Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower #5)

Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower #5) Page 9

ONE

"Gray horses," Eddie said.

"Aye," Roland agreed.

"Fifty or sixty of them, all on gray horses."

"Aye, so they did say."

"And didn't think it the least bit strange," Eddie mused.

"No. They didn't seem to."

"Is it?"

"Fifty or sixty horses, all the same color? I'd say so, yes."

"These Calla-folk raise horses themselves."

"Aye."

"Brought some for us to ride." Eddie, who had never ridden a horse in his life, was grateful that at least had been put off, but didn't say so.

"Aye, tethered over the hill."

"You know that for a fact?"

"Smelled em. I imagine the robot had the keeping of them."

"Why would these folks take fifty or sixty horses, all the same shade, as a matter of course?"

"Because they don't really think about the Wolves or anything to do with them," Roland said. "They're too busy being afraid, I think."

Eddie whistled five notes that didn't quite make a melody. Then he said, "Gray horses."

Roland nodded. "Gray horses."

They looked at each other for a moment, then laughed. Eddie loved it when Roland laughed. The sound was dry, as ugly as the calls of those giant blackbirds he called rusties... but he loved it. Maybe it was just that Roland laughed so seldom.

It was late afternoon. Overhead, the clouds had thinned enough to turn a pallid blue that was almost the color of sky. The Overholser party had returned to their camp. Susannah and Jake had gone back along the forest road to pick more muffin-balls. After the big meal they'd packed away, none of them wanted anything heavier. Eddie sat on a log, whittling. Beside him sat Roland, with all their guns broken down and spread out before him on a piece of deerskin. He oiled the pieces one by one, holding each bolt and cylinder and barrel up to the daylight for a final look before setting it aside for reassembly.

"You told them it was out of their hands," Eddie said, "but they didn't ken that any more than they did the business about all those gray horses. And you didn't press it."

"Only would have distressed them," Roland said. "There was a saying in Gilead: Let evil wait for the day on which it must fall."

"Uh-huh," Eddie said. "There was a saying in Brooklyn: You can't get snot off a suede jacket." He held up the object he was making. It would be a top, Roland thought, a toy for a baby. And again he wondered how much Eddie might know about the woman he lay down with each night. The women . Not on the top of his mind, but underneath. "If you decide we can help them, then we have to help them. That's what Eld's Way really boils down to, doesn't it?"

"Yes," Roland said.

"And if we can't get any of them to stand with us, we stand alone."

"Oh, I'm not worried about that," Roland said. He had a saucer filled with light, sweet gun-oil. Now he dipped the corner of a chamois rag into it, picked up the spring-clip of Jake's Ruger, and began to clean it. "Tian Jaffords would stand with us, come to that. Surely he has a friend or two who'd do the same regardless of what their meeting decides. In a pinch, there's his wife."

"And if we get them both killed, what about their kids? They have five. Also, I think there's an old guy in the picture. One of em's Grampy. They probably take care of him, too."

Roland shrugged. A few months ago, Eddie would have mistaken that gesture - and the gunslinger's expressionless face -  for indifference. Now he knew better. Roland was as much a prisoner of his rules and traditions as Eddie had ever been of heroin.

"What if we get killed in this little town, screwing around with these Wolves?" Eddie asked. "Isn't your last thought gonna be something like, 'I can't believe what a putz I was, throwing away my chance to get to the Dark Tower in order to take up for a bunch of snotnose brats.' Or similar sentiments."

"Unless we stand true, we'll never get within a thousand miles of the Tower," Roland said. "Would you tell me you don't feel that?"

Eddie couldn't, because he did. He felt something else, as well: a species of bloodthirsty eagerness. He actually wanted to fight again. Wanted to have a few of these Wolves, whatever they were, in the sights of one of Roland's big revolvers. There was no sense kidding himself about the truth: he wanted to take a few scalps.

Or wolf-masks.

"What's really troubling you, Eddie? I'd have you speak while it's just you and me." The gunslinger's mouth quirked in a thin, slanted smile. "Do ya, I beg."

"Shows, huh?"

Roland shrugged and waited.

Eddie considered the question. It was a big question. Facing it made him feel desperate and inadequate, pretty much the way he'd felt when faced with the task of carving the key that would letjake Chambers through into their world. Only then he'd had the ghost of his big brother to blame, Henry whispering deep down in his head that he was no good, never had been, never would be. Now it was just the enormity of what Roland was asking. Because everything was troubling him, everything was wrong. Everything . Or maybe wrong was the wrong word, and by a hundred and eighty degrees. Because in another way things seemed too right , too perfect, too...

"Arrrggghh," Eddie said. He grabbed bunches of hair on both sides of his head and pulled. "I can't think of a way to say it."

"Then say the first thing that comes into your mind. Don't hesitate."

"Nineteen," Eddie said. "This whole deal has gone nineteen."

He fell backward onto the fragrant forest floor, covered his eyes, and kicked his feet like a kid doing a tantrum. He thought: Maybe killing a few Wolves will set me right. Maybe that's all it will take .

TWO

Roland gave him a full minute by count and then said, "Do you feel better?"

Eddie sat up. "Actually I do."

Roland nodded, smiling a little. "Then can you say more? If you can't, we'll let it go, but I've come to respect your feelings, Eddie - far more than you realize - and if you'd speak, I'd hear."

What he said was true. The gunslinger's initial feelings for Eddie had wavered between caution and contempt for what Roland saw as his weakness of character. Respect had come more slowly. It had begun in Balazar's office, when Eddie had fought naked. Very few men Roland had known could have done that. It had grown with his realization of how much Eddie was like Cuthbert. Then, on the mono, Eddie had acted with a kind of desperate creativity that Roland could admire but never equal. Eddie Dean was possessed of Cuthbert Allgood's always puzzling and sometimes annoying sense of the ridiculous; he was also possessed of Alain Johns's deep flashes of intuition. Yet in the end, Eddie was like neither of Roland's old friends. He was sometimes weak and self-centered, but possessed of deep reservoirs of courage and courage's good sister, what Eddie himself sometimes called "heart."

But it was his intuition Roland wanted to tap now.

"All right, then," Eddie said. "Don't stop me. Don't ask questions. Just listen."

Roland nodded. And hoped Susannah and Jake wouldn't come back, at least not just yet.

"I look in the sky - up there where the clouds are breaking right this minute - and I see the number nineteen written in blue."

Roland looked up. And yes, it was there. He saw it, too. But he also saw a cloud like a turtle, and another hole in the thinning dreck that looked like a gunnywagon.

"I look in the trees and see nineteen. Into the fire, see nineteen. Names make nineteen, like Overholser's and Callahan's. But that's just what I can say , what I can see , what I can get hold of." Eddie was speaking with desperate speed, looking directly into Roland's eyes. "Here's another thing. It has to do with todash. I know you guys sometimes think everything reminds me of getting high, and maybe that's right, but Roland, going todash is like being stoned."

Eddie always spoke to him of these things as if Roland had never put anything stronger than graf into his brain and body in all his long life, and that was far from the truth. He might remind Eddie of this at another time, but not now.

"Just being here in your world is like going todash. Because... ah, man, this is hard... Roland, everything here is real, but it's not."

Roland thought of reminding Eddie this wasn't his world, not anymore - for him the city of Lud had been the end of Mid-World and the beginning of all the mysteries that lay beyond -  but again kept his mouth closed.

Eddie grasped a handful of duff, scooping up fragrant needles and leaving five black marks in the shape of a hand on the forest floor. "Real," he said. "I can feel it and smell it." He put the handful of needles to his mouth and ran out his tongue to touch them. "I can taste it. And at the same time, it's as unreal as a nineteen you might see in the fire, or that cloud in the sky that looks like a turtle. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"I understand it very well," Roland murmured.

"The people are real. You... Susannah...Jake... that guy Gasher who snatched Jake... Overholser and the Slightmans.

