"You forgot to tell me to grow up. That's what Henry always used to say. 'Oh grow up, kid.' "
The gunslinger had smiled, a weary, oddly beautiful smile. "I think you have grown up. Will you go or stay?"
"I'll go," Eddie said. "What are you going to eat? She scarfed the left-overs."
"The fucking shit will find a way. The fucking shit has been finding one for years."
Eddie looked away. "I . . . I guess I'm sorry I called you that, Roland. It's been--" He laughed suddenly, shrilly. "It's been a very trying day."
Roland smiled again. "Yes," he said. "It has."
5
They made the best time of the entire trek that day, but there was still no door in sight when the sun began to spill its gold track across the ocean. Although she told him she was perfectly capable of going on for another half an hour, he called a halt and helped her out of the chair. He carried her to an even patch of ground that looked fairly smooth, got the cushions from the back of the chair and the seat, and eased them under her.
"Lord, it feels so good to stretch out," she sighed. "But . . ." Her brow clouded. "I keep thinking of that man back there, Roland, all by himself, and I can't really enjoy it. Eddie, who is he? What is he?" And, almost as an afterthought: "And why does he shout so much?"
"Just his nature, I guess," Eddie said, and abruptly went off to gather rocks. Roland hardly ever shouted. He guessed some of it was this morning--FUCK the shells!--but that the rest of it was false memory: the time she thought she had been Odetta.
He killed triple, as the gunslinger had instructed, and was so intent on the last that he skipped back from a fourth which had been closing in on his right with only an instant to spare. He saw the way its claws clicked on the empty place which had been occupied by his foot and leg a moment before, and thought of the gunslinger's missing fingers.
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."
6
Later, with strange galaxies turning in slow gavotte overhead, neither thought the act of love had ever been so sweet, so full.
7
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.
8
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.
9
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.