by Stephen King
He pulled away, looking to see if his hand was bleeding, thinking incoherently that if it was he would have to do something about it, because she was poison, the woman was poison, and being bitten by her would be about the same as being bitten by a copperhead or rattler. There was no blood. And when he looked again, it was the other woman—the first woman.
“Please,” she said. “I don’t want to die. Pl—” Then she went out for good, and that was good. For all of them.
4
“So whatchoo think?” Julio asked.
“About who’s gonna be in the Series?” George squashed the butt under the heel of his loafer. “White Sox. I got ’em in the pool.”
“Whatchoo think about that lady?”
“I think she might be schizophrenic,” George said slowly.
“Yeah, I know that. I mean, what’s gonna happen to her?”
“I don’t know.”
“She needs help, man. Who gonna give it?”
“Well, I already gave her one,” George said, but his face felt hot, as if he were blushing.
Julio looked at him. “If you already gave her all the help you can give her, you shoulda let her die, doc.”
George looked at Julio for a moment, but found he couldn’t stand what he saw in Julio’s eyes—not accusation but sadness.
So he walked away.
He had places to go.
5
The Time of the Drawing:
In the time since the accident it was, for the most part, still Odetta Holmes who was in control, but Detta Walker had come forward more and more, the thing Detta liked to do best was steal. It didn’t matter that her booty was always little more than junk, no more than it mattered that she often threw it away later.
The taking was what mattered.
When the gunslinger entered her head in Macy’s, Detta screamed in a combination of fury and horror and terror, her hands freezing on the junk jewelry she was scooping into her purse.
She screamed because when Roland came into her mind, when he came forward, she for a moment sensed the other, as if a door had been swung open inside of her head.
And she screamed because the invading raping presence was a honky.
She could not see but nonetheless sensed his whiteness.
People looked around. A floorwalker saw the screaming woman in the wheelchair with her purse open, saw one hand frozen in the act of stuffing costume jewelry into a purse that looked (even from a distance of thirty feet) worth three times the stuff she was stealing.
The floorwalker yelled, “Hey Jimmy!” and Jimmy Halvorsen, one of Macy’s house detectives, looked around and saw what was happening. He started toward the black woman in the wheelchair on a dead run. He couldn’t help running—he had been a city cop for eighteen years and it was built into his system—but he was already thinking it was gonna be a shit bust. Little kids, cripples, nuns; they were always a shit bust. Busting them was like kicking a drunk. They cried a little in front of the judge and then took a walk. It was hard to convince judges that cripples could also be slime.
But he ran just the same.
6
Roland was momentarily horrified by the snakepit of hate and revulsion in which he found himself . . . and then he heard the woman screaming, saw the big man with the potato-sack belly running toward her/him, saw people looking, and took control.
Suddenly he was the woman with the dusky hands. He sensed some strange duality inside her, but couldn’t think about it now.
He turned the chair and began to shove it forward. The aisle rolled past him/her. People dived away to either side. The purse was lost, spilling Detta’s credentials and stolen treasure in a wide trail along the floor. The man with the heavy gut skidded on bogus gold chains and lipstick tubes and then fell on his ass.
7
Shit! Halvorsen thought furiously, and for a moment one hand clawed under his sport-coat where there was a .38 in a clamshell holster. Then sanity reasserted itself. This was no drug bust or armed robbery; this was a crippled black lady in a wheelchair. She was rolling it like it was some punk’s drag-racer, but a crippled black lady was all she was just the same. What was he going to do, shoot her? That would be great, wouldn’t it? And where was she going to go? There was nothing at the end of the aisle but two dressing rooms.
He picked himself up, massaging his aching ass, and began after her again, limping a little now.
The wheelchair flashed into one of the dressing rooms. The door slammed, just clearing the push-handles on the back.