"But the way stuff from my world keeps showing up over here, that's not real. It's not sensible or logical, either, but that's not what I mean. It's just not real Why do people over here sing 'Hey Jude'? I don't know. That cyborg bear, Shardik - where do I know that name from? Why did it remind me of rabbits? All that shit about the Wizard of Oz, Roland - all that happened to us, I have no doubt of it, but at the same time it doesn't seem real to me. It seems like todash. Like nineteen. And what happens after the Green Palace? Why, we walk into the woods, just like Hansel and Gretel. There's a road for us to walk on. Muffin-balls for us to pick. Civilization has ended. Everything is coming unraveled. You told us so. We saw it in Lud. Except guess what? It's not! Booya, assholes, gotcha again!"

Eddie gave a short laugh. It sounded shrill and unhealthy. When he brushed his hair back from his forehead, he left a dark smear of forest earth on his brow.

"The joke is that, out here a billion miles from nowhere, we come upon a storybook town. Civilized. Decent. The kind of folks you feel you know. Maybe you don't like em all - Overholser's a little hard to swallow - but you feel you know em."

Eddie was right about that, too, Roland thought. He hadn't even seen Calla Bryn Sturgis yet, and already it reminded him of Mejis. In some ways that seemed perfectly reasonable -  farming and ranching towns the world over bore similarities to each other - but in other ways it was disturbing. Disturbing as hell . The sombrero Slightman had been wearing, for instance. Was it possible that here, thousands of miles from Mejis, the men should wear similar hats? He supposed it might be. But was it likely that Slightman's sombrero should remind Roland so strongly of the one worn by Miguel, the old mozo at Seafront in Mejis, all those years before? Or was that only his imagination?

As for that, Eddie says I have none , he thought.

"The storybook town has a fairy-tale problem," Eddie was continuing. "And so the storybook people call on a band of movie-show heroes to save them from the fairy tale villains. I know it's real - people are going to die, very likely, and the blood will be real, the screams will be real, the crying afterward will be real - but at the same time there's something about it that feels no more real than stage scenery."

"And New York?" Roland asked. "How did that feel to you?"

"The same," Eddie said. "I mean, think about it. Nineteen books left on the table after Jake took Charlie the Choo-Choo and the riddle book... and then, out of all the hoods in New York, Balazar shows up! That fuck!"

Here, here, now!" Susannah called merrily from behind them. "No profanity, boys." Jake was pushing her up the road, and her lap was full of muffin-balls. They both looked cheerful and happy. Roland supposed that eating well earlier in the day had something to do with it.

Roland said, "Sometimes that feeling of unreality goes away, doesn't it?"

"It's not exactly unreality, Roland. It - "

"Never mind splitting nails to make tacks. Sometimes it goes away. Doesn't it?"

"Yes," Eddie said. "When I'm with her."

He went to her. Bent. Kissed her. Roland watched them, troubled.

THREE

The light was fading out of the day. They sat around the fire and let it go. What little appetite they'd been able to muster had been easily satisfied by the muffin-balls Susannah and Jake had brought back to camp. Roland had been meditating on something Slightman had said, and more deeply than was probably healthy. Now he pushed it aside still half-chewed and said, "Some of us or all of us may meet later tonight in the city of New York."

"I only hope I get to go this time," Susannah said.

"That's as ka will," Roland said evenly. "The important thing is that you stay together. If there's only one who makes the journey, I think it's apt to be you who goes, Eddie. If only one makes the journey, that one should stay exactly where he... or mayhap she ... is until the bells start again."

"The kammen ," Eddie said. "That's what Andy called em."

"Do you all understand that?"

They nodded, and looking into their faces, Roland realized that each one of them was reserving the right to decide what to do when the time came, based upon the circumstances. Which was exactly right. They were either gunslingers or they weren't, after all.

He surprised himself by uttering a brief snort of a laugh.

"What's so funny?" Jake asked.

"I was just thinking that long life brings strange companions," Roland said.

"If you mean us," Eddie said, "lemme tell you something, Roland - you're not exacdy Norman Normal yourself."

"I suppose not," Roland said. "If it's a group that crosses -  two, a trio, perhaps all of us - we should join hands when the chimes start."

"Andy said we had to concentrate on each other," Eddie said. "To keep from getting lost."

Susannah surprised them all by starting to sing. Only to Roland, it sounded more like a galley-chorus - a thing made to be shouted out verse by verse - than an actual song. Yet even without a real tune to carry, her voice was melodious enough: "Children, when ye hear the music of the clarinet. . . Children, when ye hear the music of the flute! Children, when ye hear the music of the tam-bou-rine... Ye must bow down and worship the iyyy-DOL !"

"What is it?"

"A field-chant," she said. "The sort of thing my grandparents and great-grandparents might have sung while they were picking ole massa's cotton. But times change." She smiled. "I first heard it in a Greenwich Village coffee-house, back in 1962. And the man who sang it was a white blues-shouter named Dave Van Ronk."

"I bet Aaron Deepneau was there, too," Jake breathed. "Hell, I bet he was sitting at the next damn table ."

Susannah turned to him, surprised and considering. "Why do you say so, sugar?"

Eddie said, "Because he overheard Calvin Tower saying this guy Deepneau had been hanging around the Village since... what'd he say, Jake?"

"Not the Village, Bleecker Street," Jake said, laughing a little. "Mr. Tower said Mr. Deepneau was hanging around Bleecker Street back before Bob Dylan knew how to blow more than open G on his Hohner. That must be a harmonica."

"It is," Eddie said, "and while I might not bet the farm on what Jake's saying, I'd go a lot more than pocket-change. Sure, Deepneau was there. It wouldn't even surprise me to find out that Jack Andolini was tending the bar. Because that's just how things work in the Land of Nineteen."

"In any case," Roland said, "those of us who cross should stay together. And I mean within a hand's reach, all the time."

"I don't think I'll be there," Jake said.

"Why do you say so, Jake?" the gunslinger asked, surprised.

"Because I'll never fall asleep," Jake said. "I'm too excited."

But eventually they all slept.

FOUR

He knows it's a dream, something brought on by no more than Slightman's chance remark, and yet he can't escape it . Always look for the back door, Cort used to tell them, but if there's a back door in this dream, Roland cannot find it . I heard of Jericho Hill and such blood-and-thunder tales of pretend, that was what Eisenhart's foreman had said, only Jericho Hill had seemed real enough to Roland. Why would it not? He had been there. It had been the end of them. The end of a whole world .

The day is suffocatingly hot; the sun reaches its roofpeak and then seems to stay there, as if the hours have been suspended. Below them is a long sloping field filled with great gray-black stone faces, eroded statues left by people who are long gone, and Grissom's men advance relentlessly among them as Roland and his final few companions withdraw ever upward, shooting as they go. The gunfire is constant, unending, the sound of bullets whining off the stone faces a shrill counterpoint that sinks into their heads like the bloodthirsty whine of mosquitoes. Jamie DeCurry has been killed by a sniper, perhaps Grissom's eagle-eyed son or Grissom himself. With Alain the end was far worse; he was shot in the dark the night before the final battle by his two best friends, a stupid error, a horrible death. There was no help. DeMullet's column was ambushed and slaughtered at Rimrocks and when Alain rode back after midnight to tell them, Roland and Cuthbert... the sound of their guns... and oh, when Alain cried out their names  -

And now they're at the top and there's nowhere left to run. Behind them to the east is a shale-crumbly drop to the Salt  - what five hundred miles south of here is called the Clean Sea. To the west is the hill of the stone faces, and Grissom's screaming, advancing men. Roland and his own men have killed hundreds, but there are still two thousand left, and that's a conservative estimate. Two thousand men, their howling faces painted blue, some armed with guns and even a few with Bolts  -  against a dozen. That's all that's left of them now, here at the top of Jericho Hill, under the burning sky. Jamie dead, Alain dead under the guns of his best friends  - stolid, dependable Alain, who could have ridden on to safety but chose not to  - and Cuthbert has been shot. How many times'? Five"? Six? His shirt is soaked crimson to his skin. One side of his face has been drowned in blood; the eye on that side bulges sightlessly on his cheek. Yet he still has Roland's horn, the one which was blown by Arthur Eld, or so the stories did say. He will not give it back. "For I blow it sweeter than you ever did, " he tells Roland, laughing. "You can have it again when I'm dead. Neglect not to pluck it up, Roland, for it's your property ."

