by Stephen King
He might as well have been clawing stone.
The gunslinger swept the door shut.
It made a dull clapping sound that bespoke utter finality and fell backward onto the sand. A little dust puffed up from its edges. There was nothing behind the door, and now no word written upon it. This particular portal between the worlds had closed forever.
“No!” Eddie screamed, and the gulls screamed back at him as if in jeering contempt; the lobstrosities asked him questions, perhaps suggesting he could hear them a little better if he were to come a little closer, and Eddie fell over on his side, crying and shuddering and jerking with cramps.
“Your need will pass,” the gunslinger said, and managed to get one of the sample packets out of the pocket of Eddie’s jeans, which were so like his own. Again, he could read some of these letters but not all. Cheeflet, the word looked like.
Cheeflet.
Medicine from that other world.
“Kill or cure,” Roland murmured, and dry-swallowed two of the capsules. Then he took the other three astin, and lay next to Eddie, and took him in his arms as well as he could, and after some difficult time, both of them slept.
SHUFFLE
shuffle
The time following that night was broken time for Roland, time that didn’t really exist as time at all. What he remembered was only a series of images, moments, conversation without context; images flashing past like one-eyed jacks and treys and nines and the Bloody Black Bitch Queen of Spiders in a card-sharp’s rapid shuffle.
Later on he asked Eddie how long that time lasted, but Eddie didn’t know either. Time had been destroyed for both of them. There was no time in hell, and each of them was in his own private hell: Roland the hell of the fever and infection, Eddie the hell of withdrawal.
“It was less than a week,” Eddie said. “That’s all I know for sure.”
“How do you know that?”
“A week’s worth of pills was all I had to give you. After that, you were gonna have to do the one thing or the other on your own.”
“Get well or die.”
“Right.”
shuffle
There’s a gunshot as twilight draws down to dark, a dry crack impinging on the inevitable and ineluctable sound of the breakers dying on the desolate beach: KA-BLAM! He smells a whiff of gunpowder. Trouble, the gunslinger thinks weakly, and gropes for revolvers that aren’t there. Oh no, it’s the end, it’s . . .
But there’s no more. as something starts to smell
shuffle
good in the dark. Something, after all this long dark dry time, something is cooking. It’s not just the smell. He can hear the snap and pop of twigs, can see the faint orange flicker of a campfire. Sometimes, when the sea-breeze gusts, he smells fragrant smoke as well as that mouth-watering other smell. Food, he thinks. My God, am I hungry? If I’m hungry, maybe I’m getting well.
Eddie, he tries to say, but his voice is all gone. His throat hurts, hurts so bad. We should have brought some astin, too, he thinks, and then tries to laugh: all the drugs for him, none for Eddie.
Eddie appears. He’s got a tin plate, one the gunslinger would know anywhere: it came, after all, from his own purse. On it are streaming chunks of whitish-pink meat.
What? he tries to ask, and nothing comes out but a squeaky little farting sound.
Eddie reads the shape of his lips. “I don’t know,” he says crossly. “All I know is it didn’t kill me. Eat it, damn you.”
He sees Eddie is very pale, Eddie is shaking, and he smells something coming from Eddie that is either shit or death, and he knows Eddie is in a bad way. He reaches out a groping hand, wanting to give comfort. Eddie strikes it away.
“I’ll feed you,” he says crossly. “Fucked if I know why. I ought to kill you. I would, if I didn’t think that if you could get through into my world once, maybe you could do it again.”
Eddie looks around.
“And if it wasn’t that I’d be alone. Except for them.”
He looks back at Roland and a fit of shuddering runs through him—it is so fierce that he almost spills the chunks of meat on the tin plate. At last it passes.
“Eat, God damn you.”
The gunslinger eats. The meat is more than not bad; the meat is delicious. He manages three pieces and then everything blurs into a new
shuffle
effort to speak, but all he can do is whisper. The cup of Eddie’s ear is pressed against his lips, except every now and then it shudders away as Eddie goes through one of his spasms. He says it again. “North. Up . . . up the beach.”
“How do you know?”
