The Drawing of the Three

Roland wakes at the high-tide line of the Western Sea, less than seven hours after the palaver with the man in black, soaked to the waist by a cold incoming tide. He has been dreaming he was Jake, drowning. His first thought is for his ammunition, which is wet.

Something comes out of the surf: four feet of lobster-clawed, stalk-eyed, beaked thing with a scorpion’s curl of tail, murmuring what sound like questions — “Did-a-chick? Dum-a-chum?” Each time a wave breaks it freezes and raises its claws, a posture Roland recognises as the Honor Stance Cort drilled into fledgling gunslingers. His shells are wet; the gun will not fire; and the creature takes the index and middle fingers of his right hand, most of his right big toe through the boot, and a piece of his calf. He times its next pause, beats it to death with a rock and grinds the shell under his heel. He names the species: lobstrosities.

Above the tide line he packs the stumps with tobacco, tears up his shirt for bandages and takes inventory: two fingers and a toe gone, boots wrecked, a little water, some jerky, the jawbone from the golgotha, and twenty shells that may or may not fire.

“I am, in short, a man on the edge of everything.”

Red lines of infection are already climbing his arm.

The first chapter is called The Door. He sleeps sixteen hours, then walks north, feverish and falling, for about three hours and four miles, drains the waterskin, and sees a door standing by itself on the sand. Six and a half feet of ironwood, a gold knob filigreed with a baboon, and two words in black letters: The Prisoner. It has no back; he can walk all the way round it, and from some angles it is not there at all. The knob is deadly cold. He opens it onto the world seen from a great height, then the inside of an aircraft, and understands he is looking out through someone else’s eyes.

The eyes belong to Eddie Dean, twenty-one, in seat 3-G of Delta 901 from Nassau to New York with two pounds of cocaine taped under his arms and the first cramps of heroin withdrawal coming on. He is muling for Balazar, a New York crime boss, in a paisley shirt meant to hide the bulges. Then a stranger is inside his head. Eddie vomits, and a stewardess notices that the nice-looking passenger’s hazel eyes have gone iceberg blue.

He can come forward and take Eddie’s body; he can carry things back to the beach — a sandwich, a coin. The crew spots the bulges and radios customs, so Roland sends Eddie to the lavatory, where the two men meet face to face: a gaunt scarecrow in homespun with a filthy rag round one hand, standing on a beach where the wall should be. Roland hits him once to focus him; the tape comes off; the bags go through; and the captain breaks the latch to find a sweating young man on the toilet and nothing else.

Customs holds Eddie two hours in his underwear and gets an allergy story for the tape marks. He walks out with a tail, buys hot dogs, Anacin and a Pepsi, and passes them through to Roland, who is astonished by the sugar. The door now follows Eddie wherever he goes. Outside the Dean brothers’ building a pizza van is waiting with Jack Andolini at the wheel: Balazar has the stash and he has Henry.

The Leaning Tower is Balazar’s closed bar, under a neon sign that, seen through Eddie’s eyes, looks to Roland like the Tower itself burning red in the sky; he cries out for Cuthbert and Alain before he understands it is a sign. Inside, Balazar sits building a tower of playing cards. Down the hall three of his gentlemen play Trivial Pursuit with Henry, who answers every question “Johnny Cash” and, five minutes before Eddie arrives, asks for a fix. George Biondi gives him one. Henry dies while Balazar works on the third storey.

Eddie claims half the coke is hidden in the bathroom; Balazar has him stripped and searched, then sends Jack Andolini in with him. Roland’s voice comes out of Eddie’s mouth, and Eddie grabs Jack and carries them both through the door onto the beach. Roland’s first shot misfires; Eddie, naked, hits Jack with a rock; Roland’s third round strikes Jack’s own gun as it fires, and what is left of Old Double-Ugly staggers to the waterline, where the lobstrosities take him, Gucci loafers and all. Roland cannot fire a gun with his right hand any more. He puts that revolver in Eddie’s and tells him there is going to be shooting.

