He saw the gunslinger up on one elbow, his eyes gleaming in the dark.
“You ready?” Eddie asked. He got slowly to his feet, grinning with pain.
“Are you?” Roland asked again, very softly.
Eddie twisted his back, producing a series of pops like a string of tiny firecrackers. “Yeah. But I could really get behind that cheeseburger.”
“I thought chicken was what you wanted.”
Eddie groaned. “Cut me a break, man.”
The third door was in plain view by the time the sun cleared the hills. Two hours later, they reached it.
All together again, Eddie thought, ready to drop to the sand.
But that was apparently not so. There was no sign of Odetta Holmes. No sign at all.
13
“Odetta!” Eddie screamed, and now his voice was broken and hoarse as the voice of Odetta’s other had been.
There wasn’t even an echo in return, something he might at least have mistaken for Odetta’s voice. These low, eroded hills would not bounce sound. There was only the crash of the waves, much louder in this tight arrowhead of land, the rhythmic, hollow boom of surf crashing to the end of some tunnel it had dug in the friable rock, and the steady keening of the wind.
“Odetta!”
This time he screamed so loudly his voice broke and for a moment something sharp, like a jag of fishbone, tore at his vocal cords. His eyes scanned the hills frantically, looking for the lighter patch of brown that would be her palm, looking for movement as she stood up . . . looking （God forgive him） for bright splashes of blood on roan-colored rock.
He found himself wondering what he would do if he saw that last, or found the revolver, now with deep toothmarks driven into the smooth sandalwood of the grips. The sight of something like that might drive him into hysteria, might even run him crazy, but he looked for it—or something—just the same.
His eyes saw nothing; his ears brought not the faintest returning cry.
The gunslinger, meanwhile, had been studying the third door. He had expected a single word, the word the man in black had used as he turned the sixth Tarot card at the dusty Golgotha where they had held palaver. Death, Walter had said, but not for you, gunslinger.
There was not one word writ upon this door but two . . . and neither of them was DEATH. He read it again, lips moving soundlessly:
THE PUSHER
Yet it means death, Roland thought, and knew it was so.
What made him look around was the sound of Eddie’s voice moving away. Eddie had begun to climb the first slope, still calling Odetta’s name.
For a moment Roland considered just letting him go.
He might find her, might even find her alive, not too badly hurt, and still herself. He supposed the two of them might even make a life of sorts for themselves here, that Eddie’s love for Odetta and hers for him might somehow smother the nightshade who called herself Detta Walker. Yes, between the two of them he supposed it was possible that Detta might simply be squeezed to death. He was a romantic in his own harsh way . . . yet he was also realist enough to know that sometimes love actually did conquer all. As for himself? Even if he was able to get the drugs from Eddie’s world which had almost cured him before, would they be able to cure him this time, or even make a start? He was now very sick, and he found himself wondering if perhaps things hadn’t gone too far. His arms and legs ached, his head thudded, his chest was heavy and full of snot. When he coughed there was a painful grating in his left side, as if ribs were broken there. His left ear flamed. Perhaps, he thought, the time had come to end it; to just cry off.
At this, everything in him rose up in protest.
“Eddie!” he cried, and there was no cough now. His voice was deep and powerful.