The Drawing of the Three dt-2 Page 9

  I have to go, Roland's voice had cut cleanly through whatever question they were currently throwing at him. I'll only be a few moments. Don't be afraid.

  Why? Eddie asked. Why do you have to go?

  "What's wrong?" one of the Customs guys had asked him. "All of a sudden you look scared."

  All of a sudden he had felt scared, but of nothing this yo-yo would understand.

  He looked over his shoulder, and the Customs men had also turned. They saw nothing but a blank white wall covered with white panels drilled with holes to damp sound; Eddie saw the door, its usual three feet away (now it was embedded in the room's wall, an escape hatch none of his interrogators could see). He saw more. He saw things coming out of the waves, things that looked like refugees from a horror movie where the effects are just a little more special than you want them to be, special enough so everything looks real. They looked like a hideous cross-breeding of prawn, lobster, and spider. They were making some weird sound.

  "You getting the jim-jams?" one of the Customs guys had asked. "Seeing a few bugs crawling down the wall, Eddie?"

  That was so close to the truth that Eddie had almost laughed. He understood why the man named Roland had to go back, though; Roland's mind was safe enough―at least for the time being―but the creatures were moving toward his body, and Eddie had a suspicion that if Roland did not soon vacate it from the area it currently occupied, there might not be any body left to go back to.

  Suddenly in his head he heard David Lee Roth bawling: Oh lyyyyy …ain't got no body … and this time he did laugh. He couldn't help it.

  "What's so funny?" the Customs agent who had wanted to know if he was seeing bugs asked him.

  "This whole situation," Eddie had responded. "Only in the sense of peculiar, not hilarious. I mean, if it was a movie it would be more like Fellini than Woody Allen, if you get what I mean."

  You'll be all right? Roland asked.

  Yeah, fine. TCB, man.

  I don't understand.

  Go take care of business.

  Oh. All right. I'll not be long.

  And suddenly that other had been gone. Simply gone. Like a wisp of smoke so thin that the slightest vagary of wind could blow it away. Eddie looked around again, saw nothing but drilled white panels, no door, no ocean, no weird monstrosities, and he felt his gut begin to tighten. There was no question of believing it had all been a hallucination after all; the dope was gone, and that was all the proof Eddie needed. But Roland had … helped, somehow. Made it easier.

  "You want me to hang a picture there?" one of the Customs guys asked.

  "No," Eddie said, and blew out a sigh. "I want you to let me out of here."

  "Soon as you tell us what you did with the skag," another said, "or was it coke?" And so it started again: round and round she goes and where she stops nobody knows.

  Ten minutes later―ten very long minutes―Roland was suddenly back in his mind. One second gone, next second there. Eddie sensed he was deeply exhausted.

  Taken care of? he asked.

  Yes. I'm sorry it took so long. A pause. Ihad to crawl.

  Eddie looked around again. The doorway had returned, but now it offered a slightly different view of that world, and he realized that, as it moved with him here, it moved with Roland there. The thought made him shiver a little. It was like being tied to this other by some weird umbilicus. The gunslinger's body lay collapsed in front of it as before, but now he was looking down a long stretch of beach to the braided high-tide line where the monsters wandered about, growling and buzzing. Each time a wave broke all of them raised their claws. They looked like the audiences in those old documentary films where Hitler's speaking and everyone is throwing that old seig heil! salute like their lives depended on it―which they probably did, when you thought about it. Eddie could see the tortured markings of the gunslinger's progress in the sand.

  As Eddie watched, one of the horrors reached up, lightning quick, and snared a sea-bird which happened to swoop too close to the beach. The thing fell to the sand in two bloody, spraying chunks. The parts were covered by the shelled horrors even before they had stopped twitching. A single white feather drifted up. A claw snatched it down.

  Holy Christ, Eddie thought numbly. Look at thosesnappers.

  "Why do you keep looking back there?" the guy in charge had asked.

