by Stephen King
"Well, I'll tell you one thing, Dorothy," Eddie said. "You ain't in Kansas anymore."
The woman's eyes brimmed with tears. Eddie could see her trying to hold them in but it was no good. She began to sob.
Furious (and disgusted with himself as well), Eddie turned on the gunslinger, who had staggered to his feet. Roland moved, but not toward the weeping Lady. Instead he went to pick up his knife.
"Tell her!" Eddie shouted. "You brought her, so go on and tell her, man!" And after a moment he added in a lower tone, "And then tell me how come she doesn't remember herself."
4
Roland did not respond. Not at once. He bent, pinched the hilt of the knife between the two remaining fingers of his right hand, transferred it carefully to his left, and slipped it into the scabbard at the side of one gunbelt. He was still trying to grapple with what he had sensed in the Lady's mind. Unlike Eddie, she had fought him, fought him like a cat, from the moment he came forward until they rolled through the door. The fight had begun the moment she sensed him. There had been no lapse, because there had been no surprise. He had experienced it but didn't in the least understand it. No surprise at the invading stranger in her mind, only the instant rage, terror, and the commencement of a battle to shake him free. She hadn't come close to winning that battle--could not, he suspected--but that hadn't kept her from trying like hell. He had felt a woman insane with fear and anger and hate.
He had sensed only darkness in her--this was a mind entombed in a cave-in.
Except--
Except that in the moment they burst through the doorway and separated, he had wished--wished desperately--that he could tarry a moment longer. One moment would have told so much. Because the woman before them now wasn't the woman in whose mind he had been. Being in Eddie's mind had been like being in a room with jittery, sweating walls. Being in the Lady's had been like lying naked in the dark while venomous snakes crawled all over you.
Until the end.
She had changed at the end.
And there had been something else, something he believed was vitally important, but he either could not understand it or remember it. Something like (a glance) the doorway itself, only in her mind. Something about (you broke the forspecial it was you) some sudden burst of understanding. As at studies, when you finally saw--
"Oh, fuck you," Eddie said disgustedly. "You're nothing but a goddam machine."
He strode past Roland, went to the woman, knelt beside her, and when she put her arms around him, panic-tight, like the arms of a drowning swimmer, he did not draw away but put his own arms around her and hugged her back.
"It's okay," he said. "I mean, it's not great, but it's okay."
"Where are we?" she wept. "I was sitting home watching TV so I could hear if my friends got out of Oxford alive and now I'm here and I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHERE HERE IS!"
"Well, neither do I," Eddie said, holding her tighter, beginning to rock her a little, "but I guess we're in it together. I'm from where you're from, little old New York City, and I've been through the same thing--well, a little different, but same principle--and you're gonna be just fine." As an afterthought he added: "As long as you like lobster."
She hugged him and wept and Eddie held her and rocked her and Roland thought, Eddie will be all right now. His brother is dead but he has someone else to take care of so Eddie will be all right now.
But he felt a pang: a deep reproachful hurt in his heart. He was capable of shooting--with his left hand, anyway--of killing, of going on and on, slamming with brutal relentlessness through miles and years, even dimensions, it seemed, in search of the Tower. He was capable of survival, sometimes even of protection--he had saved the boy Jake from a slow death at the way station, and from sexual consumption by the Oracle at the foot of the mountains--but in the end, he had let Jake die. Nor had this been by accident; he had committed a conscious act of damnation. He watched the two of them, watched Eddie hug her, assure her it was going to be all right. He could not have done that, and now the rue in his heart was joined by stealthy fear.
If you have given up your heart for the Tower, Roland, you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast. To be a beast is perhaps bearable, although the man who has become one will surely pay hell's own price in the end, but what if you should gain your object? What if you should, heartless, actually storm the Dark Tower and win it? If there is naught but darkness in your heart, what could you do except degenerate from beast to monster? To gain one's object as a beast would only be bitterly comic, like giving a magnifying glass to an elephaunt. But to gain one's object as a monster . . .
To pay hell is one thing. But do you want to own it?
He thought of Allie, and of the girl who had once waited for him at the window, thought of the tears he had shed over Cuthbert's lifeless corpse. Oh, then he had loved. Yes. Then.
I do want to love! he cried, but although Eddie was also crying a little now with the woman in the wheelchair, the gunslinger's eyes remained as dry as the desert he had crossed to reach this sunless sea.
5
He would answer Eddie's question later. He would do that because he thought Eddie would do well to be on guard. The reason she didn't remember was simple. She wasn't one woman but two.
And one of them was dangerous.
6
Eddie told her what he could, glossing over the shoot-out but being truthful about everything else.
When he was done, she remained perfectly silent for some time, her hands clasped together on her lap.
Little streamlets coursed down from the shallowing mountains, petering out some miles to the east. It was from these that Roland and Eddie had drawn their water as they hiked north. At first Eddie had gotten it because Roland was too weak. Later they had taken turns, always having to go a little further and search a little longer before finding a stream. They grew steadily more listless as the mountains slumped, but the water hadn't made them sick.
So far.
