The Drawing of the Three (42 page)

You ought to burn,
the gunslinger thought grimly.
What’s going to happen to you is more merciful than you deserve.

What do you mean? WHAT DO YOU MEAN?

The gunslinger didn’t answer; in fact turned him off entirely as he pelted toward the edge of the platform. He felt one of the boxes of shells trying to slip out of Mort’s ridiculous panties and held it with one hand.

He sent out every bit of his mental force toward the Lady. He had no idea if such a telepathic command could be heard, or if the hearer could be compelled to obey, but he sent it just the same, a swift, sharp arrow of thought:

THE DOOR! LOOK THROUGH THE DOOR! NOW! NOW!

Train-thunder filled the world. A woman screamed
“Oh my God he’s going to jump!”
A hand slapped at his shoulder trying to pull him back. Then Roland pushed the body of Jack Mort past the yellow warning line and dove over the edge of the platform. He fell into the path of the oncoming train with his hands cupping his crotch, holding the luggage he would bring back . . . if, that was, he was fast enough to get out of Mort at just the right instant. As he fell he called her—
them
—again:

ODETTA HOLMES! DETTA WALKER! LOOK NOW!

As he called, as the train bore down upon him, its wheels turning
with merciless silver speed, the gunslinger finally turned his head and looked back through the door.

And directly into her face.

Faces!

Both of them, I see both of them at the same time
—

NOO—!
Mort shrieked, and in the last split second before the train ran him down, cutting him in two not above the knees but at the waist, Roland lunged at the door . . . and through it.

Jack Mort died alone.

The boxes of ammunition and the bottle of pills appeared beside Roland’s physical body. His hands clenched spasmodically at them, then relaxed. The gunslinger forced himself up, aware that he was wearing his sick, throbbing body again, aware that Eddie Dean was screaming, aware that Odetta was shrieking in two voices. He looked—only for a moment—and saw exactly what he had heard: not one woman but two. Both were legless, both dark-skinned, both women of great beauty. Nonetheless, one of them was a hag, her interior ugliness not hidden by her outer beauty but enhanced by it.

Roland stared at these twins who were not really twins at all but negative and positive images of the same woman. He stared with a feverish, hypnotic intensity.

Then Eddie screamed again and the gunslinger saw the lobstrosities tumbling out of the waves and strutting toward the place where Detta had left him, trussed and helpless.

The sun was down. Darkness had come.

Detta saw herself in the doorway, saw herself through her eyes, saw herself through the
gunslinger’s
eyes, and her sense of dislocation was as sudden as Eddie’s, but much more violent.

She was here.

She was
there,
in the gunslinger’s eyes.

She heard the oncoming train.

Odetta!
she screamed, suddenly understanding everything: what she was and when it had happened.

Detta!
she screamed, suddenly understanding everything: what she was and who had done it.

A brief sensation of being turned inside out . . . and then a much more agonizing one.

She was being torn apart.

Roland shambled down the short slope to the place where Eddie lay. He moved like a man who has lost his bones. One of the lobster-things clawed at Eddie’s face. Eddie screamed. The gunslinger booted it away. He bent rustily and grabbed Eddie’s arms. He began to drag him backwards, but it was too late, his strength was too little, they were going to get Eddie, hell, both of them—

Eddie screamed again as one of the lobstrosities asked him
did-a-chick?
and then tore a swatch of his pants and a chunk of meat to go along with it. Eddie tried another scream, but nothing came out but a choked gargle. He was strangling in Detta’s knots.

The things were all around them, closing in, claws clicking eagerly. The gunslinger threw the last of his strength into a final yank . . . and tumbled backwards. He heard them coming, them with their hellish questions and clicking claws. Maybe it wasn’t so bad, he thought. He had staked everything, and that was all he had lost.

The thunder of his own guns filled him with stupid wonder.

The two women lay face to face, bodies raised like snakes about to strike, fingers with identical prints locked around throats marked with identical lines.

The woman was trying to kill her but the woman was not real, no more than the girl had been real; she was a dream created by a falling brick . . . but now the dream was real, the dream was clawing her throat and trying to kill her as the gunslinger tried to save his friend. The dream-made-real was screeching obscenities and raining hot spittle into her face. “I took the blue plate because that woman landed me in the hospital and besides I didn’t get no
forspecial
plate an I bust it cause it
needed
bustin an when I saw a white boy I could bust why I bust him too I hurt the white boys because they needed hurtin I stole from the stores that only sell things that are
forspecial
to whitefolks while the brothers and sisters go hungry in Harlem and the rats eat their babies, I’m the one, you bitch, I’m the one, I . . . I . . . I!

