They stepped through, Eddie actually leading a little.

On the other side he was suddenly wracked with fresh shudders and agonizing muscle-cramps—the first symptoms of serious heroin withdrawal. And with them he also had the first alarmed second thoughts.

“Wait!” he shouted. “I want to go back for a minute! His desk! His desk, or the other office! The scag! If they were keeping Henry doped, there’s gotta be junk! Heroin! I need it! I need it!”

He looked pleadingly at Roland, but the gunslinger’s face was stony.

“That part of your life is over, Eddie,” he said. He reached out with his left hand.

“No!” Eddie screamed, clawing at him. “No, you don’t get it, man, I need it! I NEED IT!”

He might as well have been clawing stone.

The gunslinger swept the door shut.

It made a dull clapping sound that bespoke utter finality and fell backward onto the sand. A little dust puffed up from its edges. There was nothing behind the door, and now no word written upon it. This particular portal between the worlds had closed forever.

“No!” Eddie screamed, and the gulls screamed back at him as if in jeering contempt; the lobstrosities asked him questions, perhaps suggesting he could hear them a little better if he were to come a little closer, and Eddie fell over on his side, crying and shuddering and jerking with cramps.

“Your need will pass,” the gunslinger said, and managed to get one of the sample packets out of the pocket of Eddie’s jeans, which were so like his own. Again, he could read some of these letters but not all. Cheeflet, the word looked like.

Cheeflet.

Medicine from that other world.

“Kill or cure,” Roland murmured, and dry-swallowed two of the capsules. Then he took the other three astin, and lay next to Eddie, and took him in his arms as well as he could, and after some difficult time, both of them slept.

SHUFFLE

shuffle

The time following that night was broken time for Roland, time that didn’t really exist as time at all. What he remembered was only a series of images, moments, conversation without context; images flashing past like one-eyed jacks and treys and nines and the Bloody Black Bitch Queen of Spiders in a cardsharp’s rapid shuffle.

Later on he asked Eddie how long that time lasted, but Eddie didn’t know either. Time had been destroyed for both of them. There was no time in hell, and each of them was in his own private hell: Roland the hell of the fever and infection, Eddie the hell of withdrawal.

“It was less than a week,” Eddie said. “That’s all I know for sure.”

“How do you know that?”

“A week’s worth of pills was all I had to give you. After that, you were gonna have to do the one thing or the other on your own.”

“Get well or die.”

“Right.”

shuffle

There’s a gunshot as twilight draws down to dark, a dry crack impinging on the inevitable and ineluctable sound of the breakers dying on the desolate beach: KA-BLAM! He smells a whiff of gunpowder. Trouble, the gunslinger thinks weakly, and gropes for revolvers that aren’t there. Oh no, it’s the end, it’s . . .