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 there.
"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 nothing. 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 the 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 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 turning 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 AT 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 heavy."
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.
PART TWO
TELLING TALES
CHAPTER I:
THE PAVILION
ONE
If anything about the ride into Calla Bryn Sturgis surprised Eddie, it was how easily and naturally he took to horseback. Unlike Susannah and Jake, who had both ridden at summer camp, Eddie had never even petted a horse. When he'd heard the clop of approaching hooves on the morning after what he thought of as Todash Number Two, he'd felt a sharp pang of dread. It wasn't the riding he was afraid of, or the animals themselves; it was the possibility--hell, the strong probability--of looking like a fool. What kind of gunslinger had never ridden a horse?
Yet Eddie still found time to pass a word with Roland before they came. "It wasn't the same last night."
Roland raised his eyebrows.
"It wasn't nineteen last night."
"What do you mean?"
"I don't know what I mean."
"I don't know, either," Jake put in, "but he's right. Last night New York felt like the real deal. I mean, I know we were todash, but still . . . "
"Real," Roland had mused.
And Jake, smiling, said: "Real as roses."
TWO
The Slightmans were at the head of the Calla's party this time, each leading a pair of mounts by long hacks. There was nothing very intimidating about the horses of Calla Bryn Sturgis; certainly they weren't much like the ones Eddie had imagined galloping along the Drop in Roland's tale of long-ago Mejis. These beasts were stubby, sturdy-legged creatures with shaggy coats and large, intelligent eyes. They were bigger than Shetland ponies, but a very long cast from the fiery-eyed stallions he had been expecting. Not only had they been saddled, but a proper bedroll had been lashed to each mount.
As Eddie walked toward his (he didn't need to be told which it was, he knew: the roan), all his doubts and worries fell away. He only asked a single question, directed at Ben Slightman the Younger after examining the stirrups. "These are going to be too short for me, Ben--can you show me how to make them longer?"
When the boy dismounted to do it himself, Eddie shook his head. "It'd be best if I learned," he said. And with no embarrassment at all.
As the boy showed him, Eddie realized he didn't really need the lesson. He saw how it was done almost as soon as Benny's fingers flipped up the stirrup, revealing the leather tug in back. This wasn't like hidden, subconscious knowledge, and it didn't strike him as anything supernatural, either. It was just that, with the horse a warm and fragrant reality before him, he understood how everything worked. He'd only had one experience exactly like this since coming to Mid-World, and that had been the first time he'd strapped on one of Roland's guns.
"Need help, sugar?" Susannah asked.
"Just pick me up if I go off on the other side," he grunted, but of course he didn't do any such thing. The horse stood steady, swaying just the slightest bit as Eddie stepped into the stirrup and then swung into the plain black ranchhand's saddle.
Jake asked Benny if he had a poncho. The foreman's son looked doubtfully up at the cloudy sky. "I really don't think it's going to rain," he said. "It's often like this for days around Reaptide--"
"I want it for Oy." Perfectly calm, perfectly certain. He feels exactly like I do, Eddie thought. As if he's done this a thousand times before.
The boy drew a rolled oilskin from one of his saddlebags and handed it to Jake, who thanked him, put it on, and then tucked Oy into the capacious pocket which ran across the front like a kangaroo's pouch. There wasn't a single protest from the bumbler, either. Eddie thought: If I told Jake I'd expected Oy to trot along behind us like a sheepdog, would he say, "He always rides like this"? No . . . but he might think it.
As they set off, Eddie realized what all this reminded him of: stories he'd heard of reincarnation. He had tried to shake the idea off, to reclaim the practical, tough-minded Brooklyn boy who had grown up in Henry Dean's shadow, and wasn't quite able to do it. The thought of reincarnation might have been less unsettling if it had come to him head-on, but it didn't. What he thought was that he couldn't be from Roland's line, simply couldn't. Not unless Arthur Eld had at some point stopped by Co-Op City, that was. Like maybe for a redhot and a piece of Dahlie Lundgren's fried dough. Stupid to project such an idea from the ability to ride an obviously docile horse without lessons. Yet the idea came back at odd moments through the day, and had followed him down into sleep last night: the Eld. The line of the Eld.
THREE
They nooned in the saddle, and while they were eating popkins and drinking cold coffee, Jake eased his mount in next to Roland's. Oy peered at the gunslinger with bright eyes from the front pocket of the poncho. Jake was feeding the bumbler pieces of his popkin, and there were crumbs caught in Oy's whiskers.
"Roland, may I speak to you as dinh?" Jake sounded slightly embarrassed.
"Of course." Roland drank coffee and then looked at the boy, interested, all t
he while rocking contentedly back and forth in the saddle.
"Ben--that is, both Slightmans, but mostly the kid--asked if I'd come and stay with them. Out at the Rocking B."
"Do you want to go?" Roland asked.
The boy's cheeks flushed thin red. "Well, what I thought is that if you guys were in town with the Old Fella and I was out in the country--south of town, you ken--then we'd get two different pictures of the place. My Dad says you don't see anything very well if you only look at it from one viewpoint."
"True enough," Roland said, and hoped neither his voice nor his face would give away any of the sorrow and regret he suddenly felt. Here was a boy who was now ashamed of being a boy. He had made a friend and the friend had invited him to stay over, as friends sometimes do. Benny had undoubtedly promised that Jake could help him feed the animals, and perhaps shoot his bow (or his bah, if it shot bolts instead of arrows). There would be places Benny would want to share, secret places he might have gone to with his twin in other times. A platform in a tree, mayhap, or a fishpond in the reeds special to him, or a stretch of riverbank where pirates of eld were reputed to have buried gold and jewels. Such places as boys go. But a large part of Jake Chambers was now ashamed to want to do such things. This was the part that had been despoiled by the doorkeeper in Dutch Hill, by Gasher, by the Tick-Tock Man. And by Roland himself, of course. Were he to say no to Jake's request now, the boy would very likely never ask again. And never resent him for it, which was even worse. Were he to say yes in the wrong way--with even the slightest trace of indulgence in his voice, for instance--the boy would change his mind.
The boy. The gunslinger realized how much he wanted to be able to go on calling Jake that, and how short the time to do so was apt to be. He had a bad feeling about Calla Bryn Sturgis.
"Go with them after they dine us in the Pavilion tonight," Roland said. "Go and do ya fine, as they say here."
"Are you sure? Because if you think you might need me--"
"Your father's saying is a good one. My old teacher--"
"Cort or Vannay?"
"Cort. He used to tell us that a one-eyed man sees flat. It takes two eyes, set a little apart from each other, to see things as they really are. So aye. Go with them. Make the boy your friend, if that seems natural. He seems likely enough."