The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King Read Free Book Online

I’d mind like hell, I picked up a little cold down in the Bahamas and the air-conditioning in here is real high and I’m afraid it might turn into pneumonia and they say oh is that so, do you always sweat like that when the air-conditioning’s too high, Mr. Dean, you do, well, excuse us all to hell, now do it, and you do it, and they say maybe you better take off the t-shirt too, because you look like maybe you got some kind of a medical problem, buddy, those bulges under your pits look like maybe they could be some kind of lymphatic tumors or something, and you don’t even bother to say anything else, it’s like a center-fielder who doesn’t even bother to chase the ball when it’s hit a certain way, he just turns around and watches it go into the upper deck, because when it’s gone it’s gone, so you take off the t-shirt and hey, looky here, you’re some lucky kid, those aren’t tumors, unless they’re what you might call tumors on the corpus of society, yuk-yuk-yuk, those things look more like a couple of baggies held there with Scotch strapping tape, and by the way, don’t worry about that smell, son, that’s just goose. It’s cooked.
    He reached behind him and pulled the locking knob. The lights in the head brightened. The sound of the motors was a soft drone. He turned toward the mirror, wanting to see how bad he looked, and suddenly a terrible, pervasive feeling swept over him: a feeling of being watched.
    Hey, come on, quit it, he thought uneasily. You’re supposed to be the most unparanoid guy in the world. That’s why they sent you. That’s why—
    But it suddenly seemed those were not his own eyes in the mirror, not Eddie Dean’s hazel, almost-green eyes that had melted so many hearts and allowed him to part so many pretty sets of legs during the last third of his twenty-one years, not his eyes but those of a stranger. Not hazel but a blue the color of fading Levis. Eyes that were chilly, precise, unexpected marvels of calibration. Bombardier’s eyes.
    Reflected in them he saw—clearly saw—a seagull swooping down over a breaking wave and snatching something from it.
    He had time to think What in God’s name is this shit? and then he knew it wasn’t going to pass; he was going to throw up after all.
    In the half-second before he did, in the half-second he went on looking into the mirror, he saw those blue eyes disappear . . . but before that happened there was suddenly the feeling of being two people . . . of being possessed, like the little girl in The Exorcist.
    Clearly he felt a new mind inside his own mind, and heard a thought not as his own thought but more like a voice from a radio:
    I’ve come through. I’m in the sky-carriage.
    There was something else, but Eddie didn’t hear it. He was too busy throwing up into the basin as quietly as he could.
    When he was done, before he had even wiped his mouth, something happened which had never happened to him before. For one frightening moment there was nothing—only a blank interval. As if asingle line in a column of newsprint had been neatly and completely inked out.
    What is this? Eddie thought helplessly. What the hell is this shit?
    Then he had to throw up again, and maybe that was just as well; whatever you might say against it, regurgitation had at least this much in its favor: as long as you were doing it, you couldn’t think of anything else.
3
    I’ve come through. I’m in the sky-carriage, the gunslinger thought. And, a second later: He sees me in the mirror!
    Roland pulled back—did not leave but pulled back, like a child retreating to the furthest corner of a very long room. He was inside the sky-carriage; he was also inside a man who was not himself. Inside The Prisoner. In that first moment, when he had been close to the front (it was the only way he could describe it), he had been more than inside; he had almost been the man. He felt the man’s illness, whatever it was, and sensed that the man was about to retch. Roland