The Drawing of the Three (35 page)

Who was to say that he had not sculpted the cosmos today, or might not at some future time?

God, no wonder he creamed his jeans!

He met no one as he went down the two flights of stairs but he
kept up the act, swaying a little as he went but never reeling. A swayer would not be remembered. An ostentatious reeler might be. He muttered but didn’t actually say anything a person might understand. Not acting at all would be better than hamming it up.

He let himself out the broken rear door into an alley filled with refuse and broken bottles which twinkled galaxies of sun-stars.

He had planned his escape in advance as he planned everything in advance (take only acceptable risks, minimize those which remain, be a Do Bee in all things); such planning was why he had been marked by his colleagues as a man who would go far (and he
did
intend to go far, but one of the places he did not intend to go was to jail, or the electric chair).

A few people were running along the street into which the alley debouched, but they were on their way to see what the screaming was about, and none of them looked at Jack Mort, who had removed the out-of-season knit cap but not the sunglasses (which, on such a bright morning, did not seem out of place).

He turned into another alley.

Came out on another street.

Now he sauntered down an alley not so filthy as the first two—almost, in fact, a lane. This fed into another street, and a block up there was a bus stop. Less than a minute after he got there a bus arrived, which was also part of the schedule. Jack entered when the doors accordioned open and dropped his fifteen cents into the slot of the coin receptacle. The driver did not so much as glance at him. That was good, but even if he had, he would have seen nothing but a nondescript man in jeans, a man who might be out of work—the sweatshirt he was wearing looked like something out of a Salvation Army grab-bag.

Be ready, be prepared, be a Do Bee.

Jack Mort’s secret for success both at work and at play.

Nine blocks away there was a parking lot. Jack got off the bus, entered the lot, unlocked his car (an unremarkable mid-fifties Chevrolet which was still in fine shape), and drove back to New York City.

He was free and clear.

The gunslinger saw all of this in a mere moment. Before his shocked mind could shut out the other images by simply shutting down, he saw more. Not all, but enough. Enough.

He saw Mort cutting a piece from page four of
The New York Daily Mirror
with an Exacto knife, being fussily sure to stay exactly upon the lines of the column.
NEGRO GIRL COMATOSE FOLLOWING TRAGIC ACCIDENT
, the headline read. He saw Mort apply glue to the back of the clipping with the brush attached to the cover of his paste-pot. Saw Mort position it at the center of a blank page of a scrapbook, which, from the bumpy, swelled look of the foregoing pages, contained many other clippings. He saw the opening lines of the piece: “Five-year-old Odetta Holmes, who came to Elizabethtown, N.J., to celebrate a joyous occasion, is now the victim of a cruel freak accident. Following the wedding of an aunt two days ago, the girl and her family were walking toward the railway station when a brick tumbled . . .”

But that wasn’t the only time he’d had dealings with her, was it? No. Gods, no.

In the years between that morning and the night when Odetta had lost her legs, Jack Mort had dropped a great many things and pushed a great many people.

Then there had been Odetta again.

The first time he had pushed something
on
her.

The second time he had pushed her
in front
of something.

What sort of man is this that I am supposed to use? What sort of man—

But then he thought of Jake, thought of the push which had sent Jake into this world, and he thought he heard the laughter of the man in black, and that finished him.

Roland fainted.

When he came to, he was looking at neat rows of figures marching down a sheet of green paper. The paper had been ruled both ways, so that each single figure looked like a prisoner in a cell.

He thought:
Something else.

Not
just Walter’s laughter. Something—a plan?

No, Gods, no—nothing as complex or hopeful as that.

But an idea, at least. A tickle.

How long have I been out?
he thought with sudden alarm.
It was maybe nine o’ the clock when I came through the door, maybe a little earlier. How long—?

He
came forward.

Jack Mort—who was now only a human doll controlled by the gunslinger—looked up a little and saw the hands of the expensive quartz clock on his desk stood at quarter past one.

Gods, as late as that? As late as that? But Eddie . . . he was so tired, he can never have stayed awake for so l—

The gunslinger turned Jack’s head. The door was still there, but what he saw through it was far worse than he would have imagined.

Standing to one side of the door were two shadows, one that of the wheelchair, the other that of a human being . . . but the human being was incomplete, supporting itself on its arms because its lower legs had been snatched away with the same quick brutality as Roland’s fingers and toe.

The shadow moved.

Roland whipped Jack Mort’s head away at once, moving with the whiplash speed of a striking snake.

