“Roland, watch out!” Susannah shrieks, and her voice is like a magical switch. There is something on the dressing table—the glass, of course; Gabrielle has stolen it, it’s what she’ll bring to her lover as a consolation prize for the murder her son prevented—and now it lights as if in response to Susannah’s voice. It sprays brilliant pink light up the triple mirror and casts its glow back into the room. In that light, in that triple glass, Roland finally sees the figure behind him.

“Christ!” Eddie Dean shrieks, horrified. “Oh Christ, Roland! That’s not your mother! That’s—”

It’s not even a woman, not really, not anymore; it is a kind of living corpse in a road-filthy black dress. There are only a few straggling tufts of hair left on her head and there’s a gaping hole where her nose used to be, but her eyes still blaze, and the snake she holds wriggling between her hands is very lively. Even in his own horror, Jake has time to wonder if she got it from under the same rock where she found the one Roland killed.

It is Rhea who has been waiting for the gunslinger in his mother’s apartment; it is the Cöos, come not just to retrieve her glam but to finish with the boy who has caused her so much trouble.

“Now, ye trollop’s get!” she cries shrilly, cackling. “Now ye’ll pay!”

But Roland has seen her, in the glass he has seen her, Rhea betrayed by the very ball she came to take back, and now he is whirling, his hands dropping to his new guns with all their deadly speed. He is fourteen, his reflexes are the sharpest and quickest they’ll ever be, and he goes off like exploding gunpowder.

“No, Roland, don’t!” Susannah screams. “It’s a trick, it’s a glam!”

Jake has just time to look from the mirror to the woman actually standing in the doorway; has just time to realize he, too, has been tricked.

Perhaps Roland also understands the truth at the last split-second—that the woman in the doorway really is his mother after all, that the thing in her hands isn’t a snake but a belt, something she has made for him, a peace offering, mayhap, that the glass has lied to him in the only way it can ... by reflection.

In any case, it’s too late. The guns are out and thundering, their bright yellow flashes lighting the room. He pulls the trigger of each gun twice before he can stop, and the four slugs drive Gabrielle Deschain back into the corridor with the hopeful can-we-make-peace smile still on her face.

She dies that way, smiling.