Wizard and Glass

1

For the first time in

(hours? days?)

the gunslinger fell silent. He sat for a moment looking toward the building to the east of them (with the sun behind it, the glass palace was a black shape surrounded by a gold nimbus) with his forearms propped on his knees. Then he took the waterskin which lay on the pavement beside him, held it over his face, opened his mouth, and upended it.

He drank what happened to go in his mouth-the others could see his adam’s apple working as he lay back in the breakdown lane, still pouring-but drinking didn’t seem to be his primary purpose. Water streamed down his deeply lined forehead and bounced off his closed eyelids. It pooled in the triangular hollow at the base of his throat and ran back from his temples, wetting his hair and turning it darker.

At last he put the waterskin aside and only lay there, eyes closed, arms stretched out high above his head, like a man surrendering in his sleep. Steam rose in delicate tendrils from his wet face.

“Ahhh,” he said.

“Feel better?” Eddie asked.

The gunslinger’s lids rose, disclosing those faded yet somehow alarming blue eyes. “Yes. I do. I don’t understand how that can be, as much as I dreaded this telling… but I do.”

“An ologist-of-the-psyche could probably explain it to you,” Susannah said, “but I doubt you’d listen.” She put her hands in the small of her back, stretched and winced… but the wince was only reflex. The pain and stiffness she’d expected weren’t there, and although there was one small creak near the base other spine, she didn’t get the satisfying series of snaps, crackles, and pops she had expected.

“Tell you one thing,” Eddie said, “this gives a whole new meaning to ‘Get it off your chest.’ How long have we been here, Roland?”

“Just one night.”

“The spirits have done it all in a single night,” Jake said in a dreamy voice. His legs were crossed at the ankles; Oy sat in the diamond shape made by the boy’s bent knees, looking at him with his bright gold-black eyes.

Roland sat up, wiping at his wet cheeks with his neckerchief and looking at Jake sharply. “What is it you say?”

“Not me. A guy named Charles Dickens wrote that. In a story called A Christmas Carol. All in a single night, huh?”

“Does any part of your body say it was longer?”

Jake shook his head. No, he felt pretty much the way he did any morning-better than on some. He had to take a leak, but his back teeth weren’t exactly floating, or anything like that.

“Eddie? Susannah?”

“I feel good,” Susannah said. “Surely not as if I stayed up all night, let alone many of em.”

Eddie said, “It reminds me of the time I spent as a junkie, in a way-”

“Doesn’t everything?” Roland asked dryly.

“Oh, that’s funny,” Eddie said. “A real howl. Next train that goes crazy on us, you can ask it the silly questions. What I meant was that you’d spend so many nights high that you got used to feeling like ten pounds of shit in a nine-pound bag when you got up in the morning-bad head, stuffy nose, thumping heart, glass in the old spine. Take it from your pal Eddie, you can tell just from the way you feel in the morning how good dope is for you. Anyway, you’d get so used to that-/did, anyway-that when you actually took a night off, you’d wake up the next morning and sit there on the edge of the bed, thinking, 'What the flick’s wrong with me? Am I sick? I feel weird. Did I have a stroke in the night?'”

Jake laughed, then clapped a hand over his mouth so violently that it was as if he wanted not just to hold the sound in but call it back. “Sorry,” he said. “That made me think of my dad.”

“One of my people, huh?” Eddie said. “Anyway, I expect to be sore, I expect to be tired, I expect to creak when I walk… but I actually think all I need to put me right is a quick pee in the bushes.”

“And a bite to eat?” Roland asked.

Eddie had been wearing a small smile. Now it faded. “No,” he said. “After that story, I’m not all that hungry. In fact, I’m not hungry at all.”

2

Eddie carried Susannah down the embankment and popped her behind a stand of laurel bushes to do her necessary. Jake was sixty or seventy yards east, in a grove of birches. Roland had said he would use the remedial strip to do his morning necessary, then raised his eyebrows when his New York friends laughed.

Susannah wasn’t laughing when she came out of the bushes. Her face was streaked with tears. Eddie didn’t ask her; he knew. He had been fighting the feeling himself. He took her gently in his arms and she put her face against the side of his neck. They stayed that way for a little while.

“Charyou tree,” she said at last, pronouncing it as Roland had: chair-you tree, with a little upturned vowel at the end.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, thinking that a Charlie by any other name was still a Charlie. As, he supposed, a rose was a rose was a rose. “Come, Reap.”

She raised her head and began to wipe her swimming eyes. “To have gone through all that,” she said, keeping her voice low… and looking once at the turnpike embankment to make sure Roland wasn’t there, looking down at them. “And at fourteen.”

“Yeah. It makes my adventures searching for the elusive dime bag in Tompkins Square look pretty tame. In a way, though, I’m almost relieved.”

“Relieved? Why?”

“Because I thought he was going to tell us that he killed her himself. For his damned Tower.”

Susannah looked squarely into his eyes. “But he thinks that’s what he did. Don’t you understand that?”

3

When they were back together again and there was food actually in sight, all of them decided they could eat a bit, after all. Roland shared out the last of the burritos (Maybe later today we can stop in at the nearest Boing Boing Burgers and see what they’ve got for leftovers, Eddie thought), and they dug in. All of them, that was, except Roland. He picked up his burrito, looked at it, then looked away. Eddie saw an expression of sadness on the gunslinger’s face that made him look both old and lost. It hurt Eddie’s heart, but he couldn’t think what to do about it.

Jake, almost ten years younger, could. He got up, went to Roland, knelt beside him, put his arms around the gunslinger’s neck, and hugged him. “I’m sorry you lost your friend,” he said.

Roland’s face worked, and for a moment Eddie was sure he was going to lose it. A long time between hugs, maybe. Mighty long. Eddie had to look away for a moment. Kansas in the morning, he told himself. A sight you never expected to see. Dig on that for awhile, and let the man be.

When he looked back, Roland had it together again. Jake was sitting beside him, and Oy had his long snout on one of the gunslinger’s boots. Roland had begun to eat his burrito. Slowly, and without much relish… but he was eating.

A cold hand-Susannah’s-crept into Eddie’s. He took it and folded his fingers over it.

“One night,” she marvelled.

“On our body-clocks, at least,” Eddie said. “In our heads…”

“Who knows?” Roland agreed. “But storytelling always changes time. At least it does in my world.” He smiled. It was unexpected, as always, and as always, it transformed his face into something nearly beautiful. Looking at that, Eddie mused, you could see how a girl might have fallen in love with Roland, once upon a time. Back when he had been long and going on tall but maybe not so ugly; back when the Tower hadn’t yet got its best hold on him.

“I think it’s that way in all worlds, sugar,” Susannah said. “Could I ask you a couple of questions, before we get rolling?”

“If you like.”

“What happened to you? How long were you… gone?”

“I was certainly gone, you’re right about that. I was travelling. Wandering. Not in Maerlyn’s Rainbow, exactly… I don’t think I ever would have returned from there, if I’d gone into it while I was still… sick… but everyone has a wizard’s glass, of course. Here.” He tapped his forehead gravely, just above the space between his eyebrows. “That’s where I went. That’s where I travelled while my friends travelled east with me. I got better there, little by little. I held onto the ball, and I travelled inside my head, and I got better. But the glass never glowed for me until the very end… when the battlements of the castle and the towers of the city were actually in sight. If it had awakened earlier…”

He shrugged.

“If it had awakened before I’d started to get some of my strength of mind back, I don’t think I’d be here now. Because any world-even a pink one with a glass sky-would have been preferable to one where there was no Susan. I suppose the force that gives the glass its life knew that… and waited.”

“But when it did glow for you again, it told you the rest,” Jake said. “It must have. It told you the parts that you weren’t there to see.”

“Yes. I know as much of the story as I do because of what I saw in the ball.”

“You told us once that John Farson wanted your head on a pole,” Eddie said. “Because you stole something from him. Something he held dear. It was the glass ball, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. He was more than furious when he found out. He was insane with rage. In your parlance, Eddie, he 'went nuclear.'”

“How many more times did it glow for you?” Susannah asked.

“And what happened to it?” Jake added.

“I saw in it three times after we left Mejis Barony,” Roland said. “The first was on the night before we came home to Gilead. That was when I travelled in it the longest, and it showed me what I’ve told you. A few things I’ve only guessed at, but most I was shown. It showed me these things not to teach or enlighten, but to hurt and wound. The remaining pieces of the Wizard’s Rainbow are all evil things. Hurt enlivens them, somehow. It waited until my mind was strong enough to understand and withstand… and then it showed me all the things I missed in my stupid adolescent complacency. My lovesick daze. My prideful, murderous conceit.”

“Roland, don’t,” Susannah said. “Don’t let it hurt you still.”

“But it does. It always will. Never mind. It doesn’t matter now; that tale is told.

“The second time I saw into the glass-went into the glass-was three days after I came home. My mother wasn’t there, although she was due that evening. She had gone into Debaria-a kind of retreat for women-to wait and pray for my return. Nor was Marten there. He was in Cressia, with Farson.”

“The ball,” Eddie said. “Your father had it by then?”

“No-o,” Roland said. He looked down at his hands, and Eddie observed a faint flush rising into his cheeks. “I didn’t give it to him at first. 1 found it… hard to give up.”

“I bet,” Susannah said. “You and everyone else who ever looked into the goddam thing.”

“On the third afternoon, before we were to be banqueted to celebrate our safe return”

“I bet you were really in a mood to party, too,” Eddie said.

Roland smiled without humor, still studying his hands. “At around four o’ the clock, Cuthbert and Alain came to my rooms. We were a trio for an artist to paint, I wot-windburned, hollow-eyed, hands covered with healing cuts and scrapes from our climb up the side of the canyon, scrawny as scarecrows. Even Alain, who tended toward stoutness, all but disappeared when he turned sideways. They confronted me, I suppose you’d say. They’d kept the secret of the ball to that point-out of respect for me and for the loss I’d suffered, they told me, and I believed them- but they would keep it no longer than that night’s meal. If I wouldn’t give it up voluntarily, it would be a question for our fathers to decide. They were horribly embarrassed, especially Cuthbert, but they were determined.

“I told them I’d give it over to my own father before the banquet- before my mother arrived by coach from Debaria, even. They should come early and see that I kept my promise. Cuthbert started to hem and haw and say that wouldn’t be necessary, but of course it was necessary-”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. He had the look of a man who understood this part of the story perfectly. “You can go into the crapper on your own, but it’s a lot easier to actually flush all the bad shit down the toilet if you have somebody with you.”

