“Well,” she said, looking around, “it’s my city, no doubt about that, but Second Avenue sure doesn’t look like it did back in the days when Detta got her kicks shoplifting in Macy’s.”
“So you can’t find the bookstore and the vacant lot?” Roland was disappointed but far from desolate. There would be a way. There was always a—
“Oh, no problem there,” she said. “The streets are the same. New York’s just a grid, Roland, with the avenues running one way and the streets the other. Easy as pie. Come on.”
The sign had gone back to don’t walk, but after a quick glance uptown, Susannah took his arm and they crossed Fifty-fourth to the other side. Susannah strode fearlessly in spite of her bare feet. The blocks were short but crowded with exotic shops. Roland couldn’t help goggling, but his lack of attention seemed safe enough; although the sidewalks were crowded, no one crashed into them. Roland could hear his bootheels clopping on the sidewalk, however, and could see the shadows they were casting in the light of the display windows.
Almost here, he thought. Were the force that brought us any more powerful, we would be here.
And, he realized, the force might indeed grow stronger, assuming that Callahan was right about what was hidden under the floor of his church. As they drew closer to the town and to the source of the thing doing this…
Susannah twitched his arm. Roland stopped immediately. “Is it your feet?” he asked.
“No,” she said, and Roland saw she was frightened. “Why is it so dark?”
“Susannah, it’s night.”
She gave his arm an impatient shake. “I know that, I’m not blind. Can’t you…” She hesitated. “Can’t you feel it?”
Roland realized he could. For one thing, the darkness on Second Avenue really wasn’t dark at all. The gunslinger still couldn’t comprehend the prodigal way in which these people of New York squandered the things those of Gilead had held most rare and precious. Paper; water; refined oil; artificial light. This last was everywhere. There was the glow from the store windows (although most were closed, the displays were still lit), the even harsher glow from a popkin-selling place called Blimpie’s, and over all this, peculiar orange electric lamps that seemed to drench the very air with light. Yet Susannah was right. There was a black feel to the air in spite of the orange lamps. It seemed to surround the people who walked this street. It made him think about what Eddie had said earlier: This whole deal has gone nineteen.
But this darkness, more felt than seen, had nothing to do with nineteen. You had to subtract six in order to understand what was going on here. And for the first time, Roland really believed Callahan was right.
“Black Thirteen,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s brought us here, sent us todash, and we feel it all around us. It’s not the same as when I flew inside the grapefruit, but it’s like that.”
“It feels bad,” she said, speaking low.
“It is bad,” he said. “Black Thirteen’s very likely the most terrible object from the days of Eld still remaining on the face of the earth. Not that the Wizard’s Rainbow was from then; I’m sure it existed even before—”
“Roland! Hey, Roland! Suze!”
They looked up and in spite of his earlier misgivings, Roland was immensely relieved to see not only Eddie, but Jake and Oy, as well. They were about a block and a half farther along. Eddie was waving. Susannah waved back exuberantly. Roland grabbed her arm before she started to run, which was clearly her intention.
“Mind your feet,” he said. “You don’t need to pick up some sort of infection and carry it back to the other side.”
They compromised at a rapid walk. Eddie and Jake, both shod, ran to meet them. Pedestrians moved out of their way without looking, or even breaking their conversations, Roland saw, and then observed that wasn’t quite true. There was a little boy, surely no older than three, walking sturdily along next to his mother. The woman seemed to notice nothing, but as Eddie and Jake swung around them, the toddler watched with wide, wondering eyes… and then actually stretched out a hand, as if to stroke the briskly trotting Oy.
Eddie pulled ahead of Jake and arrived first. He held Susannah out at arm’s length, looking at her. His expression, Roland saw, was really quite similar to that of the tot.
“Well? What do you think, sugar?” Susannah spoke nervously, like a woman who has come home to her husband with some radical new hairdo.
“A definite improvement,” Eddie said. “I don’t need em to love you, but they’re way beyond good and into the land of excellent. Christ, now you’re an inch taller than I am!”
Susannah saw this was true and laughed. Oy sniffed at the ankle that hadn’t been there the last time he’d seen this woman, and then he laughed, too. It was an odd barky-bark of a sound, but quite clearly a laugh for all that.
“Like your legs, Suze,” Jake said, and the perfunctory quality of this compliment made Susannah laugh again. The boy didn’t notice; he had already turned to Roland. “Do you want to see the bookstore?”
“Is there anything to see?”
Jake’s face clouded. “Actually, not much. It’s closed.”
“I would see the vacant lot, if there’s time before we’re sent back,” Roland said. “And the rose.”
“Do they hurt?” Eddie asked Susannah. He was looking at her closely indeed.
“They feel fine,” she said, laughing. ” Fine. ”
“You look different.”
“I bet!” she said, and executed a littie barefoot jig. It had been moons and moons since she had last danced, but the exultancy she so clearly felt made up for any lack of grace. A woman wearing a business suit and swinging a briefcase bore down on the ragged littie party of wanderers, then abruptly veered off, actually taking a few steps into the street to get around them. “You bet I do, I got legs!”
“Just like the song says,” Eddie told her.
“Huh?”
“Never mind,” he said, and slipped an arm around her waist. But again Roland saw him give her that searching, questioning look. But with luck he’ll leave it alone, Roland thought.
And that was what Eddie did. He kissed the corner of her mouth, then turned to Roland. “So you want to see the famous vacant lot and the even more famous rose, huh? Well, so do I. Lead on, Jake.”
SEVEN
Jake led them down Second Avenue, pausing only long enough so they could all take a quick peek into The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind. No one was wasting light in this shop, however, and there really wasn’t much to see. Roland was hoping for a look at the menu sign, but it was gone.
Reading his mind in the matter-of-fact way of people who share khef, Jake said, “He probably changes it every day.”
“Maybe,” Roland said. He looked in through the window a moment longer, saw nothing but darkened shelves, a few tables, and the counter Jake had mentioned—the one where the old fellows sat drinking coffee and playing this world’s version of Casdes. Nothing to see, but something to feel, even through the glass: despair and loss. If it had been a smell, Roland thought, it would have been sour and a bit stale. The smell of failure. Maybe of good dreams that never grew. Which made it the perfect lever for someone like Enrico ” Il Roche “Balazar.
“Seen enough?” Eddie asked.
“Yes. Let’s go.”
EIGHT
For Roland, the eight-block journey from Second and Fifty-fourth to Second and Forty-sixth was like visiting a country in which he had until that moment only half-believed. How much stranger must it be for Jake? he wondered. The bum who’d asked the boy for a quarter was gone, but the restaurant he’d been sitting near was there: Chew Chew Mama’s. This was on the corner of Second and Fifty-second. A block farther down was the record store, Tower of Power. It was still open—according to an overhead clock that told the time in large electric dots, it was only fourteen minutes after eight in the evening. Loud sounds were pouring out of the open door. Guitars and drums. This world’s music. It reminded him of the sacrificial music played by the Grays, back in the city of Lud, and why not? This was Lud, in some twisted, otherwhere-and-when way. He was sure of it.
“It’s the Rolling Stones,” Jake said, “but not the one that was playing on the day I saw the rose. That one was
‘Paint It Black.’ ”
“Don’t you recognize this one?” Eddie asked.
“Yeah, but I can’t remember the title.”
“Oh, but you should,” Eddie said. “It’s ‘Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown.'”
Susannah stopped, looked around. “Jake?”
Jake nodded. “He’s right.”
Eddie, meanwhile, had fished a piece of newspaper from the security-gated doorway next to Tower of Power Records. A section of The New York Times, in fact.