Kill her,
Odetta thought, and knew she could not.

She could no more kill the hag and survive than the hag could kill
her
and walk away. They could choke each other to death while Eddie and the
(Roland)/(Really Bad Man)
one who had called them were eaten alive down there by the edge

of the water. That would finish all of them. Or she could

(love)/(hate)
let go.

Odetta let go of Detta’s throat, ignored the fierce hands throttling her, crushing her windpipe. Instead of using her own hands to choke, she used them to embrace the other.

“No, you bitch!”
Detta screamed, but that scream was infinitely complex, both hateful and grateful.
“No, you leave me lone, you jes leave me—”

Odetta had no voice with which to reply. As Roland kicked the first attacking lobstrosity away and as the second moved in to lunch on a chunk of Eddie’s arm, she could only whisper in the witch-woman’s ear:
“I love you.”

For a moment the hands tightened into a killing noose . . . and then loosened.

Were gone.

She was being turned inside out again . . . and then, suddenly,
blessedly, she was
whole.
For the first time since a man named Jack Mort had dropped a brick on the head of a child who was only there to be hit because a white taxi driver had taken one look and driven away (and had not her father, in his pride, refused to try again for fear of a second refusal), she was
whole.
She was Odetta Holmes, but the other—?

Hurry up, bitch!
Detta yelled . . . but it was still her own voice; she and Detta had merged. She had been one; she had been two; now the gunslinger had drawn a third from her.
Hurry up or they gonna be dinner!

She looked at the shells. There was no time to use them; by the time she had his guns reloaded it would be over. She could only hope.

But is there anything else?
she asked herself, and drew.

And suddenly her brown hands were full of thunder.

Eddie saw one of the lobstrosities loom over his face, its rugose eyes dead yet hideously sparkling with hideous life. Its claws descended toward his face.

Dod-a—,
it began, and then it was smashed backward in chunks and splatters.

Roland saw one skitter toward his flailing left hand and thought
There goes the other hand
. . . and then the lobstrosity was a splatter of shell and green guts flying into the dark air.

He twisted around and saw a woman whose beauty was heart-stopping, whose fury was heart-freezing.
“COME ON, MAHFAHS!”
she screamed.
“YOU JUST COME ON! YOU JUST COME FOR EM! I’M GONNA BLOW YO EYES RIGHT BACK THROUGH YO FUCKIN ASSHOLES!”

She blasted a third one that was crawling rapidly between Eddie’s spraddled legs, meaning to eat on him and neuter him at the same time. It flew like a tiddly-wink.

Roland had suspected they had some rudimentary intelligence; now he saw the proof.

The others were retreating.

The hammer of one revolver fell on a dud, and then she blew one of the retreating monsters into gobbets.

The others ran back toward the water even faster. It seemed they had lost their appetite.

Meanwhile, Eddie was strangling.

Roland fumbled at the rope digging a deep furrow into his neck. He could see Eddie’s face melting slowly from purple to black. Eddie’s strugglings were weakening.

Then his hands were pushed away by stronger ones.

“I’ll take care of it.” There was a knife in her hand . . .
his
knife.

Take care of
what? he thought as his consciousness faded.
What is it you’ll take care of, now that we’re both at your mercy?

“Who are you?” he husked, as darkness deeper than night began to take him down.

“I am three women,” he heard her say, and it was as if she were speaking to him from the top of a deep well into which he was falling. “I who was; I who had no right to be but was; I am the woman who you have saved.

“I thank you, gunslinger.”

She kissed him, he knew that, but for a long time after, Roland knew only darkness.

For the first time in what seemed like a thousand years, the gunslinger was not thinking about the Dark Tower. He thought only about the deer which had come down to the pool in the woodland clearing.

He sighted over the fallen log with his left hand.

Meat,
he thought, and fired as saliva squirted warmly into his mouth.

Missed,
he thought in the millisecond following the shot.
It’s gone. All my skill . . . gone.

The deer fell dead at the edge of the pool.

Soon the Tower would fill him again, but now he only blessed what gods there were that his aim was still true, and thought of meat, and meat, and meat. He re-holstered the gun—the only one he wore now—and climbed over the log behind which he had patiently lain as late afternoon drew down to dusk, waiting for something big enough to eat to come to the pool.

I am getting well,
he thought with some amazement as he drew his knife.
I am really getting well.

He didn’t see the woman standing behind him, watching with assessing brown eyes.

