If not for the crawling lobster-things, Eddie would have gone down to the water and washed his hands.

“I feel like I’m going to vomit,” he said in a voice that jig-jagged up and down the scale like the voice of an adolescent boy.

“Why don’t you go on and eat each other’s COCKS?” the struggling thing in the chair screeched. “Why don’t you jus go on and do dat if you fraid of a black woman’s cunny? You just go on! Sho! Suck on yo each one’s candles! Do it while you got a chance, cause Detta Walker goan get outen dis chair and cut dem skinny ole white candles off and feed em to those walkin buzzsaws down there!”

“She’s the woman I was in. Do you believe me now?”

“I believed you before,” Eddie said. “I told you that.”

“You believed you believed. You believed on the top of your mind. Do you believe it all the way down now? All the way to the bottom?”

Eddie looked at the shrieking, convulsing thing in the chair and then looked away, white except for the slash on his jaw, which was still dripping a little. That side of his face was beginning to look a little like a balloon.

“Yes,” he said. “God, yes.”

“This woman is a monster.”

Eddie began to cry.

The gunslinger wanted to comfort him, could not commit such a sacrilege (he remembered Jake too well), and walked off into the dark with his new fever burning and aching inside him.

6

Much earlier on that night, while Odetta still slept, Eddie said he thought he might understand what was wrong with her. Might. The gunslinger asked what he meant.

“She could be a schizophrenic.”

Roland only shook his head. Eddie explained what he understood of schizophrenia, gleanings from such films as The Three Faces of Eve and various TV programs (mostly the soap operas he and Henry had often watched while stoned). Roland had nodded. Yes. The disease Eddie described sounded about right. A woman with two faces, one light and one dark. A face like the one the man in black had shown him on the fifth Tarot card.

“And they don’t know—these schizophrenes—that they have another?”

“No,” Eddie said. “But . . .” He trailed off, moodily watching the lobstrosities crawl and question, question and crawl.

“But what?”

“I’m no shrink,” Eddie said, “so I don’t really know—”

“Shrink? What is a shrink?”

Eddie tapped his temple. “A head-doctor. A doctor for your mind. They’re really called psychiatrists.”

Roland nodded. He liked shrink better. Because this Lady’s mind was too large. Twice as large as it needed to be.

“But I think schizos almost always know something is wrong with them,” Eddie said. “Because there are blanks. Maybe I’m wrong, but I always got the idea that they were usually two people who thought they had partial amnesia, because of the blank spaces in their memories when the other personality was in control. She . . . she says she remembers everything. She really thinks she remembers everything.”