They looked at each other and laughed, because “nineteen” had become a kind of jokey catchword among
them, replacing “bumhug,” which Jake and Eddie had pretty much worn out. Yet the laughter had a tinge of uneasiness about it, because this business about nineteen had gotten a trifle weird. Eddie had found himself carving it on the side of his most recent wooden animal, like a brand: Hey there, Pard, welcome to our spread! We call it the Bar-Nineteen. Both Susannah and Jake had confessed to bringing wood for the evening fire in armloads of nineteen pieces. Neither of them could say why; it just felt right to do it that way, somehow.
Then there was the morning Roland had stopped them at the edge of the wood through which they were now traveling. He had pointed at the sky, where one particularly ancient tree had reared its hoary branches. The shape those branches made against the sky was the number nineteen. Clearly nineteen. They had all seen it, but Roland had seen it first.
Yet Roland, who believed in omens and portents as routinely as Eddie had once believed in lightbulbs and Double-A batteries, had a tendency to dismiss his ka-tet’s odd and sudden infatuation with the number. They had grown close, he said, as close as any ka-tet could, and so their thoughts, habits, and little obsessions had a tendency to spread among them all, like a cold. He believed that Jake was facilitating this to a certain degree.
“You’ve got the touch, Jake,” he said. “I’m not sure that it’s as strong in you as it was in my old friend Alain, but by the gods I believe it may be.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jake had replied, frowning in puzzlement. Eddie did—sort of—and guessed that Jake would know, in time. If time ever began passing in a normal way again, that was.
And on the day Jake brought the muffin-balls, it did.
THREE
They had stopped for lunch (more uninteresting vegetarian burritos, the deer meat now gone and the Keebler cookies little more than a sweet memory) when Eddie noticed that Jake was gone and asked the gunslinger if he knew where the kid had gotten off to.
“Peeled off about half a wheel back,” Roland said, and pointed along the road with the two remaining fingers of his right hand. “He’s all right. If he wasn’t, we’d all feel it.” Roland looked at his burrito, then took an unenthusiastic bite.
Eddie opened his mouth to say something else, but Susannah got there first. “Here he is now. Hi there, sugar, what you got?”
Jake’s arms were full of round things the size of tennis balls. Only these balls would never bounce true; they had little horns sticking up from them. When the kid got closer, Eddie could smell them, and the smell was wonderful—like fresh-baked bread.
“I think these might be good to eat,” Jake said. “They smell like the fresh sourdough bread my mother and Mrs. Shaw—the housekeeper—got at Zabar’s.” He looked at Susannah and Eddie, smiling a little. “Do you guys know Zabar’s?”
” I sure do,” Susannah said. “Best of everything, mmm- hmmm. And they do smell fine. You didn’t eat any yet,
did you?”
“No way.” He looked questioningly at Roland.
The gunslinger ended the suspense by taking one, plucking off the horns, and biting into what was left.
“Muffin-balls,” he said. “I haven’t seen any in gods know how long. They’re wonderful.” His blue eyes were gleaming. “Don’t want to eat the horns; they’re not poison but they’re sour. We can fry them, if there’s a little deerfat left. That way they taste almost like meat.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Eddie said. “Knock yourself out. As for me, I think I’ll skip the mushroom muff-divers, or whatever they are.”
“They’re not mushrooms at all,” Roland said. “More like a kind of ground berry.”
Susannah took one, nibbled, then helped herself to a bigger bite. “You don’t want to skip these, sweetheart,”
she said. “My Daddy’s friend, Pop Mose, would have said ‘These are prime.’ ” She took another of the muffin-balls from Jake and ran a thumb over its silky surface.
“Maybe,” he said, “but there was this book I read for a report back in high school—I think it was called We Have Always Lived in the Castle—where this nutty chick poisoned her whole family with things like that.”
He bent toward Jake, raising his eyebrows and stretching the corners of his mouth in what he hoped was a creepy smile. “Poisoned her whole family and they died in AG-o-ny!”
