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 Iyyyyy . . . ain’t got nobody . . . 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 that 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. I had 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 hightide 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 those snappers.
“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,