Reflected in them he saw—clearly saw—a seagull swooping down over a breaking wave and snatching something from it.

He had time to think What in God’s name is this shit? and then he knew it wasn’t going to pass; he was going to throw up after all.

In the half-second before he did, in the half-second he went on looking into the mirror, he saw those blue eyes disappear . . . but before that happened there was suddenly the feeling of being two people . . . of being possessed, like the little girl in The Exorcist.

Clearly he felt a new mind inside his own mind, and heard a thought not as his own thought but more like a voice from a radio: I’ve come through. I’m in the sky-carriage.

There was something else, but Eddie didn’t hear it. He was too busy throwing up into the basin as quietly as he could.

When he was done, before he had even wiped his mouth, something happened which had never happened to him before. For one frightening moment there was nothing—only a blank interval. As if a single line in a column of newsprint had been neatly and completely inked out.

What is this? Eddie thought helplessly. What the hell is this shit?

Then he had to throw up again, and maybe that was just as well; whatever you might say against it, regurgitation had at least this much in its favor: as long as you were doing it, you couldn’t think of anything else.

3

I’ve come through. I’m in the sky-carriage, the gunslinger thought. And, a second later: He sees me in the mirror!

Roland pulled back—did not leave but pulled back, like a child retreating to the furthest corner of a very long room. He was inside the sky-carriage; he was also inside a man who was not himself. Inside The Prisoner. In that first moment, when he had been close to the front (it was the only way he could describe it), he had been more than inside; he had almost been the man. He felt the man’s illness, whatever it was, and sensed that the man was about to retch. Roland understood that if he needed to, he could take control of this man’s body. He would suffer his pains, would be ridden by whatever demon-ape rode him, but if he needed to he could.

Or he could stay back here, unnoticed.

When the prisoner’s fit of vomiting had passed, the gunslinger leaped forward—this time all the way to the front. He understood very little about this strange situation, and to act in a situation one does not understand is to invite the most terrible consequences, but there were two things he needed to know—and he needed to know them so desperately that the needing outweighed any consequences which might arise.

Was the door he had come through from his own world still there?

And if it was, was his physical self still there, collapsed, untenanted, perhaps dying or already dead without his self’s self to go on unthinkingly running lungs and heart and nerves? Even if his body still lived, it might only continue to do so until night fell. Then the lobstrosities would come out to ask their questions and look for shore dinners.