Eddie fell off the log on which he had been sitting and began to roll around on the needles and fallen leaves, making horrible faces and choking sounds. Oy ran around him, yipping Eddie’s name in a series of high-pitched barks.
“Quit it,” Roland said. “Where did you find these, Jake?”
“Back there,” he said. “In a clearing I spotted from the path. It’s full of these things. Also, if you guys are hungry for meat… I know I am… there’s all kinds of sign. A lot of the scat’s fresh.” His eyes searched Roland’s face. “Very… fresh… scat.” He spoke slowly, as if to someone who wasn’t fluent in the language.
A little smile played at the corners of Roland’s mouth. “Speak quiet but speak plain,” he said. “What worries you, Jake?”
When Jake replied, his lips barely made the shapes of the words. “Men watching me while I picked the muffin-balls.” He paused, then added: “They’re watching us now.”
Susannah took one of the muffin-balls, admired it, then dipped her face as if to smell it like a flower. “Back the way we came? To the right of the road?”
“Yes,” Jake said.
Eddie raised a curled fist to his mouth as if to stifle a cough, and said: “How many?”
“I think four.”
“Five,” Roland said. “Possibly as many as six. One’s a woman. Another a boy not much older than Jake.”
Jake looked at him, startled. Eddie said, “How long have they been there?”
“Since yesterday,” Roland said. “Cut in behind us from almost dead east.”
“And you didn’t tell us?” Susannah asked. She spoke rather sternly, not bothering to cover her mouth and obscure the shapes of the words.
Roland looked at her with the barest twinkle in his eye. “I was curious as to which of you would smell them out first. Actually, I had my money on you, Susannah.”
She gave him a cool look and said nothing. Eddie thought there was more than a little Detta Walker in that look, and was glad not to be on the receiving end.
“What do we do about them?” Jake asked.
“For now, nothing,” the gunslinger said.
Jake clearly didn’t like this. “What if they’re like Tick-Tock’s katet? Gasher and Hoots and those guys?”
“They’re not.”
“How do you know?’
“Because they would have set on us already and they’d be fly-food.”
There seemed no good reply to that, and they took to the road again. It wound through deep shadows, finding its way among trees that were centuries old. Before they had been walking twenty minutes, Eddie heard the sound of their pursuers (or shadowers): snapping twigs, rustling underbrush, once even a low voice. Slewfeet, in Roland’s terminology. Eddie was disgusted with himself for remaining unaware of them for so long. He also wondered what yon cullies did for a living. If it was tracking and trapping, they weren’t very good at it.
Eddie Dean had become a part of Mid-World in many ways, some so subde he wasn’t consciously aware of them, but he still thought of distances in miles instead of wheels. He guessed they’d come about fifteen from the spot where Jake rejoined them with his muffin-balls and his news when Roland called it a day. They stopped in the middle of the road, as they always did since entering the forest; that way the embers of their campfire stood little chance of setting the woods on fire.
Eddie and Susannah gathered a nice selection of fallen branches while Roland and Jake made a little camp and set about cutting up Jake’s trove of muffin-balls. Susannah rolled her wheelchair effortlessly over the duff under the ancient trees, piling her selections in her lap. Eddie walked nearby, humming under his breath.
“Lookit over to your left, sugar,” Susannah said. He did, and saw a distant orange blink. A fire. “Not very good, are they?” he asked. “No. Truth is, I feel a little sorry for em.”
“Any idea what they’re up to?”
“Unh-unh, but I think Roland’s right—they’ll tell us when they’re ready. Either that or decide we’re not what they want and just sort of fade away. Come on, let’s go back.”
“Just a second.” He picked up one more branch, hesitated, then took yet another. Then it was right. “Okay,”
he said.
As they headed back, he counted the sticks he’d picked up, then the ones in Susannah’s lap. The total came to nineteen in each case.