“Alain, at least, knew it would be better for me-easier-if I didn’t have to hand the ball over alone. He hushed Cuthbert up and said they’d be there. And they were. And I gave it over, little as I wanted to. My father went as pale as paper when he looked into the bag and saw what was there, then excused himself and took it away. When he came back, he picked up his glass of wine and went on talking to us of our adventures in Mejis as if nothing had happened.”

“But between the time your friends talked to you about it and the time you gave it up, you looked into it,” Jake said. “Went into it. Travelled in it. What did it show you that time?”

“First the Tower again,” Roland said, “and the beginning of the way there. I saw the fall of Gilead, and the triumph of the Good Man. We’d put those things back a mere twenty months or so by destroying the tankers and the oilpatch. I could do nothing about that, but it showed me something I could do. There was a certain knife. The blade had been treated with an especially potent poison, something from a distant Mid-World Kingdom called Garlan. Stuff so strong even the tiniest cut would cause almost instant death. A wandering singer-in truth, John Parson’s eldest nephew-had brought this knife to court. The man he gave it to was the castle’s chief of domestic staff. This man was to pass the knife on to the actual assassin. My father was not meant to see the sun come up on the morning after the banquet.” He smiled at them grimly. “Because of what I saw in the Wizard’s Glass, the knife never reached the hand that would have used it, and there was a new chief of domestics by the end of that week. These are pretty tales I tell you, are they not? Aye, very pretty, indeed.”

“Did you see the person the knife was meant for?” Susannah asked. “The actual killer?”

“Yes.”

“Anything else? Did you see anything else?” Jake asked. The plan to murder Roland’s father didn’t seem to hold much interest for him.

“Yes.” Roland looked puzzled. “Shoes. Just for a minute. Shoes tumbling through the air. At first I thought they were autumn leaves. And when I saw what they really were, they were gone and I was lying on my bed with the ball hugged in my arms… pretty much the way I carried it back from Mejis. My father… as I’ve said, his surprise when he looked inside the bag was very great, indeed.”

You told him who had the knife with the special poison on it, Susannah thought, Jeeves the Butler, or whoever, but you didn’t tell him who was supposed to actually use it, did you, sugar? Why not? Because you wanted to take care of dat little spot o’ work yo ownself? But before she could ask, Eddie was asking a question of his own.

“Shoes? Flying through the air? Does that mean anything to you now?”

Roland shook his head.

“Tell us about the rest of what you saw in it,” Susannah said.

He gave her a look of such terrible pain that what Susannah had only suspected immediately solidified to fact in her mind. She looked away from him and groped for Eddie’s hand.

“I cry your pardon, Susannah, but I cannot. Not now. For now, I’ve told all I can.”

“All right,” Eddie said. “All right, Roland, that’s cool.”

“Ool,” Oy agreed.

“Did you ever see the witch again?” Jake asked.

For a long time it seemed Roland would not answer this, either, but in the end he did.

“Yes. She wasn’t done with me. Like my dreams of Susan, she followed me. All the way from Mejis, she followed me.”

“What do you mean?” Jake asked in a low, awed voice. “Cripes, Roland, what do you mean?”

“Not now.” He got up. “It’s time we were on our way again.” He nodded to the building which floated ahead of them; the sun was just now clearing its battlements. “Yon glitter-dome’s a good distance away, but I think we can reach it this afternoon, if we move brisk. ’Twould be best. It’s not a place I’d reach after nightfall, if that can be avoided.”

“Do you know what it is yet?” Susannah asked.

“Trouble,” he repeated. “And in our road.”

4

For awhile that morning, the thinny warbled so loudly that not even the bullets in their ears would entirely stop up the sound; at its worst, Susannah felt as if the bridge of her nose would simply disintegrate, and when she looked at Jake, she saw he was weeping copiously-not crying the way people do when they’re sad, but the way they do when their sinuses are in total revolt. She couldn’t get the saw-player the kid had mentioned out of her mind. Sounds Hawaiian, she thought over and over again as Eddie pushed her grimly along in the new wheelchair, weaving in and out of the stalled vehicles. Sounds Hawaiian, doesn’t it? Sounds fucking Hawaiian, doesn’t it. Miss Oh So Black and Pretty?

On both sides of the turnpike the thinny lapped all the way up to the embankment, casting its twitching, misshapen reflections of trees and grain elevators, seeming to watch the pilgrims pass as hungry animals in a zoo might watch plump children. Susannah would find herself thinking of the thinny in Eyebolt Canyon, reaching out hungrily through the smoke for Latigo’s milling men, pulling them in (and some going in on their own, walking like zombies in a horror movie), and then she would find herself thinking of the guy in Central Park again, the wacko with the saw. Sounds Hawaiian, doesn’t it? Counting one thinny, and it sounds Hawaiian, doesn’t it?

Just when she thought she could stand it not a moment longer, the thinny began to draw back from 1-70 again, and its humming warble at last began to fade. Susannah was eventually able to pull the bullets out of her ears. She tucked them into the side-pocket of her chair with a hand that shook slightly.

“That was a bad one,” Eddie said. His voice sounded clogged and weepy. She looked around at him and saw his cheeks were wet, his eyes red. “Take it easy, Suzie-pie,” he said. “It’s my sinuses, that’s all. That sound kills em.”

“Me, too,” Susannah said.

“My sinuses are okay, but my head aches,” Jake said. “Roland, do you have any more aspirin?”

Roland stopped, rummaged, and found the bottle.

“Did you ever see Clay Reynolds again?” Jake asked, after swallowing the pills with water from the skin he carried.

“No, but I know what happened to him. He got a bunch together, some of them deserters from Parson’s army, went to robbing banks… in toward our part of the world, this was, but by then bank-thieves and stage-robbers didn’t have much to fear from gunslingers.”

“The gunslingers were busy with Farson,” Eddie said.

“Yes. But Reynolds and his men were trapped by a smart sheriff who turned the main street of a town called Oakley into a killing-zone. Six of the ten in the gang were killed outright. The rest were hung. Reynolds was one of those. This was less than a year later, during the time of Wide Earth.” He paused, then said: “One of those shot dead in the killing-zone was Coral Thorin. She had become Reynolds’s woman; rode and killed with the rest of them.”

They went on in silence for a bit. In the distance, the thinny warbled its endless song. Jake suddenly ran ahead to a parked camper. A note had been left under the wiper blade on the driver’s side. By standing on his toes, he was just able to reach it. He scanned it, frowning.

“What does it say?” Eddie asked.

Jake handed it over. Eddie looked, then passed it to Susannah, who read it in turn and gave it to Roland. He looked, then shook his head. “I can make out only a few words-old woman, dark man. What does the rest say? Read it to me.”

Jake took it back.” 'The old woman from the dreams is in Nebraska. Her name is Abagail.'” He paused. “Then, down here, it says, 'The dark man is in the west. Maybe Vegas.'”

Jake looked up at the gunslinger, the note fluttering in his hand, his face puzzled and uneasy. But Roland was looking toward the palace which shimmered across the highway-the palace that was not in the west but in the east, the palace that was light, not dark.

“In the west,” Roland said. “Dark man, Dark Tower, and always in the west.”

“Nebraska’s west of here, too,” Susannah said hesitantly. “I don’t know if that matters, this Abagail person, but…”

“I think she’s part of another story,” Roland said.

“But a story close to this one,” Eddie put in. “Next door, maybe. Close enough to swap sugar for salt… or start arguments.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Roland said, “and we may have business with the ‘old woman’ and the ‘dark man’ yet… but today our business is east. Come on.”

They began walking again.

5

“What about Sheemie?” Jake asked after awhile.

Roland laughed, partly in surprise at the question, partly in pleased remembrance. “He followed us. It couldn’t have been easy for him, and it must have been damned scary in places-there were wheels and wheels of wild country between Mejis and Gilead, and plenty of wild folks, too. Worse than just folks, mayhap. But ka was with him, and he showed up in time for Year’s End Fair. He and that damned mule.”

“Capi,” Jake said.

“Appy,” Oy repeated, padding along at Jake’s heel.

“When we went in search of the Tower, I and my friends, Sheemie was with us. As a sort of squire, I suppose you’d say. He… “But Roland trailed off, biting at his lip, and of that he would say no more.

“Cordelia?” Susannah asked. “The crazy aunt?”

“Dead before the bonfire had burned down to embers. It might have been a heart-storm, or a brain-storm-what Eddie calls a stroke.”

“Perhaps it was shame,” Susannah said. “Or horror at what she’d done.”

“It may have been,” Roland said. “Waking to the truth when it’s too late is a terrible thing. I know that very well.”

“Something up there,” Jake said, pointing at a long stretch of road from which the cars had been cleared. “Do you see?”

Roland did-with his eyes he seemed to see everything-but it was another fifteen minutes or so before Susannah began to pick up the small black specks ahead in the road. She was quite sure she knew what they were, although what she thought was less vision than intuition. Ten minutes after that, she was sure.

They were shoes. Six pairs of shoes placed neatly in a line across the eastbound lanes of Interstate 70.

1

They reached the shoes at mid-morning. Beyond them, clearer now, stood the glass palace. It glimmered a delicate green shade, like the reflection of a lily pad in still water. There were shining gates in front of it; red pennons snapped from its towers in a light breeze.

The shoes were also red.

Susannah’s impression that there were six pairs was understandable but wrong-there were actually four pairs and one quartet. This latter- four dark red booties made of supple leather-was undoubtedly meant for the four-footed member of their ka-tet. Roland picked one of them up and felt inside it. He didn’t know how many bumblers had worn shoes in the history of the world, but he was willing to guess that none had ever been gifted with a set of silk-lined leather booties.

“Bally, Gucci, eat your heart out,” Eddie said. “This is great stuff.”

Susannah’s were easiest to pick out, and not just because of the feminine, sparkly swoops on the sides. They weren’t really shoes at all-they had been made to fit over the stumps of her legs, which ended just above the knees.

“Now look at this,” she marvelled, holding one up so the sun could flash on the rhinestones with which the shoes were decorated… if they were rhinestones. She had a crazy notion that maybe they were diamond chips. “Cappies. After four years of gettin along in what my friend Cynthia calls 'circumstances of reduced leg-room,' I finally got myself a pair of cappies. Think of that.”

“Cappies,” Eddie mused. “Is that what they call em?”

“That’s what they call em, sugar.”

Jake’s were bright red Oxfords-except for the color, they would have looked perfectly at home in the well-bred classrooms of The Piper School. He flexed one, then turned it over. The sole was bright and unmarked. There was no manufacturer’s stamp, nor had he really expected one. His father had maybe a dozen pairs of fine handmade shoes. Jake knew them when he saw them.

