The arc grew longer, the bob’s swings faster, the pull at the end of each swing stronger. And
then —
“Eddie!” Jake called, somewhere between concern and delight. “Do you see?”
Of course he did. Now the bob was growing dim at the end of each swing. The downward
pressure on his arm — the bob’s weight — was rapidly growing stronger as this happened. He
had to support his right arm with his left hand in order to maintain his grip, and now he was also swaying at the hips with the swing of the bob. Eddie suddenly remembered where he was —
roughly seven hundred feet above the ground. This baby would shortly yank him right over the
side, if it wasn’t stopped. What if he couldn’t get the chain off his hand?
The plumb-bob swung to the right, tracing the shape of an invisible smile in the air, gaining
weight as it rose toward the end of its arc. All at once the puny piece of wood he’d lifted from its box with such ease seemed to weigh sixty, eighty, a hundred pounds. And as it paused at the end of its arc, momentarily balanced between motion and gravity, he realized he could see the East
Road through it, not just clearly but magnified. Then the Branni bob started back down again, plummeting, shedding weight. But when it started up again, this time to his left . . .
“Okay, I get the point!” Eddie shouted. “Get it off me, Henchick. At least make it stop!”
Henchick uttered a single word, one so guttural it sounded like something yanked from a mudflat. The bob didn’t slow through a series of diminishing arcs but simply quit, again hanging beside Eddie’s knee with the tip pointing at his foot. For a moment the humming in his arm and
head continued. Then that also quit. When it did, the bob’s disquieting sense of weight lifted. The damn thing was once more feather-light.
“Do’ee have something to say to me, Eddie of New York?” Henchick asked.
“Yeah, cry your pardon.”
Henchick’s teeth once more put in an appearance, gleaming briefly in the wilderness of his
beard and then gone. “Thee’s not entirely slow, is thee?”
“I hope not,” Eddie said, and could not forbear a small sigh of relief as Henchick of the Manni lifted the fine-link silver chain from his hand.
FOUR
Henchick insisted on a dry-run. Eddie understood why, but he hated all this foreplay crap. The
passing time now seemed almost to be a physical thing, like a rough piece of cloth slipping
beneath the palm of your hand. He kept silent, nevertheless. He’d already pissed off Henchick
once, and once was enough.
The old man brought six of his amigos (five of them looked older than God to Eddie) into the cave. He passed bobs to three of them and shell-shaped magnets to the other three. The Branni
bob, almost certainly the tribe’s strongest, he kept for himself.
The seven of them formed a ring at the mouth of the cave.
“Not around the door?” Roland asked.
“Not until we have to,” Henchick said.
The old men joined hands, each holding a bob or a mag at the clasping point. As soon as the
circle was complete, Eddie heard that humming again. It was as loud as an over-amped stereo
speaker. He saw Jake raise his hands to his ears, and Roland’s face tighten in a brief grimace.
Eddie looked at the door and saw it had lost that dusty, unimportant look. The hieroglyphs on
it once more stood out crisply, some forgotten word that meant UNFOUND. The crystal
doorknob glowed, outlining the rose carved there in lines of white light.
Could I open it now? Eddie wondered. Open it and step through? He thought not. Not yet, anyway. But he was a hell of a lot more hopeful about this process than he’d been five minutes
ago.
Suddenly the voices from deep in the cave came alive, but they did so in a roaring jumble.
Eddie could make out Benny Slightman the Younger screaming the word Dogan, heard his Ma telling him that now, to top off a career of losing things, he’d lost his wife, heard some man (probably Elmer Chambers) telling Jake that Jake had gone crazy, he was fou, he was Monsieur Lunatique. More voices joined in, and more, and more.
Henchick nodded sharply to his colleagues. Their hands parted. When they did, the voices
from below ceased in mid-babble. And, Eddie was not surprised to see, the door immediately
regained its look of unremarkable anonymity — it was any door you ever passed on the street
without a second look.
“What in God’s name was that? ” Callahan asked, nodding toward the deeper darkness where the floor sloped down. “It wasn’t like that before.”
“I believe that either the quake or the loss of the magic ball has driven the cave insane,”
Henchick said calmly. “It doesn’t matter to our business here, anyroa’. Our business is with the door.” He looked at Callahan’s packsack. “Once you were a wandering man.”
“So I was.”
Henchick’s teeth made another brief guest appearance. Eddie decided that, on some level, the
old bastard was enjoying this. “From the look of your gunna, sai Callahan, you’ve lost the knack.”
“I suppose it’s hard for me to believe that we’re really going anywhere,” Callahan said, and offered a smile. Compared to Henchick’s, it was feeble. “And I’m older now.”
Henchick made a rude sound at that — fah!, it sounded like.
“Henchick,” Roland said, “do you know what caused the ground to shake early this morning?”
The old man’s blue eyes were faded but still sharp. He nodded. Outside the cave’s mouth, in a
line going down the path, almost three dozen Manni men waited patiently. “Beam let go is what we think.”
“What I think, too,” Roland said. “Our business grows more desperate. I’d have an end to idle talk, if it does ya. Let’s have what palaver we must have, and then get on with our business.”
Henchick looked at Roland as coldly as he had looked at Eddie, but Roland’s eyes never
wavered. Henchick’s brow furrowed, then smoothed out.
“Aye,” he said. “As’ee will, Roland. Thee’s rendered us a great service, Manni and forgetful folk alike, and we’d return it now as best we can. The magic’s still here, and thick. Wants only a spark. We can make that spark, aye, easy as commala. You may get what’ee want. On the other
hand, we all may go to the clearing at the end of the path together. Or into the darkness. Does thee understand?”
Roland nodded.
“Would’ee go ahead?”
Roland stood for a moment with his head lowered and his hand on the butt of his gun. When
he looked up, he was wearing his own smile. It was handsome and tired and desperate and
dangerous. He twirled his whole left hand twice in the air: Let’s go.
FIVE
The coffs were set down — carefully, because the path leading up to what the Manni called Kra
Kammen was narrow — and the contents were removed. Long-nailed fingers (the Manni were
allowed to cut their nails only once a year) tapped the magnets, producing a shrill hum that
seemed to slice through Jake’s head like a knife. It reminded him of the todash chimes, and he
guessed that wasn’t surprising; those chimes were the kammen.
“What does Kra Kammen mean?” he asked Cantab. “House of Bells?”
“House of Ghosts,’ he replied without looking up from the chain he was unwinding. “Leave me alone, Jake, this is delicate work.”
Jake couldn’t see why it would be, but he did as bade. Roland, Eddie, and Callahan were
standing just inside the cave’s mouth. Jake joined them. Henchick, meanwhile, had placed the
oldest members of his group in a semicircle that went around the back of the door. The front
side, with its incised hieroglyphs and crystal doorknob, was unguarded, at least for the time
being.
The old man went to the mouth of the cave, spoke briefly with Cantab, then motioned for the
line of Manni waiting on the path to move up. When the first man in line was just inside the
cave, Henchick stopped him and came back to Roland. He squatted, inviting the gunslinger with a gesture to do the same.
The cave’s floor was powdery with dust. Some came from rocks, but most of it was the bone
residue of small animals unwise enough to wander in here. Using a fingernail, Henchick drew a
rectangle, open at the bottom, and then a semicircle around it.
“The door,” he said. “And the men of my kra. Do’ee kennit?”
Roland nodded.
“You and your friends will finish the circle,” he said, and drew it.
“The boy’s strong in the touch,” Henchick said, looking at Jake so suddenly that Jake jumped.
“Yes,” Roland said.
“We’ll put him direct in front of the door, then, but far enough away so that if it opens hard —