Behind the medicine cabinet Eddie finds the panel: pornography and packets of Keflex, the antibiotic that can save Roland’s life. Through the door he hears a voice tell Balazar that Henry is dead. “I want to go to war,” he says. The office becomes one. Roland kills the first man to fire; Eddie wings Balazar; a gunman with a machine gun sprays his own side; Roland finishes Balazar with four rounds from a dead man’s automatic. The last of them throws Henry’s head through the door at Eddie. Roland, bracing his left hand on his bandaged stump, kills him too. Sirens. Eddie asks what is on the other side of the door.

“Probably death. But before that happens, I don’t think you’ll be bored.”

They go through. On the sand withdrawal folds Eddie double and he begs to go back for the heroin in Balazar’s office. “That part of your life is over, Eddie,” Roland tells him, and shuts the door, which falls flat on the beach, closed for good. He dry-swallows two Keflex and sleeps holding the prisoner.

Shuffle is King’s name for the interlude that follows: Roland’s fever breaking in fragments like cards flicked past by a sharp. Eddie, in full withdrawal himself, nurses him for the better part of a week, as long as the Keflex lasts, feeds him lobstrosity — “What did you think I was doing? Calling Red Lobster for take-out?” — holds Roland’s gun to his own head one grey morning and puts it down because the gunslinger needs him, then builds a travois and drags him north, shooting one of the creatures in mid-question. He tells Roland the story of Henry, trust turned to dependency turned to addiction, and Roland hears his own plan for Eddie in it. They come to a second door: THE LADY OF SHADOWS. Through it is New York again, earlier than Eddie’s time. Eddie, desperate, swears he will shoot Roland if he is left behind. Roland tells him that part of his life is done until after the Tower at least, and goes through as Eddie lays a knife against his throat.

New York, February 1964. Odetta Holmes — heiress to Holmes Dental Industries, a civil-rights name that has been on the cover of Time — is driven home to a renovated Victorian off Central Park South by Andrew, her white chauffeur, from three days in Oxford, Mississippi, that ended in a cell. Andrew lifts the wheelchair from the trunk. She lost her legs on 19 August 1959, pushed in front of an A train; before that, at five, a brick dropped from a tenement window left her in a coma. Odetta thinks this no world for gunslingers. She does not know about the other woman.

Detta Walker remembers things Odetta does not: a scarf stolen from Macy’s at twenty-three, a roadhouse, a flat in Greenwich Village. It is Detta that Roland and Eddie watch through the door, pocketing paste jewellery at a Macy’s counter, and Roland notes that the viewpoint is too low and moves too smoothly — a wheelchair. The book cuts to 1959: an intern rides in the ambulance with a young woman in jeans and a khaki shirt who crawled far enough from the platform that the train took both legs. She wakes polite, asking what happened; then she wakes screaming for the man who pushed her, in another voice; and the intern realises the two women do not know each other.

A store detective is closing on Detta when Roland comes forward into a mind he experiences as a snakepit, spins the chair, spills her purse under the detective’s feet, and wheels her through a dressing-room door onto the beach.

Detta arrives cursing. Then Odetta surfaces, remembers none of it, and decides she is in a coma-dream again. Eddie, trying to comfort her, finds himself falling in love. Roland tells him there are two women in that body and the second is as dangerous as a lobstrosity; his Keflex is gone and the fever is coming back. That night Detta wakes, takes Roland’s revolver and pulls the trigger on the sleeping Eddie. It clicks: Roland has loaded the guns with spent shells. She clubs Eddie with the butt until Roland tackles her, and they lash her into the wheelchair with a gunbelt and slip-knots that tighten when she fights. Roland understands that in the crossing each woman glimpsed the other.

Days of pushing a wheelchair through sand at three miles a day, Detta screaming slurs and tipping the chair, both men showing scurvy. He speaks past Detta to Odetta, and faints thirty miles short of where the beach ends; Odetta comes back. In the Reshuffle that follows, Eddie pushes Odetta ahead to find the third door with one of Roland’s guns in his waistband and orders to brain her if Detta returns. They make love under strange galaxies turning slowly overhead; the door appears; and Eddie, who has read the two words on it, breaks Roland’s order and leaves Odetta the gun while he goes back for the chair. Roland’s first words when he wakes are that Eddie gave her the gun. At sunrise Odetta is gone. The door says THE PUSHER. Roland fires three times to prove some shells are live, two clicks and one shot, reloads, throws the gun to Eddie and goes through — watched from a hundred and fifty yards up the hillside by Detta, with the other revolver.