Eddie’s were low boots with Cuban heels {Maybe in this world you call them Mejis heels, he thought) and pointed toes… what, back in his other life, had been known as “street-boppers.” Kids from the mid-sixties-an era Odetta/Detta/Susannah had just missed-might have called them “Beatle-boots.”

Roland’s, of course, were cowboy boots. Fancy ones-you’d go dancing rather than droving in such as these. Looped stitching, side decorations, narrow, haughty arches. He examined them without picking them up, then looked at his fellow travellers and frowned. They were looking at each other. You would have said three people couldn’t do that, only a pair… but you only would have said it if you’d never been part of a ka-tet.

Roland still shared khef with them; he felt the powerful current of their mingled thought, but could not understand it. Because it’s of their world. They come from different whens of that world, but they see something here that’s common to all three of them.

“What is it?” he asked. “What do they mean, these shoes?”

“I don’t think any of us know that, exactly,” Susannah said.

“No,” Jake said. “It’s another riddle.” He looked at the weird, blood red Oxford shoe in his hands with distaste. “Another goddamned riddle.”

“Tell what you know.” He looked toward the glass palace again. It was perhaps fifteen New York miles away, now, shining in the clear day, delicate as a mirage, but as real as… well, as real as shoes. “Please, tell me what you know about these shoes.”

“I got shoes, you got shoes, all God’s chillun got shoes,” Odetta said. “That’s the prevailin opinion, anyway.”

“Well,” Eddie said, “we got em, anyway. And you’re thinking what I’m thinking, aren’t you?”

“I guess I am.”

“You, Jake?”

Instead of answering with words, Jake picked up the other Oxford (Roland had no doubt that all the shoes, including Oy’s, would fit perfectly) and clapped them briskly together three times. It meant nothing to Roland, but both Eddie and Susannah reacted violently, looking around, looking especially at the sky, as if expecting a storm born out of this bright autumn sunshine. I hey ended up looking at the glass palace again… and then at each other, in that knowing, round-eyed way that made Roland feel like shaking them both until their teeth rattled. Yet he waited. Sometimes that was all a man could do.

“After you killed Jonas, you looked into the ball,” Eddie said, turning to him.

“Yes.”

“Travelled in the ball.”

“Yes, but I don’t want to talk about that again now; it has nothing to do with these-”

“I think it does,” Eddie said. “You flew inside a pink storm. Inside a pink gale, you could say. Gale is a word you might use for a storm, isn’t it? Especially if you were making up a riddle.”

“Sure,” Jake said. He sounded dreamy, almost like a boy who talks in his sleep. “When does Dorothy fly over the Wizard’s Rainbow? When she’s a Gale.”

“We ain’t in Kansas anymore, sugar,” Susannah said, and then voiced a strange, humorless bark which Roland supposed was a species of laughter. “May look a little like it, but Kansas was never… you know, this thin:'

“I don’t understand you,” Roland said. But he felt cold, and his heart was beating too fast. There were thinnies everywhere now, hadn’t he told them that? Worlds melting into one another as the forces of the Tower weakened? As the day when the rose would be plowed under drew nearer?

“You saw things as you flew,” Eddie said. “Before you got to the dark land, the one you called Thunderclap, you saw things. The piano-player, Sheb. Who turned up again later in your life, didn’t he?”

“Yes, in Tull.”

“And the dweller with the red hair?”

“Him, too. He had a bird named Zoltan. But when we met, he and I, we said the normal. 'Life for you, life for your crop,' that sort of thing. I thought I heard the same when he flew by me in the pink storm, but he really said something else.” He glanced at Susannah. “I saw your wheel-chair, too. The old one.”

“And you saw the witch.”

“Yes. I-”

In a creaky chortle that reminded Roland unnervingly of Rhea, Jake Chambers cried: “I’ll get you, my pretty! And your little dog, too!”

Roland stared at him, trying not to gape.

“Only in the movie, the witch wasn’t riding a broom,” Jake said. “She was on her bike, the one with the basket on the back.”

“Yeah, no reap-charms, either,” Eddie said. “Would have been a nice touch, though. I tell you, Jake, when I was a kid, I used to have nightmares about the way she laughed.”

“It was the monkeys that gave me the creeps,” Susannah said. “The flying monkeys. I’d get thinkin about em, and then have to crawl into bed with my mom and dad. They’d still be arguin 'bout whose bright idea it was to take me to that show in the foist place when I fell asleep between em.”

“I wasn’t worried about clapping the heels together,” Jake said. “Not a bit.” It was Susannah and Eddie he was speaking to; for the time being, it was as if Roland wasn’t even there. “I wasn’t wearing them, after all.”

“True,” Susannah said, sounding severe, “but you know what my daddy always used to say?”

“No, but I have a feeling we’re going to find out,” Eddie said.

She gave Eddie a brief, severe look, then turned her attention back to Jake.” 'Never whistle for the wind unless you want it to blow,'” she said. “And it’s good advice, no matter what Young Mister Foolish here may think.”

“Spanked again,” Eddie said, grinning.

“Tanked!” Oy said, eyeing Eddie severely.

“Explain this to me,” Roland said in his softest voice. “I would hear. I would share your khef. And I would share it now.”

2

They told him a story almost every American child of the twentieth century knew, about a Kansas farmgirl named Dorothy Gale who had been carried away by a cyclone and deposited, along with her dog, in the Land of Oz. There was no 1-70 in Oz, but there was a yellow brick road which served much the same purpose, and there were witches, both good and bad. There was a ka-tet comprised of Dorothy, Toto, and three friends she met along the way: the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Woodman, and the Scarecrow. They each had

(bird and bear and hare and fish)

a fondest wish, and it was with Dorothy’s that Roland’s new friends (and Roland himself, for that matter) identified the most strongly: she wanted to find her way home again.

“The Munchkins told her that she had to follow the yellow brick road to Oz,” Jake said, “and so she went. She met the others along the way, sort of like you met us, Roland-”

“Although you don’t look much like Judy Garland,” Eddie put in. “-and eventually they got there. To Oz, the Emerald Palace, and the guy who lived in the Emerald Palace.” He looked toward the glass palace ahead of them, greener and greener in the strengthening light, and then back to Roland.

“Yes, I understand. And was this fellow, Oz, a powerful dinh? A Baron? Perhaps a King?”

Again, the three of them exchanged a glance from which Roland was excluded. “That’s complicated,” Jake said. “He was sort of a humbug-”

“A bumhug? What’s that?”

“Humbug,” Jake said, laughing. “A faker. All talk, no action. But maybe the important thing is that the Wizard actually came from-”

“Wizard?” Roland asked sharply. He grasped Jake’s shoulder with his diminished right hand. “Why do you call him so?”

“Because that was his title, sug,” Susannah said. “The Wizard of Oz.” She lifted Roland’s hand gently but firmly from Jake’s shoulder. “Let him tell it, now. He don’t need you to squeeze it out of him.”

“Did I hurt you? Jake, I cry your pardon.”

“Nah, I’m fine,” Jake said. “Don’t worry about it. Anyway, Dorothy and her friends had a lot of adventures before finding out the Wizard was a, you know, a bumhug.” Jake giggled at this with his hands clapped to his forehead and pushing back his hair, like a child of five. “He couldn’t give the Lion courage, the Scarecrow a brain, or the Tin Woodman a heart. Worst of all, he couldn’t send Dorothy back to Kansas. The Wizard had a balloon, but he went without her. I don’t think he meant to, but he did.”

“It seems to me, from your telling of the tale,” Roland said, speaking very slowly, “that Dorothy’s friends had the things they wanted all along.”

“That’s the moral of the story,” Eddie said. “Maybe what makes it a great story. But Dorothy was stuck in Oz, you see. Then Glinda showed up. Glinda the Good. And, as a present for smooshing one of the bad witches under her house and melting another one, Glinda told Dorothy how to use the ruby slippers. The ones Glinda gave her.”

Eddie raised the red Cuban-heeled street-boppers which had been left for him on the dotted white line of 1-70.

“Glinda told Dorothy to click the heels of the ruby slippers together three times. That would take her back to Kansas, she said. And it did.” “And that’s the end of the tale?”

“Well,” Jake said, “it was so popular that the guy who wrote it went ahead and wrote about a thousand more Oz stories-”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Everything but Glinda’s Guide to Firm Thighs.”

“-and there was this crazy remake called The Wiz, starring black people-”

“Really?” Susannah asked. She looked bemused. “What a peculiar concept.”

“-but the only one that really matters is the first one, I think,” Jake finished.

Roland hunkered and put his hands into the boots which had been left for him. He lifted them, looked at them, put them down again. “Are we supposed to put them on, do you think? Here and now?”

His three friends from New York looked at each other doubtfully. At last Susannah spoke for them-fed him the khef which he could feel but not quite share on his own.

“Best not to right now, maybe. Too many bad-ass spirits here.” “Takuro spirits,” Eddie murmured, mostly to himself. Then: “Look, let’s just take em along. If we’re supposed to put em on, I think we’ll know when the time comes. In the meantime, I think we ought to beware of bumhugs bearing gifts.”

It cracked Jake up, as Eddie had known it would; sometimes a word or an image got into your funny bone like a virus and just lived there awhile. Tomorrow the word “bumhug” might mean nothing to the kid; for the rest of today, however, he was going to laugh every time he heard it. Eddie intended to use it a lot, especially when ole Jake wasn’t expecting it.

They picked up the red shoes which had been left for them in the east-bound lanes (Jake took Oy’s) and moved on again toward the shimmering glass castle.

Oz, Roland thought. He searched his memory, but he didn’t think it was a name he had ever heard before, or a word of the High Speech that had come in disguise, as char had come disguised as Charlie. Yet it had a sound that belonged in this business; a sound more of his world than of Jake’s, Susannah’s, and Eddie’s, from whence the tale had come.

3

Jake kept expecting the Green Palace to begin looking normal as they drew closer to it, the way the attractions in Disney World began to look normal as you drew close to them-not ordinary, necessarily, but normal, things which were as much a part of the world as the comer bus stop or mailbox or park bench, stuff you could touch, stuff you could write fuck piper on, if you took a notion.

But that didn’t happen, wasn’t going to happen, and as they neared the Green Palace, Jake realized something else: it was the most beautiful, radiant thing he had ever seen in his life. Not trusting it-and he did not- didn’t change the fact. It was like a drawing in a fairy-tale book, one so good it had become real, somehow. And, like the thinny, it hummed… except that this sound was far fainter, and not unpleasant.

