Now I take it with me everywhere I go, he thought, just as he does. It comes with us everywhere now, following like a curse you can never get rid of.
All of this felt so true as to be unquestionable . . . and so did one other thing.
If the door between them should close, it would be closed forever.
When that happens, Roland thought grimly, he must be on this side. With me.
What a paragon of virtue you are, gunslinger! the man in black laughed. He seemed to have taken up permanent residence inside Roland’s head. You have killed the boy; that was the sacrifice that enabled you to catch me and, I suppose, to create the door between worlds. Now you intend to draw your three, one by one, and condemn all of them to something you would not have for yourself: a lifetime in an alien world, where they may die as easily as animals in a zoo set free in a wild place.
The Tower, Roland thought wildly. Once I’ve gotten to the Tower and done whatever it is I’m supposed to do there, accomplished whatever fundamental act of restoration or redemption for which I was meant, then perhaps they—
But the shrieking laughter of the man in black, the man who was dead but lived on as the gunslinger’s stained conscience, would not let him go on with the thought.
Neither, however, could the thought of the treachery he contemplated turn him aside from his course.
He managed another ten yards, looked back, and saw that even the largest of the crawling monsters would venture no further than twenty feet above the hightide line. He had already managed three times that distance.
It’s well, then.
Nothing is well, the man in black replied merrily, and you know it.
Shut up, the gunslinger thought, and for a wonder, the voice actually did.
Roland pushed the bags of devil-dust into the cleft between two rocks and covered them with handfuls of sparse saw-grass. With that done he rested briefly, head thumping like a hot bag of waters, skin alternately hot and cold, then rolled back through the doorway into that other world, that other body, leaving the increasingly deadly infection behind for a little while.
6
The second time he returned to himself, he entered a body so deeply asleep that he thought for a moment it had entered a comatose state . . . a state of such lowered bodily function that in moments he would feel his own consciousness start down a long slide into darkness.
Instead, he forced his body toward wakefulness, punched and pummelled it out of the dark cave into which it had crawled. He made his heart speed up, made his nerves re-accept the pain that sizzled through his skin and woke his flesh to groaning reality.
It was night now. The stars were out. The popkin-things Eddie had brought him were small bits of warmth in the chill.
He didn’t feel like eating them, but eat them he would. First, though . . .
He looked at the white pills in his hand. Astin, Eddie called it. No, that wasn’t quite right, but Roland couldn’t pronounce the word as the prisoner had said it. Medicine was what it came down to. Medicine from that other world.
If anything from your world is going to do for me, Prisoner, Roland thought grimly, I think it’s more apt to be your potions than your popkins.
Still, he would have to try it. Not the stuff he really needed—or so Eddie believed—but something which might reduce his fever.
Three now, three later. If there is a later.
He put three of the pills in his mouth, then pushed the cover—some strange white stuff that was neither paper nor glass but which seemed a bit like both—off the paper cup which held the drink, and washed them down.
The first swallow amazed him so completely that for a moment he only lay there, propped against a rock, his eyes so wide and still and full of reflected starlight that he would surely have been taken for dead already by anyone who happened to pass by. Then he drank greedily, holding the cup in both hands, the rotted, pulsing hurt in the stumps of his fingers barely noticed in his total absorption with the drink.