For one single moment Jack Mort lost the thin strong arrow of his concentration. On the edge of leaping forward and shoving the kid into the traffic, he felt something which his mind mistranslated just as the body may refer pain from one part of itself to another.
When the gunslinger came forward, Jack thought some sort of bug had landed on the back of his neck. Not a wasp or a bee, nothing that actually stung, but something that bit and itched. Mosquito, maybe. It was on this that he blamed his lapse in concentration at the crucial moment. He slapped at it and returned to the boy.
He thought all this happened in a bare wink; actually, seven seconds passed. He sensed neither the gunslinger’s swift advance nor his equally swift retreat, and none of the people around him （going-to-work people, most from the subway station on the next block, their faces still puffy with sleep, their half-dreaming eyes turned inward） noticed Jack’s eyes turn from their usual deep blue to a lighter blue behind the prim gold-rimmed glasses he wore. No one noticed those eyes darken to their normal cobalt color either, but when it happened and he refocused on the boy, he saw with frustrated fury as sharp as a thorn that his chance was gone. The light had changed.
He watched the boy crossing with the rest of the sheep, and then Jack himself turned back the way he had come and began shoving himself upstream against the tidal flow of pedestrians.
“Hey, mister! Watch ou—”
Some curd-faced teenaged girl he barely saw. Jack shoved her aside, hard, not looking back at her caw of anger as her own armload of schoolbooks went flying. He went walking on down Fifth Avenue and away from Forty-Third, where he had meant for the boy to die today. His head was bent, his lips pressed together so tightly he seemed to have no mouth at all but only the scar of a long-healed wound above his chin. Once clear of the bottleneck at the corner, he did not slow down but strode even more rapidly along, crossing Forty-Second, Forty-First, Fortieth. Somewhere in the middle of the next block he passed the building where the boy lived. He gave it barely a glance, although he had followed the boy from it every school-morning for the last three weeks, followed him from the building to the corner three and a half blocks further up Fifth, the corner he thought of simply as the Pushing Place.
The girl he bumped was screaming after him, but Jack Mort didn’t notice. An amateur lepidopterist would have taken no more notice of a common butterfly.
Jack was, in his way, much like an amateur lepidopterist.
By profession, he was a successful C.P.A.
Pushing was only his hobby.
4
The gunslinger returned to the back of the man’s mind and fainted there. If there was relief, it was simply that this man was not the man in black, was not Walter.
All the rest was utter horror . . . and utter realization.
Divorced of his body, his mind—his ka—was as healthy and acute as ever, but the sudden knowing struck him like a chisel-blow to the temple.
The knowing didn’t come when he went forward but when he was sure the boy was safe and slipped back again. He saw the connection between this man and Odetta, too fantastic and yet too hideously apt to be coincidental, and understood what the real drawing of the three might be, and who they might be.
The third was not this man, this Pusher; the third named by Walter had been Death.
Death . . . but not for you. That was what Walter, clever as Satan even at the end, had said. A lawyer’s answer . . . so close to the truth that the truth was able to hide in its shadow. Death was not for him; death was become him.
The Prisoner, the Lady.
Death was the third.
He was suddenly filled with the certainty that he himself was the third.
5
Roland came forward as nothing but a projectile, a brainless missile programmed to launch the body he was in at the man in black the instant he saw him.