Cuthbert Allgood, who had once ridden into the Barony of Mejis with a rook's skull mounted on the pommel of his saddle. "The lookout, " he had called it, and talked to it just as though it were alive, for such was his fancy and sometimes he drove Roland half-mad with his foolishness, and here he is under the burning sun, staggering toward him with a smoking revolver in one hand and Eld's Horn in the other, blood-bolted and half-blinded and dying... but still laughing. Ah dear gods, laughing and laughing.

"Roland!"he cries. "We've been betrayed! We're outnumbered! Our backs are to the sea! We've got em right where we want em! Shall we charge?"

And Roland understands he is right. If their quest for the Dark Tower is really to end here on Jericho Hill  - betrayed by one of their own and then overwhelmed by this barbaric remnant of John Farson's army  - then let it end splendidly .

"Aye!" he shouts. "Aye, very well. Ye of the castle, to me! Gunslingers, to me! To me, I say!"

"As for gunslingers, Roland," Cuthbert says, "I am here. And we are the last ."

Roland first looks at him, then embraces him under that hideous sky. He can feel Cuthbert's burning body, its suicidal trembling thinness. And yet he's laughing. Bert is still laughing.

"All right ," Roland says hoarsely, looking around at his few remaining men. "We're going into them. And will accept no quarter. "

"Nope, no quarter, absolutely none , " Cuthbert says .

"We will not accept their surrender if offered. "

"Under no circumstances!" Cuthbert agrees, laughing harder than ever. "Not even should all two thousand lay down their arms."

"Then blow that fucking horn."

Cuthbert raises the horn to his bloody lips and blows a great blast  -  the final blast, for when it drops from his fingers a minute later (or perhaps it's five, or ten; time has no meaning in that final battle), Roland will let it lie in the dust. In his grief and bloodlust he will forget all about Eld's Horn .

"And now, my friends  - hile !"

"Hile!" the last dozen cry beneath that blazing sun. It is the end of them, the end of Gilead, the end of everything, and he no longer cares. The old red fury, dry and maddening, is settling over his mind, drowning all thought . One last time, then, he thinks . Let it be so.

"To me!" cries Roland of Gilead. "Forward! For the Tower! "

"The Tower!" Cuthbert cries out beside him, reeling. He holds Eld's Horn up to the sky in one hand, his revolver in the other.

"No prisoners!" Roland screams. "NO PRISONERS!"

They rush forward and down toward Grissom's blue-faced horde, he and Cuthbert in the lead, and as they pass the first of the great gray-blackfaces leaning in the high grass, spears and bolts and bullets flying all around them, the chimes begin. It is a melody far beyond beautiful; it threatens to tear him to pieces with its stark loveliness.

Not now, he thinks , ah, gods, not now - let me finish it Let me finish it with my friend at my side and have peace at last. Please.

He reaches for Cuthbert's hand. For one moment he feels the touch of his friend's blood-sticky fingers, there on Jericho Hill where his brave and laughing existence was snuffed out... and then the fingers touching his are gone. Or rather, his have melted clean through Bert's. He is falling, he is falling, the world is darkening, he is falling, the chimes are playing, the kammen are playing ("Sounds Hawaiian, doesn't it?") and he is falling, Jericho Hill is gone, Eld's Horn is gone, there's darkness and red letters in the darkness, some are Great Letters, enough so he can read what they say, the words say  -

FIVE

They said don't walk. Although, Roland saw, people were crossing the street in spite of the sign. They would take a quick look in the direction of the flowing traffic, and then go for it. One fellow crossed in spite of an oncoming yellow tack-see. The tack-see swerved and blared its horn. The walking man yelled fearlessly at it, then shot up the middle finger of his right hand and shook it after the departing vehicle. Roland had an idea that this gesture probably did not mean long days and pleasant nights.

It was night in New York City, and although there were people moving everywhere, none were of his ka-tet. Here, Roland admitted to himself, was one contingency he had hardly expected: that the one person to show up would be him. Not Eddie, but him. Where in the name of all the gods was he supposed to go? And what was he supposed to do when he got there?

Remember your own advice , he thought. "If you show up alone," you told them, "stay where you are. "

But did that mean to just roost on... he looked up at the green street-sign... on the corner of Second Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, doing nothing but watching a sign change from don't walk in red to walk in white?

While he was pondering this, a voice called out from behind him, high and delirious with joy. "Roland! Sugarbunch! Turn around and see me! See me very well !"

Roland turned, already knowing what he would see, but smiling all the same. How terrible to relive that day at Jericho Hill, but what an antidote was this - Susannah Dean, flying down Fifty-fourth Street toward him, laughing and weeping with joy, her arms held out.

"My legs!" She was screaming it at the top of her voice. "My legs! I have my legs back! Oh Roland, honeydoll, praise the Man Jesus, I HAVE MY LEGS BACK !"

SIX

She threw herself into his embrace, kissing his cheek, his neck, his brow, his nose, his lips, saying it over and over again: "My legs, oh Roland do you see, I can walk, I can run , I have my legs, praise God and all the saints, I have my legs back ."

"Give you every joy of them, dear heart," Roland said. Falling into the patois of the place in which he had lately found himself was an old trick of his - or perhaps it was habit. For now it was the patois of the Calla. He supposed if he spent much time here in New York, he'd soon find himself waving his middle finger at tack-sees.

But I'd always be an outsider , he thought. Why, I can't even say aspirin. Every time I try, the word comes out wrong .

She took his right hand, dragged it down with surprising force, and placed it on her shin. "Do you feel it?" she demanded. "I mean, I'm not just imagining it, am I?"

Roland laughed. "Did you not run to me as if with wings on em like Raf? Yes, Susannah." He put his left hand, the one with all the fingers, on her left leg. "One leg and two legs, each with a foot below them." He frowned. "We ought to get you some shoes, though."

"Why? This is a dream. It has to be."

He looked at her steadily, and slowly her smile faded.

"Not? Really not?"

"We've gone todash. We are really here. If you cut your foot, Mia, you'll have a cut foot tomorrow, when you wake up aside the campfire."

The other name had come out almost - but not quite - on its own. Now he waited, all his muscles wire-tight, to see if she would notice. If she did, he'd apologize and tell her he'd gone todash directly from a dream of someone he'd known long ago (although there had only been one woman of any importance after Susan Delgado, and her name had not been Mia).

But she didn't notice, and Roland wasn't much surprised.

Because she was getting ready to go on another of her hunting expeditions  - as Mia  - when the kammen rang. And unlike Susannah, Mia has legs. She banquets on rich foods in a great hall, she talks with all her friends, she didn't go to Morehouse or to no house, and she has legs. So this one has legs. This one is both women, although she doesn't know it .

Suddenly Roland found himself hoping that they wouldn't meet Eddie. He might sense the difference even if Susannah herself didn't. And that could be bad. If Roland had had three wishes, like the foundling prince in a child's bedtime story, right now all three would have been for the same thing: to get through this business in Calla Bryn Sturgis before Susannah's pregnancy - Mia's pregnancy - became obvious. Having to deal with both things at the same time would be hard.

Perhaps impossible.

She was looking at him with wide, questioning eyes. Not because he'd called her by a name that wasn't hers, but because she wanted to know what they should do next.

"It's your city," he said. "I would see the bookstore. And the vacant lot." He paused. "And the rose. Can you take me?"

"Well," she said, looking around, "it's my city, no doubt about that, but Second Avenue sure doesn't look like it did back in the days when Detta got her kicks shoplifting in Macy's."

"So you can't find the bookstore and the vacant lot?" Roland was disappointed but far from desolate. There would be a way. There was always a -

"Oh, no problem there," she said. "The streets are the same. New York's just a grid, Roland, with the avenues running one way and the streets the other. Easy as pie. Come on."

