The Drawing of the Three (31 page)

He cooked over a dry wood fire—the encroaching hills and increasing vegetation made the search for good fuel quicker and easier, that was one thing—while the last of the daylight faded from the western sky.

“Look, Eddie!” she cried, pointing up.

He looked, and saw a single star gleaming on the breast of the night.

“Isn’t it
beautiful?
”

“Yes,” he said, and suddenly, for no reason, his eyes filled with tears. Just where had he been all of his goddamned life? Where had he been, what had he been doing, who had been with him while he did it, and why did he suddenly feel so grimy and abysmally beshitted?

Her lifted face was terrible in its beauty, irrefutable in this light, but the beauty was unknown to its possessor, who only looked at the star with wide wondering eyes, and laughed softly.

“Star light, star bright,” she said, and stopped. She looked at him. “Do you know it, Eddie?”

“Yeah.” Eddie kept his head down. His voice sounded clear enough, but if he looked up she would see he was weeping.

“Then help me. But you have to look.”

“Okay.”

He wiped the tears into the palm of one hand and looked up at the star with her.

“Star light—” she looked at him and he joined her. “Star
bright—
”

Her hand reached out, groping, and he clasped it, one the delicious brown of light chocolate, the other the delicious white of a dove’s breast.

“First star I see tonight,” they spoke solemnly in unison, boy and girl for this now, not man and woman as they would be later, when the dark was full and she called to ask him if he was asleep and he said no and she asked if he would hold her because she was cold; “Wish I may, wish I might—”

They looked at each other, and he saw that tears were streaming down her cheeks. His own came again, and he let them fall in her sight. This was not a shame but an inexpressible relief.

They smiled at each other.

“Have the wish I wish tonight,” Eddie said, and thought:
Please, always you.

“Have the wish I wish tonight,” she echoed, and thought
If I must die in this odd place, please let it not be too hard and let this good young man be with me.

“I’m sorry I cried,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I don’t usually, but it’s been—”

“A very trying day,” he finished for her.

“Yes. And you need to eat, Eddie.”

“You do, too.”

“I just hope it doesn’t make me sick again.”

He smiled at her.

“I don’t think it will.”

Later, with strange galaxies turning in slow gavotte overhead, neither thought the act of love had ever been so sweet, so full.

They were off with the dawn, racing, and by nine Eddie was wishing he had asked Roland what he should do if they came to the place where the hills cut off the beach and there was still no door in sight. It seemed a question of some importance, because the end of the beach
was
coming, no doubt about that. The hills marched ever closer, running in a diagonal line toward the water.

The beach itself was no longer a beach at all, not really; the soil was now firm and quite smooth. Something—run-off, he supposed, or flooding at some rainy season (there had been none since he had been in this world, not a drop; the sky had clouded over a few times, but then the clouds had blown away again)—had worn most of the jutting rocks away.

At nine-thirty, Odetta cried: “Stop, Eddie! Stop!”

He stopped so abruptly that she had to grab the arms of the chair to keep from tumbling out. He was around to her in a flash.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Fine.” He saw he had mistaken excitement for distress. She pointed. “Up there! Do you see something?”

He shaded his eyes and saw nothing. He squinted. For just a moment he thought . . . no, it was surely just heat-shimmer rising from the packed ground.

“I don’t think so,” he said, and smiled. “Except maybe your wish.”

“I think I do!” She turned her excited, smiling face to him. “Standing all by itself! Near where the beach ends.”

He looked again, squinting so hard this time that his eyes watered. He thought again for just a moment that he saw something.
You did,
he thought, and smiled.
You saw her wish.

“Maybe,” he said, not because he believed it but because she did.

“Let’s go!”

Eddie went behind the chair again, taking a moment to massage his lower back where a steady ache had settled. She looked around.

“What are you
waiting
for?”

“You really think you’ve got it spotted, don’t you?”

“Yes!”

“Well then, let’s go!”

Eddie started pushing again.

Half an hour later he saw it, too.
Jesus,
he thought,
her eyes are as good as Roland’s. Maybe better.