“Just know,” he whispers.
Eddie looks at him. “You’re crazy,” he says.
The gunslinger smiles and tries to black out but Eddie slaps him, slaps him hard. Roland’s blue eyes fly open and for a moment they are so alive and electric Eddie looks uneasy. Then his lips draw back in a smile that is mostly snarl.
“Yeah, you can drone off,” he said, “but first you gotta take your dope. It’s time. Sun says it is, anyway. I guess. I was never no Boy Scout, so I don’t know for sure. But I guess it’s close enough for Government work. Open wide, Roland. Open wide for Dr. Eddie, you kidnapping fuck.”
The gunslinger opens his mouth like a baby for the breast. Eddie puts two of the pills in his mouth and then slops fresh water carelessly into Roland’s mouth. Roland guesses it must be from a hill stream somewhere to the east. It might be poison; Eddie wouldn’t know fair water from foul. On the other hand, Eddie seems fine himself, and there’s really no choice, is there? No.
He swallows, coughs, and nearly strangles while Eddie looks at him indifferently.
Roland reaches for him.
Eddie tries to draw away.
The gunslinger’s bullshooter eyes command him.
Roland draws him close, so close he can smell the stink of Eddie’s sickness and Eddie can smell the stink of his; the combination sickens and compels them both.
“Only two choices here,” Roland whispers. “Don’t know how it is in your world, but only two choices here. Stand and maybe live, or die on your knees with your head down and the stink of your own armpits in your nose. Nothing . . .” He hacks out a cough. “Nothing to me.”
“Who are you?” Eddie screams at him.
“Your destiny, Eddie,” the gunslinger whispers.
“Why don’t you just eat shit and die?” Eddie asks him. The gunslinger tries to speak, but before he can he floats off as the cards
shuffle
KA-BLAM!
Roland opens his eyes on a billion stars wheeling through the blackness, then closes them again.
He doesn’t know what’s going on but he thinks everything’s okay. The deck’s still moving, the cards still
shuffle
More of the sweet, tasty chunks of meat. He feels better. Eddie looks better, too. But he also looks worried.
“They’re getting closer,” he says. “They may be ugly, but they ain’t completely stupid. They know what I been doing. Somehow they know, and they don’t dig it. Every night they get a little closer. It might be smart to move on when daybreak comes, if you can. Or it might be the last daybreak we ever see.”
“What?” This is not exactly a whisper but a husk somewhere between a whisper and real speech.
“Them,” Eddie says, and gestures toward the beach. “ Dad-a-chack, dum-a-chum, and all that shit. I think they’re like us, Roland—all for eating, but not too big on getting eaten.”
Suddenly, in an utter blast of horror, Roland realizes what the whitish-pink chunks of meat Eddie has been feeding him have been. He cannot speak; revulsion robs him of what little voice he has managed to get back. But Eddie sees everything he wants to say on his face.
“What did you think I was doing?” he nearly snarls. “Calling Red Lobster for take-out?”
“They’re poison,” Roland whispers. “That’s why—”
“Yeah, that’s why you’re hors
de combat. What I’m trying to keep from you being, Roland my friend, is hors d’oeuvres as well. As far as poison goes, rattlesnakes are poison, but people eat them. Rattlesnake tastes real good. Like chicken. I read that somewhere. They looked like lobsters to me, so I decided to take a chance. What else were we gonna eat? Dirt? I shot one of the fuckers and cooked the living Christ out of it. There wasn’t anything else. And actually, they taste pretty good. I been shooting one a night just after the sun starts to go down. They’re not real lively until it gets completely dark. I never saw you turning the stuff down.”
Eddie smiles.
“I like to think maybe I got one of the ones that ate Jack. I like to think I’m eating that dink. It, like, eases my mind, you know?”
“One of them ate part of me, too,” the gunslinger husks out. “Two fingers, one toe.”
“That’s also cool,” Eddie keeps smiling. His face is pallid, sharklike . . . but some of that ill look has gone now, and the smell of shit and death which has hung around him like a shroud seems to be going away.