The sign had gone back to don't walk, but after a quick glance uptown, Susannah took his arm and they crossed Fifty-fourth to the other side. Susannah strode fearlessly in spite of her bare feet. The blocks were short but crowded with exotic shops. Roland couldn't help goggling, but his lack of attention seemed safe enough; although the sidewalks were crowded, no one crashed into them. Roland could hear his bootheels clopping on the sidewalk, however, and could see the shadows they were casting in the light of the display windows.

Almost here , he thought. Were the force that brought us any more powerful, we would be here .

And, he realized, the force might indeed grow stronger, assuming that Callahan was right about what was hidden under the floor of his church. As they drew closer to the town and to the source of the thing doing this...

Susannah twitched his arm. Roland stopped immediately. "Is it your feet?" he asked.

"No," she said, and Roland saw she was frightened. "Why is it so dark ?"

"Susannah, it's night."

She gave his arm an impatient shake. "I know that, I'm not blind. Can't you..." She hesitated. "Can't you feel it?"

Roland realized he could. For one thing, the darkness on Second Avenue really wasn't dark at all. The gunslinger still couldn't comprehend the prodigal way in which these people of New York squandered the things those of Gilead had held most rare and precious. Paper; water; refined oil; artificial light. This last was everywhere. There was the glow from the store windows (although most were closed, the displays were still lit), the even harsher glow from a popkin-selling place called Blimpie's, and over all this, peculiar orange electric lamps that seemed to drench the very air with light. Yet Susannah was right. There was a black feel to the air in spite of the orange lamps. It seemed to surround the people who walked this street. It made him think about what Eddie had said earlier: This whole deal has gone nineteen .

But this darkness, more felt than seen, had nothing to do with nineteen. You had to subtract six in order to understand what was going on here. And for the first time, Roland really believed Callahan was right.

"Black Thirteen," he said.

"What?"

"It's brought us here, sent us todash, and we feel it all around us. It's not the same as when I flew inside the grapefruit, but it's like that."

"It feels bad," she said, speaking low.

"It is bad," he said. "Black Thirteen's very likely the most terrible object from the days of Eld still remaining on the face of the earth. Not that the Wizard's Rainbow was from then; I'm sure it existed even before - "

"Roland! Hey, Roland! Suze!"

They looked up and in spite of his earlier misgivings, Roland was immensely relieved to see not only Eddie, but Jake and Oy, as well. They were about a block and a half farther along. Eddie was waving. Susannah waved back exuberantly. Roland grabbed her arm before she started to run, which was clearly her intention.

"Mind your feet," he said. "You don't need to pick up some sort of infection and carry it back to the other side."

They compromised at a rapid walk. Eddie and Jake, both shod, ran to meet them. Pedestrians moved out of their way without looking, or even breaking their conversations, Roland saw, and then observed that wasn't quite true. There was a little boy, surely no older than three, walking sturdily along next to his mother. The woman seemed to notice nothing, but as Eddie and Jake swung around them, the toddler watched with wide, wondering eyes... and then actually stretched out a hand, as if to stroke the briskly trotting Oy.

Eddie pulled ahead of Jake and arrived first. He held Susannah out at arm's length, looking at her. His expression, Roland saw, was really quite similar to that of the tot.

"Well? What do you think, sugar?" Susannah spoke nervously, like a woman who has come home to her husband with some radical new hairdo.

"A definite improvement," Eddie said. "I don't need em to love you, but they're way beyond good and into the land of excellent. Christ, now you're an inch taller than I am!"

Susannah saw this was true and laughed. Oy sniffed at the ankle that hadn't been there the last time he'd seen this woman, and then he laughed, too. It was an odd barky-bark of a sound, but quite clearly a laugh for all that.

"Like your legs, Suze," Jake said, and the perfunctory quality of this compliment made Susannah laugh again. The boy didn't notice; he had already turned to Roland. "Do you want to see the bookstore?"

"Is there anything to see?"

Jake's face clouded. "Actually, not much. It's closed."

"I would see the vacant lot, if there's time before we're sent back," Roland said. "And the rose."

"Do they hurt?" Eddie asked Susannah. He was looking at her closely indeed.

"They feel fine," she said, laughing. "Fine . "

"You look different."

"I bet!" she said, and executed a littie barefoot jig. It had been moons and moons since she had last danced, but the exultancy she so clearly felt made up for any lack of grace. A woman wearing a business suit and swinging a briefcase bore down on the ragged littie party of wanderers, then abruptly veered off, actually taking a few steps into the street to get around them. "You bet I do, I got legs!"

"Just like the song says," Eddie told her.

"Huh?"

"Never mind," he said, and slipped an arm around her waist. But again Roland saw him give her that searching, questioning look. But with luck he'll leave it alone , Roland thought.

And that was what Eddie did. He kissed the corner of her mouth, then turned to Roland. "So you want to see the famous vacant lot and the even more famous rose, huh? Well, so do I. Lead on, Jake."

SEVEN

Jake led them down Second Avenue, pausing only long enough so they could all take a quick peek into The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind. No one was wasting light in this shop, however, and there really wasn't much to see. Roland was hoping for a look at the menu sign, but it was gone.

Reading his mind in the matter-of-fact way of people who share khef, Jake said, "He probably changes it every day."

"Maybe," Roland said. He looked in through the window a moment longer, saw nothing but darkened shelves, a few tables, and the counter Jake had mentioned - the one where the old fellows sat drinking coffee and playing this world's version of Casdes. Nothing to see, but something to feel, even through the glass: despair and loss. If it had been a smell, Roland thought, it would have been sour and a bit stale. The smell of failure. Maybe of good dreams that never grew. Which made it the perfect lever for someone like Enrico "Il Roche "Balazar.

"Seen enough?" Eddie asked.

"Yes. Let's go."

EIGHT

For Roland, the eight-block journey from Second and Fifty-fourth to Second and Forty-sixth was like visiting a country in which he had until that moment only half-believed. How much stranger must it be for Jake ? he wondered. The bum who'd asked the boy for a quarter was gone, but the restaurant he'd been sitting near was there: Chew Chew Mama's. This was on the corner of Second and Fifty-second. A block farther down was the record store, Tower of Power. It was still open - according to an overhead clock that told the time in large electric dots, it was only fourteen minutes after eight in the evening. Loud sounds were pouring out of the open door. Guitars and drums. This world's music. It reminded him of the sacrificial music played by the Grays, back in the city of Lud, and why not? This was Lud, in some twisted, otherwhere-and-when way. He was sure of it.

"It's the Rolling Stones," Jake said, "but not the one that was playing on the day I saw the rose. That one was 'Paint It Black.' "

"Don't you recognize this one?" Eddie asked.

"Yeah, but I can't remember the title."

"Oh, but you should," Eddie said. "It's 'Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown.'"

Susannah stopped, looked around. "Jake?"

Jake nodded. "He's right."

Eddie, meanwhile, had fished a piece of newspaper from the security-gated doorway next to Tower of Power Records. A section of The New York Times , in fact.

"Hon, didn't your ma ever teach you that gutter-trolling is generally not practiced by the better class of people?" Susannah asked.

Eddie ignored her. "Look at this," he said. "All of you."

Roland bent close, half-expecting to see news of another great plague, but there was nothing so shattering. At least not as far as he could tell.

"Read me what it says," he asked Jake. "The letters swim in and out of my mind. I think it's because we're todash - caught in between - "

"RHODESIAN FORCES TIGHTEN HOLD ON MOZAMBIQUE VILLAGES," Jake read, " TWO CARTER AIDES PREDICT A SAVING OF BILLIONS IN WELFARE PLAN. And down here, CHINESE DISCLOSE THAT 1976 QUAKE WAS DEADLIEST IN FOUR CENTURIES.