Pale green walls rose to battlements that jutted and towers that soared, seeming almost to touch the clouds floating over the Kansas plains. These towers were topped with needles of a darker, emerald green; it was from these that the red pennants nickered. Upon each pennant the symbol of the open eye

had been traced in yellow.

It’s the mark of the Crimson King, Jake thought. It’s really his sigul, not John Farson’s. He didn’t know how he knew this (how could he, when Alabama’s Crimson Tide was the only Crimson anything he knew?), but he did.

“So beautiful,” Susannah murmured, and when Jake glanced at her, he thought she was almost crying. “But not nice, somehow. Not right. Maybe not downright bad, the way the thinny is, but…”

“But not nice,” Eddie said. “Yeah. That works. Not a red light, maybe, but a bright yellow one just the same.” He rubbed the side of his face (a gesture he had picked up from Roland without even realizing it) and looked puzzled. “It feels almost not serious-a practical joke.”

“I doubt it’s a joke,” Roland said. “Do you think it’s a copy of the place where Dorothy and her ka-tet met the false wizard?”

Again, the three erstwhile New Yorkers seemed to exchange a single glance of consultation. When it was over, Eddie spoke for all of them. “Yeah. Yeah, probably. It’s not the same as the one in the movie, but if this thing came out of our minds, it wouldn’t be. Because we see the one from L. Frank Baum’s book, too. Both from the illustrations in the book…”

“And the ones from our imaginations,” Jake said.

“But that’s it,” Susannah said. “I’d say we’re definitely off to see the Wizard.”

“You bet,” Eddie said. “Because-because-because-because-because-”

“Because of the wonderful things he does!” Jake and Susannah finished in unison, then laughed, delighted with each other, while Roland frowned at them, feeling puzzled and looking left out.

“But I have to tell you guys,” Eddie said, “that it’s only gonna take about one more wonderful thing to send me around to the dark side of the Psycho Moon. Most likely for good.”

4

As they drew closer, they could see Interstate 70 stretching away into the pale green depths of the castle’s slightly rounded outer wall; it floated there like an optical illusion. Closer yet, and they could hear the pennants snapping in the breeze and see their own ripply reflections, like drowned folk who somehow walk at the bottoms of watery tropical graves.

There was an inner redoubt of dark blue glass-it was a color Jake associated with the bottles fountain-pen ink came in-and a rust-hued wall-walk between the redoubt and the outer wall. That color made Susannah think of the bottles Hires root-beer had come in when she was a little girl.

The way in was blocked by a barred gate that was both huge and ethereal: it looked like wrought iron which had been turned to glass. Each cunningly made stake was a different color, and these colors seemed to come from the inside, as if the bars were filled with some bright gas or liquid.

The travellers stopped before it. There was no sign of the turnpike beyond it; instead of roadway, there was a courtyard of silver glass-a huge flat mirror, in fact. Clouds floated serenely through its depths; so did the image of the occasional swooping bird. Sun reflected off this glass courtyard and ran across the green castle walls in ripples. Un the far side, the wall of the palace’s inner ward rose in a glimmery green cliff, broken by narrow loophole windows of jet-black glass. There was also an arched entry in this wall that made Jake think of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

To the left of the main doorway was a sentry-box made of cream-colored glass shot through with hazy orange threads. Its door, painted with red stripes, stood open. The phone-booth-sized room inside was empty, although there was something on the floor which looked to Jake like a newspaper.

Above the entry, flanking its darkness, were two crouching, leering gargoyles of darkest violet glass. Their pointed tongues poked out like bruises.

The pennants atop the towers flapped like schoolyard flags.

Crows cawed over empty cornfields now a week past the Reap.

Distant, the thinny whined and warbled.

“Look at the bars of this gate,” Susannah said. She sounded breathless and awestruck. “Look very closely.”

Jake bent toward the yellow bar until his nose nearly touched it and a faint yellow stripe ran down the middle of his face. At first he saw nothing, and then he gasped. What he had taken for motes of some kind were creatures-living creatures-imprisoned inside the bar, swimming in tiny schools. They looked like fish in an aquarium, but they also (their heads, Jake told himself, I think it’s mostly their heads) looked oddly, disquietingly human. As if, Jake thought, he were looking into a vertical golden sea, all the ocean in a glass rod-and living myths no bigger than grains of dust swimming within it. A tiny woman with a fish’s tail and long blonde hair streaming out behind her swam to her side of the glass, seemed to peer out at the giant boy (her eyes were round, startled, and beautiful), and then flipped away again.

Jake felt suddenly dizzy and weak. He closed his eyes until the feeling of vertigo went away, then opened them again and looked around at the others. “Cripes! Are they all the same?”

“All different, I think,” said Eddie, who had already peered into two or three. He bent close to the purple rod, and his cheeks lit up as if in the glow of an old-fashioned fluoroscope. “These guys here look like birds- little tiny birds.”

Jake looked and saw that Eddie was right: inside the gate’s purple upright were flocks of birds no bigger than summer minges. They swooped giddily about in their eternal twilight, weaving over and under one another, their wings leaving tiny silver trails of bubbles.

“Are they really there?” Jake asked breathlessly. “Are they, Roland, or are we only imagining them?”

“I don’t know. But I know what this gate has been made to look like.”

“So do I,” Eddie said. He surveyed the shining posts, each with its own column of imprisoned light and life. Each of the gate’s wings consisted of six colored bars. The one in the center-broad and flat instead of round, and made to split in two when the gate was opened-was the thirteenth. This one was dead black, and in this one nothing moved.

Oh, maybe not that you can see, but there are things moving around in there, all right, Jake thought. There’s life in there, terrible life. And maybe there are roses, too. Drowned ones.

“It’s a Wizard’s Gate,” Eddie said. “Each bar has been made to look like one of the balls in Maerlyn’s Rainbow. Look, here’s the pink one.”

Jake leaned toward it, hands propped on his thighs. He knew what would be inside even before he saw them: horses, of courses. Tiny herds of them, galloping through that strange pink stuff that was neither light nor liquid. Horses running in search of a Drop they would never find, mayhap.

Eddie stretched his hands out to grasp the sides of the central post, the black one.

“Don’t!” Susannah called sharply.

Eddie ignored her, but Jake saw his chest stop for a moment and his lips tighten as he wrapped his hands around the black bar and waited for something-some force perhaps sent Special Delivery all the way from the Dark Tower itself-to change him, or even to strike him dead. When nothing happened, he breathed deep again, and risked a smile. “No electricity, but… “He pulled; the gate held fast. “No give, either. I see where it splits down the middle, but I get nothing. Want to take a shot, Roland?”

Roland reached for the gate, but Jake put a hand on his arm and stopped him before the gunslinger could do more than give it a preliminary shake. “Don’t bother. That’s not the way.”

“Then what is?”

Instead of answering, Jake sat down in front of the gate, near the place where this strange version of 1-70 ended, and began putting on the shoes which had been left for him. Eddie watched a moment, then sat down beside him. “I guess we ought to try it,” he said to Jake, “even though it’ll probably turn out to be just another bumhug.”

Jake laughed, shook his head, and began to tighten the laces of the blood-red Oxfords. He and Eddie both knew it was no bumhug. Not this time.

5

“Okay,” Jake said when they had all put on their red shoes (he thought they looked extraordinarily stupid, especially Eddie’s pair). “I’ll count to three, and we’ll click our heels together. Like this.” He clicked the Oxfords together once, sharply… and the gate shivered like a loosely fastened shutter blown by a strong wind. Susannah cried out. There followed a low, sweet chiming sound from the Green Palace, as if the walls themselves had vibrated.

“I guess this’ll do the trick, all right,” Eddie said. “I warn you, though, I’m not singing ‘somewhere Over the Rainbow.’ That’s not in my contract.”

“The rainbow is here,” the gunslinger said softly, stretching his diminished hand out to the gate.

It wiped the smile off Eddie’s face. “Yeah, I know. I’m a little scared, Roland.”

“So am I,” the gunslinger said, and indeed, Jake thought he looked pale and ill.

“Go on, sugar,” Susannah said. “Count before we all lose our nerve.” “One… two… three.”

They clicked their heels together solemnly and in unison: tock, tock, tock. The gate shivered more violently this time, the colors in the uprights brightening perceptibly. The chime that followed was higher, sweeter- the sound of fine crystal tapped with the haft of a knife. It echoed in dreamy harmonics that made Jake shiver, half with pleasure and half with pain.

But the gate didn’t open.

“What-” Eddie began.

“I know,” Jake said. “We forgot Oy.”

“Oh Christ,” Eddie said. “I left the world I knew to watch a kid try to put booties on a fucked-up weasel. Shoot me, Roland, before I breed.”

Roland ignored him, watching Jake closely as the boy sat down on the turnpike and called, “Oy! To me!”

The bumbler came willingly enough, and although he had surely been a wild creature before they had met him on the Path of the Beam, he allowed Jake to slip the red leather booties onto his paws without making trouble: in fact, once he got the idea, he stepped into the last two. When all four of the little red shoes were in place (they looked, in fact, the most like Dorothy’s ruby slippers), Oy sniffed at one of them, then looked attentively back at Jake.

Jake clicked his heels together three times, looking at the bumbler as he did so, ignoring the rattle of the gate and the soft chime from the walls of the Green Palace.

“You, Oy!”

“Oy!”

He rolled over on his back like a dog playing dead, then simply looked at his own feet with a kind of disgusted bewilderment. Looking at him, Jake had a sharp memory: trying to pat his stomach and rub his head at the same time, and his father making fun of him when he couldn’t do it right away.

“Roland, help me. He knows what he’s supposed to do, but he doesn’t know how to do it.” Jake glanced up at Eddie. “And don’t make any smart remarks, okay?”

“No,” Eddie said. “No smart remarks, Jake. Do you think just Oy has to do it this time, or is it still a group effort?”

“Just him, I think.”

“But it wouldn’t hurt us to kind of click along with Mitch,” Susannah said.

“Mitch who?” Eddie asked, looking blank.

“Never mind. Go on, Jake, Roland. Give us a count again.”

Eddie grasped Oy’s forepaws. Roland gently grasped the bumbler’s rear paws. Oy looked nervous at this-as if he perhaps expected to be swung briskly into the air and given the old heave-ho-but he didn’t struggle.

“One, two, three.”

Jake and Roland gently patted Oy’s forepaws and rear paws together in unison. At the same time they clicked the heels of their own footwear. Eddie and Susannah did the same.

This time the harmonic was a deep, sweet bong, like a glass church bell. The black glass bar running down the center of the gate did not split open but shattered, spraying crumbs of obsidian glass in all directions.

