The Drawing of the Three (27 page)

“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.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, “but forget that for now. I’m trying to say that, no matter what she
believes,
what she
remembers
goes right from her living room where she was sitting in her bathrobe watching the midnight news to here, with no break at all. She doesn’t have any sense that some other person took over between then and when you grabbed her in Macy’s. Hell, that might have been the next day or even
weeks
later. I know it was still winter, because most of the shoppers in that store were wearing coats—”

The gunslinger nodded. Eddie’s perceptions were sharpening.
That was good. He had missed the boots and scarves, the gloves sticking out of coat pockets, but it was still a start.

“—but otherwise it’s impossible to tell how long Odetta was that other woman because she doesn’t know. I think she’s in a situation she’s never been in before, and her way of protecting both sides is this story about getting cracked over the head.”

Roland nodded.

“And the rings. Seeing those really shook her up. She tried not to show it, but it showed, all right.”

Roland asked: “If these two women don’t know they exist in the same body, and if they don’t even suspect that something may be wrong, if each has her own separate chain of memories, partly real but partly made up to fit the times the other is there, what are we to do with her? How are we even to live with her?”

Eddie had shrugged. “Don’t ask me. It’s your problem. You’re the one who says you need her. Hell, you risked your neck to bring her here.” Eddie thought about this for a minute, remembered squatting over Roland’s body with Roland’s knife held just above the gunslinger’s throat, and laughed abruptly and without humor.
LITERALLY risked your neck, man,
he thought.

A silence fell between them. Odetta had by then been breathing quietly. As the gunslinger was about to reiterate his warning for Eddie to be on guard and announce (loud enough for the Lady to hear, if she was only shamming) that he was going to turn in, Eddie said the thing which lighted Roland’s mind in a single sudden glare, the thing which made him understand at least part of what he needed so badly to know.

At the end, when they came through.

She had changed at the end.

And he had
seen
something, some
thing—

“Tell you what,” Eddie said, moodily stirring the remains of the fire with a split claw from this night’s kill, “when you brought her through, I felt like
I
was a schizo.”

“Why?”

Eddie thought, then shrugged. It was too hard to explain, or maybe he was just too tired. “It’s not important.”

“Why?”

Eddie looked at Roland, saw he was asking a serious question for a serious reason—or thought he was—and took a minute to think back. “It’s really hard to describe, man. It was looking in that door. That’s what freaked me out. When you see someone move in that door, it’s like you’re moving with them. You know what I’m talking about.”

Roland nodded.

“Well, I watched it like it was a movie—never mind, it’s not important—until the very end. Then you turned her toward
this
side of the doorway and for the first time
I was looking at myself.
It was like . . .” He groped and could find nothing. “I dunno. It should have been like looking in a mirror, I guess, but it wasn’t, because . . . because it was like looking at another person. It was like being turned inside out. Like being in two places at the same time. Shit,
I
don’t know.”

But the gunslinger was thunderstruck.
That
was what he had sensed as they came through;
that
was what had happened to her, no, not just
her, them:
for a moment Detta and Odetta had looked at each other, not the way one would look at her reflection in a mirror but as
separate people;
the mirror became a windowpane and for a moment Odetta had seen Detta and Detta had seen Odetta and had been equally horror-struck.

They each know,
the gunslinger thought grimly.
They may not have known before, but they do now. They can try to hide it from themselves, but for a moment they saw, they knew, and that knowing must still be there.

“Roland?”

“What?”

“Just wanted to make sure you hadn’t gone to sleep with your eyes open. Because for a minute you looked like you were, you know, long ago and far away.”

“If so, I’m back now,” the gunslinger said. “I’m going to turn in. Remember what I said, Eddie: be on your guard.”

“I’ll watch,” Eddie said, but Roland knew that, sick or not, he would have to be the one to do the watching tonight.

Everything else had followed from that.

Following the ruckus Eddie and Detta Walker eventually went to sleep again (she did not so much fall asleep as drop into an exhausted state of unconsciousness in her chair, lolling to one side against the restraining ropes).

The gunslinger, however, lay wakeful.

I will have to bring the two of them to battle,
he thought, but he didn’t need one of Eddie’s “shrinks” to tell him that such a battle might be to the death.
If the bright one, Odetta, were to win that battle, all might yet be well. If the dark one were to win it, all would surely be lost with her.

Yet he sensed that what really needed doing was not killing but
joining.
He had already recognized much that would be of value to him—
them
—in Detta Walker’s gutter toughness, and he wanted her—but he wanted her under control. There was a long way to go. Detta thought he and Eddie were monsters of some species she called
Honk Mafahs.
That was only dangerous delusion, but there would be real monsters along the way—the lobstrosities were not the first, nor would they be the last. The fight-until-you-drop woman he had entered and who had come out of hiding again tonight might come in very handy in a fight against such monsters, if she could be tempered by Odetta Holmes’s calm humanity—especially now, with him short two fingers, almost out of bullets, and growing more fever.

But that is a step ahead. I think if I can make them acknowledge each other, that would bring them into confrontation. How may it be done?

He lay awake all that long night, thinking, and although he felt the fever in him grow, he found no answer to his question.

Eddie woke up shortly before daybreak, saw the gunslinger sitting near the ashes of last night’s fire with his blanket wrapped around him Indian-fashion, and joined him.

“How do you feel?” Eddie asked in a low voice. The Lady still slept in her crisscrossing of ropes, although she occasionally jerked and muttered and moaned.

“All right.”

Eddie gave him an appraising glance. “You don’t look all right.”

“Thank you, Eddie,” the gunslinger said dryly.

“You’re shivering.”

“It will pass.”

The Lady jerked and moaned again—this time a word that was almost understandable. It might have been
Oxford.

