by Stephen King
This had just been too fucking close.
11
The setting sun became an arc over the Western Sea. It narrowed to a single bright line which seared Eddie’s eyes. Looking at such a light for long could put a permanent burn on your retinas. This was just one of the many interesting facts you learned in school, facts that helped you get a fulfilling job like part-time bartender and an interesting hobby like the full-time search for street-skag and the bucks with which to buy it. Eddie didn’t stop looking. He didn’t think it was going to matter much longer if he got eye-burned or not.
He didn’t beg the witch-woman behind him. First, it wouldn’t help. Second, begging would degrade him. He had lived a degrading life; he discovered that he had no wish to degrade himself further in the last few minutes of it. Minutes were all he had left now. That’s all there would be before that bright line disappeared and the time of the lobstrosities came.
He had ceased hoping that a miraculous change would bring Odetta back at the last moment, just as he ceased hoping that Detta would recognize that his death would almost certainly strand her in this world forever. He had believed until fifteen minutes ago that she was bluffing; now he knew better.
Well, it’ll be better than strangling an inch at a time, he thought, but after seeing the loathsome lobster-things night after night, he really didn’t believe that was true. He hoped he would be able to die without screaming. He didn’t think this would be possible, but he intended to try.
“They be comin fo you, honky!” Detta screeched. “Be comin any minute now! Goan be the best dinner those daddies evah had!”
It wasn’t just a bluff, Odetta wasn’t coming back . . . and the gunslinger wasn’t either. This last hurt the most, somehow. He had been sure he and the gunslinger had become—well, partners if not brothers—during their trek up the beach, and Roland would at least make an effort to stand by him.
But Roland wasn’t coming.
Maybe it isn’t that he doesn’t want to come. Maybe he can’t come. Maybe he’s dead, killed by a security guard in a drug store—shit, that’d be a laugh, the world’s last gunslinger killed by a Rent-A-Cop—or maybe run over by a taxi. Maybe he’s dead and the door’s gone. Maybe that’s why she’s not running a bluff. Maybe there’s no bluff to run.
“Goan be any minute now!” Detta screamed, and then Eddie didn’t have to worry about his retinas anymore, because that last bright slice of light disappeared, leaving only afterglow.
He stared at the waves, the bright afterimage slowly fading from his eyes, and waited for the first of the lobstrosities to come rolling and tumbling out of the waves.
12
Eddie tried to turn his head to avoid the first one, but he was too slow. It ripped off a swatch of his face with one claw, splattering his left eye to jelly and revealing the bright gleam of bone in the twilight as it asked its questions and the Really Bad Woman laughed . . .
Stop it, Roland commanded himself. Thinking such thoughts is worse than helpless; it is a distraction. And it need not be. There may still be time.
And there still was—then. As Roland strode down Forty-Ninth street in Jack Mort’s body, arms swinging, bullshooter’s eyes fixed firmly upon the sign which read DRUGS, oblivious to the stares he was getting and the way people swerved to avoid him, the sun was still up in Roland’s world. Its lower rim would not touch the place where sea met sky for another fifteen minutes or so. If Eddie’s time of agony was to come, it was still ahead.
The gunslinger did not know this for a fact, however; he only knew it was later over there than here and while the sun should still be up over there, the assumption that time in this world and his own ran at the same speed might be a deadly one . . . especially for Eddie, who would die the death of unimaginable horror that his mind nevertheless kept trying to imagine.
The urge to look back, to see, was almost insurmountable. Yet he dared not. Must not.
The voice of Cort interrupted the run of his thoughts sternly: Control the things you can control, maggot. Let everything else take a flying fuck at you, and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing.
Yes.
But it was hard.
Very hard, sometimes.