Also - "

"Who's Carter?" Susannah asked. "Is he the President before... Ronald Reagan ?" She garnished the last two words with a large wink. Eddie had so far been unable to convince her that he was serious about Reagan's being President. Nor would she believe Jake when the boy told her he knew it sounded crazy, but the idea was at least faintly plausible because Reagan had been governor of California. Susannah had simply laughed at this and nodded, as if giving him high marks for creativity. She knew Eddie had talked Jake into backing up his fish story, but she would not be hooked. She supposed she could see Paul Newman as President, maybe even Henry Fonda, who had looked presidential enough in Fail-Safe , but the host of Death Valley Days? Not on your bottom.

"Never mind Carter," Eddie said. "Look at the date ."

Roland tried, but it kept swimming in and out. It would almost settle into Great Letters that he could read, and then fall back into gibberish. "What is it, for your father's sake?"

"June second," Jake said. He looked at Eddie. "But if time's the same here and over on the other side, shouldn't it be June first ?"

"But it's not the same," Eddie said grimly. "It's not . Time goes by faster on this side. Game on. And the game-clock's running fast."

Roland considered. "If we come here again, it's going to be later each time, isn't it?"

Eddie nodded.

Roland went on, talking to himself as much as to the others. "Every minute we spend on the other side - the Calla side - a minute and a half goes by over here. Or maybe two."

"No, not two," Eddie said. "I'm sure it's not going double-time." But his uneasy glance back down at the date on the newspaper suggested he wasn't sure at all.

"Even if you're right," Roland said, "all we can do now is go forward."

"Toward the fifteenth of July," Susannah said. "When Balazar and his gentlemen stop playing nice."

"Maybe we ought to just let these Calla-folk do their own thing," Eddie said. "I hate to say that, Roland, but maybe we should."

"We can't do that, Eddie."

"Why not?"

"Because Callahan's got Black Thirteen," Susannah said. "Our help is his price for turning it over. And we need it."

Roland shook his head. "He'll turn it over in any case - I thought I was clear about that. He's terrified of it."

"Yeah," Eddie said. "I got that feeling, too."

"We have to help them because it's the Way of Eld," Roland told Susannah. "And because the way of ka is always the way of duty."

He thought he saw a glitter far down in her eyes, as though he'd said something funny. He supposed he had, but Susannah wasn't the one he had amused. It had been either Detta or Mia who found those ideas funny. The question was which one. Or had it been both?

"I hate how it feels here," Susannah said. "That dark feeling."

"It'll be better at the vacant lot," Jake said. He started walking, and the others followed. "The rose makes everything better. You'll see."

NINE

When Jake crossed Fiftieth, he began to hurry. On the downtown side of Forty-ninth, he began to jog. At the corner of Second and Forty-eighth, he began to run. He couldn't help it. He got a little walk help at Forty-eighth, but the sign on the post began to flash red as soon as he reached the far curb.

"Jake, wait up!" Eddie called from behind him, but Jake didn't. Perhaps couldn't. Certainly Eddie felt the pull of the thing; so did Roland and Susannah. There was a hum rising in the air, faint and sweet. It was everything the ugly black feeling around them was not.

To Roland the hum brought back memories of Mejis and Susan Delgado. Of kisses shared in a mattress of sweet grass.

Susannah remembered being with her father when she was little, crawling up into his lap and laying the smooth skin of her cheek against the rough weave of his sweater. She remembered how she would close her eyes and breathe deeply of the smell that was his smell and his alone: pipe tobacco and winter-green and the Musterole he rubbed into his wrists, where the arthritis first began to bite him at the outrageous age of twenty-five. What these smells meant to her was that everything was all right.

Eddie found himself remembering a trip to Atlantic City when he'd been very young, no more than five or six. Their mother had taken them, and at one point in the day she and Henry had gone off to get ice cream cones. Mrs. Dean had pointed at the boardwalk and had said, You put your fanny right there, Mister Man, and keep it there until we get back . And he did. He could have sat there all day, looking down the slope of the beach at the gray pull and flow of the ocean. The gulls rode just above the foam, calling to each other. Each time the waves drew back, they left a slick expanse of wet brown sand so bright he could hardly look at it without squinting. The sound of the waves was both large and lulling. I could stay here forever , he remembered thinking. I could stay here forever because it's beautiful and peaceful and... and all right. Everything here is all right .

That was what all five of them felt most strongly (for Oy felt it, too): the sense of something mat was wonderfully and beautifully all right.

Roland and Eddie grasped Susannah by the elbows without so much as an exchanged glance. They lifted her bare feet off the sidewalk and carried her. At Second and Forty-seventh the traffic was against them, but Roland threw up a hand at the oncoming headlights and cried, "Hile! Stop in the name of Gilead !"

And they did. There was a scream of brakes, a crump of a front fender meeting a rear one, and the tinkle of falling glass, but they stopped. Roland and Eddie crossed in a spotlight glare of headlights and a cacophony of horns, Susannah between them with her restored (and already very dirty) feet three inches off the ground. Their sense of happiness and tightness grew stronger as they approached the corner of Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street. Roland felt the hum of the rose racing deliriously in his blood.

Yes , Roland thought. By all the gods, yes. This is it. Perhaps not just a doorway to the Dark Tower, but the Tower itself. Gods, the strength of it! the pull of it! Cuthbert, Alain, Jamie  - if only you were here!

Jake stood on the corner of Second and Forty-sixth, looking at a board fence about five feet high. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. From the darkness beyond the fence came a strong harmonic humming. The sound of many voices, all singing together. Singing one vast open note. Here is yes , the voices said. Here is you may. Here is the good turn, the fortunate meeting, the fever that broke just before dawn and left your blood calm. Here is the wish that came true and the understanding eye. Here is the kindness you were given and thus learned to pass on. Here is the sanity and clarity you thought were lost. Here, everything is all right .

Jake turned to them. "Do you feel it?" he asked. "Do you?"

Roland nodded. So did Eddie.

"Suze?" the boy asked.

"It's almost the loveliest thing in the world, isn't it?" she said. Almost , Roland thought. She said almost . Nor did he miss the fact that her hand went to her belly and stroked as she said it.

TEN

The posters Jake remembered were there - Olivia Newton-John at Radio City Music Hall, G. Gordon Liddy and the Grots at a place called the Mercury Lounge, a horror movie called War of the Zombies , no trespassing. But -

"That's not the same," he said, pointing at a graffito in dusky pink. "It's the same color, and the printing looks like the same person did it, but when I was here before, it was a poem about the Turtle. 'See the TURTLE of enormous girth, on his shell he holds the earth.' And then something about following the Beam."

Eddie stepped closer and read this: "Oh SUSANNAH-MIO, divided girl of mine, Done parked her RIG in the DIXIE PIG, in the year of '99." He looked at Susannah. "What in the hell does that mean? Any idea, Suze?"

She shook her head. Her eyes were very large. Frightened eyes, Roland thought. But which woman was frightened? He couldn't tell. He only knew that Odetta Susannah Holmes had been divided from the beginning, and that "mio" was very close to Mia. The hum coming from the darkness behind the fence made it hard to think of these things. He wanted to go to the source of the hum right now. Needed to, as a man dying of thirst needs to go to water.

"Come on," Jake said. "We can climb right over. It's easy."

Susannah looked down at her bare, dirty feet, and took a step backward. "Not me," she said. "I can't. Not without shoes."

Which made perfect sense, but Roland thought there was more to it than that. Mia didn't want to go in there. Mia understood something dreadful might happen if she did. To her, and to her baby. For a moment he was on the verge of forcing the issue, of letting the rose take care of both the thing growing inside her and her troublesome new personality, one so strong that Susannah had shown up here with Mia's legs.

No, Roland . That was Alain's voice. Alain, who had always been strongest in the touch. Wrong time, wrong place .

"I'll stay with her," Jake said. He spoke with enormous regret but no hesitation, and Roland was swept by his love for the boy he had once allowed to die. That vast voice from the darkness beyond the fence sang of that love; he heard it. And of simple forgiveness rather than the difficult forced march of atonement? He thought it was.

