“All right,” Tower said. “It’s a good plan. You do this well, young man.”
I was made for it, Eddie thought but didn’t say. What he said was, “I have to be going. I’ve stayed too long as it is.”
“There’s one thing you have to help me do before you go,” Tower said, and explained.
Eddie’s eyes widened. When Tower had finished—it didn’t take long—Eddie burst out, “Aw, you’re shittin!”
Tower tipped his head toward the door to his shop, where he could see that faint shimmer. It made the passing pedestrians on Second Avenue look like momentary mirages. “There’s a door there. You as much as said so, and I believe you. I can’t see it, but I can see something.”
“You’re insane,” Eddie said. “Totally gonzo.” He didn’t mean it—not precisely—but less than ever he liked having his fate so firmly woven into the fate of a man who’d make such a request. Such a demand.
“Maybe I am and maybe I’m not,” Tower said. He folded his arms over his broad but flabby chest. His voice was soft but the look in his eyes was adamant. “In either case, this is my condition for doing all that you say.
For falling in with your madness, in other words.”
“Aw, Cal, for God’s sake! God and the Man Jesus! I’m only asking you to do what Stefan Toren’s will told you to do.”
The eyes did not soften or cut aside as they did when Tower was waffling or preparing to fib. If anything, they grew stonier yet. “Stefan Toren’s dead and I’m not. I’ve told you my condition for doing what you want.
The only question is whether or not—”
“Yeah, yeah, YEAF! ” Eddie cried, and drank off the rest of the white stuff in his cup. Then he picked up the carton and drained that, for good measure. It looked like he was going to need the strength. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
FIFTEEN
Roland could see into the bookshop, but it was like looking at things on the bottom of a fast-running stream.
He wished Eddie would hurry. Even with the bullets buried deep in his ears he could hear the todash chimes, and nothing blocked the terrible smells: now hot metal, now rancid bacon, now ancient melting cheese, now burning onions. His eyes were watering, which probably accounted for at least some of the wavery look of things seen beyond the door.
Far worse than the sound of the chimes or the smells was the way the ball was insinuating itself into his already compromised joints, filling them up with what felt like splinters of broken glass. So far he’d gotten nothing but a few twinges in his good left hand, but he had no illusions; the pain there and everywhere else would continue to increase for as long as the box was open and Black Thirteen shone out unshielded. Some of the pain from the dry twist might go away once the ball was hidden again, but Roland didn’t think all of it would. And this might only be the beginning.
As if to congratulate him on his intuition, a baleful flare of pain setded into his right hip and began to throb there. To Roland it felt like a bag filled with warm liquid lead. He began to massage it with his right hand…
as if that would do any good.
“Roland!” The voice was bubbly and distant—like the things he could see beyond the door, it seemed to be underwater—but it was unmistakably Eddie’s. Roland looked up from his hip and saw that Eddie and Tower had carried some sort of case over to the unfound door. It appeared to be filled with books. “Roland, can you help us?”
The pain had settled so deeply into his hips and knees that Roland wasn’t even sure he could get up… but he did it, and fluidly. He didn’t know how much of his condition Eddie’s sharp eyes might have already seen, but Roland didn’t want them to see any more. Not, at least, until their adventures in Calla Bryn Sturgis were over.
“When we push it, you pull!”
Roland nodded his understanding, and the bookcase slid forward. There was one strange and vertiginous moment when the half in the cave was firm and clear and the half still back in The Manhattan Bookstore of the Mind shimmered unsteadily. Then Roland took hold of it and pulled it through. It juddered and squalled across the floor of the cave, pushing aside little piles of pebbles and bones.
As soon as it was out of the doorway, the lid of the ghost-wood box began to close. So did the door itself.
“No, you don’t,” Roland murmured. “No, you don’t, you bastard.” He slipped the remaining two fingers of his right hand into the narrowing space beneath the lid of the box. The door stopped moving and remained ajar when he did. And enough was enough. Now even his teeth were buzzing. Eddie was having some last little bit of palaver with Tower, but Roland no longer cared if they were the secrets of the universe.
“Eddie!” he roared. “Eddie, to me!”
And, thankfully, Eddie grabbed his swag-bag and came. The moment he was through the door, Roland closed the box. The unfound door shut a second later with a flat and undramatic clap. The chimes ceased. So did the jumble of poison pain pouring into Roland’s joints. The relief was so tremendous that he cried out. Then, for the next ten seconds or so, all he could do was lower his chin to his chest, close his eyes, and struggle not to sob.
“Say thankya,” he managed at last. “Eddie, say thankya.”
“Don’t mention it. Let’s get out of this cave, what do you think?”
“I think yes,” Roland said. “Gods, yes.”
SIXTEEN
“Didn’t like him much, did you?” Roland asked.
Ten minutes had passed since Eddie’s return. They had moved a little distance down from the cave, then stopped where the path twisted through a small rocky inlet. The roaring gale that had tossed back their hair and plastered their clothes against their bodies was here reduced to occasional prankish gusts. Roland was grateful for them. He hoped they would excuse the slow and clumsy way he was building his smoke. Yet he felt Eddie’s eyes upon him, and the young man from Brooklyn—who had once been almost as dull and unaware as Andolini and Biondi—now saw much.
“Tower, you mean.”
Roland tipped him a sardonic glance. “Of whom else would I speak? The cat?”
Eddie gave a brief grunt of acknowledgment, almost a laugh. He kept pulling in long breaths of the clean air.
It was good to be back. Going to New York in the flesh had been better than going todash in one way—that sense of lurking darkness had been gone, and the accompanying sense of thinness— but God, the place stank.
Mostly it was cars and exhaust (the oily clouds of diesel were the worst), but there were a thousand other bad smells, too. Not the least of them was the aroma of too many human bodies, their essential polecat odor not hidden at all by the perfumes and sprays the folken put on themselves. Were they unconscious of how bad they smelled, all huddled up together as they were? Eddie supposed they must be. Had been himself, once upon a time. Once upon a time he couldn’t wait to get back to New York, would have killed to get there.
“Eddie? Come back from Nis!” Roland snapped his fingers in front of Eddie Dean’s face.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “As for Tower… no, I didn’t like him much. God, sending his books through like that!
Making his lousy first editions part of his condition for helping to save the fucking universe!”
“He doesn’t think of it in those terms… unless he does so in his dreams. And you know they’ll burn his shop when they get there and find him gone. Almost surely. Pour gasoline under the door and light it. Break his window and toss in a grenado, either manufactured or homemade. Do you mean to tell me that never occurred to you?”
Of course it had. “Well, maybe.”
It was Roland’s turn to utter the humorous grunting sound. “Not much may in that be. So he saved his best books. And now, in Doorway Cave, we have something to hide the Pere’s treasure behind. Although I suppose it must be counted our treasure now.”
“His courage didn’t strike me as real courage,” Eddie said. “It was more like greed.”
“Not all are called to the way of the sword or the gun or the ship,” Roland said, “but all serve ka.”
“Really? Does the Crimson King? Or the low men and women Callahan talked about?”
Roland didn’t reply.
Eddie said, “He may do well. Tower, I mean. Not the cat.”
“Very amusing,” Roland said dryly. He scratched a match on the seat of his pants, cupped the flame, lit his smoke.