Roland would have understood.
7
When Roland opened the door with the words THE LADY OF THE SHADOWS written upon it, he saw things he did not understand at all—but he understood they didn’t matter.
It was Eddie Dean’s world, but beyond that it was only a confusion of lights, people and objects—more objects than he had ever seen in his life. Lady-things, from the look of them, and apparently for sale. Some under glass, some arranged in tempting piles and displays. None of it mattered any more than the movement as that world flowed past the edges of the doorway before them. The doorway was the Lady’s eyes. He was looking through them just as he had looked through Eddie’s eyes when Eddie had moved up the aisle of the sky-carriage.
Eddie, on the other hand, was thunderstruck. The revolver in his hand trembled and dropped a little. The gunslinger could have taken it from him easily but did not. He only stood quietly. It was a trick he had learned a long time ago.
Now the view through the doorway made one of those turns the gunslinger found so dizzying—but Eddie found this same abrupt swoop oddly comforting. Roland had never seen a movie. Eddie had seen thousands, and what he was looking at was like one of those moving point-of-view shots they did in ones like Halloween and The Shining. He even knew what they called the gadget they did it with. Steadicam. That was it.
“Star Wars, too,” he muttered. “Death Star. That fuckin crack, remember?”
Roland looked at him and said nothing.
Hands—dark brown hands—entered what Roland saw as a doorway and what Eddie was already starting to think of as some sort of magic movie screen . . . a movie screen which, under the right circumstances, you might be able to walk into the way that guy had just walked out of the screen and into the real world in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Bitchin movie.
Eddie hadn’t realized how bitchin until just now.
Except that movie hadn’t been made yet on the other side of the door he was looking through. It was New York, okay—somehow the very sound of the taxi-cab horns, as mute and faint as they were—proclaimed that—and it was some New York department store he had been in at one time or another, but it was . . . was . . .
“It’s older,” he muttered.
“Before your when?” the gunslinger asked.
Eddie looked at him and laughed shortly. “Yeah. If you want to put it that way, yeah.”
“Hello, Miss Walker,” a tentative voice said. The view in the doorway rose so suddenly that even Eddie was a bit dizzied and he saw a saleswoman who obviously knew the owner of the black hands—knew her and either didn’t like her or feared her. Or both. “Help you today?”
“This one.” The owner of the black hands held up a white scarf with a bright blue edge. “Don’t bother to wrap it up, babe, just stick it in a bag.”
“Cash or ch—”
“Cash, it’s always cash, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s fine, Miss Walker.”
“I’m so glad you approve, dear.”
There was a little grimace on the salesgirl’s face—Eddie just caught it as she turned away. Maybe it was something as simple as being talked to that way by a woman the salesgirl considered an “uppity nigger” （again it was more his experience in movie theaters than any knowledge of history or even life on the streets as he had lived it that caused this thought, because this was like watching a movie either set or made in the ’60s, something like that one with Sidney Steiger and Rod Poitier, In the Heat of the Night）， but it could also be something even simpler: Roland’s Lady of the Shadows was, black or white, one rude bitch.
And it didn’t really matter, did it? None of it made a damned bit of difference. He cared about one thing and one thing only and that was getting the fuck out.