With hardly a pause she moved on again, questing. Next it was a small fish . . . then another frog . . . and then a real prize: a water-rat that squeaked and writhed and tried to bite. She crushed the life out of it and stuffed it into her mouth, paws and all. A moment later she bent her head down and regurgitated the waste--a twisted mass of fur and splintered bones.
Show him this, then--always assuming that he and Jake get back from whatever adventure they're on, that is. And say, "I know that women are supposed to have strange cravings when they carry a child, Eddie, but doesn't this seem a little too strange? Look at her, questing through the reeds and ooze like some sort of human alligator. Look at her and tell me she's doing that in order to feed your child. Any human child."
Still he would argue. Roland knew it. What he didn't know was what Susannah herself might do when Roland told her she was growing something that craved raw meat in the middle of the night. And as if this business wasn't worrisome enough, now there was todash. And strangers who had come looking for them. Yet the strangers were the least of his problems. In fact, he found their presence almost comforting. He didn't know what they wanted, and yet he did know. He had met them before, many times. At bottom, they always wanted the same thing.
EIGHT
Now the woman who called herself Mia began to talk as she hunted. Roland was familiar with this part of her ritual as well, but it chilled him nevertheless. He was looking right at her and it was still hard to believe all those different voices could be coming from the same throat. She asked herself how she was. She told herself she was doing fine, thank you so vereh much. She spoke of someone named Bill, or perhaps it was Bull. She asked after someone's mother. She asked someone about a place called Morehouse, and then in a deep, gravelly voice--a man's voice, beyond doubt--she told herself that she didn't go to Morehouse or no house. She laughed raucously at this, so it must have been some sort of joke. She introduced herself several times (as she had on other nights) as Mia, a name Roland knew well from his early life in Gilead. It was almost a holy name. Twice she curtsied, lifting invisible skirts in a way that tugged at the gunslinger's heart--he had first seen that sort of curtsy in Mejis, when he and his friends Alain and Cuthbert had been sent there by their fathers.
She worked her way back to the edge of the
(hall)
pond, glistening and wet. She stayed there without moving for five minutes, then ten. The owl uttered its derisive salute again--hool!--and as if in response, the moon came out of the clouds for a brief look around. When it did, some small animal's bit of shady concealment disappeared. It tried to dart past the woman. She snared it faultlessly and plunged her face into its writhing belly. There was a wet crunching noise, followed by several smacking bites. She held the remains up in the moonlight, her dark hands and wrists darker with its blood. Then she tore it in half and bolted down the remains. She gave a resounding belch and rolled herself back into the water. This time she made a great splash, and Roland knew tonight's banqueting was done. She had even eaten some of the binnie-bugs, snatching them effortlessly out of the air. He could only hope nothing she'd taken in would sicken her. So far, nothing had.
While she made her rough toilet, washing off the mud and blood, Roland retreated back the way he'd come, ignoring the more frequent pains in his hip and moving with all his guile. He had watched her go through this three times before, and once had been enough to see how gruesomely sharp her senses were while in this state.
He paused at her wheelchair, looking around to make sure he'd left no trace of himself. He saw a bootprint, smoothed it away, then tossed a few leaves over it for good measure. Not too many; too many might be worse than none at all. With that done, he headed back toward the road and their camp, not hurrying anymore. She would pause for a little housekeeping of her own before going on. What would Mia see as she was cleaning Susannah's wheelchair, he wondered? Some sort of small, motorized cart? It didn't matter. What did was how clever she was. If he hadn't awakened with a need to make water just as she left on one of her earlier expeditions, he quite likely still wouldn't know about her hunting trips, and he was supposed to be clever about such things.
Not as clever as she, maggot. Now, as if the ghost of Vannay were not enough, here was Cort to lecture him. She's shown you before, hasn't she?
Yes. She had shown him cleverness as three women. Now there was this fourth.
NINE
When Roland saw the break in the trees ahead--the road they'd been following, and the place where they'd camped for the night--he took two long, deep breaths. These were meant to steady him and didn't succeed very well.