Got you now, bitch, Jimmy thought. And I’m going to give you one hell of a scare. I don’t care if you got five orphan children and only a year to live. I’m not gonna hurt you, but oh babe I’m gonna shake your dice.
He beat the floorwalker to the dressing room, slammed the door open with his left shoulder, and it was empty.
No black woman.
No wheelchair.
No nothing.
He looked at the floorwalker, starey-eyed.
“Other one!” the floorwalker yelled. “Other one!”
Before Jimmy could move, the floorwalker had busted open the door of the other dressing room. A woman in a linen skirt and a Playtex Living Bra screamed piercingly and crossed her arms over her chest. She was very white and very definitely not crippled.
“Pardon me,” the floorwalker said, feeling hot crimson flood his face.
“Get out of here, you pervert!” the woman in the linen skirt and the bra cried.
“Yes, ma’am,” the floorwalker said, and closed the door.
At Macy’s, the customer was always right.
He looked at Halvorsen.
Halvorsen looked back.
“What is this shit?” Halvorsen asked. “Did she go in there or not?”
“Yeah, she did.”
“So where is she?”
The floorwalker could only shake his head. “Let’s go back and pick up the mess.”
“You pick up the mess,” Jimmy Halvorsen said. “I feel like I just broke my ass in nine pieces.” He paused. “To tell you the truth, me fine bucko, I also feel extremely confused.”
8
The moment the gunslinger heard the dressing room door bang shut behind him, he rammed the wheelchair around in a half turn, looking for the doorway. If Eddie had done what he had promised, it would be gone.
But the door was open. Roland wheeled the Lady of Shadows through it.
CHAPTER 3
Odetta on the Other Side
1
Not long after, Roland would think: Any other woman, crippled or otherwise, suddenly shoved all the way down the aisle of the mart in which she was doing business—monkeybusiness, you may call it if you like—by a stranger inside her head, shoved into a little room while some man behind her yelled for her to stop, then suddenly turned, shoved again where there was by rights no room in which to shove, then finding herself suddenly in an entirely different world . . . I think any other woman, under those circumstances, would have most certainly have asked, “Where am I?” before all else.
Instead, Odetta Holmes asked almost pleasantly, “What exactly are you planning to do with that knife, young man?”
2
Roland looked up at Eddie, who was crouched with his knife held less than a quarter of an inch over the skin. Even with his uncanny speed, there was no way the gunslinger could move fast enough to evade the blade if Eddie decided to use it.
“Yes,” Roland said. “What are you planning to do with it?”
“I don’t know,” Eddie said, sounding completely disgusted with himself. “Cut bait, I guess. Sure doesn’t look like I came here to fish, does it?”
He threw the knife toward the Lady’s chair, but well to the right. It stuck, quivering, in the sand to its hilt.
Then the Lady turned her head and began, “I wonder if you could please explain where you’ve taken m—”
She stopped. She had said I wonder if you before her head had gotten around far eno
ugh to see there was no one behind her, but the gunslinger observed with some real interest that she went on speaking for a moment anyway, because the fact of her condition made certain things elementary truths of her life—if she had moved, for instance, someone must have moved her. But there was no one behind her.
No one at all.
She looked back at Eddie and the gunslinger, her dark eyes troubled, confused, and alarmed, and now she asked. “Where am I? Who pushed me? How can I be here? How can I be dressed, for that matter, when I was home watching the twelve o’clock news in my robe? Who am I? Where is this? Who are you?”
“Who am I?” she asked, the gunslinger thought. The dam broke and there was a flood of questions; that was to be expected. But that one question—“Who am I?”—even now I don’t think she knows she asked it.
Or when.
Because she had asked before.
Even before she had asked who they were, she had asked who she was.
3
Eddie looked from the lovely young/old face of the black woman in the wheelchair to Roland’s face.
“How come she doesn’t know?”
“I can’t say. Shock, I suppose.”
