He had awakened after perhaps six hours of deep and dreamless sleep to discover she was gone. He went to the barn’s bay door, which they’d left open, and looked out. There she was. Even by moonlight he’d known that wasn’t really Susannah down there in the wheelchair; not his Suze, not Odetta Holmes or Detta Walker, either. Yet she wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. She—

You saw her in New York, only then she had legs and she knew how to use them. She had legs and she didn’t want to go too close to the rose. She had her reasons for that, and they were good reasons, but you know what I think the real reason was? I think she was afraid it would hurt whatever it is she’s carrying in her belly.

Yet he felt sorry for the woman below. No matter who she was or what she was carrying, she’d gotten herself into this situation while saving Jake Chambers. She’d held off the demon of the circle, trapping it inside her just long enough for Eddie to finish whittling the key he’d made.

If you’d finished it earlier— if you hadn’t been such a damned little chickenshit— she might not evenbe in this mess, did you ever think of that?

Eddie had pushed the thought away. There was some truth to it, of course—he had lost his confidence while whittling the key, which was why it hadn’t been finished when the time of Jake’s drawing came—but he was done with that kind of thinking. It was good for nothing but creating a truly excellent array of self-inflicted wounds.

Whoever she was, his heart had gone out to the woman he saw below him. In the sleeping silence of the night, through the alternating shutters of moonlight and dark, she pushed Susannah’s wheelchair first across the yard…then back…then across again…then left…then right. She reminded him a little of the old robots in Shardik’s clearing, the ones Roland had made him shoot. And was that so surprising? He’d drifted off to sleep thinking of those robots, and what Roland had said of them: They are creatures of great sadness, I think, in their own way. Eddie is going to put them out of their misery. And so he had, after some persuasion: the one that looked like a many-jointed snake, the one that looked like the Tonka tractor he’d once gotten as a birthday present, the ill-tempered stainless-steel rat. He’d shot them all except for the last, some sort of mechanical flying thing. Roland had gotten that one.

Like the old robots, the woman in the yard below wanted to go someplace, but didn’t know where. She wanted to get something, but didn’t know what. The question was, what was he supposed to do?