“Fuck yourself,” the gunslinger husks.
“Roland shows a flash of spirit!” Eddie cries. “Maybe you ain’t gonna die after all! Dahling! I think that’s mah-vellous!”
“Live,” Roland says. The husk has become a whisper again. The fishhooks are returning to his throat.
“Yeah?” Eddie looks at him, then nods and answers his own question. “Yeah. I think you mean to. Once I thought you were going and once I thought you were gone. Now it looks like you’re going to get better. The antibiotics are helping, I guess, but mostly I think you’re hauling yourself up. What for? Why the fuck do you keep trying so hard to keep alive on this scuzzy beach?”
Tower, he mouths, because now he can’t even manage a husk.
“You and your fucking Tower,” Eddie says, starts to turn away, and then turns back, surprised, as Roland’s hand clamps on his arm like a manacle.
They look into each other’s eyes and Eddie says, “All right. All right!”
North, the gunslinger mouths. North, I told you. Has he told him that? He thinks so, but it’s lost. Lost in the shuffle.
“How do you know?” Eddie screams at him in sudden frustration. He raises his fists as if to strike Roland, then lowers them.
I just know—so why do you waste my time and energy asking me foolish questions? he wants to reply, but before he can, the cards
shuffle
being dragged along, bounced and bumped, his head lolling helplessly from one side to the other, bound to some kind of a weird travois by his own gunbelts, and he can hear Eddie Dean singing a song which is so weirdly familiar he at first believes this must be a delirium dream:
“Heyy Jude . . . don’t make it bad . . . take a saaad song . . . and make it better . . .”
Where did you hear that? he wants to ask. Did you hear me singing it, Eddie? And where are we?
But before he can ask anything
shuffle
Cort would bash the kid’s head in if he saw that contraption, Roland thinks, looking at the travois upon which he has spent the day, and laughs. It isn’t much of a laugh. It sounds like one of those waves dropping its load of stones on the beach. He doesn’t know how far they have come, but it’s far enough for Eddie to be totally bushed. He’s sitting on a rock in the lengthening light with one of the gunslinger’s revolvers in his lap and a half-full water-skin to one side. There’s a small bulge in his shirt pocket. These are the bullets from the back of the gunbelts—the diminishing supply of “good” bullets. Eddie has tied these up in a piece of his own shirt. The main reason the supply of “good” bullets is diminishing so fast is because one of every four or five has also turned out to be a dud.
Eddie, who has been nearly dozing, now looks up. “What are you laughing about?” he asks.
The gunslinger waves a dismissive hand and shakes his head. Because he’s wrong, he realizes. Cort wouldn’t bash Eddie for the travois, even though it was an odd, lame-looking thing. Roland thinks it might even be possible that Cort might grunt some word of compliment—such a rarity that the boy to whom it happened hardly ever knew how to respond; he was left gaping like a fish just pulled from a cook’s barrel.
The main supports were two cottonwood branches of approximately the same length and thickness. A blowdown, the gunslinger presumed. He had used smaller branches as supports, attaching them to the support poles with a crazy conglomeration of stuff: gunbelts, the glue-string that had held the devil-powder to his chest, even the rawhide thong from the gunslinger’s hat and his, Eddie’s, own sneaker laces. He had laid the gunslinger’s bedroll over the supports.
Cort would not have struck him because, sick as he was, Eddie had at least done more than squat on his hunkers and bewail his fate. He had made something. Had tried.
And Cort might have offered one of his abrupt, almost grudging compliments because, crazy as the thing looked, it worked. The long tracks stretching back down the beach to a point where they seemed to come together at the rim of perspective proved that.
“You see any of them?” Eddie asks. The sun is going down, beating an orange path across the water, and so the gunslinger reckons he has been out better than six hours this time. He feels stronger. He sits up and looks down to the water. Neither the beach nor the land sweeping to the western slope of the mountains have changed much; he can see small variations of landscape and detritus (a dead seagull, for instance, lying in a little heap of blowing feathers on the sand about twenty yards to the left and thirty or so closer to the water), but these aside, they might as well be right where they started.
