plaster hand, groping wildly, struck one of his booted feet and spun him into the wall, which again tried to bite. Roland pushed forward, turned, and drew his gun. He fired twice into the aimlessly thrashing hand, vaporizing one of the crude plaster fingers. Behind them, the face of the doorkeeper had gone from white to a dingy purplish-black, as if it were choking on something—something which had been fleeing so rapidly that it had entered the monster’s mouth and jammed in its gullet before it realized what it was doing.
Roland turned again and ran through the doorway. Although there was now no visible barrier, he was stopped cold for a moment, as if an unseen meshwork had been drawn across the chair.
Then he felt Eddie’s hands in his hair and he was yanked not forward but upward.
42
THEY EMERGED INTO WET air and slackening hail like babies being born. Eddie was the midwife, as the gunslinger had told him he must be. He was sprawled forward on his chest and belly, his arms out of sight in the doorway, his hands clutching fistfuls of Roland’s hair.
“Suze! Help me!”
She wriggled forward, reached through, and groped a hand under Roland’s chin. He came up to her with his head cocked backward and his lips parted in a snarl of pain and effort.
Eddie felt a tearing sensation and one of his hands came free holding a thick lock of the gunslinger’s gray-streaked hair. “He’s slipping!”
“This motherfucker . . . ain’t . . . nowhere!” Susannah gasped, and gave a terrific wrench, as if she meant to snap Roland’s neck.
Two small hands shot out of the doorway in the center of the circle and clutched one of the edges. Freed of Jake’s weight, Roland got an elbow up, and a moment later he was boosting himself out. As he did it, Eddie grabbed Jake’s wrists and hauled him up.
Jake rolled onto his back and lay there, panting.
Eddie turned to Susannah, took her in his arms, and began to rain kisses on her forehead, cheeks, and neck. He was laughing and crying at the same time. She clung to him, breathing hard . . . but there was a small, satisfied smile on her lips and one hand slipped over Eddie’s wet hair in slow, contented strokes.
From below them came a cauldron of black sounds: squeals, grunts, thuds, crashes.
Roland crawled away from the hole with his head down. His hair stood up in a wild wad. Threads of blood trickled down his cheeks. “Shut it!” he gasped at Eddie. “Shut it, for your father’s sake!”
Eddie got the door moving, and those vast, unseen hinges did the rest. The door fell with a gigantic, toneless bang, cutting off all sound from below. As Eddie watched, the lines that had marked its edges faded back to smudged marks in the dirt. The doorknob lost its dimension and was once more only a circle he’d drawn with a stick. Where the keyhole had been there was only a crude shape with a chunk of wood sticking out of it, like the hilt of a sword from a stone.
Susannah went to Jake and pulled him gently to a sitting position. “You all right, sugar?”
He looked at her dazedly. “Yes, I think so. Where is he? The gunslinger? There’s something I have to ask him.”
“I’m here, Jake,” Roland said. He got to his feet, drunk-walked over to Jake, and hunkered beside him. He touched the boy’s smooth cheek almost unbelievingly.
“You won’t let me drop this time?”
“No,” Roland said. “Not this time, not ever again.” But in the deepest darkness of his heart, he thought of the Tower and wondered.
43
THE HAIL CHANGED TO a hard, driving rain, but Eddie could see gleams of blue sky behind the unravelling clouds in the north. The storm was going to end soon, but in the meantime, they were going to get drenched.
He found he didn’t mind. He could not remember when he had felt so calm, so at peace with himself, so utterly drained. This mad adventure wasn’t over yet—he suspected, in fact, that it had barely begun— but today they had won a big one.
“Suze?” He pushed her hair away from her face and looked into her dark eyes. “Are you okay? Did it hurt you?”
“Hurt me a little, but I’m okay. I think that bitch Detta Walker is still the undefeated Roadhouse Champeen, demon or no demon.”
“What’s that mean?”
She grinned impishly. “Not much, not anymore . . . thank God. How about