“Shock took her all the way back to her living room, before she left for Macy’s? You telling me the last thing she remembers is sitting in her bathrobe and listening to some blow-dried dude talk about how they found that gonzo down in the Florida Keys with Christa McAuliffe’s left hand mounted on his den wall next to his prize marlin?”
Roland didn’t answer.
More dazed than ever, the Lady said, “Who is Christa McAuliffe? Is she one of the missing Freedom Riders?”
Now it was Eddie’s turn not to answer. Freedom Riders? What the hell were they?
The gunslinger glanced at him and Eddie was able to read his eyes easily enough: Can’t you see she’s in shock?
I know what you mean, Roland old buddy, but it only washes up to a point. I felt a little shock myself when you came busting into my head like Walter Payton on crack, but it didn’t wipe out my memory banks.
Speaking of shock, he’d gotten another pretty good jolt when she came through. He had been kneeling over Roland’s inert body, the knife just above the vulnerable skin of the throat . . . but the truth was Eddie couldn’t have used the knife anyway—not then, anyway. He was staring into the doorway, hypnotized, as an aisle of Macy’s rushed forward—he was reminded again of The Shining, where you saw what the little boy was seeing as he rode his trike through the hallways of that haunted hotel. He remembered the little boy had seen this creepy pair of dead twins in one of those hallways. The end of this aisle was much more mundane: a white door. The words ONLY TWO GARMENTS AT ONE TIME, PLEASE were printed on it in discreet lettering. Yeah, it was Macy’s, all right. Macy’s for sure.
One black hand flew out and slammed the door open while the male voice (a cop voice if Eddie had ever heard one, and he had heard many in his time) behind yelled for her to quit it, that was no way out, she was only making things a helluva lot worse for herself, and Eddie caught a bare glimpse of the black woman in the wheelchair in the mirror to the left, and he remembered thinking Jesus, he’s got her, all right, but she sure don’t look happy about it.
Then the view pivoted and Eddie was looking at himself. The view rushed toward the viewer and he wanted to put up the hand holding the knife to shield his eyes because all at once the sensation of looking through two sets of eyes was too much, too crazy, it was going to drive him crazy if he didn’t shut it out, but it all happened too fast for him to have time.
The wheelchair came through the door. It was a tight fit; Eddie heard its hubs squeal on the sides. At the same moment he heard another sound: a thick tearing sound that made him think of some word (placental) that he couldn’t quite think of because he didn’t know he knew it.
Then the woman was rolling toward him on the hard-packed sand, and she no longer looked mad as hell—hardly looked like the woman Eddie had glimpsed in the mirror at all, for that matter, but he supposed that wasn’t surprising; when you all at once went from a changing-room at Macy’s to the seashore of a godforsaken world where some of the lobsters were the size of small Collie dogs, it left you feeling a little winded. That was a subject on which Eddie Dean felt he could personally give testimony.
She rolled about four feet before stopping, and only went that far because of the slope and the gritty pack of the sand. Her hands were no longer pumping the wheels as they must have been doing (when you wake up with sore shoulders tomorrow you can blame them on Sir Roland, lady, Eddie thought sourly). Instead they went to the arms of the chair and gripped them as she regarded the two men.
Behind her, the doorway had already disappeared. Disappeared? That was not quite right. It seemed to fold in on itself, like a piece of film run backward. This began to happen just as the store dick came slamming through the other, more mundane door—the one between the store and the dressing room. He was coming hard, expecting the shoplifter would have locked the door, and Eddie thought he was going to take one hell of a splat against the far wall, but Eddie was never going to see it happen or not happen. Before the shrinking space where the door between that world and this disappeared entirely, Eddie saw everything on that side freeze solid.
The movie had become a still photograph.
All that remained now were the dual tracks of the wheelchair, starting in sandy nowhere and running four feet to where it and its occupant now sat.
“Won’t somebody please explain where I am and how I got here?” the woman in the wheelchair asked—almost pleaded.
“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.