“Look,” Roland said, taking his hands. The others now made a tight circle around them.
“Look. I think you’ll see.”
A brilliant seam opened in the darkness, obliterating Sheemie and Ted from Jake’s view.
For a moment it trembled and darkened, and Jake thought it would disappear. Then it grew
bright again and spread wider. He heard, very faintly (the way you heard things when you
were underwater), the sound of a car or truck passing in that other world. And saw a
building with a small asphalt lot in front of it. Three cars and a pickup truck were parked
there.
Daylight!he thought, dismayed. Because if time never ran backward in the Keystone
World, that meant that timehad slipped. If that was Keystone World, then it was Saturday,
the nineteenth of June, in the year—
“Quick!” Ted shouted from the other side of that brilliant hole in reality. “If you’re going, go now! He’s going to faint! If you’re going—”
Roland yanked Jake forward, his purse bouncing on his back as he did so.
Wait!Jake wanted to shout.Wait, I forgot my stuff!
But it was too late. There was the sensation of big hands squeezing his chest, and he felt all the air whoosh out of his lungs. He thought,Pressure change. There was a sensation of
fallingup and then he was reeling onto the pavement of the parking lot with his shadow
tacked to his heels, squinting and grimacing, wondering in some distant part of his mind
how long it had been since his eyes had been exposed to plain old natural daylight. Not
since entering the Doorway Cave in pursuit of Susannah, maybe.
Very faintly he heard someone—he thought it was the girl who had kissed him—callGood
luck, and then it was gone. Thunderclap was gone, and the Devar-Toi, and the darkness.
They were America-side, in the parking lot of the place to which Roland’s memory and
Sheemie’s power—boosted by the other four Breakers—had taken them. It was the East
Stoneham General Store, where Roland and Eddie had been ambushed by Jack Andolini.
Only unless there had been some horrible error, that had been twenty-two years earlier.
This was June 19th of 1999, and the clock in the window (IT’SALWAYS TIME FOR
BOAR’S HEAD MEATS! was written in a circle around the face) said it was nineteen
minutes of four in the afternoon.
Time was almost up.
Chapter I:
Mrs. Tassenbaum
Drives South
One
The fact of his own almost unearthly speed of hand never occurred to Jake Chambers. All
he knew was that when he staggered out of the Devar-Toi and back into America, his
shirt—belled out into a pregnant curve by Oy’s weight—was pulling out of his jeans. The
bumbler, who never had much luck when it came to passing between the worlds (he’d
nearly been squashed by a taxicab the last time), tumbled free. Almost anyone else in the
world would have been unable to prevent that fall (and in fact it very likely wouldn’t have
hurt Oy at all), but Jake wasn’t almost anyone. Ka had wanted him so badly that it had even
found its way around death to put him at Roland’s side. Now his hands shot out with a
speed so great that they momentarily blurred away to nothing. When they reappeared, one
was curled into the thick shag at the nape of Oy’s neck and the other into the shorter fur at the rump end of his long back. Jake set his friend down on the pavement. Oy looked up at
him and gave a single short bark. It seemed to express not one idea but two:thanks,
anddon’t do that again.
“Come on,” Roland said. “We have to hurry.”
Jake followed him toward the store, Oy falling in at his accustomed place by the boy’s left
heel. There was a sign hanging in the door from a little rubber suction cup. It readWE’RE
OPEN, SO COME IN N VISIT , just as it had in 1977. Taped in the window to the left of
the door was this:
COME ONE COME ALL
TO THE
1st CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH
BEANHOLE BEAN SUPPER
Saturday June 19th, 1999
Intersection Route 7 & Klatt Road
PARISH HOUSE (In Back)
5 PM–7:30 PM
AT 1st CONGO
“WE’RE ALWAYS GLAD TO SEEYA, NAYBAH!”
Jake thought,The bean supper will be starting in an hour or so. They’ll already be putting
down the tablecloths and setting the places.