Neither wanted to stop for lunch, but they needed to eat. They made a quick meal and then pushed on again. The tide was coming in and Eddie looked to the right—west—with rising unease. They were still well above the tangled line of kelp and seaweed that marked high water, but he thought that by the time they reached the door they would be in an uncomfortably tight angle bounded by the sea on one side and the slanting hills on the other. He could see those hills very clearly now. There was nothing pleasant about the view. They were rocky, studded with low trees that curled their roots into the ground like arthritic knuckles, keeping a grim grip, and thorny-looking bushes. They weren’t really steep, but too steep for the wheelchair. He might be able to carry her up a way, might, in fact, be forced to, but he didn’t fancy leaving her there.

For the first time he was hearing insects. The sound was a little like crickets, but higher pitched than that, and with no swing of rhythm—just a steady monotonous
riiiiiiii
sound like power-lines. For the first time he was seeing birds other than gulls. Some were biggies that circled inland on stiff wings. Hawks, he thought. He saw them fold their wings from time to time and plummet like stones. Hunting. Hunting what? Well, small animals. That was all right.

Yet he kept thinking of that yowl he’d heard in the night.

By mid-afternoon they could see the third door clearly. Like the other two, it was an impossibility which nonetheless stood as stark as a post.

“Amazing,” he heard her say softly. “How utterly amazing.”

It was exactly where he had begun to surmise it would be, in the angle that marked the end of any easy northward progress. It stood just above the high tide line and less than nine yards from the place where the hills suddenly leaped out of the ground like a giant hand coated with gray-green brush instead of hair.

The tide came full as the sun swooned toward the water; and at what might have been four o’clock—Odetta said so, and since she had said she was good at telling the sun (and because she was his beloved), Eddie believed her—they reached the door.

They simply looked at it, Odetta in her chair with her hands in her lap, Eddie on the sea-side. In one way they looked at it as they had looked at the evening star the previous night—which is to say, as children look at things—but in another they looked differently. When they wished on the star they had been children of joy. Now they were solemn, wondering, like children looking at the stark embodiment of a thing which only belonged in a fairy tale.

Two words were written on this door.

“What does it mean?” Odetta asked finally.

“I don’t know,” Eddie said, but those words had brought a hopeless chill; he felt an eclipse stealing across his heart.

“Don’t you?” she asked, looking at him more closely.

“No. I . . .” He swallowed. “No.”

She looked at him a moment longer. “Push me behind it, please. I’d like to see that. I know you want to get back to him, but would you do that for me?”

He would.

They started around, on the high side of the door.

“Wait!” she cried. “Did you see it?”

“What?”

“Go back! Look! Watch!”

This time he watched the door instead of what might be ahead to trip them up. As they went above it he saw it narrow in perspective, saw its hinges, hinges which seemed to be buried in nothing at all, saw its thickness . . .

Then it was gone.

The thickness of the door was gone.

His view of the water should have been interrupted by three, perhaps even four inches of solid wood (the door looked extraordinarily stout), but there was no such interruption.

The door was gone.

Its shadow was there, but the door was gone.

He rolled the chair back two feet, so he was just south of the place where the door stood, and the thickness was there.

“You see it?” he asked in a ragged voice.

“
Yes!
It’s there again!”

He rolled the chair forward a foot. The door was still there. Another six inches. Still there. Another
two
inches. Still there. Another inch . . . and it was gone. Solid gone.

“Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus Christ.”

“Would it open for you?” she asked. “Or me?”

He stepped forward slowly and grasped the knob of the door with those two words upon it.

He tried clockwise; he tried anti-clockwise.

The knob moved not an iota.

“All right.” Her voice was calm, resigned. “It’s for him, then. I think we both knew it. Go for him, Eddie. Now.”

“First I’ve got to see to you.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“No you won’t. You’re too close to the high-tide line. If I leave you here, the lobsters are going to come out when it gets dark and you’re going to be din—”

Up in the hills, a cat’s coughing growl suddenly cut across what he was saying like a knife cutting thin cord. It was a good distance away, but closer than the other had been.