"No," she said. "You go on, honeybunch. I'll be fine." She smiled at them. "This is my city too, you know. I can look out for myself. And besides - " She lowered her voice as if confiding a great secret. "I think we're kind of invisible."

Eddie was once again looking at her in that searching way, as if to ask her how she could not go with them, bare feet or no bare feet, but this time Roland wasn't worried. Mia's secret was safe, at least for the time being; the call of the rose was too strong for Eddie to be able to think of much else. He was wild to get going.

"We should stay together," Eddie said reluctantly. "So we don't get lost going back. You said so yourself, Roland."

"How far is it from here to the rose, Jake?" Roland asked. It was hard to talk with that hum singing in his ears like a wind. Hard to think.

"It's pretty much in the middle of the lot. Maybe thirty yards, but probably less."

"The second we hear the chimes," Roland said, "we run for the fence and Susannah. All three of us. Agreed?"

"Agreed," Eddie said.

"All three of us and Oy,"Jake said.

"No, Oy stays with Susannah."

Jake frowned, clearly not liking this. Roland hadn't expected him to. "Jake, Oy also has bare feet... and didn't you say there was broken glass in there?"

"Ye-eahh..." Drawn-out. Reluctant. Then Jake dropped to one knee and looked into Oy's gold-ringed eyes. "Stay with Susannah, Oy."

"Oy! Ay!" Oy stay . It was good enough for Jake. He stood up, turned to Roland, and nodded.

"Suze?" Eddie asked. "Are you sure?"

"Yes." Emphatic. No hesitation. Roland was now almost sure it was Mia in control, pulling the levers and turning the dials. Almost . Even now he wasn't positive. The hum of the rose made it impossible to be positive of anything except that everything - everything  - could be all right.

Eddie nodded, kissed the corner of her mouth, then stepped to the board fence with its odd poem: Oh SUSANNAH-MIO, divided girl of mine. He laced his fingers together into a step. Jake was into it, up, and gone like a breath of breeze.

"Ake!" Oy cried, and then was silent, sitting beside one of Susannah's bare feet.

"You next, Eddie," Roland said. He laced his remaining fingers together, meaning to give Eddie the same step Eddie had given Jake, but Eddie simply grabbed the top of the fence and vaulted over. The junkie Roland had first met in a jet plane coming into Kennedy Airport could never have done that.

Roland said, "Stay where you are. Both of you." He could have meant the woman and the billy-bumbler, but it was only the woman he looked at.

"We'll be fine," she said, and bent to stroke Oy's silky fur. "Won't we, big guy?"

"Oy!"

"Go see your rose, Roland. While you still can."

Roland gave her a last considering look, then grasped the top of the fence. A moment later he was gone, leaving Susannah and Oy alone on the most vital and vibrant streetcorner in the entire universe.

ELEVEN

Strange things happened to her as she waited.

Back the way they'd come, near Tower of Power Records, a bank clock alternately flashed the time and temperature: 8:27, 64. 8:27, 64. 8:27, 64. Then, suddenly, it was flashing 8:34, 64. 8:34, 64. She never took her eyes off it, she would swear to that. Had something gone wrong with the sign's machinery?

Must've , she thought. What else could it be ? Nothing, she supposed, but why did everything suddenly feel different? Even look different? Maybe it was my machinery that went wrong .

Oy whined and stretched his long neck toward her. As he did, she realized why things looked different. Besides somehow slipping seven uncounted minutes by her, the world had regained its former, all-too-familiar perspective. A lower perspective. She was closer to Oy because she was closer to the ground. The splendid lower legs and feet she'd been wearing when she had opened her eyes on New York were gone.

How had it happened1 ? And when? In the missing seven minutes'?

Oy whined again. This time it was almost a bark. He was looking past her, in the other direction. She turned that way. Halfa dozen people were crossing Forty-sixth toward them. Five were normal. The sixth was a white-faced woman in a moss-splotched dress. The sockets of her eyes were empty and black. Her mouth hung open seemingly all the way down to her breastbone, and as Susannah watched, a green worm crawled over the lower lip. Those crossing with her gave her her own space, just as the other pedestrians on Second Avenue had given Roland and his friends theirs. Susannah guessed that in both cases, the more normal promenaders sensed something out of the ordinary and steered clear. Only this woman wasn't todash.

This woman was dead.

TWELVE

The hum rose and rose as the three of them stumbled across the trash -  and brick-littered wilderness of the vacant lot. As before, Jake saw faces in every angle and shadow. He saw Gasher and Hoots; Tick-Tock and Flagg; he saw Eldred Jonas's gunbunnies, Depape and Reynolds; he saw his mother and father and Greta Shaw, their housekeeper, who looked a little like Edith Bunker on TV and who always remembered to cut the crusts off his sandwiches. Greta Shaw who sometimes called him 'Bama, although that was a secret, just between them.

Eddie saw people from the old neighborhood: Jimmie Polio, the kid with the clubfoot, and Tommy Fredericks, who always got so excited watching the street stickball games that he made faces and the kids called him Halloween Tommy. There was Skipper Brannigan, who would have picked a fight with Al Capone himself, had Capone shown sufficient bad judgment to come to their neighborhood, and Csaba Drabnik, the Mad Fuckin Hungarian. He saw his mother's face in a pile of broken bricks, her glimmering eyes recreated from the broken pieces of a soft-drink bottle. He saw her friend, Dora Bertollo (all the kids on the block called her Tits Bertollo because she had really big ones, big as fuckin watermelons). And of course he saw Henry. Henry standing far back in the shadows, watching him. Only Henry was smiling instead of scowling, and he looked straight. Holding out one hand and giving Eddie what looked like a thumbs-up. Go on , the rising hum seemed to whisper, and now it whispered in Henry Dean's voice. Go on, Eddie, show em what you're made of. Didn't I tell those other guys? When we were out behind Dahlie's smokin Jimmie Polio's cigarettes, didn't I tell em ? "My little bro could talk the devil into settin himself on fire,"I said. Didn't I?Yes . Yes he had. And that's the way I always felt , the hum whispered.Ialways loved you. Sometimes I put you down, but I always loved you. You were my little man .

Eddie began to cry. And these were good tears.

Roland saw all the phantoms of his life in this shadowed, brick-strewn ruin, from his mother and his cradle-amah right up to their visitors from Calla Bryn Sturgis. And as they walked, that sense of Tightness grew. A feeling that all his hard decisions, all the pain and loss and spilled blood, had not been for nothing, after all. There was a reason. There was a purpose. There was life and love. He heard it all in the song of the rose, and he too began to cry. Mostly with relief. Getting here had been a hard journey. Many had died. Yet here they lived; here they sang with the rose. His life had not all been a dry dream after all.

They joined hands and stumbled forward, helping each other to avoid the nail-studded boards and the holes into which an ankle could plunge and twist and perhaps break. Roland didn't know if one could break a bone while in the todash state, but he had no urge to find out.

"This is worth everything," he said hoarsely.

Eddie nodded. "I'll never stop now. Might not stop even if I die."

Jake gave him a thumb-and-forefinger circle at that, and laughed. The sound was sweet in Roland's ears. It was darker in here than it had been on the street, but the orange streetlights on Second and Forty-sixth were strong enough to provide at least some illumination. Jake pointed at a sign lying in a pile of boards. "See that? It's the deli sign. I pulled it out of th weeds. That's why it is where it is." He looked around, dien pointed in anodier direction. "And look!"

This sign was still standing. Roland and Eddie turned to read it. Although neither of them had seen it before, they both felt a strong sense of deja vu , nonetheless.

MILLS CONSTRUCTION AND SOMBRA REAL ESTATE ASSOCIATES ARE CONTINUING TO REMAKE THE FACE OF MANHATTAN!

COMING SOON TO THIS LOCATION:

TURTLE BAY LUXURY CONDOMINIUMS!

CALL 661-6712 FOR INFORMATION!

YOU WILL BE SO GLAD YOU DID!