Water if God wills it, he reminded himself. About the great matters, Roland, you have no say.
Not a comfortable truth, especially for a man on a quest such as his, but one he'd learned to live with.
He took another breath, then stepped out. He released the air in a long, relieved sigh as he saw Eddie and Jake lying deeply asleep beside the dead fire. Jake's right hand, which had been linked with Eddie's left when the gunslinger had followed Susannah out of camp, now circled Oy's body.
The bumbler opened one eye and regarded Roland. Then he closed it again.
Roland couldn't hear her coming, but sensed her just the same. He lay down quickly, rolled over onto his side, and put his face in the crook of his elbow. And from this position he watched as the wheelchair rolled out of the trees. She had cleaned it quickly but well. Roland couldn't see a single spot of mud. The spokes gleamed in the moonlight.
She parked the chair where it had been before, slipped out of it with her usual grace, and moved across to where Eddie lay. Roland watched her approach her husband's sleeping form with some anxiety. Anyone, he thought, who had met Detta Walker would have felt that anxiety. Because the woman who called herself mother was simply too close to what Detta had been.
Lying completely still, like one in sleep's deepest sling, Roland prepared himself to move.
Then she brushed the hair back from the side of Eddie's face and kissed the hollow of his temple. The tenderness in that gesture told the gunslinger all he needed to know. It was safe to sleep. He closed his eyes and let the darkness take him.
CHAPTER IV:
PALAVER
ONE
When Roland woke in the morning, Susannah was still asleep but Eddie and Jake were up. Eddie had built a small new fire on the gray bones of the old one. He and the boy sat close to it for the warmth, eating what Eddie called gunslinger burritos. They looked both excited and worried.
"Roland," Eddie said, "I think we need to talk. Something happened to us last night--"
"I know," Roland said. "I saw. You went todash."
"Todash?" Jake asked. "What's that?"
Roland started to tell them, then shook his head. "If we're going to palaver, Eddie, you'd better wake Susannah up. That way we won't have to double back over the first part." He glanced south. "And hopefully our new friends won't interrupt us until we've had our talk. They're none of this." But already he was wondering about that.
He watched with more than ordinary interest as Eddie shook Susannah awake, quite sure but by no means positive that it would be Susannah who opened her eyes. It was. She sat up, stretched, ran her fingers through her tight curls. "What's your problem, honeychile? I was good for another hour, at least."
"We need to talk, Suze," Eddie said.
"All you want, but not quite yet," she said. "God, but I'm stiff."
"Sleeping on hard ground'll do it every time," Eddie said.
Not to mention hunting naked in the bogs and damps, Roland thought.
"Pour me some water, sug." She held out her palms, and Eddie filled them with water from one of the skins. She dashed this over her cheeks and into her eyes, gave out a little shivery cry, and said, "Cold."
"Old!" Oy said.
"Not yet," she told the bumbler, "but you give me a few more months like the last few, and I will be. Roland, you Mid-World folks know about coffee,
right?"
Roland nodded. "From the plantations of the Outer Arc. Down south."
"If we come across some, we'll hook it, won't we? You promise me, now."
"I promise," Roland said.
Susannah, meanwhile, was studying Eddie. "What's going on? You boys don't look so good."
"More dreams," Eddie said.
"Me too," Jake said.
"Not dreams," the gunslinger said. "Susannah, how did you sleep?"
She looked at him candidly. Roland did not sense even the shadow of a lie in her answer. "Like a rock, as I usually do. One thing all this traveling is good for--you can throw your damn Nembutal away."
"What's this toadish thing, Roland?" Eddie asked.
"Todash," he said, and explained it to them as well as he could. What he remembered best from Vannay's teachings was how the Manni spent long periods fasting in order to induce the right state of mind, and how they traveled around, looking for exactly the right spot in which to induce the todash state. This was something they determined with magnets and large plumb-bobs.
"Sounds to me like these guys would have been right at home down in Needle Park," Eddie said.
