Two words were written on this door.

“What does it mean?” Odetta asked finally.

“I don’t know,” Eddie said, but those words had brought a hopeless chill; he felt an eclipse stealing across his heart.

“Don’t you?” she asked, looking at him more closely.

“No. I . . .” He swallowed. “No.”

She looked at him a moment longer. “Push me behind it, please. I’d like to see that. I know you want to get back to him, but would you do that for me?”

He would.

They started around, on the high side of the door.

“Wait!” she cried. “Did you see it?”

“What?”

“Go back! Look! Watch!”

This time he watched the door instead of what might be ahead to trip them up. As they went above it he saw it narrow in perspective, saw its hinges, hinges which seemed to be buried in nothing at all, saw its thickness . . .

Then it was gone.

The thickness of the door was gone.

His view of the water should have been interrupted by three, perhaps even four inches of solid wood (the door looked extraordinarily stout), but there was no such interruption.

The door was gone.

Its shadow was there, but the door was gone.

He rolled the chair back two feet, so he was just south of the place where the door stood, and the thickness was there.

“You see it?” he asked in a ragged voice.

“Yes! It’s there again!”

He rolled the chair forward a foot. The door was still there. Another six inches. Still there. Another two inches. Still there. Another inch . . . and it was gone. Solid gone.

“Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus Christ.”

“Would it open for you?” she asked. “Or me?”

He stepped forward slowly and grasped the knob of the door with those two words upon it.

He tried clockwise; he tried anti-clockwise.

The knob moved not an iota.

“All right.” Her voice was calm, resigned. “It’s for him, then. I think we both knew it. Go for him, Eddie. Now.”

“First I’ve got to see to you.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“No you won’t. You’re too close to the high-tide line. If I leave you here, the lobsters are going to come out when it gets dark and you’re going to be din—”

Up in the hills, a cat’s coughing growl suddenly cut across what he was saying like a knife cutting thin cord. It was a good distance away, but closer than the other had been.

Her eyes flicked to the gunslinger’s revolver shoved into the waistband of his pants for just a moment, then back to his face. He felt a dull heat in his cheeks.

“He told you not to give it to me, didn’t he?” she said softly. “He doesn’t want me to have it. For some reason he doesn’t want me to have it.”

“The shells got wet,” he said awkwardly. “They probably wouldn’t fire, anyway.”

“I understand. Take me a little way up the slope, Eddie, can you? I know how tired your back must be, Andrew calls it Wheelchair Crouch, but if you take me up a little way, I’ll be safe from the lobsters. I doubt if anything else comes very close to where they are.