“No,” the gunslinger says. Then: “Yes. There’s one.”
He points. Eddie squints, then nods. As the sun sinks lower and the orange track begins to look more and more like blood, the first of the lobstrosities come tumbling out of the waves and begin crawling up the beach.
Two of them race clumsily toward the dead gull. The winner pounces on it, rips it open, and begins to stuff the rotting remains into its maw. “Did-a-chick?” it asks.
“Dum-a-chum?” responds the loser. “Dod-a—”
KA-BLAM!
Roland’s gun puts an end to the second creature’s questions. Eddie walks down to it and grabs it by the back, keeping a wary eye on its fellow as he does so. The other offers no trouble, however; it is busy with the gull. Eddie brings his kill back. It is still twitching, raising and lowering its claws, but soon enough it stops moving. The tail arches one final time, then simply drops instead of flexing downward. The boxers’ claws hang limp.
“Dinnah will soon be served, mawster,” Eddie says. “You have your choice: filet of creepy-crawler or filet of creepy-crawler. Which strikes your fancy, mawster?”
“I don’t understand you,” the gunslinger said.
“Sure you do,” Eddie said. “You just don’t have any sense of humor. What happened to it?”
“Shot off in one war or another, I guess.”
Eddie smiles at that. “You look and sound a little more alive tonight, Roland.”
“I am, I think.”
“Well, maybe you could even walk for awhile tomorrow. I’ll tell you very frankly, my friend, dragging you is the pits and the shits.”
“I’ll try.”
“You do that.”
“You look a little better, too,” Roland ventures. His voice cracks on the last two words like the voice of a young boy. If I don’t stop talking soon, he thought, I won’t be able to talk at all again.
“I guess I’ll live.” He looks at Roland expressionlessly. “You’ll never know how close it was a couple of times, though. Once I took one of your guns and put it against my head. Cocked it, held it there for awhile, and then took it away. Eased the hammer down and shoved it back in your holster. Another night I had a convulsion. I think that was the second night, but I’m not sure.” He shakes his head and says something the gunslinger both does and doesn’t understand. “Michigan seems like a dream to me now.”
Although his voice is down to that husky murmur again and he knows he shouldn’t be talking at all, the gunslinger has to know one thing. “What stopped you from pulling the trigger?”
“Well, this is the only pair of pants I’ve got,” Eddie says. “At the last second I thought that if I pulled the trigger and it was one of those dud shells, I’d never get up the guts to do it again . . . and once you shit your pants, you gotta wash ’em right away or live with the stink forever. Henry told me that. He said he learned it in Nam. And since it was nighttime and Lester the Lobster was out, not to mention all his friends—”
But the gunslinger is laughing, laughing hard, although only an occasional cracked sound actually escapes his lips. Smiling a little himself, Eddie says: “I think maybe you only got your sense of humor shot off up to the elbow in that war.” He gets up, meaning to go up the slope to where there will be fuel for a fire, Roland supposes.
“Wait,” he whispers, and Eddie looks at him. “Why, really?”
“I guess because you needed me. If I’d killed myself, you would have died. Later on, after you’re really on your feet again, I may, like, re-examine my options.” He looks around and sighs deeply.
“There may be a Disneyland or Coney Island somewhere in your world, Roland, but what I’ve seen of it so far really doesn’t interest me much.”
He starts away, pauses, and looks back again at Roland. His face is somber, although some of the sickly pallor has left it. The shakes have become no more than occasional tremors.
“Sometimes you really don’t understand me, do you?”
“No,” the gunslinger whispers. “Sometimes I don’t.”
“Then I’ll elucidate. There are people who need people to need them. The reason you don’t understand is because you’re not one of those people. You’d use me and then toss me away like a paper bag if that’s what it came down to. God fucked you, my friend. You’re just smart enough so it would hurt you to do that, and just hard enough so you’d go ahead and do it anyway. You wouldn’t be able to help yourself. If I was lying on the beach there and screaming for help, you’d walk over me if I was between you and your goddam Tower. Isn’t that pretty close to the truth?”