She mustn’t look in. Not until I am ready. Until then, she sees nothing but the back of this man’s head.

Detta Walker would not see Jack Mort in any case, because the person who looked through the open door saw only what the host saw. She could only see Mort’s face if he looked into a mirror (although that might lead to its own awful consequences of paradox and repetition), but even then it would mean nothing to either Lady; for that
matter, the Lady’s face would not mean anything to Jack Mort. Although they had twice been on terms of deadly intimacy, they had never seen each other.

What the gunslinger didn’t want was for the Lady to see the
Lady.

Not yet, at least.

The spark of intuition grew closer to a plan.

But it was late over there—the light had suggested to him that it must be three in the afternoon, perhaps even four.

How long until sunset brought the lobstrosities, and the end of Eddie’s life?

Three hours?

Two?

He could go back and try to save Eddie . . . but that was exactly what Detta wanted. She had laid a trap, just as villagers who fear a deadly wolf may stake out a sacrificial lamb to draw it into bowshot. He would go back into his diseased body . . . but not for long. The reason he had seen only her shadow was because she was lying beside the door with one of his revolvers curled in her fist. The moment his Roland-body moved, she would shoot it and end his life.

His
ending, because she feared him, would at least be merciful.

Eddie’s would be a screaming horror.

He seemed to hear Detta Walker’s nasty, giggling voice:
You want to go at me, graymeat?
Sho
you want to go at me! You ain’t afraid of no lil ole cripple black woman, are you?

“Only one way,” Jack’s mouth muttered. “Only one.”

The door of the office opened, and a bald man with lenses over his eyes looked in.

“How are you doing on that Dorfman account?” the bald man asked.

“I feel ill. I think it was my lunch. I think I might leave.”

The bald man looked worried. “It’s probably a bug. I heard there’s a nasty one going around.”

“Probably.”

“Well . . . as long as you get the Dorfman stuff finished by five tomorrow afternoon . . .”

“Yes.”

“Because you know what a dong he can be—”

“Yes.”

The bald man, now looking a little uneasy, nodded. “Yes, go home. You don’t seem like your usual self at all.”

“I’m not.”

The bald man went out the door in a hurry.

He sensed me,
the gunslinger thought.
That was part of it. Part, but not all. They’re afraid of him. They don’t know why, but they’re afraid of him. And they’re right to be afraid.

Jack Mort’s body got up, found the briefcase the man had been carrying when the gunslinger entered him, and swept all the papers on the surface of the desk into it.

He felt an urge to sneak a look back at the door and resisted it. He would not look again until he was ready to risk everything and come back.

In the meantime, time was short and there were things which had to be done.

Detta laid up in a deeply shadowed cleft formed by rocks which leaned together like old men who had been turned to stone while sharing some weird secret. She watched Eddie range up and down the rubble-strewn slopes of the hills, yelling himself hoarse. The duck-fuzz on his cheeks was finally becoming a beard, and you might have taken him for a growed man except for the three or four times he passed close to her (once he had come close enough for her to have snaked a hand out and grabbed his ankle). When he got close you saw he wasn’t nothing but a kid still, and one who was dog tired to boot.

Odetta would have felt pity; Detta felt only the still, coiled readiness of the natural predator.

When she first crawled in here she had felt things crackling under her hands like old autumn leaves in a woods holler. As her eyes adjusted she saw they weren’t leaves but the tiny bones of small animals. Some predator, long gone if these ancient yellow bones told the truth, had once denned here, something like a weasel or a ferret. It had perhaps gone out at night, following its nose further up into The Drawers to where the trees and undergrowth were thicker—following its nose to prey. It had killed, eaten, and brought the remains back here to snack on the following day as it laid up, waiting for night to bring the time of hunting on again.

Now there was a bigger predator here, and at first Detta thought she’d do pretty much what the previous tenant had done: wait until
Eddie fell asleep, as he was almost certain to do, then kill him and drag his body up here. Then, with both guns in her possession, she could drag herself back down by the doorway and wait for the Really Bad Man to come back. Her first thought had been to kill the Really Bad Man’s body as soon as she had taken care of Eddie, but that was no good, was it? If the Really Bad Man had no body to come back to, there would be no way Detta could get out of here and back to her own world.

Could she make that Really Bad Man take her back?

Maybe not.

But maybe so.

If he knew Eddie was still alive, maybe so.

And that led to a much better idea.