As Jake had told them, the sign looked old, in need of either refreshment or outright replacement. Jake had remembered the graffito which had been sprayed across the sign, and Eddie remembered it from Jake's story, not because it meant anything to him but simply because it was odd. And there it was, just as reported: bango skank. Some long-gone tagger's calling card.

"I think the telephone number on the sign's different," Jake said.

"Yeah?" Eddie asked. "What was the old one?"

"I don't remember."

"Then how can you be sure this one's different?"

In another place and at another time, Jake might have been irritated by these questions. Now, soothed by the proximity of the rose, he smiled, instead. "I don't know. I guess I can't. But it sure seems different. Like the sign in the bookstore window."

Roland barely heard. He was walking forward over the piles of bricks and boards and smashed glass in his old cowboy boots, his eyes brilliant even in the shadows. He had seen the rose. There was something lying beside it, in the spot where Jake had found his version of the key, but Roland paid this no heed. He only saw the rose, growing from a clump of grass that had been stained purple with spilled paint. He dropped to his knees before it. A moment later Eddie joined him on his left, Jake on his right.

The rose was tightly furled against the night. Then, as they knelt there, the petals began to open, as if in greeting. The hum rose all around them, like a song of angels.

THIRTEEN

At first Susannah was all right. She held on despite the fact that she had lost over a foot and a half of herself - the self that had arrived here, anyway - and was now forced into her old familiar (and hatefully subservient) posture, half-kneeling and half-sitting on the filthy sidewalk. Her back was propped against the fence surrounding the vacant lot. A sardonic thought crossed her mind - All I need's a cardboard sign and a tin cup .

She held on even after seeing the dead woman cross Forty-sixth Street. The singing helped - what she understood to be the voice of the rose. Oy helped, too, crowding his warmth close to her. She stroked his silky fur, using the reality of him as a steadying-point. She told herself again and again that she was not insane. All right, she'd lost seven minutes. Maybe . Or maybe the guts inside that newfangled clock down there had just hiccupped. All right, she'd seen a dead woman crossing the street. Maybe . Or maybe she'd just seen some strung-out junkie, God knew there was no shortage of them in New York -

A junkie with a little green worm crawling out of her mouth ?

"I could have imagined that part," she said to the bumbler. "Right?"

Oy was dividing his nervous attention between Susannah and the rushing headlights, which might have looked to him like large, predatory animals with shining eyes. He whined nervously.

"Besides, the boys'll be back soon."

"Oys," the bumbler agreed, sounding hopeful.

Why didn't I just go in with em ? Eddie would have carried me on his back, God knows he's done it before, both with the harness and without it.

"I couldn't," she whispered. "I just couldn't."

Because some part of her was frightened of the rose. Of getting too close to it. Had that part been in control during the missing seven minutes? Susannah was afraid it had been. If so, it was gone now. Had taken back its legs and just walked off on them into New York, circa 1977. Not good. But it had taken her fear of the rose with it, and that was good. She didn't want to be afraid of something that felt so strong and so wonderful.

Another personality ? Are you thinking the lady who brought the legs was another personality ?

Another version of Detta Walker, in other words?

The idea made her feel like screaming. She thought she now understood how a woman would feel if, five years or so after an apparently successful cancer operation, the doctor told her a routine X-ray had picked up a shadow on her lung.

"Not again," she murmured in a low, frantic voice as a fresh group of pedestrians schooled past. They all moved away from the board fence a little, although it reduced the space between them considerably. "No, not again. It can't be. I'm whole. I'm... I'm fixed ."

How long had her friends been gone?

She looked downstreet at the flashing clock. It said 8:42, but she wasn't sure she could trust it. It felt longer than that. Much longer. Maybe she should call to them. Just give a halloo. How y'all doin in there?

No. No such thing. You're a gunslinger, girl. At least that's what he says. What he thinks. And you're not going to change what he thinks by hollering like a schoolgirl just seen a garter snake under a bush. You're just going to sit here and wait. You can do it. You've got Oy for company and you  -

Then she saw the man standing on the other side of the street. Just standing there beside a newsstand. He was naked. A ragged Y-cut, sewn up with large black industrial stitches, began at his groin, rose, and branched at his sternum. His empty eyes gazed at her. Through her. Through the world.

Any possibility that this might only have been a hallucination ended when Oy began to bark. He was staring directly across at the naked dead man.

Susannah gave up her silence and began to scream for Eddie.

FOURTEEN

When the rose opened, disclosing the scarlet furnace within its petals and the yellow sun burning at the center, Eddie saw everything that mattered.

"Oh my Lord," Jake sighed from beside him, but he might have been a thousand miles away.

Eddie saw great things and near misses. Albert Einstein as a child, not quite struck by a runaway milk-wagon as he crossed a street. A teenage boy named Albert Schweitzer getting out of a bathtub and not quite stepping on the cake of soap lying beside the pulled plug. A Nazi Oberleutnant burning a piece of paper with the date and place of the D-Day invasion written on it. He saw a man who intended to poison the entire water supply of Denver die of a heart attack in a roadside rest stop on 1-80 in Iowa with a bag of McDonald's french fries on his lap. He saw a terrorist wired up with explosives suddenly turn away from a crowded restaurant in a city that might have been Jerusalem. The terrorist had been transfixed by nothing more than the sky, and the thought that it arced above the just and unjust alike. He saw four men rescue a little boy from a monster whose entire head seemed to consist of a single eye.

But more important than any of these was the vast, accretive weight of small things, from planes which hadn't crashed to men and women who had come to the correct place at the perfect time and thus founded generations. He saw kisses exchanged in doorways and wallets returned and men who had come to a splitting of the way and chosen the right fork. He saw a thousand random meetings that weren't random, ten thousand right decisions, a hundred thousand right answers, a million acts of unacknowledged kindness. He saw the old people of River Crossing and Roland kneeling in the dust for Aunt Talitha's blessing; again heard her giving it freely and gladly. Heard her telling him to lay the cross she had given him at the foot of the Dark Tower and speak the name of Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth. He saw the Tower itself in the burning folds of the rose and for a moment understood its purpose: how it distributed its lines of force to all the worlds that were and held them steady in time's great helix. For every brick that landed on the ground instead of some little kid's head, for every tornado that missed the trailer park, for every missile that didn't fly, for every hand stayed from violence, there was the Tower.

And the quiet, singing voice of the rose. The song that promised all might be well, all might be well, that all manner of things might be well.

But something's wrong with it , he thought.

There was a jagged dissonance buried in the hum, like bits of broken glass. There was a nasty flickering purple glare in its hot heart, some cold light that did not belong diere.

"There are two hubs of existence," he heard Roland say. "Two !" Like Jake, he could have been a thousand miles away. "The Tower... and the rose. Yet they are the same."

"The same," Jake agreed. His face was painted with brilliant light, dark red and bright yellow. Yet Eddie thought he could see that other light, as well - a flickering purple reflection like a bruise. Now it danced on Jake's forehead, now on his cheek, now it swam in the well of his eye; now gone, now reappearing at his temple like the physical manifestation of a bad idea.

"What's wrong with it?" Eddie heard himself ask, but there was no answer. Not from Roland or Jake, not from the rose.

Jake raised one finger and began to count. Counting petals, Eddie saw. But there was really no need to count. They all knew how many petals there were.

"We must have this patch," Roland said. "Own it and then protect it. Until the Beams are reestablished and the Tower is made safe again. Because while the Tower weakens, this is what holds everything together. And this is weakening, too. It's sick. Do you feel it?"

Eddie opened his mouth to say of course he felt it, and that was when Susannah began to scream. A moment later Oy joined his voice to hers, barking wildly.

Eddie, Jake, and Roland looked at each other like sleepers awakened from the deepest of dreams. Eddie made it to his feet first. He turned and stumbled back toward the fence and Second Avenue, shouting her name. Jake followed, pausing only long enough to snatch something out of the snarl of burdocks where the key had been before.

Roland spared one final, agonized look at the wild rose growing so bravely here in this tumbled wasteland of bricks and boards and weeds and litter. It had already begun to furl its petals again, hiding the light that blazed within.

