by Stephen King
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 high-tide 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.
Sweet! Gods, such sweetness! Such sweetness! Such—
One of the small flat icecubes in the drink caught in his throat. He coughed, pounded his chest, and choked it out. Now there was a new pain in his head: the silvery pain that comes with drinking something too cold too fast.
He lay still, feeling his heart pumping like a runaway engine, feeling fresh energy surge into his body so fast he felt as if he might actually explode. Without thinking of what he was doing, he tore another piece from his shirt—soon it would be no more than a rag hanging around his neck—and laid it across one leg. When the drink was gone he would pour the ice into the rag and make a pack for his wounded hand. But his mind was elsewhere.
Sweet! it cried out again and again, trying to get the sense of it, or to convince itself there was sense in it, much as Eddie had tried to convince himself of the other as an actual being and not some mental convulsion that was only another part of himself trying to trick him.
Sweet! Sweet! Sweet!
The dark drink was laced with sugar, even more than Marten—who had been a great glutton behind his grave ascetic’s exterior—had put in his coffee mornings and at ’Downers.
Sugar . . . white . . . powder . . .
The gunslinger’s eyes wandered to the bags, barely visible under the grass he had tossed over them, and wondered briefly if the stuff in this drink and the stuff in the bags might be one and the same. He knew that Eddie had understood him perfectly over here, where they were two separate physical creatures; he suspected that if he had crossed bodily to Eddie’s world (and he understood instinctively it could be done . . . although if the door should shut while he was there, he would be there forever, as Eddie would be here forever if their positions were reversed), he would have understood the language just as perfectly. He knew from being in Eddie’s mind that the languages of the two worlds were similar to begin with. Similar, but not the same. Here a sandwich was a popkin. There to rustle was finding something to eat. So . . . was it not possible that the drug Eddie called cocaine was, in the gunslinger’s world, called sugar?
Reconsideration made it seem unlikely. Eddie had bought this drink openly, knowing that he was being watched by people who served the Priests of Customs. Further, Roland sensed he had paid comparatively little for it. Less, even, than for the popkins of meat. No, sugar was not cocaine, but Roland could not understand why anyone would want cocaine or any other illegal drug, for that matter, in a world where such a powerful one as sugar was so plentiful and cheap.
He looked at the meat popkins again, felt the first stirrings of hunger . . . and realized with amazement and confused thankfulness that he felt better.
The drink? Was that it? The sugar in the drink?
That might be part of it—but a small part. Sugar could revive one’s strength for awhile when it was flagging; this was something he had known since he was a child. But sugar could not dull pain or damp the fever-fire in your body when some infection had turned it into a furnace. All the same, that was exactly what had happened to him . . . was still happening.
The convulsive shuddering had stopped. The sweat was drying on his brow. The fishhooks which had lined his throat seemed to be disappearing. Incredible as it was, it was also an inarguable fact, not just imagination or wishful thinking (in point of fact, the gunslinger had not been capable of such frivolity as the latter in unknown and unknowable decades). His missing fingers and toes still throbbed and roared, but he believed even these pains to be muted.
Roland put his head back, closed his eyes and thanked God.
God and Eddie Dean.
Don’t make the mistake of putting your heart near his hand, Roland, a voice from the deeper ranges of his mind spoke—this was not the nervous, tittery-bitchy voice of the man in black or the rough one of Cort; to the gunslinger it sounded like his father. You know that what he’s done for you he has done out of his own personal need, just as you know that those men—Inquisitors though they may be—are partly or completely right about him. He is a weak vessel, and the reason they took him was neither false nor base. There is steel in him, I dispute it not. But there is weakness as well. He is like Hax, the cook. Hax poisoned reluctantly . . . but reluctance has never stilled the screams of the dying as their intestines rupture. And there is yet another reason to beware . . .
But Roland needed no voice to tell him what that other reason was. He had seen that in Jake’s eyes when the boy finally began to understand his purpose.
Don’t make the mistake of putting your heart near his hand.
Good advice. You did yourself ill to feel well of those to whom ill must eventually be done.
Remember your duty, Roland.
“I’ve never forgotten it,” he husked as the stars shone pitilessly down and the waves grated on the shore and the lobster monstrosities cried their idiot questions. “I’m damned for my duty. And why should the damned turn aside?”
He began to eat the meat popkins which Eddie called “dogs.”
Roland didn’t much care for the idea of eating dog, and these things tasted like gutter-leavings compared to the tooter-fish, but after that marvellous drink, did he have any right to complain? He thought not. Besides, it was late in the game to worry overmuch about such niceties.
