The shape in the shadows grew clearer. He wasn’t surprised to see it was a door exactly like those he’d come to on the beach; why else would this have been called Doorway Cave? It was made of ironwood (or perhaps ghostwood), and stood about twenty feet inside the entrance to the cave. It was six and a half feet high, as the doors on the beach had been. And, like those, it stood freely in the shadows, with hinges that seemed fastened to nothing.

Yet it would turn on those hinges easily,he thought. Will turn. When the time comes.

There was no keyhole. The knob appeared to be crystal. Etched upon it was a rose. On the beach of the Western Sea, the three doors had been marked with the High Speech: THE PRISONER on one, THE LADY OF THE SHADOWS on another, THE PUSHER on the third. Here were the hieroglyphs he had seen on the box hidden in Callahan’s church:

“It means ‘unfound,’ ” Roland said.

Henchick nodded, but when Roland moved to walk around the door, the old man took a step forward and held out a hand. “Be careful, or’ee may be able to discover who those voices belong to for yourself.”

Roland saw what he meant. Eight or nine feet beyond the door, the floor of the cave sloped down at an angle of fifty or even sixty degrees. There was nothing to hold onto, and the rock looked smooth as glass. Thirty feet down, this slippery-slide disappeared into a chasm. Moaning, intertwined voices rose from it. And then one came clear. It was that of Gabrielle Deschain.

“Roland, don’t!”his dead mother shrieked up from the darkness. “Don’t shoot, it’s me! It’s your m—” But before she could finish, the overlapping crash of pistol shots silenced her. Pain shot up into Roland’s head. He was pressing the bandanna against his face almost hard enough to break his own nose. He tried to ease the muscles in his arm and at first was unable to do so.

Next from that reeking darkness came the voice of his father.

“I’ve known since you toddled that you were no genius,” Steven Deschain said in a tired voice, “but I never believed until yestereve that you were an idiot. To let him drive you like a cow in a chute! Gods!”

Never mind. These are not even ghosts. I think they’re only echoes, somehow taken from deep inside my own head and projected.

When he stepped around the door (minding the drop now to his right), the door was gone. There was only the silhouette of Henchick, a severe man-shape cut from black paper standing in the cave’s mouth.

The door’s still there, but you can only see it from one side. And in that way it’s like the other doors, too.