“God, I hate to see her tied up like that,” Eddie murmured. “Like a goddam calf in a barn.”

“She’ll wake soon. Mayhap we can unloose her when she does.”

It was the closest either of them came to saying out loud that when the Lady in the chair opened her eyes, the calm, if slightly puzzled gaze of Odetta Holmes might greet them.

Fifteen minutes later, as the first sunrays struck over the hills, those eyes did open—but what the men saw was not the calm gaze of Odetta Holmes but the mad glare of Detta Walker.

“How many times you done rape me while I was buzzed out?” she asked. “My cunt feel all slick an tallowy, like somebody done been at it with a couple them little bitty white candles you graymeat mahfahs call cocks.”

Roland sighed.

“Let’s get going,” he said, and gained his feet with a grimace.

“I ain’t goan nowhere wit
choo,
mahfah,” Detta spat.

“Oh yes you are,” Eddie said. “Dreadfully sorry, my dear.”

“Where you think I’m goan?”

“Well,” Eddie said, “what was behind Door Number One wasn’t so hot, and what was behind Door Number Two was even worse, so now, instead of quitting like sane people, we’re going to go right on ahead and check out Door Number Three. The way things have been going, I think it’s likely to be something like Godzilla or Ghidra the Three-Headed Monster, but I’m an optimist. I’m still hoping for the stainless steel cookware.”

“I ain’t goan.”

“You’re going, all right,” Eddie said, and walked behind her chair. She began struggling again, but the gunslinger had made these knots, and her struggles only drew them tighter. Soon enough she saw this and ceased. She was full of poison but far from stupid. But she looked back over her shoulder at Eddie with a grin which made him recoil a little. It seemed to him the most evil expression he had ever seen on a human face.

“Well, maybe I be goan on a little way,” she said, “but maybe not s’far’s you think, white boy. And sure-God not s’fast’s you think.”

“What do you mean?”

That leering, over-the-shoulder grin again.

“You find out, white boy.” Her eyes, mad but cogent, shifted briefly to the gunslinger. “You bofe be findin
dat
out.”

Eddie wrapped his hands around the bicycle grips at the ends of the push-handles on the back of her wheelchair and they began north again, now leaving not only footprints but the twin tracks of the Lady’s chair as they moved up the seemingly endless beach.

The day was a nightmare.

It was hard to calculate distance travelled when you were moving
along a landscape which varied so little, but Eddie knew their progress had slowed to a crawl.

And he knew who was responsible.

Oh yeah.

You
bofe
be findin dat out,
Detta had said, and they hadn’t been on the move more than half an hour before the finding out began.

Pushing.

That was the first thing. Pushing the wheelchair up a beach of fine sand would have been as impossible as driving a car through deep unplowed snow. This beach, with its gritty, marly surface, made moving the chair possible but far from easy. It would roll along smoothly enough for awhile, crunching over shells and popping little pebbles to either side of its hard rubber tires . . . and then it would hit a dip where finer sand had drifted, and Eddie would have to shove, grunting, to get it and its solid unhelpful passenger through it. The sand sucked greedily at the wheels. You had to simultaneously push and throw your weight against the handles of the chair in a downward direction, or it and its bound occupant would tumble over face-first onto the beach.

Detta would cackle as he tried to move her without upending her. “You havin a good time back dere, honeychile?” she asked each time the chair ran into one of these dry bogs.

When the gunslinger moved over to help, Eddie motioned him away. “You’ll get your chance,” he said. “We’ll switch off.”
But I think my turns are going to be a hell of a lot longer than his,
a voice in his head spoke up.
The way he looks, he’s going to have his hands full just keeping himself moving before much longer, let alone moving the woman in this chair. No sir, Eddie, I’m afraid this Bud’s for you. It’s God’s revenge, you know it? All those years you spent as a junkie, and guess what? You’re finally the pusher!

He uttered a short out-of-breath laugh.

“What’s so funny, white boy?” Detta asked, and although Eddie thought she meant to sound sarcastic, it came out sounding just a tiny bit angry.

Ain’t supposed to be any laughs in this for me,
he thought.
None at all. Not as far as she’s concerned.

“You wouldn’t understand, babe. Just let it lie.”

“I be lettin
you
lie before this be all over,” she said. “Be lettin you and yo bad-ass buddy there lie in pieces all ovah dis beach. Sho. Meantime you better save yo breaf to do yo pushin with. You already sound like you gettin a little sho’t winded.”

“Well, you talk for both of us, then,” Eddie panted. “You
never
seem to run out of wind.”

“I goan
break
wind, graymeat! Goan break it ovah yo dead face!”

“Promises, promises.” Eddie shoved the chair out of the sand and onto relatively easier going—for awhile, at least. The sun was not yet fully up, but he had already worked up a sweat.

This is going to be an amusing and informative day,
he thought.
I can see that already.

Stopping.

That was the next thing.

They had struck a firm stretch of beach. Eddie pushed the chair along faster, thinking vaguely that if he could keep this bit of extra speed, he might be able to drive right through the next sandtrap he happened to strike on pure impetus.

All at once the chair stopped. Stopped dead. The crossbar on the back hit Eddie’s chest with a thump. He grunted. Roland looked around, but not even the gunslinger’s cat-quick reflexes could stop the Lady’s chair from going over exactly as it had threatened to do in each of the sandtraps. It went and Detta went with it, tied and helpless but cackling wildly. She still was when Roland and Eddie finally managed to right the chair again. Some of the ropes had drawn so tight they must be cutting cruelly into her flesh, cutting off the circulation to her extremities; her forehead was slashed and blood trickled into her eyebrows. She went on cackling just the same.