Then the view pivoted and Eddie was looking at himself. The view rushed toward the viewer and he wanted to put up the hand holding the knife to shield his eyes because all at once the sensation of looking through two sets of eyes was too much, too crazy, it was going to drive him crazy if he didn’t shut it out, but it all happened too fast for him to have time.

The wheelchair came through the door. It was a tight fit; Eddie heard its hubs squeal on the sides. At the same moment he heard another sound: a thick tearing sound that made him think of some word

(placental)

that he couldn’t quite think of because he didn’t know he knew it. Then the woman was rolling toward him on the hard-packed sand, and she no longer looked mad as hell—hardly looked like the woman Eddie had glimpsed in the mirror at all, for that matter, but he supposed that wasn’t surprising; when you all at once went from a changing-room at Macy’s to the seashore of a godforsaken world where some of the lobsters were the size of small Collie dogs, it left you feeling a little winded. That was a subject on which Eddie Dean felt he could personally give testimony.

She rolled about four feet before stopping, and only went that far because of the slope and the gritty pack of the sand. Her hands were no longer pumping the wheels as they must have been doing (when you wake up with sore shoulders tomorrow you can blame them on Sir Roland, lady, Eddie thought sourly). Instead they went to the arms of the chair and gripped them as she regarded the two men.

Behind her, the doorway had already disappeared. Disappeared? That was not quite right. It seemed to fold in on itself, like a piece of film run backward. This began to happen just as the store dick came slamming through the other, more mundane door—the one between the store and the dressing room. He was coming hard, expecting the shoplifter would have locked the door, and Eddie thought he was going to take one hell of a splat against the far wall, but Eddie was never going to see it happen or not happen. Before the shrinking space where the door between that world and this disappeared entirely, Eddie saw everything on that side freeze solid.

The movie had become a still photograph.

All that remained now were the dual tracks of the wheelchair, starting in sandy nowhere and running four feet to where it and its occupant now sat.

“Won’t somebody please explain where I am and how I got here?” the woman in the wheelchair asked—almost pleaded.

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing, Dorothy,” Eddie said. “You ain’t in Kansas anymore.”

The woman’s eyes brimmed with tears. Eddie could see her trying to hold them in but it was no good. She began to sob.

Furious (and disgusted with himself as well), Eddie turned on the gunslinger, who had staggered to his feet. Roland moved, but not toward the weeping Lady. Instead he went to pick up his knife.