So Eddie had fallen asleep, even though Roland had told him he must be on his guard, and when Roland was sure they both slept (he had waited longer for the Lady, who could, he thought, be sly), he had reloaded his guns with spent casings, unstrapped them (that caused a pang), and put them by Eddie.
Then he waited.
One hour; two; three.
Halfway through the fourth hour, as his tired and feverish body tried to drowse, he sensed rather than saw the Lady come awake and came fully awake himself.
He watched her roll over. He watched her turn her hands into claws and pull herself along the sand to where his gunbelts lay. He watched her take one of them out, come closer to Eddie, and then pause, her head cocking, her nostrils swelling and contracting, doing more than smelling the air; tasting it.
Yes. This was the woman he had brought across.
When she glanced toward the gunslinger he did more than feign sleep, because she would have sensed sham; he went to sleep. When he sensed her gaze shift away he awoke and opened that single eye again. He saw her begin to raise the gun--she did this with less effort than Eddie had shown the first time Roland saw him do the same thing--and point it toward Eddie's head. Then she paused, her face filled with an inexpressible cunning.
In that moment she reminded him of Marten.
She fiddled with the cylinder, getting it wrong at first, then swinging it open. She looked at the heads of the shells. Roland tensed, waiting first to see if she would know the firing pins had already been struck, waiting next to see if she would turn the gun, look into the other end of the cylinder, and see there was only emptiness there instead of lead (he had thought of loading the guns with cartridges which had already misfired, but only briefly; Cort had taught them that every gun is ultimately ruled by Old Man Splitfoot, and a cartridge which misfires once may not do so a second time). If she did that, he would spring at once.
But she swung the cylinder back in, began to cock the hammer . . . and then paused again. Paused for the wind to mask the single low click.
He thought: Here is another. God, she's evil, this one, and she's legless, but she's a gunslinger as surely as Eddie is one.
He waited with her.
The wind gusted.
She pulled the hammer to full cock and placed it half an inch from Eddie's temple. With a grin that was a ghoul's grimace, she pulled the trigger.
Click.
He waited.
She pulled it again. And again. And again.
Click-Click-Click.
"MahFAH!" she screamed, and reversed the gun with liquid grace.
Roland coiled but did not leap. A child doesn't understand a hammer until he's mashed his finger at a nail.
If she kills him, she kills you.
Doesn't matter, the voice of Cort answered inexorably.
Eddie stirred. And his reflexes were not bad; he moved fast enough to avoid being driven unconscious or killed. Instead of coming down on the vulnerable temple, the heavy gun-butt cracked the side of his jaw.
"What . . . Jesus!"
"MAHFAH! HONKY MAHFAH!" Detta screamed, and Roland saw her raise the gun a second time. And even though she was legless and Eddie was rolling away, it was as much as he dared. If Eddie hadn't learned the lesson now, he never would. The next time the gunslinger told Eddie to be on his guard, Eddie would be, and besides--the bitch was quick. It would not be wise to depend further than this on either Eddie's quickness or the Lady's infirmity.
He uncoiled, flying over Eddie and knocking her backward, ending up on top of her.
"You want it, mahfah?" she screamed at him, simultaneously rolling her crotch against his groin and raising the arm which still held the gun above his head. "You want it? I goan give you what you want, sho!"
"Eddie!" he shouted again, not just yelling now but commanding. For a moment Eddie just went on squatting there, eyes wide, blood dripping from his jaw (it had already begun to swell), staring, eyes wide. Move, can't you move? he thought, or is it that you don't want to? His strength was fading now, and the next time she brought that heavy gun-butt down she was going to break his arm with it . . . that was if he got his arm up in time. If he didn't, she was going to break his head with it.
Then Eddie moved. He caught the gun on the downswing and she shrieked, turning toward him, biting at him like a vampire, cursing him in a gutter patois so darkly southern that even Eddie couldn't understand it; to Roland it sounded as if the woman had suddenly begun to speak in a foreign language. But Eddie was able to yank the gun out of her hand and with the impending bludgeon gone, Roland was able to pin her.
She did not quit even then but continued to buck and heave and curse, sweat standing out all over her dark face.
Eddie stared, mouth opening and closing like the mouth of a fish. He touched tentatively at his jaw, winced, pulled his fingers back, examined them and the blood on them.
