This time the voice that greeted them from the Doorway Cave's depths belonged to a woman Eddie had never actually met, although he had heard of her - aye, much, say thankya - and knew her voice at once.
"She's gone, ye great dickled galoot!" cried Rhea of the Coos from the darkness. "Taken her labor elsewhere, ye ken! And I've no doubt that when her cannibal baby finally comes out, it'll munch its mother north from the cunt, aye!" She laughed, a perfect (and perfectly grating) Witch Hazel cackle. "No titty-milk fer this one, ye grobbut lost lad! This one'll have meat!"
"Shut up!" Eddie screamed into the darkness. "Shut up, you... you f**king phantom!"
And for a wonder, the phantom did.
Eddie looked around. He saw Tower's goddamned two-shelf bookcase - first editions under glass, may they do ya fine - but no pink metal-mesh bag with mid-world lanes printed on it; no engraved ghostwood box, either. The unfound door was still here, its hinges still hooked to nothing, but now it had a strangely dull look. Not just unfound but unremembered; only one more useless piece of a world that had moved on.
"No," Eddie said. "No, I don't accept that. The power is still here. The power is still here ."
He turned to Roland, but Roland wasn't looking at him. Incredibly, Roland was studying the books. As if the search for Susannah had begun to bore him and he was looking for a good read to pass the time.
Eddie took Roland's shoulder, turned him. "What happened, Roland? Do you know?"
"What happened is obvious," Roland said. Callahan had come up beside him. Only Jake, who was visiting the Doorway Cave for the first time, hung back at the entrance. "She took her wheelchair as far as she could, then went on her hands and knees to the foot of the path, no mean feat for a woman who's probably in labor. At the foot of the path, someone - probably Andy, just as Jake says - left her a ride."
"If it was Slightman, I'll go back and kill him myself."
Roland shook his head. "Not Slightman." But Slightman might know for sure , he thought. It probably didn't matter, but he liked loose ends no more than he liked crooked pictures hanging on walls.
"Hey, bro, sorry to tell you this, but your poke-bitch is dead," Henry Dean called up from deep in the cave. He didn't sound sorry; he sounded gleeful. "Damn thing ate her all the way up! Only stopped long enough on its way to the brain to spit out her teeth!"
"Shut up !" Eddie screamed.
"The brain's the ultimate brain-food, you know," Henry said. He had assumed a mellow, scholarly tone. "Revered by cannibals the world over. That's quite the chap she's got, Eddie! Cute but hongry ."
"Be still, in the name of God!" Callahan cried, and the voice of Eddie's brother ceased. For the time being, at least, all the voices ceased.
Roland went on as if he had never been interrupted. "She came here. Took the bag. Opened the box so that Black Thirteen would open the door. Mia, this is - not Susannah but Mia. Daughter of none. And then, still carrying the open box, she went through. On the other side she closed the box, closing the door. Closing it against us."
"No," Eddie said, and grabbed the crystal doorknob with the rose etched into its geometric facets. It wouldn't turn. There was not so much as a single iota of give.
From the darkness, Elmer Chambers said: "If you'd been quicker, son, you could have saved your friend. It's your fault." And fell silent again.
"It's not real, Jake," Eddie said, and rubbed a finger across the rose. The tip of his finger came away dusty. As if the unfound door had stood here, unused as well as unfound, for a score of centuries. "It just broadcasts the worst stuff it can find in your own head."
"I was always hatin yo' guts, honky!" Detta cried triumphantly from the darkness beyond the door. "Ain't I glad to be shed of you!"
"Like that," Eddie said, cocking a thumb in the direction of the voice.
Jake nodded, pale and thoughtful. Roland, meanwhile, had turned back to Tower's bookcase.
"Roland?" Eddie tried to keep the irritation out of his voice, or at least add a little spark of humor to it, and failed at both. "Are we boring you, here?"
"No," Roland said.
"Then I wish you'd stop looking at those books and help me think of a way to open this d - "
"I know how to open it," Roland said. "The first question is where will it take us now that the ball is gone? The second question is where do we want to go? After Mia, or to the place where Tower and his friend are hiding from Balazar and his friends?"
"We go after Susannah!" Eddie shouted. "Have you been listening to any of the shit those voices are saying? They're saying it's a cannibal! My wife could be giving birth to some kind of a cannibal monster right now , and if you think anything's more important than that - "
"The Tower's more important," Roland said. "And somewhere on the other side of this door there's a man whose name is Tower. A man who owns a certain vacant lot and a certain rose growing there."
Eddie looked at him uncertainly. So did Jake and Callahan. Roland turned again to the little bookcase. It looked strange indeed, here in this rocky darkness.