Roland had gone yesterday, and although that made today Eddie's turn, the gunslinger had gone again, shouldering the hide water-skins and walking off without a word. Eddie found this queerly discreet. He didn't want to be touched by the gesture--by anything about Roland, for that matter--and found he was, a little, just the same.
She listened attentively to Eddie, not speaking at all, her eyes fixed on his. At one moment Eddie would guess she was five years older than he, at another he would guess fifteen. There was one thing he didn't have to guess about: he was falling in love with her.
When he had finished, she sat for a moment without saying anything, now not looking at him but beyond him, looking at the waves which would, at nightfall, bring the lobsters and with their alien, lawyerly questions. He had been particularly careful to describe them. Better for her to be a little scared now than a lot scared when they came out to play. He supposed she wouldn't want to eat them, not after hearing what they had done to Roland's hand and foot, not after she got a good close look at them. But eventually hunger would win out over did-a-chick and dum-a-chum.
Her eyes were far and distant.
"Odetta?" he asked after perhaps five minutes had gone by. She had told him her name. Odetta Holmes. He thought it was a gorgeous name.
She looked back at him, startled out of her revery. She smiled a little. She said one word.
"No."
He only looked at her, able to think of no suitable reply. He thought he had never understood until that moment how illimitable a simple negative could be.
"I don't understand," he said finally. "What are you no-ing?"
"All this." Odetta swept an arm (she had, he'd noticed, very strong arms--smooth but very strong), indicating the sea, the sky, the beach, the scruffy foothills where the gunslinger was now presumably searching for water (or maybe getting eaten alive by some new and interesting monster, something Eddie didn't really care to think about). Indicating, in short, this entire world.
/> "I understand how you feel. I had a pretty good case of the unrealities myself at first."
But had he? Looking back, it seemed he had simply accepted, perhaps because he was sick, shaking himself apart in his need for junk.
"You get over it."
"No," she said again. "I believe one of two things has happened, and no matter which one it is, I am still in Oxford, Mississippi. None of this is real."
She went on. If her voice had been louder (or perhaps if he had not been falling in love) it would almost have been a lecture. As it was, it sounded more like lyric than lecture.
Except, he had to keep reminding himself, bullshit's what it really is, and you have to convince her of that. For her sake.
"I may have sustained a head injury," she said. "They are notorious swingers of axe-handles and billy-clubs in Oxford Town."
Oxford Town.
That produced a faint chord of recognition far back in Eddie's mind. She said the words in a kind of rhythm that he for some reason associated with Henry . . . Henry and wet diapers. Why? What? Didn't matter now.
"You're trying to tell me you think this is all some sort of dream you're having while you're unconscious?"
"Or in a coma," she said. "And you needn't look at me as though you thought it was preposterous, because it isn't. Look here."
She parted her hair carefully on the left, and Eddie could see she wore it to one side not just because she liked the style. The old wound beneath the fall of her hair was scarred and ugly, not brown but a grayish-white.
"I guess you've had a lot of hard luck in your time," he said.
She shrugged impatiently. "A lot of hard luck and a lot of soft living," she said. "Maybe it all balances out. I only showed you because I was in a coma for three weeks when I was five. I dreamed a lot then. I can't remember what the dreams were, but I remember my mamma said they knew I wasn't going to die just as long as I kept talking and it seemed like I kept talking all the time, although she said they couldn't make out one word in a dozen. I do remember that the dreams were very vivid."
She paused, looking around.
"As vivid as this place seems to be. And you, Eddie."
When she said his name his arms prickled. Oh, he had it, all right. Had it bad.
"And him." She shivered. "He seems the most vivid of all."
"We ought to. I mean, we are real, no matter what you think."
She gave him a kind smile. It was utterly without belief.
"How did that happen?" he asked. "That thing on your head?"
"It doesn't matter. I'm just making the point that what has happened once might very well happen again."
"No, but I'm curious."
"I was struck by a brick. It was our first trip north. We came to the town of Elizabeth, New Jersey. We came in the Jim Crow car."
"What's that?"
She looked at him unbelievingly, almost scornfully. "Where have you been living, Eddie? In a bomb-shelter?"
"I'm from a different time," he said. "Could I ask how old you are, Odetta?"
"Old enough to vote and not old enough for Social Security."
"Well, I guess that puts me in my place."
"But gently, I hope," she said, and smiled that radiant smile which made his arms prickle.
"I'm twenty-three," he said, "but I was born in 1964--the year you were living in when Roland took you."
"That's rubbish."
"No. I was living in 1987 when he took me."
"Well," she said after a moment. "That certainly adds a great deal to your argument for this as reality, Eddie."
"The Jim Crow car . . . was it where the black people had to stay?"
"The Negros," she said. "Calling a Negro a black is a trifle rude, don't you think?"
"You'll all be calling yourselves that by 1980 or so," Eddie said. "When I was a kid, calling a black kid a Negro was apt to get you in a fight. It was almost like calling him a nigger."
She looked at him uncertainly for a moment, then shook her head again.
"Tell me about the brick, then."