He ate everything and then returned to the place where now Eddie was, in some magical v
ehicle that rushed along a metal road filled with other such vehicles . . . dozens, maybe hundreds, and not a horse pulling a single one.
7
Eddie stood ready as the pizza truck pulled up; Roland stood even more ready inside of him.
Just another version of Diana’s Dream, Roland thought. What was in the box? The golden bowl or the biter-snake? And just as she turns the key and puts her hands upon the lid she hears her mother calling “Wake up, Diana! It’s time to milk!”
Okay, Eddie thought. Which is it gonna be? The lady or the tiger?
A man with a pale, pimply face and big buck teeth looked out of the pizza truck’s passenger window. It was a face Eddie knew.
“Hi, Col,” Eddie said without much enthusiasm. Beyond Col Vincent, sitting behind the wheel, was Old Double-Ugly, which was what Henry called Jack Andolini.
But Henry never called him that to his face, Eddie thought. No, of course not. Calling Jack something like that to his face would be a wonderful way to get yourself killed. He was a huge man with a bulging caveman’s forehead and a prothagonous jaw to match. He was related to Enrico Balazar by marriage . . . a niece, a cousin, some fucking thing. His gigantic hands clung to the wheel of the delivery truck like the hands of a monkey clinging to a branch. Coarse sprouts of hair grew from his ears. Eddie could only see one of those ears now because Jack Andolini remained in profile, never looking around.
Old Double-Ugly. But not even Henry (who, Eddie had to admit, was not always the most perceptive guy in the world) had ever made the mistake of calling him Old Double-Stupid. Colin Vincent was no more than a glorified gofer. Jack, however, had enough smarts behind that Neanderthal brow to be Balazar’s number one lieutenant. Eddie didn’t like the fact that Balazar had sent a man of such importance. He didn’t like it at all.
“Hi, Eddie,” Col said. “Heard you had some trouble.”
“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” Eddie said. He realized he was scratching first one arm then the other, one of the typical junkie moves he had tried so hard to keep away from while they had him in custody. He made himself stop. But Col was smiling, and Eddie felt an urge to slam a fist all the way through that smile and out the other side. He might have done it, too . . . except for Jack. Jack was still staring straight ahead, a man who seemed to be thinking his own rudimentary thoughts as he observed the world in the simple primary colors and elementary motions which were all a man of such intellect (or so you’d think, looking at him) could perceive. Yet Eddie thought Jack saw more in a single day than Col Vincent would in his whole life.
“Well, good,” Col said. “That’s good.”
Silence. Col looked at Eddie, smiling, waiting for Eddie to start the Junkie Shuffle again, scratching, shifting from foot to foot like a kid who needs to go to the bathroom, waiting mostly for Eddie to ask what was up, and by the way, did they just happen to have any stuff on them?
Eddie only looked back at him, not scratching now, not moving at all.
A faint breeze blew a Ring Ding wrapper across the parking lot. The scratchy sound of its skittering passage and the wheezy thump of the pizza truck’s loose valves were the only sounds.
Col’s knowing grin began to falter.
“Hop in, Eddie,” Jack said without looking around. “Let’s take a ride.”
“Where?” Eddie asked, knowing.
“Balazar’s.” Jack didn’t look around. He flexed his hands on the wheel once. A large ring, solid gold except for the onyx stone which bulged from it like the eye of a giant insect, glittered on the third finger of his right as he did it. “He wants to know about his goods.”
“I have his goods. They’re safe.”
“Fine. Then nobody has anything to worry about,” Jack Andolini said, and did not look around.
“I think I want to go upstairs first,” Eddie said. “I want to change my clothes, talk to Henry—”
“And get fixed up, don’t forget that,” Col said, and grinned his big yellow-toothed grin. “Except you got nothing to fix with, little chum.”
Dad-a-chum? the gunslinger thought in Eddie’s mind, and both of them shuddered a little.
Col observed the shudder and his smile widened. Oh, here it is after all, that smile said. The good old Junkie Shuffle. Had me worried there for a minute, Eddie. The teeth revealed by the smile’s expansion were not an improvement on those previously seen.
“Why’s that?”
“Mr. Balazar thought it would be better to make sure you guys had a clean place,” Jack said without looking around. He went on observing the world an observer would have believed it impossible for such a man to observe. “In case anyone showed up.”