She was deeply sly. She would have laughed harshly at anyone daring to suggest it, but she was also deeply insecure. Because of the latter, she attributed the former to anyone she met whose intellect seemed to approach her own. This was how she felt about the gunslinger. She had heard a shot, and when she looked she’d seen smoke drifting from the muzzle of his remaining gun. He had reloaded and tossed this gun to Eddie just before going through the door.

She knew what it was supposed to mean to Eddie: all the shells weren’t wet after all; the gun would protect him. She
also
knew what it was supposed to mean to her (for of course the Really Bad Man had known she was watching; even if she had been sleeping when the two of them started chinning, the shot would have awakened her):
Stay away from him. He’s packing iron.

But devils could be subtle.

If that little show had been put on for her benefit, might not that Really Bad Man have had another purpose in mind as well, one
neither
she nor Eddie was supposed to see? Might that Really Bad Man
not have been thinking
If she sees
this
one fires good shells, why, she’ll think the one she took from Eddie does, too.

But suppose he had guessed that Eddie would doze off? Wouldn’t he know she would be waiting for just that, waiting to filch the gun and creep slowly away up the slopes to safety? Yes, that Really Bad Man might have foreseen all that. He was smart for a honky. Smart enough, anyway, to see that Detta was bound to get the best of that little white boy.

So just maybe that Really Bad Man had purposely loaded this gun with bad shells. He had fooled her once; why not again? This time she had been careful to check that the chambers were loaded with more than empty casings, and yes, they
appeared
to be real bullets, but that didn’t mean they were. He didn’t even have to take the chance that
one
of them might be dry enough to fire, now did he? He could have fixed them somehow. After all, guns were the Really Bad Man’s business. Why would he do that? Why, to trick her into showing herself, of course! Then Eddie could cover her with the gun that really
did
work, and he would not make the same mistake twice, tired or not. He would, in fact, be especially careful not to make the same mistake twice because he
was
tired.

Nice try, honky,
Detta thought in her shadowy den, this tight but somehow comforting dark place whose floor was carpeted with the softened and decaying bones of small animals.
Nice try, but I ain’t goin fo dat shit.

She didn’t need to shoot Eddie, after all; she only needed to wait.

Her one fear was that the gunslinger would return before Eddie fell asleep, but he was still gone. The limp body at the base of the door did not stir. Maybe he was having some trouble getting the medicine he needed—some other kind of trouble, for all she knew. Men like him seemed to find trouble easy as a bitch in heat finds a randy hound.

Two hours passed while Eddie hunted for the woman he called “Odetta” (oh how she hated the sound of that name), ranging up and down the low hills and yelling until he had no voice left to yell with.

At last Eddie did what she had been waiting for: he went back down to the little angle of beach and sat by the wheelchair, looking around disconsolately. He touched one of the chair’s wheels, and the touch was almost a caress. Then his hand dropped away and he fetched him a deep sigh.

This sight brought a steely ache to Detta’s throat; pain bolted across her head from one side to the other like summer lightning and she seemed to hear a voice calling . . . calling or demanding.

No you don’t,
she thought, having no idea who she was thinking about or speaking to.
No you don’t, not this time, not now. Not now, maybe not ever again.
That bolt of pain ripped through her head again and she curled her hands into fists. Her face made its own fist, twisting itself into a sneer of concentration—an expression remarkable and arresting in its mixture of ugliness and almost beatific determination.

That bolt of pain did not come again. Neither did the voice which sometimes seemed to speak through such pains.

She waited.

Eddie propped his chin on his fists, propping his head up. Soon it began to droop anyway, the fists sliding up his cheeks. Detta waited, black eyes gleaming.

Eddie’s head jerked up. He struggled to his feet, walked down to the water, and splashed his face with it.

Dat’s right, white boy. Crine shame there ain’t any No-Doz in this worl or you be takin
dat
too, ain’t dat right?

Eddie sat down
in
the wheelchair this time, but evidently found that just a little
too
comfortable. So, after a long look through the open door (
what you seein in dere, white boy? Detta give a twenty-dollar bill to know
dat), he plopped his ass down on the sand again.

Propped his head with his hands again.

Soon his head began to slip down again.

This time there was no stopping it. His chin lay on his chest, and
even over the surf she could hear him snoring. Pretty soon he fell over on his side and curled up.

She was surprised, disgusted, and frightened to feel a sudden stab of pity for the white boy down there. He looked like nothing so much as a little squirt who had tried to stay up until midnight on New Year’s Eve and lost the race. Then she remembered the way he and the Really Bad Man had tried to get her to eat poison food and teased her with their own, always snatching away at the last second . . . at least until they got scared she might die.