  "From time to time I need an antidote," Eddie said.

  "From what?"

  "Your face."

  3

  The cab driver dropped Eddie at the building in Co-Op City , thanked him for the dollar tip, and drove off. Eddie just stood for a moment, zipper bag in one hand, his jacket hooked over a finger of the other and slung back over his shoulder. Here he shared a two-bedroom apartment with his brother. He stood for a moment looking up at it, a monolith with all the style and taste of a brick Saltines box. The many windows made it look like a prison cellblock to Eddie, and he found the view as depressing as Roland―the other― did amazing.

  Never, even as a child, did I see a building so high, Roland said. And there are so many of them!

  Yeah, Eddie agreed. We live like a bunch of ants in a hill. It may look good to you, but I'll tell you, Roland, it gets old. It gets old in a hurry.

  The blue car cruised by; the pizza truck turned in and approached. Eddie stiffened and felt Roland stiffen inside him. Maybe they intended to blow him away after all.

  The door? Roland asked. Shall we go through? Do you wish it? Eddie sensed Roland was ready―for anything―but the voice was calm.

  Not yet, Eddie said. Could be they only want to talk. But be ready.

  He sensed that was an unnecessary thing to say; he sensed that Roland was readier to move and act in his deepest sleep than Eddie would ever be in his most wide-awake moment.

  The pizza truck with the smiling kid on the side closed in. The passenger window rolled down and Eddie waited outside the entrance to his building with his shadow trailing out long in front of him from the toes of his sneakers, waiting to see which it would be―a face or a gun.

  4

  The second time Roland left him had been no more than five minutes after the Customs people had finally given up and let Eddie go.

  The gunslinger had eaten, but not enough; he needed to drink; most of all he needed medicine. Eddie couldn't yet help him with the medicine Roland really needed (although he suspected the gunslinger was right and Balazar could … if Balazar wanted to), but simple aspirin might at least knock down the fever that Eddie had felt when the gunslinger stepped close to sever the top part of the tape girdle. He paused in front of the newsstand in the main terminal.

  Do you have aspirin where you come from?

  I have never heard of it. Is it magic or medicine?

  Both, I guess.

  Eddie went into the newsstand and bought a tin of Extra-Strength Anacin. He went over to the snack bar and bought a couple of foot-long dogs and an extra-large Pepsi. He was putting mustard and catsup on the franks (Henry called the foot-longs Godzilla-dogs) when he suddenly remembered this stuff wasn't for him. For all he knew, Roland might not like mustard and catsup. For all he knew, Roland might be a veggie. For all he knew, this crap might kill Roland.

  Well, too late now, Eddie thought. When Roland spoke―when Roland acted― Eddie knew all this was really happening. When he was quiet, that giddy feeling that it must be a dream—an extraordinarily vivid dream he was having as he slept on Detta 901 inbound to Kennedy―insisted on creeping back.

  Roland had told him he could carry the food into his own world. He had already done something similar once, he said, when Eddie was asleep. Eddie found it all but impossible to believe, but Roland assured him it was true.

  Well, we still have to be damned careful, Eddie said. They've got two Customs guys watching me. Us. Whatever the hell I am now.

  I know we have to be careful, Roland returned. There aren't two; there are five. Eddie suddenly felt one of the weirdest sensations of his entire life. He did not move his
eyes but felt them moved. Roland moved them.

  A guy in a muscle shirt talking into a telephone.

  A woman sitting on a bench, rooting through her purse.

  A young black guy who would have been spectacularly handsome except for the harelip which surgery had only partially repaired, looking at the tee-shirts in the newsstand Eddie had come from not long since.

