“You do it or I do it, graymeat,” she said in that crooning voice. “Only if I do it, you goan be dead when I do. I jes kick some san’ over de brains dat squoit out d’other side yo haid, cover de hole wit yo hair. He think you be sleepin!” She cackled again.
Eddie brought his feet up, and she quickly secured the third running slipknot around his ankles.
“There. Trussed up just as neat as a calf at a ro-day-o.”
That described it as well as anything, Eddie thought. If he tried to bring his feet down from a position which was already growing uncomfortable, he would tighten the slipknot holding his ankles even more. That would tighten the length of rope between his ankles and his wrists, which would in turn tighten that slipknot, and the rope between his wrists and the noose she’d put around his neck, and . . .
She was dragging him, somehow dragging him down the beach.
“Hey! What—”
He tried to pull back and felt everything tighten—including his ability to draw breath. He let himself go as limp as possible （and keep those feet up, don’t forget that, asshole, because if you lower your feet enough you’re going to strangle） and let her drag him along the rough ground. A jag of rock peeled skin away from his cheek, and he felt warm blood begin to flow. She was panting harshly. The sound of the waves and the boom of surf ramming into the rock tunnel were louder.
Drown me? Sweet Christ, is that what she means to do?
No, of course not. He thought he knew what she meant to do even before his face plowed through the twisted kelp which marked the high-tide line, dead salt-stinking stuff as cold as the fingers of drowned sailors.
He remembered Henry saying once, Sometimes they’d shoot one of our guys. An American, I mean—they knew an ARVN was no good, because wasn’t any of us that’d go after a gook in the bush. Not unless he was some fresh fish just over from the States. They’d guthole him, leave him screaming, then pick off the guys that tried to save him. They’d keep doing that until the guy died. You know what they called a guy like that, Eddie?
Eddie had shaken his head, cold with the vision of it.
They called him a honeypot, Henry had said. Something sweet. Something to draw flies. Or maybe even a bear.
That’s what Detta was doing: using him as a honeypot.
She left him some seven feet below the high-tide line, left him without a word, left him facing the ocean. It was not the tide coming in to drown him that the gunslinger, looking through the door, was supposed to see, because the tide was on the ebb and wouldn’t get up this far again for another six hours. And long before then . . .
Eddie rolled his eyes up a little and saw the sun striking a long gold track across the ocean. What was it? Four o’clock? About that. Sunset would come around seven.
It would be dark long before he had to worry about the tide.
And when dark came, the lobstrosities would come rolling out of the waves; they would crawl their questioning way up the beach to where he lay helplessly trussed, and then they would tear him apart.
7
That time stretched out interminably for Eddie Dean. The idea of time itself became a joke. Even his horror of what was going to happen to him when it got dark faded as his legs began to throb with a discomfort which worked its way up the scale of feeling to pain and finally to shrieking agony. He would relax his muscles, all the knots would pull tight, and when he was on the verge of strangling he would manage somehow to pull his ankles up again, releasing the pressure, allowing some breath to return. He was no longer sure he could make it to dark. There might come a time when he would simply be unable to bring his legs back up.
CHAPTER 3
Roland Takes His Medicine
1
Now Jack Mort knew the gunslinger was here. If he had been another person—an Eddie Dean or an Odetta Walker, for instance—Roland would have held palaver with the man, if only to ease his natural panic and confusion at suddenly finding one’s self shoved rudely into the passenger seat of the body one’s brain had driven one’s whole life.