Some rattled against Oy’s hide. He sprang up in a hurry, yanking out of Jake’s and Roland’s grip and trotting a little distance away. He sat on the broken white line between the travel lane and the passing lane of the highway, his ears laid back, looking at the gate and panting.

“Come on,” Roland said. He went to the left wing of the gate and pushed it slowly open. He stood at the edge of the mirror courtyard, a tall, lanky man in cowpoke jeans, an ancient shirt of no particular color, and improbable red cowboy boots. “Let’s go in and see what the Wizard of Oz has to say for himself.”

“If he’s still here,” Eddie said.

“Oh, I think he’s here,” Roland murmured. “Yes, I think he’s here.”

He ambled toward the main door with the empty sentry-box beside it. The others followed, welded to their own downward reflections by the red shoes like sets of Siamese twins.

Oy came last, skipping nimbly along in his ruby slippers, pausing once to sniff down at his own reflected snout.

“Oy!” he cried to the humbler floating below him, and then hurried after Jake.

1

Roland stopped at the sentry-box, glanced in, then picked up the thing which was lying on the floor. The others caught up with him and clustered around. It had looked like a newspaper, and that was just what it was… although an exceedingly odd one. No Topeka Capital-Journal this, and no news of a population-levelling plague.

The Oy Daily Buzz

Vol. MDLXVDI No. 96 “Daily Buzz, Daily Buzz, Handsome Iz as Handsome Duuzz” Weather: Here today, gone tomorrow Lucky Numbers: None Prognosis: Bad

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak blah blah blah good is bad bad is good all the stuffs the same good is bad bad is good all the stuffs the same go slow past the drawers all the stuffs the same blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Blame is a pain all the stuffs the same yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak charyou tree all the stuffs the same blah yak blah blah yak yak blah blah blah yak yak yak baked turkey cooked goose all the stuffs the same blah blah yak yak ride a train die in pain all the stuffs the same blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blame blame blame blame blame blame blah blah blah blah blah blah blah yak yak blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. (Related story p. 6)

Below this was a picture of Roland, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake crossing the mirrored courtyard, as if this had happened the day before instead of only minutes ago. Beneath it was a caption reading: Tragedy in Oz: Travellers Arrive Seeking Fame and Fortune; Find Death Instead.

“I like that,” Eddie said, adjusting Roland’s revolver in the holster he wore low on his hip. “Comfort and encouragement after days of confusion. Like a hot drink on a cold fucking night.”

“Don’t be afraid of this,” Roland said. “This is a joke.”

“I’m not afraid,” Eddie said, “but it’s a little more than a joke. I lived with Henry Dean for a lot of years, and I know when there’s a plot to psych me out afoot. I know it very well.” He looked curiously at Roland. “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you ’re the one who looks scared, Roland.”

“I’m terrified,” Roland said simply.

2

The arched entryway made Susannah think of a song which had been popular ten years or so before she had been yanked out of her world and into Roland’s. Saw an eyeball peepin through a smoky cloud behind the Green Door, the lyric went. When I said “Joe sent me,” someone laughed out loud behind the Green Door. There were actually two doors here instead of one, and no peephole through which an eyeball could look in either. Nor did Susannah try that old speakeasy deal about how Joe had sent her. She did, however, bend forward to read the sign hanging from one of the circular glass door-pulls. bell out of order, please knock, it said.

“Don’t bother,” she said to Roland, who had actually doubled up his fist to do as the sign said. “It’s from the story, that’s all.”

Eddie pulled her chair back slightly, stepped in front of it, and took hold of the circular pulls. The doors opened easily, the hinges rolling in silence. He took a step forward into what looked like a shadowy green grotto, cupped his hands to his mouth, and called: “Hey!”

The sound of his voice rolled away and came back changed… small, echoing, lost. Dying, it seemed.

“Christ,” Eddie said. “Do we have to do this?”

“If we want to get back to the Beam, I think so.” Roland looked paler than ever, but he led them in. Jake helped Eddie lift Susannah’s chair over the sill (a milky block of jade-colored glass) and inside. Oy’s little shoes flashed dim red on the green glass floor. They had gone only ten paces when the doors slammed shut behind them with a no-question-about-it boom that rolled past them and went echoing away into the depths of the Green Palace.

3

There was no reception room; only a vaulted, cavernous hallway that seemed to go on forever. The walls were lit with a faint green glow. This is just like the hallway in the movie, Jake thought, the one where the Cowardly Lion got so scared when he stepped on his own tail.

And, adding a little extra touch of verisimilitude Jake could have done without, Eddie spoke up in a trembly (and better than passable) Bert Lahr imitation: “Wait a minute, fellas, I wuz just thinkin-I really don’t wanna see the Wizard this much. I better wait for you outside!”

“Stop it,” Jake said sharply.

“Oppit!” Oy agreed. He walked directly at Jake’s heel, swinging his head watchfully from side to side as he went. Jake could hear no sound except for their own passage… yet he sensed something: a sound that wasn’t. It was, he thought, like looking at a wind-chime that wants only the slightest puff of breeze to set it tinkling.

“Sorry,” Eddie said. “Really.” He pointed. “Look down there.”

About forty yards ahead of them, the green corridor did end, in a narrow green doorway of amazing height-perhaps thirty feet from the floor to its pointed tip. And from behind it, Jake could now hear a steady thrumming sound. As they drew closer and the sound grew louder, his dread grew. He had to make a conscious effort to take the last dozen steps to the door. He knew this sound; he knew it from the run he’d made with Gasher under Lud, and from the run he and his friends had made on Blaine the Mono. It was the steady beat-beat-beat of slo-trans engines.

“It’s like a nightmare,” he said in a small, close-to-tears voice. “We’re right back where we started.”

“No, Jake,” the gunslinger said, touching his hair. “Never think it. What you feel is an illusion. Stand and be true.”

The sign on this door wasn’t from the movie, and only Susannah knew it was from Dante. abandon hope, all ye who enter here, it said.

Roland reached out with his two-fingered right hand and pulled the thirty-foot door open.

4

What lay beyond it was, to the eyes of Jake, Susannah, and Eddie, a weird combination of The Wizard of Oz and Blaine the Mono. A thick mg (pale blue, like the one in the Barony Coach) lay on the floor. The chamber was like the nave of a cathedral, soaring to impenetrable heights of greenish-black. The pillars which supported the glowing walls were great glass ribs of alternating green and pink light; the pink was the exact shade of Blaine’s hull. Jake saw these supporting pillars had been carven with a billion different images, none of them comforting; they jostled the eye and unsettled the heart. There seemed to be a preponderance of screaming faces.

Ahead of them, dwarfing the visitors, turning them into creatures that seemed no bigger than ants, was the chamber’s only furnishing: an enormous green glass throne. Jake tried to estimate its size and was unable- he had no reference-points to help him. He thought that the throne’s back might be fifty feet high, but it could as easily have been seventy-five or a hundred. It was marked with the open eye symbol, this time traced in red instead of yellow. The rhythmic thrusting of the light made the eye seem alive; to be beating like a heart.

Above the throne, rising like the pipes of a mighty medieval organ, were thirteen great cylinders, each pulsing a different color. Each, that was, save for the pipe which ran directly down in back of the throne’s center. That one was black as midnight and as still as death.

“Hey!” Susannah shouted from her chair. “Anyone here?”

At the sound of her voice, the pipes flashed so brilliantly that Jake had to shield his eyes. For a moment the entire throneroom glared like an exploding rainbow. Then the pipes went out, went dark, went dead, just as the wizard’s glass in Roland’s story had done when the glass (or the force inhabiting the glass) decided to shut up for awhile. Now there was only the column of blackness, and the steady green pulse of the empty throne.

Next, a somehow tired humming sound, as of a very old servomechanism being called into use one final time, began to whine its way into their ears. Panels, each at least six feet long and two feet wide, slid open in the arms of the throne. From the black slots thus revealed, a rose-colored smoke began to drift out and up. As it rose, it darkened to a bright red. And in it, a terribly familiar zigzag line appeared. Jake knew what it was even before the words

(Lud Candleton Rilea The Falls of the Hounds Dasherville Topeka)

appeared, glowing smoke-bright.

It was Blaine’s route-map.

Roland could say all he wanted about how things had changed, how Jake’s feeling of being trapped in a nightmare

(this is the worst nightmare of my life, and that is the truth)

was just an illusion created by his confused mind and frightened heart, but Jake knew better. This place might look a little bit like the throneroom of Oz the Great and Terrible, but it was really Blaine the Mono. They were back aboard Blaine, and soon the riddling would begin all over again.

Jake felt like screaming.

5

Eddie recognized the voice that boomed out of the smoky route-map hanging above the green throne, but he believed it was Blaine the Mono no more than he believed it was the Wizard of Oz. Some wizard, perhaps, but this wasn’t the Emerald City, and Blaine was just as dead as dogshit. Eddie had sent him home with a fuckin rupture.

“HELLO THERE AGAIN, LITTLE TRAILHANDS!”

The smoky route-map pulsed, but Eddie no longer associated it with the voice, although he guessed they were supposed to. No, the voice was coming from the pipes.

He glanced down, saw Jake’s paper-white face, and knelt beside him. “If scrap, kid,” he said.

“N-No… it’s Blaine… not dead…”

“He’s dead, all right. This is nothing but an amplified version of the after-school announcements… who’s got detention and who’s supposed to report to Room Six for Speech Therapy. You dig?”

“What?” Jake looked up at him, lips wet and trembling, eyes dazed. “What do you-”

“Those pipes are speakers. Even a pipsqueak can sound big through a twelve-speaker Dolby sound-system; don’t you remember the movie? It has to sound big because it’s a bumhug, Jake-just a bumhug.”

“WHAT ARE YOU TELLING HIM, EDDIE OF NEW YORK? ONE OF YOUR STUPID, NASTY-MINDED LITTLE JOKES? ONE OF YOUR UNFAIR RIDDLES?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “The one that goes, 'How many dipolar computers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?' Who are you, buddy? 1 know goddam well you’re not Blaine the Mono, so who are you?”

“I… AM… Oz!” the voice thundered. The glass columns flashed; so did the pipes behind the throne. “OZ THE GREAT! OZ THE POWERFUL! WHO ARE YOU?”

Susannah rolled forward until her wheelchair was at the base of the dull green steps leading up to a throne that would have dwarfed even Lord Perth.

“I’m Susannah Dean, the small and crippled,” she said, “and I was raised to be polite, but not to suffer bullshit. We’re here because we’re s'pozed to be here-why else did we get left the shoes?”