I'll come back , he told it. I swear by the gods of all the worlds, by my mother and father and my friends that were, that I'll come back .

Yet he was afraid.

Roland turned and ran for the board fence, picking his way through the tumbled litter with unconscious agility in spite of the pain in his hip. As he ran, one thought returned to him and beat at his mind like a heart: Two. Two hubs of existence. The rose and the Tower. The Tower and the rose .

All the rest was held between them, spinning in fragile complexity.

FIFTEEN

Eddie threw himself over the fence, landed badly and asprawl, leaped to his feet, and stepped in front of Susannah without even thinking. Oy continued to bark.

"Suze! What? What is it?" He reached for Roland's gun and found nod��ng. It seemed that guns did not go todash.

"There!" she cried, pointing across the street. "There! Do you see him? Please, Eddie, please tell me you see him !"

Eddie felt the temperature of his blood plummet. What he saw was a naked man who had been cut open and then sewed up again in what could only be an autopsy tattoo. Another man - a living one - bought a paper at the nearby newsstand, checked for traffic, then crossed Second Avenue. Although he was shaking open the paper to look at the headline as he did it, Eddie saw die way he swerved around the dead man. The way people swerved around us , he thought.

"There was another one, too," she whispered. "A woman. She was walking. And there was a worm. I saw a worm c-c-crawling - "

"Look to your right," Jake said tightly. He was down on one knee, stroking Oy back to quietness. In his other hand he held a crumpled pink something. His face was as pale as cottage cheese.

They looked. A child was wandering slowly toward them. It was only possible to tell it was a girl because of the red-and-blue dress she wore. When she got closer, Eddie saw that the blue was supposed to be the ocean. The red blobs resolved themselves into little candy-colored sailboats. Her head had been squashed in some cruel accident, squashed until it was wider than it was long. Her eyes were crushed grapes. Over one pale arm was a white plastic purse. A little girl's best I'm-going-to-the-car-accident-and-don't-know-it purse.

Susannah drew in breath to scream. The darkness she had only sensed earlier was now almost visible. Certainly it was palpable; it pressed against her like earth. Yet she would scream. She must scream. Scream or go mad.

"Not a sound," Roland of Gilead whispered in her ear. "Do not disturb her, poor lost thing. For your life, Susannah!" Susannah's scream expired in a long, horrified sigh.

"They're dead," Jake said in a thin, controlled voice. "Both of them."

"The vagrant dead," Roland replied. "I heard of them from Alain Johns's father. It must have been not long after we returned from Mejis, for after that there wasn't much more time before everything... what is it you say, Susannah? Before everything 'went to hell in a handbasket.' In any case, it was Burning Chris who warned us that if we ever went todash, we might see vags." He pointed across the street where the naked dead man still stood. "Such as him yonder have either died so suddenly they don't yet understand what's happened to them, or they simply refuse to accept it. Sooner or later they do go on. I don't think there are many of them."

"Thank God," Eddie said. "It's like something out of a George Romero zombie movie."

"Susannah, what happened to your legs?" Jake asked.

"I don't know," she said. "One minute I had em, and the next minute I was the same as before." She seemed to become aware of Roland's gaze and turned toward him. "You see somethin funny, sugar?"

"We are ka-tet, Susannah. Tell us what really happened."

"What the hell are you trying to imply?" Eddie asked him. He might have had said more, but before he could get started, Susannah grasped his arm.

"Caught me out, didn't you?" she asked Roland. "All right, I'll tell you. According to that fancy dot-clock down there, I lost seven minutes while I was waiting for you boys. Seven minutes and my fine new legs. I didn't want to say anything because..." She faltered, then went on. "Because I was afraid I might be losing my mind."

That's not what you're afraid of , Roland thought. Not exactly . ' Eddie gave her a brief hug and a kiss on the cheek. He glanced nervously across the street at the nude corpse (the little girl with the squashed head had, thankfully, wandered off down Forty-sixth Street toward the United Nations), then back at the gunslinger. "If what you said before is true, Roland, this business of time slipping its cogs is very bad news. What if instead of just seven minutes, it slips three months? What if the next time we get back here, Calvin Tower's sold his lot? We can't let that happen. Because that rose, man... that rose..." Tears had begun to slip out of Eddie's eyes.

"It's the best thing in the world," Jake said, low.

"In all the worlds," Roland said. Would it ease Eddie and Jake to know that this particular time-slip had probably been in Susannah's head? That Mia had come out for seven minutes, had a look around, and then dived back into her hole like Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day? Probably not. But he saw one thing in Susannah's haggard face: she either knew what was going on, or suspected very strongly. It must be hellish for her , he thought.

"We have to do better than this if we're really going to change things," Jake said. "This way we're not much better than vags ourselves."

"We have to get to '64, too," Susannah said. "If we're going to get hold of my dough, that is. Can we, Roland? If Callahan's got Black Thirteen, will it work like a door?"

What it will work is mischief , Roland thought. Mischief and worse . But before he could say that (or anything else), the todash chimes began. The pedestrians on Second Avenue heard them no more than they saw the pilgrims gathered by the board fence, but the corpse across the street slowly raised his dead hands and placed them over his dead ears, his mouth turn-ing down in a grimace of pain. And then they could see through him.

"Hold onto each other," Roland said. "Jake, get your hand into Oy's fur, and deep! Never mind if it hurts him!"

Jake did as Roland said, the chimes digging deep into his head. Beautiful but painful.

"Like a root canal without Novocain," Susannah said. She turned her head and for one moment she could see through the board fence. It had become transparent. Beyond it was the rose, its petals now closed but still giving off its own quietly gorgeous glow. She felt Eddie's arm slip around her shoulders.

"Hold on, Suze - whatever you do, hold on."

She grasped Roland's hand. For a moment longer she could see Second Avenue, and then everything was gone. The chimes ate up the world and she was flying through blind darkness with Eddie's arm around her and Roland's hand squeezing her own.

SIXTEEN

When the darkness let them go, they were almost forty feet down the road from their camp. Jake sat up slowly, then turned to Oy. "You all right, boy?"

"Oy."

Jake patted the bumbler's head. He looked around at the others. All here. He sighed, relieved.

"What's this?" Eddie asked. He had taken Jake's other hand when the chimes began. Now, caught in their interlocked fingers, was a crumpled pink object. It felt like cloth; it also felt like metal.

"I don't know," Jake said.

"You picked it up in the lot, just after Susannah screamed," Roland said. "I saw you."

Jake nodded. "Yeah. I guess maybe I did. Because it was where the key was, before."

"What is it, sugar?"

"Some kind of bag." He held it by the straps. "I'd say it was my bowling bag, but that's back at the lanes, with my ball inside it. Back in 1977."

"What's written on the side?" Eddie asked.

But they couldn't make it out. The clouds had closed in again and there was no moonlight. They walked back to their camp together, slowly, shaky as invalids, and Roland built up the fire. Then they looked at the writing on the side of the rose-pink bowling bag.

NOTHING BUT STRIKES AT MID-WORLD LANES

was what it said.

"That's not right," Jake said. "Almost, but not quite. What it says on my bag is nothing but strikes mid-town lanes. Timmy gave it to me one day when I bowled a two-eighty-two. He said I wasn't old enough for him to buy me a beer."

"A bowling gunslinger," Eddie said, and shook his head. "Wonders never cease, do they?"

Susannah took the bag and ran her hands over it. "What kind of weave is this? Feels like metal. And it's heazry ."

Roland, who had an idea what the bag was for - although not who or what had left it for them - said, "Put it in your knapsack with the books, Jake. And keep it very safe."

"What do we do next?" Eddie asked.

"Sleep," Roland said. "I think we're going to be very busy for the next few weeks. We'll have to take our sleep when and where we find it."

"But - "

"Sleep," Roland said, and spread out his skins.

Eventually they did, and all of them dreamed of the rose. Except for Mia, who got up in the night's last dark hour and slipped away to feast in the great banquet hall. And there she feasted very well.

She was, after all, eating for two.