He would have seen and understood why people were staring at him and then veering away if he had been a little less savagely fixed on finishing his work in this world as soon as he could and getting the hell out, but it would have changed nothing. He strode so rapidly toward the blue sign where, according to the Mortcypedia, he could get the Ke-flex stuff his body needed, that Mort’s suitcoat flapped out behind him in spite of the heavy lead weighting in each pocket. The gunbelts buckled across his hips were clearly revealed. He wore them not as their owners had, straight and neat, but as he wore his own, criss-cross, low-hung on his hips.
To the shoppers, boppers, and hawkers on Forty-Ninth, he looked much as he had looked to Fat Johnny: like a desperado.
Roland reached Katz’s Drug Store and went in.
13
The gunslinger had known magicians, enchanters, and alchemists in his time. Some had been clever charlatans, some stupid fakes in whom only people more stupid than they were themselves could believe (but there had never been a shortage of fools in the world, so even the stupid fakes survived; in fact most actually thrived), and a small few actually able to do those things of which men whisper—these few could call demons and the dead, could kill with a curse or heal with strange potions. One of these men had been a creature the gunslinger believed to be a demon himself, a creature that pretended to be a man and called itself Flagg. He had seen him only briefly, and that had been near the end, as chaos and the final crash approached his land. Hot on his heels had come two young men who looked desperate and yet grim, men named Dennis and Thomas. These three had crossed only a tiny part of what had been a confused and confusing time in the gunslinger’s life, but he would never forget seeing Flagg change a man who had irritated him into a howling dog. He remembered that well enough. Then there had been the man in black.
And there had been Marten.
Marten who had seduced his mother while his father was away, Marten who had tried to author Roland’s death but had instead authored his early manhood, Marten who, he suspected, he might meet again before he reached the Tower . . . or at it.
This is only to say that his experience of magic and magicians had led him to expect something quite different than what he did find in Katz’s Drug Store.
He had anticipated a dim, candle-lit room full of bitter fumes, jars of unknown powders and liquids and philters, many covered with a thick layer of dust or spun about with a century’s cobwebs. He had expected a man in a cowl, a man who might be dangerous. He saw people moving about inside through the transparent plate-glass windows, as casually as they would in any shop, and believed they must be an illusion.
They weren’t.
So for a moment the gunslinger merely stood inside the door, first amazed, then ironically amused. Here he was in a world which struck him dumb with fresh wonders seemingly at every step, a world where carriages flew through the air and paper seemed as cheap as sand. And the newest wonder was simply that for these people, wonder had run out: here, in a place of miracles, he saw only dull faces and plodding bodies.
There were thousands of bottles, there were potions, there were philters, but the Mortcypedia identified most as quack remedies. Here was a salve that was supposed to restore fallen hair but would not; there a cream which promised to erase unsightly spots on the hands and arms but lied. Here were cures for things that needed no curing: things to make your bowels run or stop them up, to make your teeth white and your hair black, things to make your breath smell better as if you could not do that by chewing alder-bark. No magic here; only trivialities—although there was astin, and a few other remedies which sounded as if they might be useful. But for the most part, Roland was appalled by the place. In a place that promised alchemy but dealt more in perfume than potion, was it any
wonder that wonder had run out?
But when he consulted the Mortcypedia again, he discovered that the truth of this place was not just in the things he was looking at. The potions that really worked were kept safely out of sight. One could only obtain these if you had a sorcerer’s fiat. In this world, such sorcerers were called DOCKTORS, and they wrote their magic formulae on sheets of paper which the Mortcypedia called REXES. The gunslinger didn’t know the word. He supposed he could have consulted further on the matter, but didn’t bother. He knew what he needed, and a quick look into the Mortcypedia told him where in the store he could get it.
He strode down one of the aisles toward a high counter with the words PRESCRIPTIONS FILLED over it.
14
The Katz who had opened Katz’s Pharmacy and Soda Fountain (Sundries and Notions for Misses and Misters) on 49th Street in 1927 was long in his grave, and his only son looked ready for his own. Although he was only forty-six, he looked twenty years older. He was balding, yellow-skinned, and frail. He knew people said he looked like death on horseback, but none of them understood why.