“WHAT DO YOU WANT OF ME, SUSANNAH? WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE, LITTLE COWGIRL?”

“You know,” she said. “We want what everyone wants, so far as I know-to go back home again, 'cause there’s no place like home. We-”

“You can’t go home,” Jake said. He spoke in a rapid, frightened murmur. “You can’t go home again, Thomas Wolfe said that, and that is the truth.”

“It’s a lie, sug,” Susannah said. “A flat-out lie. You can go home again. All you have to do is find the right rainbow and walk under it. We’ve found it; the rest is just, you know, footwork.”

“WOULD YOU GO BACK TO NEW YORK, SUSANNAH DEAN? EDDIE DEAN? JAKE CHAMBERS? IS THAT WHAT YOU ASK OF OZ, THE MIGHTY AND POWERFUL?”

“New York isn’t home for us anymore,” Susannah said. She looked very small yet very fearless as she sat in her new wheelchair at the foot of the enormous, pulsing throne. “No more than Gilead is home for Roland. Take us back to the Path of the Beam. That’s where we want to go, because that’s our way home. Only way home we got.”

“GO AWAY!” cried the voice from the pipes. “GO AWAY AND COME BACK TOMORROW! WE’ll DISCUSS THE BEAM THEN! FIDDLE-DE-DEE, SAID SCARLETT, WE’ll TALK ABOUT THE BEAM TOMORROW, FOR TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY!”

“No,” Eddie said. “We’ll talk about it now.”

“DO NOT AROUSE THE WRATH OF THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ!” the voice cried, and the pipes flashed furiously with each word. Susannah was sure this was supposed to be scary, but she found it almost amusing, instead. It was like watching a salesman demonstrate a child’s toy. Hey, kids! When you talk, the pipes flash bright colors! Try it and see!

“Sugar, you best listen, now,” Susannah said. “What you don’t want to do is arouse the wrath of folks with guns. Especially when you be livin in a glass house.”

“I SAID COME BACK TOMORROW!”

Red smoke once more began to boil out of the slots in the arms of the throne. It was thicker now. The shape which had been Blaine’s route-map melted apart and joined it. The smoke formed a face, this time. It was narrow and hard and watchful, framed by long hair.

It’s the man Roland shot in the desert, Susannah thought wonderingly. It’s that man Jonas. I know it is.

Now Oz spoke in a slightly trembling voice: “DO YOU PRESUME TO THREATEN THE GREAT OZ?” The lips of the huge, smoky face hovering over the throne’s seat parted in a snarl of mingled menace and contempt. “YOU UNGRATEFUL CREATURES! OH, YOU UNGRATEFUL CREATURES!”

Eddie, who knew smoke and mirrors when he saw them, had glanced in another direction. His eyes widened and he gripped Susannah’s arm above the elbow. “Look,” he whispered. “Christ, Suze, look at Oy!”

The billy-bumbler had no interest in smoke-ghosts, whether they were monorail route-maps, dead Coffin Hunters, or just Hollywood special effects of the pre-World War II variety. He had seen (or smelled) something that was more interesting.

Susannah grabbed Jake, turned him, and pointed at the bumbler. She saw the boy’s eyes widen with understanding a moment before Oy reached the small alcove in the left wall. It was screened from the main chamber by a green curtain which matched the glass walls. Oy stretched his long neck forward, caught the curtain’s fabric in his teeth, and yanked it back.

6

Behind the curtain red and green lights flashed; cylinders spun inside glass boxes; needles moved back and forth inside long rows of lighted dials. Yet Jake barely noticed these things. It was the man who took all his attention, the one sitting at the console, his back to them. His filthy hair, streaked with dirt and blood, hung to his shoulders in matted clumps. He was wearing some sort of headset, and was speaking into a tiny mike which hung in front of his mouth. His back was to them, and at first he had no idea that Oy had smelled him out and uncovered his hiding place.

“GO!” thundered the voice from the pipes… except now Jake saw where it was really coming from. “COME BACK TOMORROW IF YOU LIKE, BUT GO NOW! I WARN YOU!”

“It is Jonas, Roland must not have killed him after all,” Eddie whispered, but Jake knew better. He had recognized the voice. Even distorted by the amplification of the colored pipes, he had recognized the voice. How could he have ever believed it to be the voice of Blaine?

“I WARN YOU, IF YOU REFUSE-”

Oy barked, a sharp and somehow forbidding sound. The man in the equipment alcove began to turn.

Tell me, cully, Jake remembered this voice saying before its owner had discovered the dubious attractions of amplification. Tell me all you know about dipolar computers and transitive circuits. Tell me and I’ll give you a drink.

It wasn’t Jonas, and it wasn’t the Wizard of anything. It was David Quick’s grandson. It was the Tick-Tock Man.

7

Jake stared at him, horrified. The coiled, dangerous creature who had lived beneath Lud with his mates-Gasher and Hoots and Brandon and Tilly-was gone. This might have been that monster’s ruined father… or grandfather. His left eye-the one Oy had punctured with his claws- bulged white and misshapen, partly in its socket and partly on his unshaven cheek. The right side of his head looked half-scalped, the skull showing through in a long, triangular strip. Jake had a distant, panic-darkened memory of a flap of skin falling over the side of Tick-Tock’s face, but he had been on the edge of hysteria by that point… and was again now.

Oy had also recognized the man who had tried to kill him and was barking hysterically, head down, teeth bared, back bowed. Tick-Tock stared at him with wide, stunned eyes.

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” said a voice from behind them, and then tittered. “My friend Andrew is having another in a long series of bad days. Poor boy. I suppose I was wrong to bring him out of Lud, but he just looked so lost…” The owner of the voice tittered again.

Jake swung around and saw that there was now a man sitting in the middle of the great throne, with his legs casually crossed in front of him. He was wearing jeans, a dark jacket that belted at the waist, and old, rundown cowboy boots. On his jacket was a button that showed a pig’s head with a bullethole between the eyes. In his lap this newcomer held a drawstring bag. He rose, standing in the seat of the throne like a child in daddy’s chair, and the smile dropped away from his face like loose skin. Now his eyes blazed, and his lips parted over vast, hungry teeth.

“Get them, Andrew! Get them! Kill them! Every sister-fucking one of them!”

“My life for you!” the man in the alcove screamed, and for the first time Jake saw the machine-gun propped in the comer. Tick-Tock sprang for it and snatched it up. “My life for you!”

He turned, and Oy was on him once again, leaping forward and upward, sinking his teeth deep into Tick-Tock’s left thigh, just below the crotch.

Eddie and Susannah drew in unison, each raising one of Roland’s big guns. They fired in concert, not even the smallest overlap in the sound of their shots. One of them tore off the top of Tick-Tock’s miserable head, buried itself in the equipment, and created a loud but mercifully brief snarl of feedback. The other took him in the throat.

He staggered forward one step, then two. Oy dropped to the floor and backed away from him, snarling. A third step took Tick-Tock out into the throneroom proper. He raised his arms toward Jake, and the boy could read Ticky’s hatred in his remaining green eye; the boy thought he could hear the man’s last, hateful thought: Oh, you fucking little squint-

Then Tick-Tock collapsed forward, as he had collapsed in the Cradle of the Grays… only this time he would rise no more.

“Thus fell Lord Perth, and the earth did shake with that thunder,” said the man on the throne.

Except he’s not a man, Jake thought. Not a man at all. We’ve found the Wizard at last, I think. And I’m pretty sure I know what’s in the bag he has.

“Marten,” Roland said. He held out his left hand, the one which was still whole. “Marten Broadcloak. After all these years. After all these centuries.”

“Want this, Roland?”

Eddie put the gun he had used to kill the Tick-Tock Man in Roland’s hand. A tendril of blue smoke was still rising from the barrel. Roland looked at the old revolver as if he had never seen it before, then slowly lifted it and pointed it at the grinning, rosy-cheeked figure sitting cross-legged on the Green Palace’s throne.

“Finally,” Roland breathed, thumbing back the trigger. “Finally in my sights.”

8

“That six-shooter will do you no good, as I think you know,” the man on the throne said. “Not against me. Only misfires against me, Roland, old fellow. How’s the family, by the way? I seem to have lost touch with them over the years. I was always such a lousy correspondent. Someone ought to take a hosswhip to me, aye, so they should!”

He threw back his head and laughed. Roland pulled the trigger of the gun in his hand. When the hammer fell there was only a dull click.

“Toadjer,” the man on the throne said. “I think you must have gotten some of those wet slugs in there by accident, don’t you? The ones with the flat powder? Good for blocking the sound of the thinny, but not so good for shooting old wizards, are they? Too bad. And your hand, Roland, look at your hand! Short a couple of fingers, by the look. My, this has been hard on you, hasn’t it? Things could get easier, though. You and your friends could have a fine, fruitful life-and, as Jake would say, that is the truth. No more lobstrosities, no more mad trains, no more disquieting-not to mention dangerous-trips to other worlds. All you have to do is give over this stupid and hopeless quest for the Tower.”

“No,” Eddie said.

“No,” Susannah said.

“No,” Jake said.

“No!” Oy said, and added a bark.

The dark man on the green throne continued to smile, unperturbed. “Roland?” he asked. “What about you?” Slowly, he raised the drawstring bag. It looked dusty and old. It hung from the wizard’s fist like a teardrop, and now the thing in its pouch began to pulse with pink light. “Cry off, and they need never see what’s inside this-they need never see the last scene of that sad long-ago play. Cry off. Turn from the Tower and go your way.”

“No,” Roland said. He began to smile, and as his smile broadened, that of the man sitting on the throne began to falter. “You can enchant my guns, those of this world, I reckon,” he said.

“Roland, I don’t know what you’re thinking of, laddie, but I warn you not to-”

“Not to cross Oz the Great? Oz the Powerful? But I think I will, Marten… or Maerlyn… or whoever you call yourself now…”

“Flagg, actually,” the man on the throne said. “And we’ve met before.” He smiled. Instead of broadening his face, as smiles usually did, it contracted Flagg’s features into a narrow and spiteful grimace. “In the wreck of Gilead. You and your surviving pals-that laughing donkey Cuthbert Allgood made one of your party, I remember, and DeCurry, the fellow with the birthmark, made another-were on your way west, to seek the Tower. Or, in the parlance of Jake’s world, you were off to see the Wizard. I know you saw me, but I doubt you knew until now that I saw you, as well.”

“And will again, I reckon,” Roland said. “Unless, that is, I kill you now and put an end to your interference.”

