“Suze,” he said, and when she glanced over at him: “Time’s started up again.”
She didn’t ask him what he meant, only nodded.
FOUR
Eddie’s resolution about not eating the muffin-balls didn’t last long; they just smelled too damned good sizzling in the lump of deerfat Roland (thrifty, murderous soul that he was) had saved away in his scuffed old purse. Eddie took his share on one of the ancient plates they’d found in Shardik’s woods and gobbled them.
“These are as good as lobster,” he said, then remembered the monsters on the beach that had eaten Roland’s fingers. “As good as Nathan’s hotdogs is what I meant to say. And I’m sorry for teasing you, Jake.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jake said, smiling. “You never tease hard.”
“One thing you should be aware of,” Roland said. He was smiling—he smiled more these days, quite a lot more—but his eyes were serious. “All of you. Muffin-balls sometimes bring very lively dreams.”
“You mean they make you stoned?” Jake asked, rather uneasily. He was thinking of his father. Elmer Chambers had enjoyed many of the weirder things in life.
“Stoned? I’m not sure I—”
“Buzzed. High. Seeing things. Like when you took the mescaline and went into the stone circle where that thing almost… you know, almost hurt me.”
Roland paused for a moment, remembering. There had been a kind of succubus imprisoned in that ring of stones. Left to its own devices, she undoubtedly would have initiated Jake Chambers sexually, then fucked him to death. As matters turned out, Roland had made it speak. To punish him, it had sent him a vision of Susan Delgado.
“Roland?” Jake was looking at him anxiously.
“Don’t concern yourself, Jake. There are mushrooms that do what you’re thinking of—change consciousness, heighten it—but not muffin-balls. These are berries, just good to eat. If your dreams are particularly vivid, just remind yourself you are dreaming.”
Eddie thought this a very odd little speech. For one thing, it wasn’t like Roland to be so tenderly solicitous of their mental health. Not like him to waste words, either.
Things have started again and he knows it, too, Eddie thought. There was a little time-out there, but now the clock’s running again. Game on, as they say.
“We going to set a watch, Roland?” Eddie asked.
“Not by my warrant,” the gunslinger said comfortably, and began rolling himself a smoke.
“You really don’t think they’re dangerous, do you?” Susannah said, and raised her eyes to the woods, where
the individual trees were now losing themselves in the general gloom of evening. The little spark of campfire they’d noticed earlier was now gone, but the people following them were still there. Susannah felt them.
When she looked down at Oy and saw him gazing in the same direction, she wasn’t surprised.
“I think that may be their problem,” Roland said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eddie asked, but Roland would say no more. He simply lay in the road with a rolled-up piece of deerskin beneath his neck, looking up at the dark sky and smoking.
Later, Roland’s ka-tet slept. They posted no watch and were undisturbed.
FIVE
The dreams, when they came, were not dreams at all. They all knew this except perhaps for Susannah, who in a very real sense was not there at all that night.
My God, I’m back in New York, Eddie thought. And, on the heels of this: Really back in New York. This is really happening.
It was. He was in New York. On Second Avenue.
That was when Jake and Oy came around the corner from Fifty-fourth Street. “Hey, Eddie,” Jake said, grinning. “Welcome home.”
Game on, Eddie thought. Game on.
Chapter II: New York Groove
ONE
Jake fell asleep looking into pure darkness—no stars in that cloudy night sky, no moon. As he drifted off, he had a sensation of falling that he recognized with dismay: in his previous life as a so-called normal child he’d often had dreams of falling, especially around exam time, but these had ceased since his violent rebirth into Mid-World.
Then the falling feeling was gone. He heard a brief chiming melody that was somehow too beautiful: three notes and you wanted it to stop, a dozen and you thought it would kill you if it didn’t. Each chime seemed to make his bones vibrate. Sounds Hawaiian, doesn’t it? he thought, for although the chiming melody was nothing like the sinister warble of the thinny, somehow it was.
It was.
Then, just when he truly believed he could bear it no longer, the terrible, gorgeous tune stopped. The darkness behind his closed eyes suddenly lit up a brilliant dark red.
He opened them cautiously on strong sunlight.
And gaped.
At New York.
Taxis bustled past, gleaming bright yellow in the sunshine. A young black man wearing Walkman earphones strolled by Jake, bopping his sandaled feet a little bit to the music and going “Cha-da-ba, cha-da-fcow!”
under his breath. A jackhammer battered Jake’s eardrums. Chunks of cement dropped into a dumptruck with a crash that echoed from one cliff-face of buildings to another. The world was a-din with racket. He had gotten used to the deep silences of Mid-World without even realizing it. No, more. Had come to love them. Still, this noise and bustle had its attractions, and Jake couldn’t deny it. Back in the New York groove. He felt a little grin stretch his lips.
“Ake! Ake!” cried a low, rather distressed voice. Jake looked down and saw Oy sitting on the sidewalk with his tail curled neatly around him. The billy-bumbler wasn’t wearing little red booties and Jake wasn’t wearing the red Oxfords (thank God), but this was still very like their visit to Roland’s Gilead, which they had reached by traveling in the pink Wizard’s Glass. The glass ball that had caused so much trouble and woe.
No glass this time… he’d just gone to sleep. But this was no dream. It was more intense than any dream he’d ever had, and more textured. Also…
Also, people kept detouring around him and Oy as they stood to the left of a midtown saloon called Kansas City Blues. While Jake was making this observation, a woman actually stepped over Oy, hitching up her straight black skirt a bit at the knee in order to do so. Her preoccupied face {I’m just one more New Yorker minding my business, so don’t screw with mewss what that face said to Jake) never changed.
They don’t see us, but somehow they sense us. And if they can sense us, we must really be here.
The first logical question was Why? Jake considered this for a moment, then decided to table it. He had an idea the answer would come. Meantime, why not enjoy New York while he had it?
“Come on, Oy,” he said, and walked around the corner. The billy-bumbler, clearly no city boy, walked so close to him that
Jake could feel his breath feathering against his ankle.
Second Avenue, he thought. Then: My God—
Before he could finish the thought, he saw Eddie Dean standing outside of the Barcelona Luggage store, looking dazed and more than a little out of place in old jeans, a deerskin shirt, and deerskin moccasins. His hair was clean, but it hung to his shoulders in a way that suggested no professional had seen to it in quite some time. Jake realized he himself didn’t look much better; he was also wearing a deerskin shirt and, on his lower half, the battered remains of the Dockers he’d had on the day he left home for good, setting sail for Brooklyn, Dutch Hill, and another world.
Good thing no one can see us, Jake thought, then decided that wasn’t true. If people could see them, they’d
probably get rich on spare change before noon. The thought made him grin. “Hey, Eddie,” he said. “Welcome home.”
Eddie nodded, looking bemused. “See you brought your friend.”
Jake reached down and gave Oy an affectionate pat. “He’s my version of the American Express Card. I don’t go home without him.”
Jake was about to go on—he felt witty, bubbly, full of amusing things to say—when someone came around the corner, passed them without looking (as everyone else had), and changed everything. It was a kid wearing Dockers that looked like Jake’s because they were Jake’s. Not the pair he had on now, but they were his, all right. So were the sneakers. They were the ones Jake had lost in Dutch Hill. The plaster-man who guarded the door between the worlds had torn them right off his feet.
The boy who had just passed them was John Chambers, it was him, only this version looked soft and innocent and painfully young. How did you survive? he asked his own retreating back. How did you survive the mental stress of losing your mind, and running away from home, and that horrible house in Brooklyn ?