“I have to tell you something about Odetta.”

“That’s her name?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s very lovely,” the gunslinger said.

“Yeah. I thought so, too. What isn’t so lovely is the way she feels about this place. She doesn’t think she’s here.”

“I know. And she doesn’t like me much, does she?”

No, Eddie thought, but that doesn’t keep her from thinking you’re one booger of a hallucination. He didn’t say it, only nodded.

“The reasons are almost the same,” the gunslinger said. “She’s not the woman I brought through, you see. Not at all.”

Eddie stared, then suddenly nodded, excited. That blurred glimpse in the mirror . . . that snarling face . . . the man was right. Jesus Christ, of course he was! That hadn’t been Odetta at all.

Then he remembered the hands which had gone pawing carelessly through the scarves and had just as carelessly gone about the business of stuffing the junk jewelry into her big purse—almost, it had seemed, as if she wanted to be caught.

The rings had been there.

Same rings.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean the same hands, he thought wildly, but that would only hold for a second. He had studied her hands. They were the same, long-fingered and delicate.

“No,” the gunslinger continued. “She is not.” His blue eyes studied Eddie carefully.

“Her hands—”

“Listen,” the gunslinger said, “and listen carefully. Our lives may depend on it—mine because I’m getting sick again, and yours because you have fallen in love with her.”

Eddie said nothing.

“She is two women in the same body. She was one woman when I entered her, and another when I returned here.”

Now Eddie could say nothing.

“There was something else, something strange, but either I didn’t understand it or I did and it’s slipped away. It seemed important.”

Roland looked past Eddie, looked to the beached wheelchair, standing alone at the end of its short track from nowhere. Then he looked back at Eddie.

“I understand very little of this, or how such a thing can be, but you must be on your guard. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.” Eddie’s lungs felt as if they had very little wind in them. He understood—or had, at least, a moviegoer’s understanding of the sort of thing the gunslinger was speaking of—but he didn’t have the breath to explain, not yet. He felt as if Roland had kicked all his breath out of him.

“Good. Because the woman I entered on the other side of the door was as deadly as those lobster-things that come out at night.”

CHAPTER 4

Detta On the Other Side

1

You must be on your guard, the gunslinger said, and Eddie had agreed, but the gunslinger knew Eddie didn’t know what he was talking about; the whole back half of Eddie’s mind, where survival is or isn’t, didn’t get the message.

The gunslinger saw this.

It was a good thing for Eddie he did.

2

In the middle of the night, Detta Walker’s eyes sprang open. They were full of starlight and clear intelligence.