Still holding his own gun out in his left hand, he went for the one tucked in the waistband of his jeans-Jake’s Ruger, a gun from another world and perhaps immune to this creature’s enchantments-with his right. And he was fast as he had always been fast, his speed blinding.

The man on the throne shrieked and cringed back. The bag fell from his lap, and the glass ball-once held by Rhea, once held by Jonas, once held by Roland himself-slipped out of its mouth. Smoke, green this time instead of red, billowed from the slots in the arms of the throne. It rose in obscuring fumes. Yet Roland still might have shot the figure disappearing into the smoke if he had made a clean draw. He didn’t, however; the Ruger slid in the grip of his reduced hand, then twisted. The front sight caught on his belt-buckle. It took only an extra quarter-second for him to free the snag, but that was the quarter-second he had needed. He pumped three shots into the billowing smoke, then ran forward, oblivious of the shouts of the others.

He waved the smoke aside with his hands. His shots had shattered the back of the throne into thick green slabs of glass, but the man-shaped creature which had called itself Flagg was gone. Roland found himself already beginning to wonder if he-or it had been there in the first place.

The ball was still there, however, unharmed and glowing the same enticing pink he remembered from so long ago-from Mejis, when he had been young and in love. This survivor of Maerlyn’s Rainbow had rolled almost to the edge of the throne’s seat; two more inches and it would have plunged over and shattered on the floor. Yet it had not; still it remained, this bewitched thing Susan Delgado had first glimpsed through the window of Rhea’s hut, under the light of the Kissing Moon.

Roland picked it up-how well it fit his hand, how natural it felt against his palm, even after all these years-and looked into its cloudy, troubled depths. “You always did have a charmed life,” he whispered to it. He thought of Rhea as he had seen her in this ball-her ancient, laughing eyes. He thought of the flames from the Reap-Night bonfire rising around Susan, making her beauty shimmer in the heat. Making it shiver like a mirage.

Wretched glam! he thought. If I dashed you to the floor, surely we would drown in the sea of tears that would pour out of your split belly… the tears of all those you’ve put to ruin.

And why not do it? Left whole, the nasty thing might be able to help them back to the Path of the Beam, but Roland didn’t believe they actually needed it. He thought that Tick-Tock and the creature which had called itself Flagg had been their last challenge in that regard. The Green Palace was their door back to Mid-World… and it was theirs, now. They had conquered it by force of arms.

But you can’t go yet, gunslinger. Not until you’ve finished your story, told the last scene.

Whose voice was that? Vannay’s? No. Cort’s? No. Nor was it the voice of his father, who had once turned him naked out of a whore’s bed. That was the hardest voice, the one he often heard in his troubled dreams, the one he wanted so to please and so seldom could. No, not that voice, not this time.

This time what he heard was the voice of ka-ka like a wind. He had told so much of that awful fourteenth year… but he hadn’t finished the tale. As with Detta Walker and the Blue Lady’s forspecial plate, there was one more thing. A hidden thing. The question wasn’t, he saw, whether or not the five of them could find their way out of the Green Palace and recover the Path of the Beam; the question was whether or not they could go on as ka-tet. If they were to do that, there could be nothing hidden; he would have to tell them of the final time he had looked into the wizard’s glass in that long-ago year. Three nights past the welcoming banquet, it had been. He would have to tell them-

No, Roland, the voice whispered. Not just tell. Not this time. You know better.

Yes. He knew better.

“Come,” he said, turning to them.

They drew slowly around him, their eyes wide and filling with the ball’s flashing pink light. Already they were half-hypnotized by it, even Oy.

“We are ka-tet,” Roland said, holding the ball toward them. “We are one from many. I lost my one true love at the beginning of my quest for the Dark Tower. Now look into this wretched thing, if you would, and see what I lost not long after. See it once and for all; see it very well.”

They looked. The ball, cupped in Roland’s upraised hands, began to pulse faster. It gathered them in and swept them away. Caught and whirled in the grip of that pink storm, they flew over the Wizard’s Rainbow to the Gilead that had been.

1

“-home,” Eddie muttered. His voice sounded thick and punch-drunk to his own ears. “Back home, because there’s no place like home, no indeed.”

He tried to open his eyes and at first couldn’t. It was as if they were glued shut. He put the heel of his hand to his forehead and pushed up, tightening the skin on his face. It worked; his eyes popped open. He saw neither the throneroom of the Green Palace nor (and this was what he had really expected) the richly appointed but somehow claustrophobic bedroom in which he had just been.

He was outside, lying in a small clearing of winter-white grass. Nearby was a little grove of trees, some still with their last brown leaves clinging to the branches. And one branch with an odd white leaf, an albino leaf. There was a pretty trickle of running water farther into the grove. Standing abandoned in the high grass was Susannah’s new and improved wheelchair. There was mud on the tires, Eddie saw, and a few late leaves, crispy and brown, caught in the spokes. A few swatches of grass, too. Overhead was a skyful of still white clouds, every bit as interesting as a laundry-basket full of sheets.

The sky was clear when we went inside the Palace, he thought, and realized time had slipped again. How much or how little, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know-Roland’s world was like a transmission with its gear-teeth all but stripped away; you never knew when time was going to pop into neutral or race you away in overdrive.

Was this Roland’s world, though? And if it was, how had they gotten back to it?

“How should I know?” Eddie croaked, and got slowly to his feet, wincing as he did so. He didn’t think he was hungover, but his legs were sore and he felt as if he had just taken the world’s heaviest Sunday afternoon nap.

Roland and Susannah lay on the ground under the trees. The gunslinger was stirring, but Susannah lay on her back, arms spread extravagantly wide, snoring in an unladylike way that made Eddie grin. Jake was nearby, with Oy sleeping on his side by one of the kid’s knees. As Eddie looked at them, Jake opened his eyes and sat up. His gaze was wide but blank; he was awake, but had been so heavily asleep he didn’t know it yet.

“Gruz,” Jake said, and yawned.

“Yep,” Eddie said, “that works for me.” He turned in a slow circle, and had gotten three quarters of the way back to where he’d started when he saw the Green Palace on the horizon. From here it looked very small, and its brilliance had been robbed by the sunless day. Eddie guessed it might be thirty miles away. Leading toward them from that direction were the tracks of Susannah’s wheelchair.

He could hear the thinny, but faintly. He thought he could see it, as well-a quicksilver shimmer like bogwater, stretching across the flat, open land… and finally drying up about five miles away. Five miles west of here? Given the location of the Green Palace and the fact that they had been travelling east on 1-70, that was the natural assumption, but who really knew, especially with no visible sun to use for orientation?

“Where’s the turnpike?” Jake asked. His voice sounded thick and gummy. Oy joined him, stretching first one rear leg, then the other. Eddie saw he had lost one of his booties at some point.

“Maybe it was cancelled due to lack of interest.”

“I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” Jake said. Eddie looked at him sharply, but didn’t believe the kid was consciously riffing on The Wizard of Oz. “Not the one where the Kansas City Royals play, not the one where the Monarchs play, either.”

“What gives you that idea?”

Jake hoisted a thumb toward the sky, and when Eddie looked up, he saw that he had been wrong: it wasn’t all still white overcast, boring as a basket of sheets. Directly above their heads, a band of clouds was moiling toward the horizon as steadily as a conveyor belt.

They were back on the Path of the Beam.

2

“Eddie? Where you at, sugar?”

Eddie looked down from the lane of clouds in the sky and saw Susannah sitting up, rubbing the back of her neck. She looked unsure of where she was. Perhaps even of who she was. The red cappies she was wearing looked oddly dull in this light, but they were still the brightest things in Eddie’s view… until he looked down at his own feet and saw the street-boppers with their Cuban heels. Yet these also looked dull, and Eddie no longer thought it was just the day’s cloudy light that made them seem so. He looked at Jake’s shoes, Oy’s remaining three slippers, Roland’s cowboy boots (the gunslinger was sitting up now, arms crossed around his knees, looking blankly off into the distance). All the same ruby red, but a lifeless red, somehow. As if some magic essential to them had been used up.

Suddenly, Eddie wanted them off his feet.

He sat down beside Susannah, gave her a kiss, and said: “Good morning, Sleeping Beauty. Or afternoon, if it’s that.” Then, quickly, almost hating to touch them (it was like touching dead skin, somehow), Eddie yanked off the street-boppers. As he did, he saw that they were scuffed at the toes and muddy at the heels, no longer new looking. He’d wondered how they’d gotten here; now, feeling the ache in the muscles of his legs and remembering the wheelchair tracks, he knew. They had walked, by God. Walked in their sleep.

“That,” Susannah said, “is the best idea you’ve had since… well, in a long time.” She stripped off the cappies. Close by, Eddie saw Jake taking off Oy’s booties. “Were we there?” Susannah asked him. “Eddie, were we really there when he…”

“When I killed my mother,” Roland said. “Yes, you were there. As I was. Gods help me, I was there. I did it.” He covered his face with his hands and began to voice a series of harsh sobs.

Susannah crawled across to him in that agile way that was almost a version of walking. She put an arm around him and used her other hand to take his hands away from his face. At first Roland didn’t want to let her do that, but she was persistent, and at last his hands-those killer’s hands-came down, revealing haunted eyes which swam with tears.

Susannah urged his face down against her shoulder. “Be easy, Roland,” she said. “Be easy and let it go. This part is over now. You past it.”

“A man doesn’t get past such a thing,” Roland said. “No, I don’t think so. Not ever.”

“You didn’t kill her,” Eddie said.

“That’s too easy.” The gunslinger’s face was still against Susannah’s shoulder, but his words were clear enough. “Some responsibilities can’t be shirked. Some sins can’t be shirked. Yes, Rhea was there-in a way, at least-but I can’t shift it all to the Coos, much as I might like to.”

“It wasn’t her, either,” Eddie said. “That’s not what I mean.”

Roland raised his head. “What in hell’s name are you talking about?”

“Ka,” Eddie said. “Ka like a wind.”

3

In their packs there was food none of them had put there-cookies with Keebler elves on the packages, Saran Wrapped sandwiches that looked like the kind you could get (if you were desperate, that was) from turnpike vending machines, and a brand of cola neither Eddie, Susannah, nor Jake knew. It tasted like Coke and came in a red and white can, but the brand was Nozz-A-La.

They ate a meal with their backs to the grove and their faces to the distant glam-gleam of the Green Palace, and called it lunch. If we start to lose the light in an hour or so, we can make it supper by voice vote, Eddie thought, but he didn’t believe they’d need to. His interior clock was running again now, and that mysterious but usually accurate device suggested that it was early afternoon.