Take this crotch on the phone now. Mrs. Rathbun. Ranting that she would sue him if he didn’t fill her goddamned Valium prescription and right now, RIGHT THIS VERY INSTANT.
What do you think, lady, I’m gonna pour a stream of blue bombers through the phone? If he did, she would at least do him a favor and shut up. She would just tip the receiver up over her mouth and open wide.
The thought raised a ghostly grin which revealed his sallow dentures.
“You don’t understand, Mrs. Rathbun,” he interrupted after he had listened to a minute—a full minute, timed it with the sweep second-hand of his watch—of her raving. He would like, just once, to be able to say: Stop shouting at me, you stupid crotch! Shout at your DOCTOR! He’s the one who hooked you on that shit! Right. Damn quacks gave it out like it was bubblegum, and when they decided to cut off the supply, who got hit with the shit? The sawbones? Oh, no! He did!
“What do you mean, I don’t understand?” The voice in his ear was like an angry wasp buzzing in a jar. “I understand I do a lot of business at your tacky drugstore, I understand I’ve been a loyal customer all these years, I understand—”
“You’ll have to speak to—” He glanced at the crotch’s Rolodex card through his half-glasses again. “—Dr. Brumhall, Mrs. Rathbun. Your prescription has expired. It’s a Federal crime to dispense Valium without a prescription.” And it ought to be one to perscribe it in the first place . . . unless you’re going to give the patient you’re perscribing it for your unlisted number with it, that is, he thought.
“It was an oversight!” the woman screamed. Now there was a raw edge of panic in her voice. Eddie would have recognized that tone at once: it was the call of the wild Junk-Bird.
“Then call him and ask him to rectify it,” Katz said. “He has my number.” Yes. They all had his number. That was precisely the trouble. He looked like a dying man at forty-six because of the fershlugginer doctors.
And all I have to do to guarantee that the last thin edge of profit I am somehow holding onto in this place will melt away is tell a few of these junkie bitches to go fuck themselves. That’s all.
“I CAN’T CALL HIM!” she screamed. Her voice drilled painfully into his ear. “HIM AND HIS FAG BOY-FRIEND ARE ON VACATION SOMEPLACE AND NO ONE WILL TELL ME WHERE!”
Katz felt acid seeping into his stomach. He had two ulcers, one healed, the other currently bleeding, and women like this bitch were the reason why. He closed his eyes. Thus he did not see his assistant stare at the man in the blue suit and the gold-rimmed glasses approaching the prescription counter, nor did he see Ralph, the fat old security guard (Katz paid the man a pittance but still bitterly resented the expense; his father had never needed a security guard, but his father, God rot him, had lived in a time when New York had been a city instead of a toilet-bowl) suddenly come out of his usual dim daze and reach for the gun on his hip. He heard a woman scream, but thought it was because she had just discovered all the Revlon was on sale, he’d been forced to put the Revlon on sale because that putz Dollentz up the street was undercutting him.
He was thinking of nothing but Dollentz and this bitch on the phone as the gunslinger approached like fated doom, thinking of how wonderful the two of them would look naked save for a coating of honey and staked out over anthills in the burning desert sun. HIS and HERS anthills, wonderful. He was thinking this was the worst it could get, the absolute worst. His father had been so determined that his only son follow in his footsteps that he had refused to pay for anything but a degree in pharmacology, and so he had followed in his father’s footsteps, and God rot his father, for this was surely the lowest moment in a life that had been full of low moments, a life which had made him old before his time.
This was the absolute nadir.
Or so he thought with his eyes closed.
“If you come by, Mrs. Rathbun, I could give you a dozen five milligram Valium. Would that be all right?”