“People with a Federal search warrant, for instance,” Col said. His face hung and leered. Now Eddie could feel Roland also wanting to drive a fist through the rotted teeth that made that grin so reprehensible, so somehow irredeemable. The unanimity of feeling cheered him up a little. “He sent in a cleaning service to wash the walls and vacuum the carpets and he ain’t going to charge you a red cent for it, Eddie!”
Now you’ll ask what I’ve got, Col’s grin said. Oh yeah, now you’ll ask, Eddie my boy. Because you may not love the candy-man, but you do love the candy, don’t you? And now that you know Balazar’s made sure your own private stash is gone—
A sudden thought, both ugly and frightening, flashed through his mind. If the stash was gone—
“Where’s Henry?” he said suddenly, so harshly that Col drew back, surprised.
Jack Andolini finally turned his head. He did so slowly, as if it was an act he performed only rarely, and at great personal cost. You almost expected to hear old oilless hinges creaking inside the thickness of his neck.
“Safe,” he said, and then turned his head back to its original position again, just as slowly.
Eddie stood beside the pizza truck, fighting the panic trying to rise in his mind and drown coherent thought. Suddenly the need to fix, which he had been holding at bay pretty well, was overpowering. He had to fix. With a fix he could think, get himself under control—
Quit it! Roland roared inside his head, so loud Eddie winced (and Col, mistaking Eddie’s grimace of pain and surprise for another little step in the Junkie Shuffle, began to grin again). Quit it! I’ll be all the goddamned control you need!
You don’t understand! He’s my brother! He’s my fucking brother! Balazar’s got my brother!
You speak as if it was a word I’d never heard before. Do you fear for him?
Yes! Christ, yes!
Then do what they expect. Cry. Pule and beg. Ask for this fix of yours. I’m sure they expect you to, and I’m sure they have it. Do all those things, make them sure of you, and you can be sure all your fears will be justified.
I don’t understand what you m—
I mean if you show a yellow gut, you will go far toward getting your precious brother killed. Is that what you want?
All right. I’ll be cool. It may not sound that way, but I’ll be cool.
Is that what you call it? All right, then. Yes. Be cool.
“This isn’t the way the deal was supposed to go down,” Eddie said, speaking past Col and directly at Jack Andolini’s tufted ear. “This isn’t why I took care of Balazar’s goods and hung onto my lip while some other guy would have been puking out five names for every year off on the plea-bargain.”
“Balazar thought your brother would be safer with him,” Jack said, not looking around. “He took him into protective custody.”
“Well good,” Eddie said. “You thank him for me, and you tell him that I’m back, his goods are safe, and I can take care of Henry just like Henry always took care of me. You tell him I’ll have a six-pack on ice and when Henry walks in the place we’re going to split it and then we’ll get in our car and come on into town and do the deal like it was supposed to be done. Like we talked about it.”
“Balazar wants to see you, Eddie,” Jack said. His voice was implacable, immovable. His head did not turn. “Get in th
e truck.”
“Stick it where the sun doesn’t shine, motherfucker,” Eddie said, and started for the doors to his building.
8
It was a short distance but he had gotten barely halfway when Andolini’s hand clamped on his upper arm with the paralyzing force of a vise-grip. His breath was hot as a bull’s on the back of Eddie’s neck. He did all this in the time you would have thought, looking at him, it would have taken his brain to convince his hand to pull the doorhandle up.
Eddie turned around.
Be cool, Eddie, Roland whispered.
Cool, Eddie responded.
“I could kill you for that,” Andolini said. “No one tells me stick it up my ass, especially no shitass little junkie like you.”
“Kill shit!” Eddie screamed at him—but it was a calculated scream. A cool scream, if you could dig that. They stood there, dark figures in the golden horizontal light of late spring sundown in the wasteland of housing developments that is the Bronx’s Co-Op City, and people heard the scream, and people heard the word kill, and if their radios were on they turned them up and if their radios were off they turned them on and then turned them up because it was better that way, safer.
“Rico Balazar broke his word! I stood up for him and he didn’t stand up for me! So I tell you to stick it up your fuckin ass, I tell him to stick it up his fuckin ass, I tell anybody I want to stick it up his fuckin ass!”
Andolini looked at him. His eyes were so brown the color seemed to have leaked into his corneas, turning them the yellow of old parchment.
“I tell President Reagan to stick it up his ass if he breaks his word to me, and fuck his fuckin rectal palp or whatever it is!”
The words died away in echoes on brick and concrete. A single child, his skin very black against his white basketball shorts and high-topped sneakers, stood in the playground across the street, watching them, a basketball held loosely against his side in the crook of his elbow.