"Anywhere in Greenwich Village," Susannah added.
" 'Sounds Hawaiian, doesn't it?' " Jake said in a grave, deep voice, and they all laughed. Even Roland laughed a little.
"Todash is another way of traveling," Eddie said when the laughter had stopped. "Like the doors. And the glass balls. Is that right?"
Roland started to say yes, then hesitated. "I think they might all be variations of the same thing," he said. "And according to Vannay, the glass balls--the pieces of the Wizard's Rainbow--make going todash easier. Sometimes too easy."
Jake said, "We really flickered on and off like . . . like lightbulbs? What you call sparklights?"
"Yes--you appeared and disappeared. When you were gone, there was a dim glow where you'd been, almost as if something were holding your place for you."
"Thank God if it was," Eddie said. "When it ended . . . when those chimes started playing again and we kicked loose . . . I'll tell you the truth, I didn't think we were going to get back."
"Neither did I," Jake said quietly. The sky had clouded over again, and in the dull morning light, the boy looked very pale. "I lost you."
"I was never so glad to see anyplace in my life as I was when I opened my eyes and saw this little piece of road," Eddie said. "And you beside me, Jake. Even Rover looked good to me." He glanced at Oy, then over at Susannah. "Nothing like this happened to you last night, hon?"
"We'd have seen her," Jake said.
"Not if she todashed off to someplace else," Eddie said.
Susannah shook her head, looking troubled. "I just slept the night away. As I told you. What about you, Roland?"
"Nothing to report," Roland said. As always, he would keep his own counsel until his instinct told him it was time to share. And besides, what he'd said wasn't exactly a lie. He looked keenly at Eddie and Jake. "There's trouble, isn't there?"
Eddie and Jake looked at each other, then back at Roland. Eddie sighed. "Yeah, probably."
"How bad? Do you know?"
"I don't think we do. Do we, Jake?"
Jake shook his head.
"But I've got some ideas," Eddie went on, "and if I'm right, we've got a problem. A big one." He swallowed. Hard. Jake touched his hand, and the gunslinger was concerned to see how quickly and firmly Eddie took hold of the boy's fingers.
Roland reached out and drew Susannah's hand into his own. He had a brief vision of that hand seizing a frog and squeezing the guts out of it. He put it out of his mind. The woman who had done that was not here now.
"Tell us," he said to Eddie and Jake. "Tell us everything. We would hear it all."
"Every word," Susannah agreed. "For your fathers' sakes."
TWO
They recounted what had happened to them in the New York of 1977. Roland and Susannah listened, fascinated, as they told of following Jake to the bookstore, and of seeing Balazar and his gentlemen pull up in front.
"Huh!" Susannah said. "The very same bad boys! It's almost like a Dickens novel."
"Who is Dickens, and what is a novel?" Roland asked.
"A novel's a long story set down in a book," she said. "Dickens wrote about a dozen. He was maybe the best who ever lived. In his stories, folks in this big city called London kept meeting people they knew from other places or long ago. I had a teacher in college who hated the way that always happened. He said Dickens's stories were full of easy coincidences."
"A teacher who either didn't know about ka or didn't believe in it," Roland said.
Eddie was nodding. "Yeah, this is ka, all right. No doubt."
"I'm more interested in the woman who wrote Charlie the Choo-Choo than this storyteller Dickens," Roland said. "Jake, I wonder if you'd--"
"I'm way ahead of you," Jake said, unbuckling the straps of his pack. Almost reverently, he slid out the battered book telling the adventures of Charlie the locomotive and his friend, Engineer Bob. They all looked at the cover. The name below the picture was still Beryl Evans.
"Man," Eddie said. "That is so weird. I mean, I don't want to get sidetracked, or anything . . . " He paused, realizing he had just made a railroading pun, then went on. Roland wasn't very interested in puns and jokes, anyway. " . . . but that is weird. The one Jake bought--Jake Seventy-seven--was by Claudia something Bachman."