  There was nothing wrong about any of them on top, but Eddie recognized them for what they were nonetheless and it was like seeing those hidden images in a child's puzzle, which, once seen, could never be unseen. He felt dull heat in his cheeks, because it had taken the other to point out what he should have seen at once. He had spotted only two. These three were a little better, but not that much; the eyes of the phone-man weren't blank, imagining the person he was talking to but aware, actually looking, and the place where Eddie was … that was the place to which the phone-man's eyes just happened to keep returning. The purse-woman didn't find what she wanted or give up but simply went on rooting endlessly. And the shopper had had a chance to look at every shirt on the spindle-rack at least a dozen times.

  All of a sudden Eddie felt five again, afraid to cross the street without Henry to hold his hand.

  Never mind, Roland said. And don't worry about the food, either. I've eaten bugs while they were still lively enough for some of them to go running down my throat.

  Yeah, Eddie replied, but this isNew York.

  He took the dogs and the soda to the far end of the counter and stood with his back to the terminal's main concourse. Then he glanced up in the left-hand corner. A convex mirror bulged there like a hypertensive eye. He could see all of his followers in it, but none was close enough to see the food and cup of soda, and that was good, because Eddie didn't have the slightest idea what was going to happen to it.

  Put the astin on the meat-things. Then hold everything in your hands.

  Aspirin.

  Good. Call It flutergork if you want, pr …Eddie. Just do it.

  He took the Anacin out of the stapled bag he had stuffed in his pocket, almost put it down on one of the hot-dogs, and suddenly realized that Roland would have problems just getting what Eddie thought of as the poison-proofing―off the tin, let alone opening it.

  He did it himself, shook three of the pills onto one of the napkins, debated, then added three more.

  Three now, three later, he said. Ifthere is a later.

  All right. Thank you.

  Now what?

  Hold all of it.

  Eddie had glanced into the convex mirror again. Two of the agents were strolling casually toward the snack bar, maybe not liking the way Eddie's back was turned, maybe smelling a little prestidigitation in progress and wanting a closer look. If something was going to happen, it better happen quick.

  He put his hands around everything, feeling the heat of the dogs in their soft white rolls, the chill of the Pepsi. In that moment he looked like a guy getting ready to carry a snack back to his kids … and then the stuff started to melt.

  He stared down, eyes widening, widening, until it felt to him that they must soon fall out and dangle by their stalks.

  He could see the hotdogs through the rolls. He could see the Pepsi through the cup, the ice-choked liquid curving to conform to a shape which could no longer be seen.

  Then he could see the red Formica counter through the foot-longs and the white wall through the Pepsi. His hands slid toward each other, the resistance between them growing less and less … and then they closed against each other, palm to palm. The food … the napkins … the Pepsi Cola … the six Anacin … all the things which had been between his hands were gone.

  Jesus jumped up and played the fiddle, Eddie thought numbly. He flicked his eyes up toward the convex mirror.

  The doorway was gone … just as Roland was gone from his mind.

  Eat hearty, my friend, Eddie thought … but was this weird alien presence that called itself Roland his friend? That was far from proved, wasn't it? He had saved Eddie's bacon, true enough, but that didn't mean he was a Boy Scout.

  All the same, he liked Roland. Feared him … but liked him as well.

  Suspected that in time he could love him, as he loved Henry.

  Eat well, stranger, he thought. Eat well, stay alive …and come back.

  Close by were a few mustard-stained napkins left by a previous customer. Eddie balled them up, tossed them in the trash-barrel by the door on his way out, and chewed air as if finishing a last bite of something. He was even able to manufacture a burp as he approached the black guy on his way toward the signs pointing the way to LUGGAGE and GROUND TRANSPORTATION.

  "Couldn't find a shirt you liked?" Eddie asked.

  "I beg your pardon?" the black guy turned from the American Airlines departures monitor he was pretending to study.

  "I thought maybe you were looking for one that said PLEASE FEED ME, I AM A U.S. GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE," Eddie said, and walked on.

  As he headed down the stairs he saw the purse-rooter hurriedly snap her purse shut and get to her feet.

  Oh boy, this is gonna be like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.

  It had been one fuck of an interesting day, and Eddie didn't think it was over yet.

