Wizard and Glass

Interlude
KANSAS, SOMEWHERE, SOMEWHEN

Eddie stirred. Around them the thinny still whined like an unpleasant mother-in-law; above them the stars gleamed as bright as new hopes… or bad intentions. He looked at Susannah, sitting with the stumps of her legs curled beneath her; he looked at Jake, who was eating a burrito; he looked at Oy, whose snout rested on Jake’s ankle and who was looking up at the boy with an expression of calm adoration.

The fire was low, but still it burned. The same was true of Demon Moon, far in the west.

“Roland.” His voice sounded old and rusty to his own ears.

The gunslinger, who had paused for a sip of water, looked at him with his eyebrows raised.

“How can you know every comer of this story?”

Roland seemed amused. “I don’t think that’s what you really want to know, Eddie.”

He was right about that-old long, tall, and ugly made a habit of being right. It was, as far as Eddie was concerned, one of his most irritating characteristics. “All right. How long have you been talking? That’s what I really want to know.”

“Are you uncomfortable? Want to go to bed?”

He’s making fun of me, Eddie thought… but even as the idea occurred to him, he knew it wasn’t true. And no, he wasn’t uncomfortable. There was no stiffness in his joints, although he had been sitting cross-legged ever since Roland had begun by telling them about Rhea and the glass ball, and he didn’t need to go to the toilet. Nor was he hungry. Jake was munching the single leftover burrito, but probably for the same reason folks climbed Mount Everest… because it was there. And why should he be hungry or sleepy or stiff? Why, when the fire still burned and the moon was not yet down?

He looked at Roland’s amused eyes and saw the gunslinger was reading his thoughts.

“No, I don’t want to go to bed. You know I don’t. But, Roland… you’ve been talking a long time.” He paused, looked down at his hands, then looked up again, smiling uneasily. “Days, I would have said.”

“But time is different here. I’ve told you that; now you see for yourself. Not all nights are the same length just recently. Days, either… but we notice time more at night, don’t we? Yes, I think we do.”

“Is the thinny stretching time?” And now that he had mentioned it, Eddie could hear it in all its creepy glory-a sound like vibrating metal, or maybe the world’s biggest mosquito.

“It might be helping, but mostly it’s just how things are in my world.”

Susannah stirred like a woman who rises partway from a dream that holds her like sweet quicksand. She gave Eddie a look that was both distant and impatient. “Let the man talk, Eddie.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “Let the man talk.”

And Oy, without raising his snout from Jake’s ankle: “An. Awk.”

“All right,” Eddie said. “No problem.”

Roland swept them with his eyes. “Are you sure? The rest is… “He didn’t seem able to finish, and Eddie realized that Roland was scared.

“Go on,” Eddie told him quietly. “Let the rest be what it is. What it was.” He looked around. Kansas, they were in Kansas. Somewhere, somewhen. Except he felt that Mejis and those people he had never seen- Cordelia and Jonas and Brian Hookey and Sheemie and Pettie the Trotter and Cuthbert Allgood-were very close now. That Roland’s lost Susan was very close now. Because reality was thin here-as thin as the seat in an old pair of blue jeans-and the dark would hold for as long as Roland needed it to hold. Eddie doubted if Roland even noticed the dark, particularly. Why would he? Eddie thought it had been night inside of Roland’s mind for a long, long time… and dawn was still nowhere near.

He reached out and touched one of those callused killer’s hands. Gently he touched it, and with love.

“Go on, Roland. Tell your tale. All the way to the end.”

“All the way to the end,” Susannah said dreamily. “Cut the vein.” Her eyes were full of moonlight.

“All the way to the end,” Jake said.

“End,” Oy whispered.

Roland held Eddie’s hand for a moment, then let it go. He looked into the guttering fire without immediately speaking, and Eddie sensed him trying to find the way. Trying doors, one after another, until he found one that opened. What he saw behind it made him smile and look up at Eddie.

“True love is boring,” he said.

“Say what?”

“True love is boring,” Roland repeated. “As boring as any other strong and addicting drug. And, as with any other strong drug…”