At one point he stood up and raised his soda, smiling into an invisible camera. “When I’m travelling through the Land of Oz in my new Takuro Spirit, I drink Nozz-A-La!” he proclaimed. “It fills me up but never fills me out! It makes me happy to be a man! It makes me know God! It gives me the outlook of an angel and the balls of a tiger! When I drink Nozz-A-La, I say 'Gosh! Ain’t I glad to be alive!' I say-”

“Sit down, you bumhug,” Jake said, laughing.

“Ug,” Oy agreed. His snout was on Jake’s ankle, and he was watching the boy’s sandwich with great interest.

Eddie started to sit, and then that strange albino leaf caught his eye again. That’s no leaf, he thought, and walked over to it. No, not a leaf but a scrap of paper. He turned it over and saw columns of “blah blah” and “yak yak” and “all the stuff’s the same.” Usually newspapers weren’t blank on one side, but Eddie wasn’t surprised to find this one was-the Oz Daily Buzz had only been a prop, after all.

Nor was the blank side blank. Printed on it in neat, careful letters, was this message:

Below that, a little drawing:

Eddie brought the note back to where the others were eating. Each of them looked at it. Roland held it last, ran his thumb over it thoughtfully, feeling the texture of the paper, then gave it back to Eddie.

“R.F.,” Eddie said. “The man who was running Tick-Tock. This is from him, isn’t it?”

“Yes. He must have brought the Tick-Tock Man out of Lud.”

“Sure,” Jake said darkly. “That guy Flagg looked like someone who’d know a first-class bumhug when he found one. But how did they get here before us? What could be faster than Blaine the Mono, for cripe’s sake?”

“A door,” Eddie said. “Maybe they came through one of those special doors.”

“Bingo,” Susannah said. She held her hand out, palm up, and Eddie slapped it.

“In any case, what he suggests is not bad advice,” Roland said. “I urge you to consider it most seriously. And if you want to go back to your world, I will allow you to go.”

“Roland, I can’t believe you,” Eddie said. “This, after you dragged me and Suze over here, kicking and screaming? You know what my brother would say about you? That you’re as contrary as a hog on ice-skates.”

“I did what I did before I learned to know you as friends,” Roland said. “Before I learned to love you as I loved Alain and Cuthbert. And before I was forced to… to revisit certain scenes. Doing that has…” He paused, looking down at his feet (he had put his old boots back on again) and thinking hard. At last he looked up again. “There was a part of me that hadn’t moved or spoken in a good many years. 1 thought it was dead. It isn’t. I have learned to love again, and I’m aware that this is probably my last chance to love. I’m slow-Vannay and Cort knew that; so did my father-but I’m not stupid.”

“Then don’t act that way,” Eddie said. “Or treat us as if we were.”

“What you call 'the bottom line,' Eddie, is this: I get my friends killed. And I’m not sure I can even risk doing that again. Jake especially… I… never mind. I don’t have the words. For the first time since I turned around in a dark room and killed my mother, I may have found something more important than the Tower. Leave it at that.”

“All right, I guess I can respect that.”

“So can I,” Susannah said, “but Eddie’s right about ka.” She took the note and ran a finger over it thoughtfully. “Roland, you can’t talk about that-ka, I mean-then turn around and take it back again, just because you get a little low on willpower and dedication.”

“Willpower and dedication are good words,” Roland remarked. “There’s a bad one, though, that means the same thing. That one is obsession.”

She shrugged it away with an impatient twitch of her shoulders. “Sugarpie, either this whole business is ka, or none of it is. And scary as ka might be-the idea of fate with eagle eyes and a bloodhound’s nose- I find the idea of no ka even scarier.” She tossed the R.F. note aside on the matted grass.

“Whatever you call it, you’re just as dead if it runs you over,” Roland said. “Rimer… Thorin… Jonas… my mother… Cuthbert… Susan. Just ask them. Any of them. If you only could.”

“You’re missing the biggest part of this,” Eddie said. “You can’t send us back. Don’t you realize that, you big galoot? Even if there was a door, we wouldn’t go through it. Am I wrong about that?”

He looked at Jake and Susannah. They shook their heads. Even Oy shook his head. No, he wasn’t wrong.

“We’ve changed,” Eddie said. “We…” Now he was the one who didn’t know how to go on. How to express his need to see the Tower… and his other need, just as strong, to go on carrying the gun with the sandal-wood insets. The big iron was how he’d come to think of it. Like in that old Marty Robbins song about the man with the big iron on his hip. “It’s ka,” he said. It was all he could think of that was big enough to cover it.

“Kaka,” Roland replied, after a moment’s consideration. The three of them stared at him, mouths open. Roland of Gilead had made a joke.

4

“There’s one thing I don’t understand about what we saw,” Susannah said hesitantly. “Why did your mother hide behind that drape when you came in, Roland? Did she mean to…” She bit her lip, then brought it out. “Did she mean to kill you?”

“If she’d meant to kill me, she wouldn’t have chosen a belt as her weapon. The very fact that she had made me a present-and that’s what it was, it had my initials woven into it-suggests that she meant to ask my forgiveness. That she had had a change of heart.”

Is that what you know, or only what you want to believe? Eddie thought. It was a question he would never ask. Roland had been tested enough, had won their way back to the Path of the Beam by reliving that terrible final visit to his mother’s apartment, and that was enough.

“I think she hid because she was ashamed,” the gunslinger said. “Or because she needed a moment to think of what to say to me. Of how to explain.”

“And the ball?” Susannah asked him gently. “Was it on the vanity table, where we saw it? And did she steal it from your father?”

“Yes to both,” Roland said. “Although… did she steal it?” He seemed to ask this question of himself. “My father knew a great many things, but he sometimes kept what he knew to himself.”

“Like him knowing that your mother and Marten were seeing each other,” Susannah said.

“Yes.”

“But, Roland… you surely don’t believe that your father would knowingly have allowed you to… to…”

Roland looked at her with large, haunted eyes. His tears had gone, but when he tried to smile at her question, he was unable. “Have knowingly allowed his son to kill his wife?” he asked. “No, I can’t say that. Much as I’d like to, I can’t. That he should have caused such a thing to have happened, to have deliberately set it in motion, like a man playing Castles… that I cannot believe. But would he allow ka to run its course? Aye, most certainly.”

“What happened to the ball?” Jake asked.

“I don’t know. I fainted. When I awoke, my mother and 1 were still alone, one dead and one alive. No one had come to the sound of the shots-the walls of that place were thick stone, and that wing mostly empty as well. Her blood had dried. The belt she’d made me was covered with it, but I took it, and I put it on. I wore that bloodstained gift for many years, and how I lost it is a tale for another day-I’ll tell it to you before we have done, for it bears on my quest for the Tower.

“But although no one had come to investigate the gunshots, someone had come for another reason. While I lay fainted away by my mother’s corpse, that someone came in and took the wizard’s glass away.”

“Rhea?” Eddie asked.

“I doubt she was so close in her body… but she had a way of making friends, that one. Aye, a way of making friends. I saw her again, you know.” Roland explained no further, but a stony gleam arose in his eyes. Eddie had seen it before, and knew it meant killing.

Jake had retrieved the note from R.F. and now gestured at the little drawing beneath the message. “Do you know what this means?”

“I have an idea it’s the sigul of a place I saw when I first travelled in the wizard’s glass. The land called Thunderclap.” He looked around at them, one by one. “I think it’s there that we’ll meet this man-this thing-named Flagg again.”

Roland looked back the way they had come, sleepwalking in their fine red shoes. “The Kansas we came through was his Kansas, and the plague that emptied out that land was his plague. At least, that’s what I believe.”

“But it might not stay there,” Susannah said.

“It could travel,” Eddie said.

“To our world,” Jake said.

Still looking back toward the Green Palace, Roland said: “To your world, or any other.”

“Who’s the Crimson King?” Susannah asked abruptly.

“Susannah, I know not.”

They were quiet, then, watching Roland look toward the palace where he had faced a false wizard and a true memory and somehow opened the door back to his own world by so doing.

Our world, Eddie thought, slipping an arm around Susannah. Our world now. If we go back to America, and perhaps we’ll have to before this is over, we’ll arrive as strangers in a strange land, no matter what when it is. This is our world now. The world of the Beams, and the Guardians, and the Dark Tower.

“We got some daylight left,” he said to Roland, and put a hesitant hand on the gunslinger’s shoulder. When Roland immediately covered it with his own hand, Eddie smiled. “You want to use it, or what?”

“Yes,” Roland said. “Let’s use it.” He bent and shouldered his pack.

“What about the shoes?” Susannah asked, looking doubtfully at the little red pile they had made.

“Leave them here,” Eddie said. “They’ve served their purpose. Into your wheelchair, girl.” He put his arms around her and helped her in.

“All God’s children have shoes,” Roland mused. “Isn’t that what you said, Susannah?”

“Well,” she said, settling herself, “the correct dialect adds a soupcon of flavor, but you’ve got the essence, honey, yes.”

“Then we’ll undoubtedly find more shoes as God wills it,” Roland said.

Jake was looking into his knapsack, taking inventory of the foodstuffs that had been added by some unknown hand. He held up a chicken leg in a Baggie, looked at it, then looked at Eddie. “Who do you suppose packed this stuff?”

Eddie raised his eyebrows, as if to ask Jake how he could possibly be so stupid. “The Keebler Elves,” he said. “Who else? Come on, let’s go.”

5

They clustered near the grove, five wanderers on the face of an empty land. Ahead of them, running across the plain, was a line in the grass which exactly matched the lane of rushing clouds in the sky. This line was nothing so obvious as a path… but to the awakened eye, the way that everything bent in the same direction was as clear as a painted stripe.

The Path of the Beam. Somewhere ahead, where this Beam intersected all the others, stood the Dark Tower. Eddie thought that, if the wind were right, he would almost be able to smell its sullen stone.

And roses-the dusky scent of roses.

He took Susannah’s hand as she sat in her chair; Susannah took Roland’s; Roland took Jake’s. Oy stood two paces before them, head up, scenting the autumn air that combed his fur with unseen fingers, his gold-ringed eyes wide.

“We are ka-tet,” Eddie said. It crossed his mind to wonder at how much he’d changed; how he had become a stranger, even to himself. “We are one from many.”

“Ka-tet,” Susannah said. “We are one from many.”

“One from many,” Jake said. “Come on, let’s go.”

Bird and bear and hare and fish, Eddie thought.

With Oy in the lead, they once more set out for the Dark Tower, walking along the Path of the Beam.