness was there.
“You see it?” he asked in a ragged voice.
“Yes! It’s there again!”
He rolled the chair forward a foot. The door was still there. Another six inches. Still there. Another two inches. Still there. Another inch . . . and it was gone. Solid gone.
“Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus Christ.”
“Would it open for you?” she asked. “Or me?”
He stepped forward slowly and grasped the knob of the door with those two words upon it.
He tried clockwise; he tried anti-clockwise.
The knob moved not an iota.
“All right.” Her voice was calm, resigned. “It’s for him, then. I think we both knew it. Go for him, Eddie. Now.”
“First I’ve got to see to you.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“No you won’t. You’re too close to the high-tide line. If I leave you here, the lobsters are going to come out when it gets dark and you’re going to be din—”
Up in the hills, a cat’s coughing growl suddenly cut across what he was saying like a knife cutting thin cord. It was a good distance away, but closer than the other had been.
Her eyes flicked to the gunslinger’s revolver shoved into the waistband of his pants for just a moment, then back to his face. He felt a dull heat in his cheeks.
“He told you not to give it to me, didn’t he?” she said softly. “He doesn’t want me to have it. For some reason he doesn’t want me to have it.”
“The shells got wet,” he said awkwardly. “They probably wouldn’t fire, anyway.”
“I understand. Take me a little way up the slope, Eddie, can you? I know how tired your back must be, Andrew calls it Wheelchair Crouch, but if you take me up a little way, I’ll be safe from the lobsters. I doubt if anything else comes very close to where they are.”
Eddie thought, When the tide’s in, she’s probably right . . . but what about when it starts to go out again?
“Give me something to eat and some stones,” she said, and her unknowing echo of the gunslinger made Eddie flush again. His cheeks and forehead felt like the sides of a brick oven.
She looked at him, smiled faintly, and shook her head as if he had spoken out loud. “We’re not going to argue about this. I saw how it is with him. His time is very, very short. There is no time for discussion. Take me up a little way, give me food and some stones, then take the chair and go.”
10
He got her fixed as quickly as he could, then pulled the gunslinger’s revolver and held it out to her butt-first. But she shook her head.