The Drawing of the Three

How it opens

Roland wakes on the shore of the Western Sea missing two fingers and a toe, feverish, with the infection from a monster's bite climbing his right arm. Walking north up the beach, he comes to a door that stands by itself on the sand, with THE PRISONER written on it in the High Speech. Through the door he looks out of the eyes of Eddie Dean, a young heroin addict on a plane to New York with a pound of cocaine under each arm, and then he steps through into Eddie's mind. A flight attendant, Jane Dorning, notices that the passenger's eyes have changed from hazel to blue, and then Roland carries a sandwich back through the door and eats it in his own body on the beach.

Who you meet early

• Roland DeschainRoland, the last gunslinger, is alone on the shore of the Western Sea, still bound for the Tower, with the boy Jake dead in the mountains behind him. After an attack by one of the shelled creatures from the sea, he is missing two fingers of his right hand and a toe, and the bite is infected.
• Eddie DeanEddie Dean, twenty-one, is flying back to New York from Nassau with a pound of cocaine under each arm, smuggling for a New York drug boss named Balazar. He is going cool turkey from heroin, and his older brother, Henry, is a junkie too.