  5

  When Roland saw the lobster-things coming out of the waves again (their coming had nothing to do with tide, then; it was the dark that brought them), he left Eddie Dean to move himself before the creatures could find and eat him.

  The pain he had expected and was prepared for. He had lived with pain so long it was almost an old friend. He was appalled, however, by the rapidity with which his fever had increased and his strength decreased. If he had not been dying before, he most assuredly was now. Was there something powerful enough in the prisoner's world to keep that from happening? Perhaps. But if he didn't get some of it within the next six or eight hours, he thought it wouldn't matter. If things went much further, no medicine or magic in that world or any other that would make him well again.

  Walking was impossible. He would have to crawl.

  He was getting ready to start when his eye fixed upon the twisted band of sticky stuff and the bags of devil-powder. If he left the stuff here, the lobstrosities would almost surely tear the bags open. The sea-breeze would scatter the powder to the four winds. Which is where it belongs, the gunslinger thought grimly, but he couldn't allow it. When the time came, Eddie Dean would be in a long tub of trouble if he couldn't produce that powder. It was rarely possible to bluff men of the sort he guessed this Balazar to be. He would want to see what he had paid for, and until he saw it Eddie would have enough guns pointed at him to equip a small army.

  The gunslinger pulled the twisted rope of glue-string over to him and slung it over his neck. Then he began to work his way up the beach.

  He had crawled twenty yards―almost far enough to consider himself safe, he judged―when the horrible (yet cosmically funny) funny realization that he was leaving the doorway behind came to him. What in God's name was he going through this for?

  He turned his head and saw the doorway, not down on the beach, but three feet behind him. For a moment Roland could only stare, and realize what he would have known already, if not for the fever and the sound of the Inquisitors, drumming their ceaseless questions at Eddie, Where did you, how did you, why did you, when did you (questions that seemed to merge eerily with the questions of the scrabbling horrors that came crawling and wriggling out of the waves: Dad-a-chock? Dad-a-chum? Did-a-chick?), as mere delirium. Not so.

  Now I take it with me everywhere I go, he thought, just as he does. It comes with us everywhere now, following like a curse you can never get rid of.

  All of this felt so true as to be unquestionable … and so did one other thing.

  If the door between them should close, it would be closed forever.

  When that happens, Roland thought grimly, he must be on this side. With me.

  What a paragon of virtue you are, gunslinger! the man in black laughed.
He seemed to have taken up permanent residence inside Roland's head. You have killed the boy; that was the sacrifice that enabled you to catch me and, I suppose, to create the door between worlds. Now you intend to draw your three, one by one, and condemn all of them to something you would not have for yourself: a lifetime in an alien world, where they may die as easily as animals in a zoo set free in a wild place.

  The Tower, Roland thought wildly. Once I've gotten to the Tower and done whatever it is I'm supposed to do there, accomplished whatever fundamental act of restoration or redemption for which I was meant, then perhaps they―

  But the shrieking laughter of the man in black, the man who was dead but lived on as the gunslinger's stained conscience, would not let him go on with the thought.

  Neither, however, could the thought of the treachery he contemplated turn him aside from his course.

  He managed another ten yards, looked back, and saw that even the largest of the crawling monsters would venture no further than twenty feet above the high-tide line. He had already managed three times that distance.

  It's well, then.

  Nothing is well, the man in black replied merrily, and you know it.

  Shut up, the gunslinger thought, and for a wonder, the voice actually did.

  Roland pushed the bags of devil-dust into the cleft between two rocks and covered them with handfuls of sparse saw-grass. With that done he rested briefly, head thumping like a hot bag of waters, skin alternately hot and cold, then rolled back through the doorway into that other world, that other body, leaving the increasing deadly infection behind for a little while.

  6

  The second time he returned to himself, he entered a body so deeply asleep that he thought for a moment it had entered a comatose state … a state of such lowered bodily function that in moments he would feel his own consciousness start down a long slide into darkness.