Her eyes flicked to the gunslinger’s revolver shoved into the waistband of his pants for just a moment, then back to his face. He felt a dull heat in his cheeks.

“He told you not to give it to me, didn’t he?” she said softly. “He doesn’t want me to have it. For some reason he doesn’t want me to have it.”

“The shells got wet,” he said awkwardly. “They probably wouldn’t fire, anyway.”

“I understand. Take me a little way up the slope, Eddie, can you? I know how tired your back must be, Andrew calls it Wheelchair Crouch, but if you take me up a little way, I’ll be safe from the lobsters. I doubt if anything else comes very close to where they are.”

Eddie thought,
When the tide’s in, she’s probably right . . . but what about when it starts to go out again?

“Give me something to eat and some stones,” she said, and her unknowing echo of the gunslinger made Eddie flush again. His cheeks and forehead felt like the sides of a brick oven.

She looked at him, smiled faintly, and shook her head as if he had spoken out loud. “We’re not going to argue about this. I saw how it is with him. His time is very, very short. There is no time for discussion. Take me up a little way, give me food and some stones, then take the chair and go.”

He got her fixed as quickly as he could, then pulled the gunslinger’s revolver and held it out to her butt-first. But she shook her head.

“He’ll be angry with both of us. Angry with you for giving, angrier at me for taking.”

“Crap!” Eddie yelled. “What gave you that idea?”

“I know,” she said, and her voice was impervious.

“Well, suppose that’s true. Just suppose.
I’ll
be angry with you if you
don’t
take it.”

“Put it back. I don’t like guns. I don’t know how to use them. If
something came at me in the dark the first thing I’d do is wet my pants. The second thing I’d do is point it the wrong way and shoot myself.” She paused, looking at Eddie solemnly. “There’s something else, and you might as well know it. I don’t want to touch anything that belongs to him. Not
anything.
For me, I think his things might have what my Ma used to call a hoodoo. I like to think of myself as a modern woman . . . but I don’t want any hoodoo on me when you’re gone and the dark lands on top of me.”

He looked from the gun to Odetta, and his eyes still questioned.

“Put it
back,
” she said, stern as a schoolteacher. Eddie burst out laughing and obeyed.

“Why are you laughing?”

“Because when you said that you sounded like Miss Hathaway. She was my third-grade teacher.”

She smiled a little, her luminous eyes never leaving his. She sang softly, sweetly:
“Heavenly shades of night are falling . . . it’s twilight time . . .”
She trailed off and they both looked west, but the star they had wished on the previous evening had not yet appeared, although their shadows had drawn long.

“Is there anything else, Odetta?” He felt an urge to delay and delay. He thought it would pass once he was actually headed back, but now the urge to seize any excuse to remain, seemed very strong.

“A kiss. I could do with that, if you don’t mind.”

He kissed her long and when their lips no longer touched, she caught his wrist and stared at him intently. “I never made love with a white man before last night,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s important to you or not. I don’t even know if it’s important to
me.
But I thought you should know.”

He considered.

“Not to me,” he said. “In the dark, I think we were both gray. I love you, Odetta.”

She put a hand over his.

“You’re a sweet young man and perhaps I love you, too, although it’s too early for either of us—”

At that moment, as if given a cue, a wildcat growled in what the gunslinger had called the brakes. It still sounded four or five miles away, but that was still four or five miles closer than the last time they heard it, and it sounded
big.

They turned their heads toward the sound. Eddie felt hackles trying to stand up on his neck. They couldn’t quite make it.
Sorry, hackles,
he thought stupidly.
I guess my hair’s just a little too long now.

The growl rose to a tortured scream that sounded like a cry of some being suffering a horrid death (it might actually have signalled no more than a successful mating). It held for a moment, almost unbearable, and then it wound down, sliding through lower and lower registers until it was gone or buried beneath the ceaseless cry of the wind. They waited for it to come again, but the cry was not repeated. As far as Eddie was concerned, that didn’t matter. He pulled the revolver out of his waistband again and held it out to her.