"My mother's youngest sister was going to be married," Odetta said. "Her name was Sophia, but my mother always called her Sister Blue because it was the color she always fancied. 'Or at least she fancied to fancy it,' was how my mother put it. So I always called her Aunt Blue, even before I met her. It was the most lovely wedding. There was a reception afterward. I remember all the presents."
She laughed.
"Presents always look so wonderful to a child, don't they, Eddie?"
He smiled. "Yeah, you got that right. You never forget presents. Not what you got, not what somebody else got, either."
"My father had begun to make money by then, but all I knew is that we were getting ahead. That's what my mother always called it and once, when I told her a little girl I played with had asked if my daddy was rich, my mother told me that was what I was supposed to say if any of my other chums ever asked me that question. That we were getting ahead.
"So they were able to give Aunt Blue a lovely china set, and I remember . . ."
Her voice faltered. One hand rose to her temple and rubbed absently, as if a headache were beginning there.
"Remember what, Odetta?"
"I remember my mother gave her a forspecial."
"What?"
"I'm sorry. I've got a headache. It's got my tongue tangled. I don't know why I'm bothering to tell you all this, anyway."
"Do you mind?"
"No. I don't mind. I meant to say mother gave her a special plate. It was white, with delicate blue tracework woven all around the rim." Odetta smiled a little. Eddie didn't think it was an entirely comfortable smile. Something about this memory disturbed her, and the way its immediacy seemed to have taken precedence over the extremely strange situation she had found herself in, a situation which should be claiming all or most of her attention, disturbed him.
"I can see that plate as clearly as I can see you now, Eddie. My mother gave it to Aunt Blue and she cried and cried over it. I think she'd seen a plate like that once when she and my mother were children, only of course their parents could never have afforded such a thing. There was none of them who got anything forspecial as kids. After the reception Aunt Blue and her husband left for the Great Smokies on their honeymoon. They went on the train." She looked at Eddie.
"In the Jim Crow car," he said.
"That's right! In the Crow car! In those days that's what Negros rode in and where they ate. That's what we're trying to change in Oxford Town."
She looked at him, almost surely expecting him to insist she was here, but he was caught in the webwork of his own memory again: wet diapers and those words. Oxford Town. Only suddenly other words came, just a single line, but he could remember Henry singing it over and over until his mother asked if he couldn't please stop so she could hear Walter Cronkite.
Somebody better investigate soon. Those were the words. Sung over and over by Henry in a nasal monotone. He tried for more but couldn't get it, and was that any real surprise? He could have been no more than three at the time. Somebody better investigate soon. The words gave him a chill.
"Eddie, are you all right?"
"Yes. Why?"
"You shivered."
He smiled. "Donald Duck must have walked over my grave."
She laughed. "Anyway, at least I didn't spoil the wedding. It happened when we were walking back to the railway station. We stayed the night with a friend of Aunt Blue's, and in the morning my father called a taxi. The taxi came almost right away, but when the driver saw we were colored, he drove off like his head was on fire and his ass was catching. Aunt Blue's friend had already gone ahead to the depot with our luggage--there was a lot of it, because we were going to spend a week in New York. I remember my father saying he couldn't wait to see my face light up when the clock in Central Park struck the hour and all the animals danced.
"My father said we might as well walk to the station. My mother agreed just as fast as lickety
-split, saying that was a fine idea, it wasn't but a mile and it would be nice to stretch our legs after three days on one train just behind us and half a day on another one just ahead of us. My father said yes, and it was gorgeous weather besides, but I think I knew even at five that he was mad and she was embarrassed and both of them were afraid to call another taxi-cab because the same thing might happen again.
"So we went walking down the street. I was on the inside because my mother was afraid of me getting too close to the traffic. I remember wondering if my daddy meant my face would actually start to glow or something when I saw that clock in Central Park, and if that might not hurt, and that was when the brick came down on my head. Everything went dark for a while. Then the dreams started. Vivid dreams."
She smiled.
"Like this dream, Eddie."
"Did the brick fall, or did someone bomb you?"
"They never found anyone. The police (my mother told me this long after, when I was sixteen or so) found the place where they thought the brick had been, but there were other bricks missing and more were loose. It was just outside the window of a fourth-floor room in an apartment building that had been condemned. But of course there were lots of people staying there just the same. Especially at night."
"Sure," Eddie said.
"No one saw anyone leaving the building, so it went down as an accident. My mother said she thought it had been, but I think she was lying. She didn't even bother trying to tell me what my father thought. They were both still smarting over how the cab-driver had taken one look at us and driven off. It was that more than anything else that made them believe someone had been up there, just looking out, and saw us coming, and decided to drop a brick on the niggers.
"Will your lobster-creatures come out soon?"
"No," Eddie said. "Not until dusk. So one of your ideas is that all of this is a coma-dream like the ones you had when you got bopped by the brick. Only this time you think it was a billy-club or something."
"Yes."
"What's the other one?"
Odetta's face and voice were calm enough, but her head was filled with an ugly skein of images which all added up to Oxford Town, Oxford Town. How did the song go? Two men killed by the light of the moon,/Somebody better investigate soon. Not quite right, but it was close. Close.