Taped to the right of the door was a more startling message to the public:
1st Lovell-Stoneham Church of the Walk-Ins
Will YOU join us for Worship?
Sunday services: 10 AM
Thursday services: 7 PM
EVERY WEDNESDAY IS YOUTH NIGHT!!! 7–9 PM!
Games! Music! Scripture!
***AND***
NEWS OF WALK-INS!
Hey, Teens!
“Be There or Be Square!!!”
“We Seek the Doorway to Heaven—Will You Seek With Us?”
Jake found himself thinking of Harrigan, the street-preacher on the corner of Second
Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, and wondering to which of these two churches he might
have been attracted. His head might have told him First Congo, but hisheart —
“Hurry, Jake,” Roland repeated, and there was a jingle as the gunslinger opened the door.
Good smells wafted out, reminding Jake (as they had reminded Eddie) of Took’s on the
Calla high street: coffee and peppermint candy, tobacco and salami, olive oil, the salty tang of brine, sugar and spice and most things nice.
He followed Roland into the store, aware that he had brought at least two things with him,
after all. The Coyote machine-pistol was stuffed into the waistband of his jeans, and the
bag of Orizas was still slung over his shoulder, hanging on his left side so that the half a
dozen plates remaining inside would be within easy reach of his right hand.
Two
Wendell “Chip” McAvoy was at the deli counter, weighing up a pretty sizable order of
sliced honey-cured turkey for Mrs. Tassenbaum, and until the bell over the door rang, once
more turning Chip’s life upside down (You’ve turned turtle,the oldtimers used to say when
your car rolled in the ditch), they had been discussing the growing presence of Jet Skis on
Keywadin Pond…or rather Mrs.Tassenbaum had been discussing it.
Chip thought Mrs. T. was a more or less typical summer visitor: rich as Croesus (or at least
her husband, who had one of those new dot-com businesses, was), gabby as a parrot loaded
on whiskey, and as crazy as Howard Hughes on a morphine toot. She could afford a cabin
cruiser (and two dozen Jet Skis to pull it, if she fancied), but she came down to the market
on this end of the lake in a battered old rowboat, tying up right about where John Cullum
used to tie his up, until That Day (as the years had refined his story to ever greater purity, burnishing it like an oft-polished piece of teak furniture, Chip had come more and more to
convey its capital-letter status with his voice, speaking of That Day in the same reverential tones the Reverend Conveigh used when speaking of Our Lord). La Tassenbaum was talky,
meddlesome, good-looking (kinda…he supposed…if you didn’t mind the makeup and the
hairspray), loaded with green, and a Republican. Under the circumstances, Chip McAvoy
felt perfectly justified in sneaking his thumb onto the corner of the scale…a trick he had
learned from his father, who had told him you practically had a duty to rook folks from
away if they could afford it, but you must never rook folks from the home place, not even if
they were as rich as that writer, King, from over in Lovell. Why? Because word got around, and the next thing you knew, out-of-town custom was all a man had to get by on, and try
doingthat in the month of February when the snowbanks on the sides of Route 7 were nine
feet high. This wasn’t February, however, and Mrs. Tassenbaum—a Daughter of Abraham
if he had ever seen one—was not from these parts. No, Mrs. Tassenbaum and her
rich-as-Croesus dot-com husband would be gone back to Jew York as soon as they saw the
first colored leaf fall. Which was why he felt perfectly comfortable in turning her six-dollar order of turkey into seven dollars and eighty cents with the ball of his thumb on the scale.
Nor did it hurt to agree with her when she switched topics and started talking about what a
terrible man that Bill Clinton was, although in fact Chip had voted twice for Bubba and
would have voted for him a third time, had the Constitution allowed him to run for another
term. Bubba was smart, he was good at persuading the ragheads to do what he wanted, he
hadn’tentirely forgotten the working man, and by the Lord Harry he got more pussy than a
toilet seat.
“And nowGore expects to just…ride in on his coattails!” Mrs. Tassenbaum said, digging
for her checkbook (the turkey on the scale magically gained another two ounces, and there