came at you?”
“Yes. You told me to get down.”
“He never opened his mouth, Eddie,” Susannah said.
“Yes, you did! You yelled! I heard you, man!”
“I yelled, all right, but I did it with my mind.” The gunslinger turned to Jake. “Do you remember? In the house?”
“When the board I was pulling on wouldn’t come up, you told me to pull on the other one.
But if you can’t read my mind, Roland, how did you know what land of trouble I was in?”
“I saw. I heard nothing, but I saw—just a little, as if through a dirty window.” His eyes surveyed them. “This closeness and sharing of minds is called khef, a word that means
many other things in the original tongue of the Old World—water, birth, and life-force are
only three of them. Be aware of it. For now, that’s all I want.”
“Can you be aware of something you don’t believe in?” Eddie asked.
Roland smiled. “Just keep an open mind.”
“That I can do.”
“Roland?” It was Jake. “Do you think Oy might be part of our ka-tet?”
Susannah smiled. Roland didn’t. “I’m not prepared to even guess right now, but I’ll tell you this, Jake—I’ve been thinking about your furry friend a good deal. Ka does not rule all, and
coincidences still happen . . . but the sudden appearance of a billy-bumbler that still
remembers people doesn’t seem completely coincidental to me.”
He glanced around at them.
“I’ll begin. Eddie will speak next, taking up from the place where I leave off. Then
Susannah. Jake, you’ll speak last. All right?”
They nodded.
“Fine,” Roland said. “We are ka-tet—one from many. Let the pala- ver begin.”
20
THE TALK WENT ON until sundown, stopping only long enough for them to eat a cold
meal, and by the time it was over, Eddie felt as if he had gone twelve hard rounds with
Sugar Ray Leonard. He no longer doubted that they had been “sharing khef,” as Roland put it; he and Jake actually seemed to have been living each other’s life in their dreams, as if
they were two halves of the same whole.
Roland began with what had happened under the mountains, where Jake’s first life in this
world had ended. He told of his own palaver with the man in black, and Walter’s veiled
words about a Beast and someone he called the Ageless Stranger. He told of the strange,
daunting dream which had come to him, a dream in which the whole universe had been
swallowed in a beam of fantastic white light. And how, at the end of that dream, there had
been a single blade of purple grass.
Eddie glanced sideways at Jake and was stunned by the knowledge— the recognition—in
the boy’s eyes.
21
ROLAND HAD BABBLED PARTS of this story to Eddie in his time of delir- ium, but it
was entirely new to Susannah, and she listened with wide eyes. As Roland repeated the
things Walter had told him, she caught glints of her own world, like reflections in a
smashed mirror: automobiles, cancer, rockets to the moon, artificial insemination. She had
no idea who the Beast might be, but she recognized the name of the Ageless Stranger as a
variation upon the name of Merlin, the magician who had supposedly orchestrated the
career of King Arthur. Curiouser and curiouser.
Roland told of how he had awakened to find Walter long years dead—time had somehow
slipped forward, perhaps a hundred years, per- haps five hundred. Jake listened in
fascinated silence as the gunslinger told of reaching the edge of the Western Sea, of how he
had lost two of the fingers on his right hand, and how he had drawn Eddie and Susannah
before encountering Jack Mort, the dark third.
The gunslinger motioned to Eddie, who took up the tale with the coming of the great bear.
“Shardik?” Jake interjected. “But that’s the name of a book! A book in our world! It was written by the man who wrote that famous book about the rabbits—”
“Richard Adams!” Eddie shouted. “And the book about the bunnies was Watership Down!
I knew I knew that name! But how can that be, Roland? How is it that the people in your
world know about things in ours?”
“There are doors, aren’t there?” Roland responded. “Haven’t we seen four of them already?
Do you think they never existed before, or never will again?”
“But—”
“All of us have seen the leavings of your world in mine, and when I was in your city of
New York, I saw the marks of my world in yours. I saw gunslingers. Most were lax and
slow, but they were gunslingers all the same, clearly members of their own ancient ka-tet.”
“Roland, they were just cops. You ran rings around them.”
“Not the last one. When Jack Mort and I were in the underground railway station, that one
almost took me down. Except for blind luck— Mort’s flint-and-steel—he would have done.
That one … I saw his eyes. He knew the face of his father. I believe he knew it very well.
And then … do you remember the name of Balazar’s nightclub?”
“Sure,” Eddie said uneasily. “The Leaning Tower. But it could have been coincidence; you
yourself said ka doesn’t rule everything.”
Roland nodded. “You really are like Cuthbert—I remember some- thing he said when we
were boys. We were planning a midnight lark in the cemetery, but Alain wouldn’t go. He
said he was afraid of offending the shades of his fathers and mothers. Cuthbert laughed at
him. He said he wouldn’t believe in ghosts until he caught one in his teeth.”
“Good for him!” Eddie exclaimed. “Bravo!”
Roland smiled. “I thought you’d like that. At any rate, let’s leave this ghost for now. Go on with your story.”
Eddie told of the vision which had come to him when Roland threw the jawbone into the
fire—the vision of the key and the rose. He told of his dream, and how he had walked
through the door of Tom and Gerry’s Artistic Deli and into the field of roses which was
dominated by the tall, soot-colored Tower. He told of the blackness which had issued from
its windows, forming a shape in the sky overhead, speaking directly to Jake now, because
Jake was listening with hungry concentration and growing wonder. He tried to convey
some sense of the exaltation and terror which had permeated the dream, and saw from their
eyes—Jake’s most of all— that he was either doing a better job of that than he could have
hoped for … or that they’d had dreams of their own.
He told of following Shardik’s backtrail to the Portal of the Bear, and how, when he put his
head against it, he’d found himself remember- ing the day he had talked his brother into
taking him to Dutch Hill, so he could see The Mansion. He told about die cup and the
needle, and how the pointing needle had become unnecessary once they realized they could
see the Beam at work in everything it touched, even the birds in the sky.
Susannah took up the tale at this point. As she spoke, telling of how Eddie had begun to
carve his own version of the key, Jake lay back, laced his hands together behind his head,
and watched the clouds run slowly toward the city on their straight southeasterly course.
The orderly shape they made showed the presence of the Beam as clearly as smoke leaving
a chimney shows die direction of the wind.
She finished with the story of how they had finally hauled Jake into this world, closing the
split track of his and Roland’s memories as sud- denly and as completely as Eddie had
closed the door in the speaking ring. The only fact she left out was really not a fact at
all—at least, not yet. She’d had no morning sickness, after all, and a single missed period
meant nothing by itself. As Roland himself might have said, that was a tale best left for
another day.
Yet as she finished, she found herself wishing she could forget what Aunt Talitha had said
when Jake told her this was his home now: Gods pity you, then, for the sun is going down
on this world. It’s going down forever.
“And now it’s your turn, Jake,” Roland said.
Jake sat up and looked toward Lud, where the windows of the west-em towers reflected back the late afternoon light in golden sheets. “It’s all crazy,” he murmured, “but it almost makes sense. Like a dream when you wake up.”
“Maybe we can help you make sense of it,” Susannah said.
“Maybe you can. At least you can help me think about the train. I’m tired of trying to make sense of Blaine by myself.” He sighed. “You know what Roland went through, living two
lives at the same time, so I can skip that part. I’m not sure I could ever explain how it felt,