Susannah ignored this. “And the Dark Tower? Is it some kind of generator? A central
power-source for these Beams?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you do know that this is point A,” Eddie said. “If we walked long enough in a straight line, we’d come to another portal—call it point C—on the other edge of the world. But
before we did, we’d come to point B. The center-point. The Dark Tower.”
The gunslinger nodded.
“How long a trip is it? Do you know?”
“No. But I know it’s very far, and that the distance grows with every day that passes.”
Eddie had bent to examine the walking box. Now he straightened up and stared at Roland.
“That can’t be.” He sounded like a man trying to explain to a small child that there really isn’t a boogeyman living in his closet, that there can’t be because there isn’t any such thing
as the boogeyman, not really. “Worlds don’t grow, Roland.”
“Don’t they? When I was a boy, Eddie, there were maps. I remem- ber one in particular. It
was called The Greater Kingdoms of the Western Earth. It showed my land, which was
called by the name Gilead. It showed the Downland Baronies, which were overrun by riot
and civil war in the year after I won my guns, and the hills, and the desert, and the
mountains, and the Western Sea. It was a long distance from Gilead to the Western Sea—a
thousand miles or more—but it had taken me over twenty years to cross that distance.”
“That’s impossible,” Susannah said quickly, fearfully. “Even if you walked the whole distance it couldn’t take twenty years.”
“Well, you have to allow for stops to write postcards and drink beer,” Eddie said, but they both ignored him.
“I didn’t walk but rode most of the distance on horseback,” Roland said. “I was—slowed up, shall we say?—every now and then, but for most of that time I was moving. Moving
away from John Farson, who led the revolt which toppled the world I grew up in and who
wanted my head on a pole in his courtyard—he had good reason to want that, I suppose,
since I and my compatriots were responsible for the deaths of a great many of his
followers—and because I stole something he held very dear.”
“What, Roland?” Eddie asked curiously.
Roland shook his head. “That’s a story for another day … or maybe never. For now, think
not of that but of this: I’ve come many thousands of miles. Because the world is growing.”
“A thing like that just can’t happen,” Eddie reiterated, but he was badly shaken, all the same. “There’d be earthquakes . . . floods . . . tidal waves … I don’t know what all …”
“Look!” Roland said furiously. “Just look around you! What do you see? A world that is slowing down like a child’s top even as it speeds up and moves on in some other way none
of us understand. Look at your kills, Eddie! Look at your kills, for your father’s sake!”
He took two strides toward the stream, picked up the steel snake, examined it briefly, and
tossed it to Eddie, who caught it with his left hand. The snake broke in two pieces as he did
so.
“You see? It’s exhausted. All the creatures we found here were exhausted. If we hadn’t
come, they would have died before long, anyway. Just as the hear would have died.”
“The bear had some sort of disease,” Susannah said.
The gunslinger nodded. “Parasites which attacked the natural parts of its body. But why
did they never attack it before?”
Susannah did not reply.
Eddie was examining the snake. Unlike the bear, it appeared to be a totally artificial
construction, a thing of metal, circuits, and yards (or maybe miles) of gossamer-thin wire.
Yet he could see flecks of rust, not just on the surface of the half-snake he still held, but in its guts as well. And there was a patch of wetness where either oil had leaked out or water
had seeped in. This moisture had rotted away some of the wires, and a greenish stuff that
looked like moss had grown over several of the thumbnail-sized circuit boards.
Eddie turned the snake over. A steel plate proclaimed it to be the work of North Central
Positronics, Ltd. There was a serial number, but no name. Probably too unimportant to
name, he thought. Just a sophisti- cated mechanical Roto-Rooter designed to give old Br•er
Bear an enema every once In a while, keep him regular, or something equally disgusting.
He dropped the snake and wiped his hands on his pants.
Roland had picked up the tractor-gadget. He yanked at one of the treads. It came off easily, showering a cloud of rust down between his boots. He tossed it aside.
“Everything in the world is either coming to rest or falling to pieces,” he said flatly. “At the same time, the forces which interlock and give the world its coherence—in time and size as
well as in space—are weakening. We knew that even as children, but we had no idea what
the time of the end would be like. How could we? Yet now I am living in those times, and
I don’t believe they affect my world alone. They affect yours, Eddie and Susannah; they
may affect a billion others. The Beams are breaking down. I don’t know if that’s a cause or
only another symptom, but I know it’s true. Come! Draw close! Listen!”
As Eddie approached the metal box with its alternating diagonal slashes of yellow and
black, a strong and unpleasant memory seized him—for the first time in years he found
himself thinking of a crumbling Victorian wreck in Dutch Hill, about a mile away from the
neighborhood he and Henry had grown up. This wreck, which was known as The Mansion
to the neighborhood kids, occupied a plot of weedy, untended lawn on Rhinehold Street.
Eddie guessed that practically all the kids in the borough had heard spooky stories about
The Mansion. The house stood slumped beneath its steep roofs, seeming to glare at
passersby from the deep shadows thrown by its eaves. The windows were gone, of
course—kids can throw rocks through windows without getting too close to a place—hut it
had not been spray-painted, and it had not become a make-out spot or a shooting gallery.
Oddest of all was the simple fact of its continued existence: no one had set it on fire to
collect the insurance or just to see it bum. The kids said it was haunted, of course, and as
Eddie stood on the sidewalk with Henry one day, looking at it (they had made the
pilgrimage specifically to see this object of fabulous rumor, although Henry had told their
mother they were only going for Hoodsie Rockets at Dahlberg’s with some of his friends),
it had seemed that it really might be haunted. Hadn’t he felt some strong and unfriendly
force seeping from that old Victorian’s shadowy windows, windows that seemed to look at
him with the fixed stare of a dangerous lunatic? Hadn’t he felt some subtle wind stirring the
hairs on his arms and the back of his neck? Hadn’t he had the clear intuition that if he
stepped inside that place, the door would slam and lock behind him and the walls would
begin to close in, grinding the bones of dead mice to powder, wanting to crush his bones
the same way?
Haunting. Haunted.
He felt that same old sense of mystery and danger now, as he approached the metal box.
Gooseflesh began to ripple up his legs and down his arms; the hair on the back of his neck
bushed out and became rough, overlapping hackles. He felt that same subtle wind blowing
past him, although the leaves on the trees which ringed the clearing were perfectly still.
Yet he walked toward the door anyway (for that was what it was, of course, another door,
although this one was locked and always would be against the likes of him), not stopping
until his ear was pressed against it.
It was as if he had dropped a tab of really strong acid half an hour ago and it was just beginning to come on heavy. Strange colors flowed across the darkness behind his eyeballs.
He seemed to hear voices mur- muring up to him from long hallways like stone throats,
halls which were lit with guttering electric torches. Once these flambeaux of the modern
age had thrown a bright glare across everything, but now they were only sullen cores of
blue light. He sensed emptiness . . . desertion . . . desola- tion . . . death.
The machinery rumbled on and on, but wasn’t there a rough under- tone to the sound? A
land of desperate thudding beneath the hum, like the arrhythmia of a diseased heart? A
feeling that the machinery produc- ing this sound, although far more sophisticated even