They had eaten nothing but lobster-meat and had drunk nothing but brackish stream water for six days following the confrontation at the end of the beach. Roland remembered very little of that time; he had been raving, delirious. He sometimes called Eddie Alain, sometimes Cuthbert, and always he called the woman Susan.

His fever had abated little by little, and they began the laborious trek into the hills. Eddie pushed the woman in the chair some of the time, and sometimes Roland rode in it while Eddie carried her piggyback, her arms locked loosely around his neck. Most of the time the way made it impossible for either to ride, and that made the going slow. Roland knew how exhausted Eddie was. The woman knew, too, but Eddie never complained.

They had food; during the days when Roland lay between life and death, smoking with fever, reeling and railing of times long past and people long dead, Eddie and the woman killed again and again and again. Bye and bye the lobstrosities began staying away from their part of the beach, but by then they had plenty of meat, and when they at last got into an area where weeds and slutgrass grew, all three of them ate compulsively of it. They were starved for greens, any greens. And, little by little, the sores on their skins began to fade. Some of the grass was bitter, some sweet, but they ate no matter what the taste . . . except once.

The gunslinger had wakened from a tired doze and seen the woman yanking at a handful of grass he recognized all too well.

“No! Not that!” he croaked. “Never that! Mark it, and remember it! Never that!”

She looked at him for a long moment and put it aside without asking for an explanation.

The gunslinger lay back, cold with the closeness of it. Some of the other grasses might kill them, but what the woman had pulled would damn her. It had been devil-weed.

The Keflex had brought on explosions in his bowels, and he knew
Eddie had been worried about that, but eating the grasses had controlled it.

Eventually they had reached real woods, and the sound of the Western Sea diminished to a dull drone they heard only when the wind was right.

And now . . .
meat.

The gunslinger reached the deer and tried to gut it with the knife held between the third and fourth fingers of his right hand. No good. His fingers weren’t strong enough. He switched the knife to his stupid hand, and managed a clumsy cut from the deer’s groin to its chest. The knife let out the steaming blood before it could congeal in the meat and spoil it . . . but it was still a bad cut. A puking child could have done better.

You are going to learn to be smart,
he told his left hand, and prepared to cut again, deeper.

Two brown hands closed over his one and took the knife.

Roland looked around.

“I’ll do it,” Susannah said.

“Have you ever?”

“No, but you’ll tell me how.”

“All right.”

“Meat,” she said, and smiled at him.

“Yes,” he said, and smiled back. “Meat.”

“What’s happening?” Eddie called. “I heard a shot.”

“Thanksgiving in the making!” she called back. “Come help!”

Later they ate like two kings and a queen, and as the gunslinger drowsed toward sleep, looking up at the stars, feeling the clean coolness in this upland air, he thought that this was the closest he had come to contentment in too many years to count.

He slept. And dreamed.

It was the Tower. The Dark Tower.

It stood on the horizon of a vast plain the color of blood in the violent setting of a dying sun. He couldn’t see the stairs which spiraled up and up and up within its brick shell, but he could see the windows which spiraled up along that staircase’s way, and saw the ghosts of all the people he had ever known pass through them. Up and up they marched, and an arid wind brought him the sound of voices calling his name.

Roland . . . come . . . Roland . . . come . . . come . . . come . . .

“I come,” he whispered, and awoke sitting bolt upright, sweating and shivering as if the fever still held his flesh.

“Roland?”

Eddie.

“Yes.”

“Bad dream?”

“Bad. Good.
Dark.
”

“The Tower?”

“Yes.”

They looked toward Susannah, but she slept on, undisturbed. Once there had been a woman named Odetta Susannah Holmes; later, there had been another named Detta Susannah Walker. Now there was a third: Susannah Dean.

Roland loved her because she would fight and never give in; he feared for her because he knew he would sacrifice her—Eddie as well—without a question or a look back.

For the Tower.

The God-Damned Tower.

“Time for a pill,” Eddie said.

“I don’t want them anymore.”

“Take it and shut up.”

Roland swallowed it with cold stream-water from one of the skins, then burped. He didn’t mind. It was a
meaty
burp.

Eddie asked, “Do you know where we’re going?”

“To the Tower.”

“Well, yeah,” Eddie said, “but that’s like me being some ignoramus from Texas without a road-map saying he’s going to Achin’ Asshole, Alaska. Where is it? Which direction?”

“Bring me my purse.”

Eddie did. Susannah stirred and Eddie paused, his face red planes and black shadows in the dying embers of the campfire. When she rested easy again, he came back to Roland.

