Roland nodded.

“Well, I watched it like it was a movie—never mind, it’s not important—until the very end. Then you turned her toward this side of the doorway and for the first time I was looking at myself. It was like . . .” He groped and could find nothing. “I dunno. It should have been like looking in a mirror, I guess, but it wasn’t, because . . . because it was like looking at another person. It was like being turned inside out. Like being in two places at the same time. Shit, I don’t know.”

But the gunslinger was thunderstruck. That was what he had sensed as they came through; that was what had happened to her, no, not just her, them: for a moment Detta and Odetta had looked at each other, not the way one would look at her reflection in a mirror but as separate people; the mirror became a windowpane and for a moment Odetta had seen Detta and Detta had seen Odetta and had been equally horror-struck.

They each know, the gunslinger thought grimly. They may not have known before, but they do now. They can try to hide it from themselves, but for a moment they saw, they knew, and that knowing must still be there.

“Roland?”

“What?”

“Just wanted to make sure you hadn’t gone to sleep with your eyes open. Because for a minute you looked like you were, you know, long ago and far away.”

“If so, I’m back now,” the gunslinger said. “I’m going to turn in. Remember what I said, Eddie: be on your guard.”

“I’ll watch,” Eddie said, but Roland knew that, sick or not, he would have to be the one to do the watching tonight.

Everything else had followed from that.

7

Following the ruckus Eddie and Detta Walker eventually went to sleep again (she did not so much fall asleep as drop into an exhausted state of unconsciousness in her chair, lolling to one side against the restraining ropes).

The gunslinger, however, lay wakeful.

I will have to bring the two of them to battle, he thought, but he didn’t need one of Eddie’s “shrinks” to tell him that such a battle might be to the death. If the bright one, Odetta, were to win that battle, all might yet be well. If the dark one were to win it, all would surely be lost with her.

Yet he sensed that what really needed doing was not killing but joining. He had already recognized much that would be of value to him—them—in Detta Walker’s gutter toughness, and he wanted her—but he wanted her under control. There was a long way to go. Detta thought he and Eddie were monsters of some species she called Honk Mafahs. That was only dangerous delusion, but there would be real monsters along the way—the lobstrosities were not the first, nor would they be the last. The fight-until-you-drop woman he had entered and who had come out of hiding again tonight might come in very handy in a fight against such monsters, if she could be tempered by Odetta Holmes’s calm humanity—especially now, with him short two fingers, almost out of bullets, and growing more fever.