“The man sees reason! Thank God, the man sees reason!” And she hung up. Just like that. Not a word of thanks. But when she saw the walking rectum that called itself a doctor again, she would just about fall down and polish the tips of his Gucci loafers with her nose, she would give him a blowjob, she would—
“Mr. Katz,” his assistant said in a voice that sounded strangely winded. “I think we have a prob—”
There was another scream. It was followed by the crash of a gun, startling him so badly he thought for a moment his heart was simply going to utter one monstrous clap in his chest and then stop forever.
He opened his eyes and stared into the eyes of the gunslinger. Katz dropped his gaze and saw the pistol in the man’s fist. He looked left and saw Ralph the guard nursing one hand and staring at the thief with eyes that seemed to be bugging out of his face. Ralph’s own gun, the .38 which he had toted dutifully through eighteen years as a police officer (and which he had only fired from the line of the 23rd Precinct’s basement target range; he said he had drawn it twice in the line of duty . . . but who knew?), was now a wreck in the corner.
“I want Keflex,” the man with the bullshooter eyes said expressionlessly. “I want a lot. Now. And never mind the REX.”
For a moment Katz could only look at him, his mouth open, his heart struggling in his chest, his stomach a sickly boiling pot of acid.
Had he thought he had hit rock bottom?
Had he really?
15
“You don’t understand,” Katz managed at last. His voice sounded strange to himself, and there was really nothing very odd about that, since his mouth felt like a flannel shirt and his tongue like a strip of cotton batting. “There is no cocaine here. It is not a drug which is dispensed under any cir—”
“I did not say cocaine,” the man in the blue suit and the gold-rimmed glasses said. “I said Keflex.”
That’s what I thought you said, Katz almost told this crazy momser, and then decided that might provoke him. He had heard of drug stores getting held up for speed, for Bennies, for half a dozen other things (including Mrs. Rathbun’s precious Valium), but he thought this might be the first penicillin robbery in history.
The voice of his father (God rot the old bastard) told him to stop dithering and gawping and do something.
But he could think of nothing to do.
The man with the gun supplied him with something.
“Move,” the man with the gun said. “I’m in a hurry.”
“H-How much do you want?” Katz asked. His eyes flicked momentarily over the robber’s shoulder, and he saw something he could hardly believe. Not in this city. But it looked like it was happening, anyway. Good luck? Katz actually has some good luck? That you could put in The Guinness Book of World Records!
“I don’t know,” the man with the gun said. “As much as you can put in a bag. A big bag.” And with no warning at all, he whirled and the gun in his fist crashed again. A man bellowed. Plat
e glass blew onto the sidewalk and the street in a sparkle of shards and splinters. Several passing pedestrians were cut, but none seriously. Inside Katz’s drugstore, women (and not a few men) screamed. The burglar alarm began its own hoarse bellow. The customers panicked and stampeded toward and out the door. The man with the gun turned back to Katz and his expression had not changed at all: his face wore the same look of frightening (but not inexhaustible) patience that it had worn from the first. “Do as I say rapidly. I’m in a hurry.”
Katz gulped.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
16
The gunslinger had seen and admired the curved mirror in the upper left corner of the shop while he was still halfway to the counter behind which they kept the powerful potions. The creation of such a curved mirror was beyond the ability of any craftsman in his own world as things were now, although there had been a time when such things—and many of the others he saw in Eddie and Odetta’s world—might have been made. He had seen the remains of some in the tunnel under the mountains, and he had seen them in other places as well . . . relics as ancient and mysterious as the Druit stones that sometimes stood in the places where demons came.
He also understood the mirror’s purpose.
He had been a bit late seeing the guard’s move—he was still discovering how disastrously the lenses Mort wore over his eyes restricted his peripheral vision—but he’d still time to turn and shoot the gun out of the guard’s hand. It was a shot Roland thought as nothing more than routine, although he’d needed to hurry a little. The guard, however, had a different opinion. Ralph Lennox would swear to the end of his days that the guy had made an impossible shot . . . except, maybe, on those old kiddie Western shows like Annie Oakley.