Roland opens his eyes behind another man’s, on a 1977 street corner, and sees a boy with a lunch bag and a bookbag waiting at a busy crossing: Jake. His first thought is that this is his punishment, to watch Jake die twice. Then reflex: he comes forward, the host loses what feels like an instant and is in fact seven seconds, the light changes, and Jake crosses the street and walks on to school without knowing anything happened. The host is Jack Mort, a thin, sandy-haired accountant in a blue suit who plans his crimes with a schoolroom neatness and dresses baggy to hide his build.

“Pushing was only his hobby.”

In Mort’s memory Roland finds the brick, dropped on a five-year-old girl; the newspaper clippings in a scrapbook; the platform at Christopher Street. The third card was Death, and Roland sees now that Death is himself. He faints inside Mort, and wakes at Mort’s desk after one-thirty. Looking back through the door he sees two shadows on the sand: a wheelchair, and a legless figure moving on her arms, waiting beside his body with one of his guns.

On the beach Detta has watched Eddie call for Odetta for two hours and decided he is worth more as bait than dead. She has slashed Odetta’s dress into holsters. With the rope that held her in the chair she nooses the sleeping Eddie, draws his heels up to his buttocks so that relaxing his legs will strangle him, and drags him below the tide line to wait for dark and the lobstrosities: a honeypot, to bring Roland back into her sights.

Roland uses Mort as an atlas. He takes a taxi to Clements Guns and Sporting Goods, where a squad car idles outside, learns from a caliber chart that fifty .45 shells come in a box and, having no permit, calls in the two officers to accuse the clerk of theft, cracks their heads together when they bend to look, takes the clerk’s .357, buys and pays for four boxes, handcuffs the clerk and walks out wearing two police gunbelts under Mort’s suit coat. At Katz’s Drugs he shoots a pistol out of a guard’s hand and a knife out of another man’s, and tells the druggist he wants Keflex, a lot of it, now. Out of money, he leaves Mort’s gold Rolex on the counter for a two-hundred-pill bottle. The two officers arrive concussed and furious, one with a shotgun. Roland disarms both without killing either. “You’re a dangerous fool who should be sent west,” he tells the one who fired into a crowd.

He drives their cruiser to Christopher Street and the A train. A patrolman’s bullet finds the silver lighter Mort carries for his boss’s cigarettes, and Mort catches fire. Burning, he runs down into the station; Roland stuffs the shells and the Keflex into Mort’s underwear, vaults the turnstiles, and, as the train comes in, sends one thought back through the door: look now. Two faces look out of it, the negative and positive of the same woman. Roland pushes Mort under the train, which cuts him in half at the waist, and lunges back through the door with the ammunition and the pills.

Each woman has seen the other, and both remember the brick and the platform. For the first time since the brick, the woman on the beach is whole. She pulls Roland’s guns. Eddie is at the waterline with lobstrosities on him and Roland too weak to stand; then both of Roland’s revolvers are firing at once, and the new woman shoots the creatures off him.

Six days inland on lobstrosity meat and brackish water. Roland is delirious, calling Eddie “Alain” and “Cuthbert” and the woman “Susan”; the Keflex works. They reach woods and leave the sea behind. Roland shoots a deer, and the woman takes the knife from him and dresses it. She is Susannah now — Odetta’s middle name, joined to Eddie’s surname by ka rather than by any ceremony. Roland takes the jawbone out of his purse: it will tell them which way to go.

Eddie says he followed Henry to poison and may be following Roland to something worse. Roland does not argue. They will go on, he says, and fight, and be hurt, and in the end they will stand. The book ends with no Tower in sight and a paradox planted: Jake is alive in 1977 and dead in Roland’s memory, and The Waste Lands opens on what that does to him.

“He would come to the Dark Tower and there he would sing their names.”