Left hand! Roland screamed at himself as they went through and he separated from Eddie. Remember! Left hand! Left hand!
He saw Eddie and Jack stumble backward, fall, and then go rolling down the rocky scree that edged the beach, struggling for the gun in Andolini’s hand.
Roland had just time to think what a cosmic joke it would be if he arrived back in his own world only to discover that his physical body had died while he had been away . . . and then it was too late. Too late to wonder, too late to go back.
12
Andolini didn’t know what had happened. Part of him was sure he had gone crazy, part was sure Eddie had doped him or gassed him or something like that, part believed that the vengeful God of his childhood had finally tired of his evils and had plucked him away from the world he knew and set him down in this weird purgatory.
Then he saw the door, standing open, spilling a fan of white light—the light from Balazar’s john—onto the rocky ground—and understood it was possible to get back. Andolini was a practical man above all else. He would worry about what all this meant later on. Right now he intended to kill this creep’s ass and get back through that door.
The strength that had gone out of him in his shocked surprise now flooded back. He realized Eddie was trying to pull his small but very efficient Colt Cobra out of his hand and had nearly succeeded. Jack pulled it back with a curse, tried to aim, and Eddie promptly grabbed his arm again.
Andolini hoisted a knee into the big muscle of Eddie’s right thigh （the expensive gabardine of Andolini’s slacks was now crusted with dirty gray beach sand） and Eddie screamed as the muscle seized up.
“Roland!” he cried. “Help me! For Christ’s sake, help me!”
Andolini snapped his head around and what he saw threw him off-balance again. There was a guy standing there . . . only he looked more like a ghost than a guy. Not exactly Casper the Friendly Ghost, either. The swaying figure’s white, haggard face was rough with beard-stubble. His shirt was in tatters which blew back behind him in twisted ribbons, showing the starved stack of his ribs. A filthy rag was wrapped around his right hand. He looked sick, sick and dying, but even so he also looked tough enough to make Andolini feel like a soft-boiled egg.
And the joker was wearing a pair of guns.
They looked older than the hills, old enough to have come from a Wild West museum . . . but they were guns just the same, they might even really work, and Andolini suddenly realized he was going to have to take care of the white-faced man right away . . . unless he really was a spook, and if that was the case, it wouldn’t matter fuck-all, so there was really no sense worrying about it.
Andolini let go of Eddie and snap-rolled to the right, barely feeling the edge of rock that tore open his five-hundred-dollar sport jacket. At the same instant the gunslinger drew left-handed, and his draw was as it had always been, sick or well, wide awake or still half asleep: faster than a streak of blue summer lightning.
I’m beat, Andolini thought, full of sick wonder. Christ, he’s faster than anybody I ever saw! I’m beat, holy Mary Mother of God, he’s gonna blow me away, he’s g—
The man in the ragged shirt pulled the trigger of the revolver in his left hand and Jack Andolini thought—really thought—he was dead before he realized there had been only a dull click instead of a report.
Misfire.
Smiling, Andolini rose to his knees and raised his own gun.
“I don’t know who you are, but you can kiss your ass good-bye, you fucking spook,” he said.
13
Eddie sat up, shivering, his naked body pocked with goosebumps. He saw Roland draw, heard the dry snap that should have been a bang, saw Andolini come up on his knees, heard him say something, and before he really knew what he was doing his hand had found a ragged chunk of rock. He pulled it out of the grainy earth and threw it as hard as he could.