Roland rummaged in the purse, heavy now with shells from that other world. It was short enough work to find what he wanted in what remained of his life.

The jawbone.

The jawbone of the man in black.

“We’ll stay here awhile,” he said, “and I’ll get well.”

“You’ll know when you are?”

Roland smiled a little. The shakes were abating, the sweat drying in the cool night breeze. But still, in his mind, he saw those figures, those knights and friends and lovers and enemies of old, circling up and up, seen briefly in those windows and then gone; he saw the shadow of the Tower in which they were pent struck black and long across a plain of blood and death and merciless trial.

“
I
won’t,” he said, and nodded at Susannah. “But
she
will.”

“And then?”

Roland held up the jawbone of Walter. “This once spoke.”

He looked at Eddie.

“It will speak again.”

“It’s dangerous.” Eddie’s voice was flat.

“Yes.”

“Not just to you.”

“No.”

“I love her, man.”

“Yes.”

“If you hurt her—”

“I’ll do what I need to,” the gunslinger said.

“And we don’t matter? Is that it?”

“I love you both.” The gunslinger looked at Eddie, and Eddie saw that Roland’s cheeks glistened red in what remained of the campfire’s embered dying glow. He was weeping.

“That doesn’t answer the question. You’ll go on, won’t you?”

“Yes.”

“To the very end.”

“Yes. To the very end.”

“No matter what.” Eddie looked at him with love and hate and all the aching dearness of one man’s dying hopeless helpless reach for another man’s mind and will and need.

The wind made the trees moan.

“You sound like Henry, man.” Eddie had begun to cry himself. He didn’t want to. He hated to cry. “He had a tower, too, only it wasn’t dark. Remember me telling you about Henry’s tower? We were brothers, and I guess we were gunslingers. We had this White Tower, and he asked me to go after it with him the only way he could ask, so I saddled up, because he was my brother, you dig it? We got there, too. Found the White Tower. But it was poison. It killed him. It would have killed me. You saw me. You saved more than my life. You saved my fuckin
soul.
”

Eddie held Roland and kissed his cheek. Tasted his tears.

“So what? Saddle up again? Go on and meet the man again?”

The gunslinger said not a word.

“I mean, we haven’t seen many people, but I know they’re up ahead, and whenever there’s a Tower involved, there’s a man. You wait for the man because you gotta meet the man, and in the end money talks and bullshit walks, or maybe here it’s bullets instead of bucks that do the talking. So is that it? Saddle up? Go to meet the man? Because if it’s just a replay of the same old shitstorm, you two should have left me for the lobsters.” Eddie looked at him with dark-ringed eyes. “I been dirty, man. If I found out anything, it’s that I don’t want to die dirty.”

“It’s not the same.”

“No? You gonna tell me you’re not hooked?”

Roland said nothing.

“Who’s gonna come through some magic door and save
you,
man? Do you know?
I
do. No one. You drew all you could draw. Only thing you can draw from now on is a fucking gun, because that’s all you got left. Just like Balazar.”

Roland said nothing.

“You want to know the only thing my brother ever had to teach me?” His voice was hitching and thick with tears.

“Yes,” the gunslinger said. He leaned forward, his eyes intent upon Eddie’s eyes.

“He taught me if you kill what you love, you’re damned.”

“I am damned already,” Roland said calmly. “But perhaps even the damned may be saved.”

“Are you going to get all of us killed?”

Roland said nothing.

Eddie seized the rags of Roland’s shirt.
“Are you going to get
her
killed?”

“We all die in time,” the gunslinger said. “It’s not just the world that moves on.” He looked squarely at Eddie, his faded blue eyes almost the color of slate in this light.
“But we will be magnificent.”
He paused. “There’s more than a world to win, Eddie. I would not risk you and her—I would not have allowed the boy to die—if that was all there was.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Everything there is,” the gunslinger said calmly. “We are going to go, Eddie. We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt.
And in the end we will stand.
”

Now it was Eddie who said nothing. He could think of nothing to say.

Roland gently grasped Eddie’s arm. “Even the damned love,” he said.

Eddie eventually slept beside Susannah, the third Roland had drawn to make a new three, but Roland sat awake and listened to voices in the night while the wind dried the tears on his cheeks.

Damnation?

Salvation?

The Tower.

He would come to the Dark Tower and there he would sing their names; there he would sing their names; there he would sing all their names.

The sun stained the east a dusky rose, and at last Roland, no longer the last gunslinger but one of the last three, slept and dreamed his angry dreams through which there ran only that one soothing blue thread:

There I will sing all their names!