"Inez," Jake said. "Also, there was a y. A lowercase y. Any of you know what that means?"
None of them did, but Roland said there had been names like it in Mejis. "I believe it was some sort of added honorific. And I'm not sure it is to the side. Jake, you said the sign in the window was different from before. How?"
"I can't remember. But you know what? I think if you hypnotized me again--you know, with the bullet--I could."
"And in time I may," Roland said, "but this morning time is short."
Back to that again, Eddie thought. Yesterday it hardly existed, and now it's short. But it's all about time, somehow, isn't it? Roland's old days, our old days, and these new days. These dangerous new days.
"Why?" Susannah asked.
"Our friends," Roland said, and nodded to the south. "I have a feeling they'll be making themselves known to us soon."
"Are they our friends?" Jake asked.
"That really is to the side," Roland said, and again wondered if that were really true. "For now, let's turn the mind of our khef to this Bookstore of the Mind, or whatever it's called. You saw the harriers from the Leaning Tower greensticking the owner, didn't you? This man Tower, or Toren."
"Pressuring him, you mean?" Eddie asked. "Twisting his arm?"
"Yes."
"Sure they were," Jake said.
"Were," Oy put in. "Sure were."
"Bet you anything that Tower and Toren are really the same name," Susannah said. "That toren's Dutch for 'tower.' " She saw Roland getting ready to speak, and held up her hand. "It's the way folks often do things in our bit of the universe, Roland--change the foreign name to one that's more . . . well . . . American."
"Yeah," Eddie said. "So Stempowicz becomes Stamper . . . Yakov becomes Jacob . . . or . . . "
"Or Beryl Evans becomes Claudia y Inez Bachman," Jake said. He laughed but didn't sound very amused.
Eddie picked a half-burned stick out of the fire and began to doodle with it in the dirt. One by one the Great Letters formed: C . . . L . . . A . . . U. "Big Nose even said Tower was Dutch. 'A squarehead's always a squarehead, right, boss?' " He looked at Jake for confirmation. Jake nodded, then took the stick and continued on with it: D . . . I . . . A.
"Him being Dutch makes a lot of sense, you know," Susannah said. "At one time, the Dutch owned most of Manhattan."
"You want another Dickens touch?" Jake asked. He wrote y in the dirt after CLAUDIA, then looked up at Susannah. "How about the haunted house where I came through into this world?"
"The Mansion," Eddie said.
"The Mansion in Dutch Hill," Jake said.
"Dutch Hill. Yeah, that's right. Goddam."
"Let's go to the core," Roland said. "I think it's the agreement paper you saw. And you felt you had to see it, didn't you?"
Eddie nodded.
"Did your need feel like a part of following the Beam?"
"Roland, I think it was the Beam."
"The way to the Tower, in other words."
"Yeah," Eddie said. He was thinking about the way clouds flowed along the Beam, the way shadows bent along the Beam, the way every twig of every tree seemed to turn in its direction. All things serve the Beam, Roland had told them, and Eddie's need to see the paper Balazar had put in front of Calvin Tower had felt like a need, harsh and imperative.
"Tell me what it said."
Eddie bit his lip. He didn't feel as scared about this as he had about carving the key which had ultimately allowed them to rescue Jake and pull him through to this side, but it was close. Because, like the key, this was important. If he forgot something, worlds might crash.
"Man, I can't remember it all, not word for word--"
Roland made an impatient gesture. "If I need that, I'll hypnotize you and get it word for word."
"Do you think it matters?" Susannah asked.
"I think it all matters," Roland said.
"What if hypnosis doesn't work on me?" Eddie asked. "What if I'm not, like, a good subject?"
"Leave that to me," Roland said.
"Nineteen," Jake said abruptly. They all turned toward him. He was looking at the letters he and Eddie had drawn in the dirt beside the dead campfire. "Claudia y Inez Bachman. Nineteen letters."
THREE
Roland considered for a moment, then let it pass. If the number nineteen was somehow part of this, its meaning would declare itself in time. For now there were other matters.