The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower #2)(68)

He beat the floorwalker to the dressing room, slammed the door open with his left shoulder, and it was empty.

No black woman.

No wheelchair.

No nothing.

He looked at the floorwalker, starey-eyed.

"Other one!" the floorwalker yelled. "Other one!"

Before Jimmy could move, the floorwalker had busted open the door of the other dressing room. A woman in a linen skirt and a Playtex Living Bra screamed piercingly and crossed her arms over her chest. She was very white and very definitely not crippled.

"Pardon me," the floorwalker said, feeling hot crimson flood his face.

"Get out of here, you pervert!" the woman in the linen skirt and the bra cried.

"Yes, ma'am," the floorwalker said, and closed the door.

At Macy's, the customer was always right.

He looked at Halvorsen.

Halvorsen looked back.

"What is this shit?" Halvorsen asked. "Did she go in there or not?"

"Yeah, she did."

"So where is she?"

The floorwalker could only shake his head. "Let's go back and pick up the mess."

"You pick up the mess," Jimmy Halvorsen said. "I feel like I just broke my ass in nine pieces." He paused. "To tell you the truth, me fine bucko, I also feel extremely confused."

8

The moment the gunslinger heard the dressing room door bang shut behind him, he rammed the wheelchair around in a half turn, looking for the doorway. If Eddie had done what he had promised, it would be gone.

But the door was open. Roland wheeled the Lady of Shadows through it.

THE LADY OF SHADOWS CHAPTER 3 ODETTA ON THE OTHER SIDE

1

Not long after, Roland would think: Any other woman, crippled or otherwise, suddenly shoved all the way down the aisle of the mart in which she was doing business - monkey-business, you may call it if you like - by a stranger inside her head, shoved into a little room while some man behind her yelled for her to stop, then suddenly turned, shoved again where there was by rights no room in which to shove, then finding herself suddenly in an entirely different world ...I think any other woman, under those circumstances, would have most certainly have asked "Where am I?" before all else.

Instead, Odetta Holmes asked almost pleasantly, "What exactly are you planning to do with that knife, young man?"

2

Roland looked up at Eddie, who was crouched with his knife held less than a quarter of an inch over the skin. Even with his uncanny speed, there was no way the gunslinger could move fast enough to evade the blade if Eddie decided to use it.

"Yes," Roland said. "What are you planning to do with it?"

"I don't know," Eddie said, sounding completely disgusted with himself. "Cut bait, I guess. Sure doesn't look like I came here to fish, does it?"

He threw the knife toward the Lady's chair, but well to the right. It stuck, quivering, in the sand to its hilt.

Then the Lady turned her head and began, "I wonder if you could please explain where you've taken m―"

She stopped. She had said Iwonder if you before her head had gotten around far enough to see there was no one behind her, but the gunslinger observed with some real interest that she went on speaking for a moment anyway, because the fact of her condition made certain things elementary truths of her life - if she had moved, for instance, someone must have moved her. But there was no one behind her.

No one at all.

She looked back at Eddie and the gunslinger, her dark eyes troubled, confused, and alarmed, and now she asked. "Where am I? Who pushed me? How can I be here? How can I be dressed, for that matter, when I was home watching the twelve o'clock news in my robe? Who am I? Where is this? Who are you?"

"Who am I?" she asked, the gunslinger thought. The dam broke and there was a flood of questions; that was to be expected. But that one question―"Who am I?"―even now I don't think she knows she asked it.

Or when.

Because she had asked before.

Even before she had asked who they were, she had asked who she was.

3

Eddie looked from the lovely young/old face of the black woman in the wheelchair to Roland's face.

"How come she doesn't know?"

"I can't say. Shock, I suppose."

"Shock took her all the way back to her living room, before she left for Macy's? You telling me the last thing she remembers is sitting in her bathrobe and listening to some blow-dried dude talk about how they found that gonzo down in the Florida Keys with Christa McAuliff's left hand mounted on his den wall next to his prize marlin?"

Roland didn't answer.

More dazed than ever, the Lady said, "Who is Christa McAuliff? Is she one of the missing Freedom Riders?"

Now it was Eddie's turn not to answer. Freedom Riders? What the hell were they?

The gunslinger glanced at him and Eddie was able to read his eyes easily enough: Can't you see she's in shock?

Iknow what you mean, Roland old buddy, but it only washes up to a point. I felt a little shock myself when you came busting into my head like Walter Payton on crack, but it didn't wipe out my memory banks.

Speaking of shock, he'd gotten another pretty good jolt when she came through. He had been kneeling over Roland's inert body, the knife just above the vulnerable skin of the throat ... but the truth was Eddie couldn't have used the knife anyway―not then, anyway. He was staring into the doorway, hypnotized, as an aisle of Macy's rushed forward―he was reminded again of The Shining, where you saw what the little boy was seeing as he rode his trike through the hallways of that haunted hotel. He remembered the little boy had seen this creepy pair of dead twins in one of those hallways. The end of this aisle was much more mundane: a white door. The words ONLY TWO GARMENTS AT ONE TIME, PLEASE were printed on it in discreet lettering. Yeah, it was Macy's, all right. Macy's for sure.