She was screaming that she would kill them both; they could try and rape her but she would kill them with her cunt, they would see, that was one bad son of a bitching cave with teeth around the entrance and if they wanted to try and explore it they would find out.
"What in the hell--" Eddie said stupidly.
"One of my gunbelts," the gunslinger panted harshly at him. "Get it. I'm going to roll her over on top of me and you're going to grab her arms and tie her hands behind her."
"You ain't NEVAH!" Detta shrieked, and sunfished her legless body with such sudden force that she almost bucked Roland off. He felt her trying to bring the remainder of her right thigh up again and again, wanting to drive it into his balls.
"I. . .I. . .she. . ."
"Move, God curse your father's face!" Roland roared, and at last Eddie moved.
4
They almost lost control of her twice during the tying and binding. But Eddie was at last able to slipknot one of Roland's gunbelts around her wrists when Roland--using all his force--finally brought them together behind her (all the time drawing back from her lunging bites like a mongoose from a snake; the bites he avoided but before Eddie had finished, the gunslinger was drenched with spittle) and then Eddie dragged her off, holding the short leash of the makeshift slipknot to do it. He did not want to hurt this thrashing screaming cursing thing. It was uglier than the lobstrosities by far because of the greater intelligence which informed it, but he knew it could also be beautiful. He did not want to harm the other person the vessel held somewhere inside it (like a live dove deep inside one of the secret compartments in a magician's magic box).
Odetta Holmes was somewhere inside that screaming screeching thing.
5
Although his last mount--a mule--had died too long ago to remember, the gunslinger still had a piece of its tether-rope (which, in turn, had once been a fine gunslinger's lariat). They used this to bind her in her wheelchair, as she had imagined (or falsely remembered, and in the end they both came to the same thing, didn't they?) they had done already. Then they drew away from her.
If not for the crawling lobster-things, Eddie would have gone down to the water and washed his hands.
"I feel like I'm going to vomit," he said in a voice that jig-jagged up and down the scale like the voice of an adolescent boy.
"Why don't you go on and eat each other's COCKS?" the struggling thing in the chair screeched. "Why don't you jus go on and do dat if you fraid of a black woman's cunny? You just go on! Sho! Suck on yo each one's candles! Do it while you got a chance, cause Detta Walker goan get outen dis chair and cut dem skinny ole white candles off and feed em to those walkin buzzsaws down there!"
"She's the woman I was in. Do you believe me now?"
"I believed you before," Eddie said. "I told you that."
"You believed you believed. You believed on the top of your mind. Do you believe it all the way down now? All the way to the bottom?"
Eddie looked at the shrieking, convulsing thing in the chair and then looked away, white except for the slash on his jaw, which was still dripping a little.
That side of his face was beginning to look a little like a balloon.
"Yes," he said. "God, yes."
"This woman is a monster."
Eddie began to cry.
The gunslinger wanted to comfort him, could not commit such a sacrilege (he remembered Jake too well), and walked off into the dark with his new fever burning and aching inside him.
6
Much earlier on that night, while Odetta still slept, Eddie said he thought he might understand what was wrong with her. Might. The gunslinger asked what he meant.
"She could be a schizophrenic."
Roland only shook his head. Eddie explained what he understood of schizophrenia, gleanings from such films as The Three Faces of Eve and various TV programs (mostly the soap operas he and Henry had often watched while stoned). Roland had nodded. Yes. The disease Eddie described sounded about right. A woman with two faces, one light and one dark. A face like the one the man in black had shown him on the fifth Tarot card.
"And they don't know--these schizophrenes--that they have another?"
"No," Eddie said. "But . . ." He trailed off, moodily watching the lobstrosities crawl and question, question and crawl.
"But what?"
"I'm no shrink," Eddie said, "so I don't really know--"
"Shrink? What is a shrink?"
Eddie tapped his temple. "A head-doctor. A doctor for your mind. They're really called psychiatrists."
Roland nodded. He liked shrink better. Because this Lady's mind was too large. Twice as large as it needed to be.
"But I think schizos almost always know something is wrong with them," Eddie said. "Because there are blanks. Maybe I'm wrong, but I always got the idea that they were usually two people who thought they had partial amnesia, because of the blank spaces in their memories when the other personality was in control. She . . . she says she remembers everything. She really thinks she remembers everything."
"I thought you said she didn't believe any of this was happening."