If they were scared you might die, why’d they try to get you to eat poison in the first place?

The question scared her the way that momentary feeling of pity had scared her. She wasn’t used to questioning herself, and furthermore, the questioning voice in her mind didn’t seem like her voice at all.

Wadn’t meanin to kill me wid dat poison food. Jes wanted to make me sick. Set there and laugh while I puked an moaned, I speck.

She waited twenty minutes and then started down toward the beach, pulling herself with her hands and strong arms, weaving like a snake, eyes never leaving Eddie. She would have preferred to have waited another hour, even another half; it would be better to have the little mahfah ten miles asleep instead of one or two. But waiting was a luxury she simply could not afford. That Really Bad Man might come back anytime.

As she drew near the place where Eddie lay (he was still snoring, sounded like a buzzsaw in a sawmill about to go tits up), she picked up a chunk of rock that was satisfyingly smooth on one side and satisfyingly jagged on the other.

She closed her palm over the smooth side and continued her snake-crawl to where he lay, the flat sheen of murder in her eyes.

What Detta planned to do was brutally simple: smash Eddie with the jagged side of the rock until he was as dead as the rock itself. Then she’d take the gun and wait for Roland to come back.

When his body sat up, she would give him a choice: take her back to her world or refuse and be killed.
You goan be quits wid me either way, toots,
she would say,
and wit yo boyfrien dead, ain’t nothin more you can do like you said you wanted to.

If the gun the Really Bad Man had given Eddie didn’t work—it was possible; she had never met a man she hated and feared as much as Roland, and she put no depth of slyness past him—she would do him just the same. She would do him with the rock or with her bare hands. He was sick and shy two fingers to boot. She could take him.

But as she approached Eddie, a disquieting thought came to her. It was another question, and again it seemed to be another voice that asked it.

What if he knows? What if he knows what you did the second you kill Eddie?

He ain’t goan know
nuthin.
He be too busy gittin his medicine. Gittin hisself laid, too, for all I know.

The alien voice did not respond, but the seed of doubt had been planted. She had heard them talking when they thought she was asleep. The Really Bad Man needed to do something. She didn’t know what it was. Had something to do with a tower was all Detta knew. Could be the Really Bad Man thought this tower was full of gold or jewels or something like that. He said he needed her and Eddie and some other one to get there, and Detta guessed maybe he did. Why else would these doors be here?

If it was magic and she killed Eddie, he
might
know. If she killed his way to the tower, she thought she might be killing the only thing graymeat mahfah was living for. And if he knew he had nothing to live for, mahfah might do anything, because the mahfah wouldn’t give a bug-turd for nothin no more.

The idea of what might happen if the Really Bad Man came back like that made Detta shiver.

But if she couldn’t kill Eddie, what was she going to do? She could take the gun while Eddie was asleep, but when the Really Bad Man came back, could she handle both of them?

She just didn’t know.

Her eyes touched on the wheelchair, started to move away, then moved back again, fast. There was a deep pocket in the leather backrest. Poking out of this was a curl of the rope they had used to tie her into the chair.

Looking at it, she understood how she could do everything.

Detta changed course and began to crawl toward the gunslinger’s inert body. She meant to take what she needed from the knapsack he called his “purse,” then get the rope, fast as she could . . . but for a moment she was held frozen by the door.

Like Eddie, she interpreted what she was seeing in terms of the movies . . . only this looked more like some TV crime show. The setting was a drug-store. She was seeing a druggist who looked scared silly, and Detta didn’t blame him. There was a gun pointing straight into the druggist’s face. The druggist was saying something, but his voice was distant, distorted, as if heard through sound-baffles. She couldn’t tell what it was. She couldn’t see who was holding the gun, either, but then, she didn’t really need to see the stick-up man, did she? She knew who it was, sho.

It was the Really Bad Man.

Might not
look
like him over there, might look like some tubby little sack of shit, might even look like a brother, but inside it
be
him, sho. Didn’t take him long to find another gun, did it? I bet it never does. You get movin, Detta Walker.

She opened Roland’s purse, and the faint, nostalgic aroma of tobacco long hoarded but now long gone drifted out. In one way it was very much like a lady’s purse, filled with what looked like so much random rickrack at first glance . . . but a closer look showed you the travelling gear of a man prepared for almost any contingency.

She had an idea the Really Bad Man had been on the road to his Tower a good long time. If that was so, just the amount of stuff still left in here, poor as some of it was, was cause for amazement.