neck and gripped like hoops of steel.
“I’ll never leave you again,” Roland said, and now his own tears came. “I swear to you on the names of all my fathers: I’ll never leave you again.”
Yet his heart, that silent, watchful, lifelong prisoner of ka, received the words of this
promise not just with wonder but with doubt.
BOOK TWO
LUD
A HEAP OF BROKEN IMAGES
IV-TOWN AND KA-TET
IV
TOWN AND KA-TET
1
FOUR DAYS AFTER EDDIE had yanked him through the doorway between worlds,
minus his original pair of pants and his sneakers but still in possession of his pack and his
life, Jake awoke with something warm and wet nuzzling at his face.
If he had come around to such a sensation on any of the three previous mornings, he
undoubtedly would have wakened his companions with his screams, for he had been
feverish and his sleep had been haunted by nightmares of the plaster-man. In these dreams
his pants did not slide free, the doorkeeper kept its grip, and it tucked him into its
unspeakable mouth, where its teeth came down like the bars guarding a castle keep. Jake awoke from these dreams shuddering and moaning helplessly.
The fever had been caused by the spider-bite on the back of his neck. When Roland
examined it on the second day and found it worse instead of better, he had conferred briefly
with Eddie and had then given Jake a pink pill. “You’ll want to take four of these every day for at least a week,” he said.
Jake had gazed at it doubtfully. “What is it?”
“Cheflet,” Roland said, then looked disgustedly at Eddie. “You tell him. I still can’t say it.”
“Keflex. You can trust it, Jake; it came from a government-approved pharmacy in good
old New York. Roland swallowed a bunch of it, and he’s as healthy as a horse. Looks a little
like one, too, as you can see.”
Jake was astonished. “How did you get medicine in New York?”
“That’s a long story,” the gunslinger said. “You’ll hear all of it in time, but for now just take the pill.”
Jake did. The response was both quick and satisfying. The angry red swelling around the
bite began to fade in twenty-four hours, and now the fever was gone as well.
The warm thing nuzzled again and Jake sat up with a jerk, his eyes flying open.
The creature which had been licking his cheek took two hasty steps backward. It was a
billy-bumbler, but Jake didn’t know that; he had never seen one before now. It was skinnier
than the ones Roland’s party had seen earlier, and its black- and gray-striped fur was matted
and mangy. There was a clot of old dried blood on one flank. Its gold-ringed black eyes
looked at Jake anxiously; its hindquarters switched hopefully back and forth. Jake relaxed.
He supposed there were exceptions to the rule, but he had an idea that something wagging
its tail—or trying to—was probably not too dangerous.
It was just past first light, probably around five-thirty in the morning. Jake could peg it no
closer than that because his digital Seiko no longer worked … or rather, was working in an
extremely eccentric way. When he had first glanced at it after coming through, the Seiko
claimed it was 98:71:65, a time which did not, so far as Jake knew, exist. A longer look
showed him that the watch was now running backward. If it had been doing this at a steady
rate, he supposed it might still have been of some use, but it wasn’t. It would unwind its
numbers at what seemed like the right speed for awhile (Jake verified this by saying the
word “Mississippi” between each number), and then the readout would either stop entirely for ten or twenty seconds—making him think the watch had finally given up the ghost—or
a bunch of numbers would blur by all at once.
He had mentioned this odd behavior to Roland and had shown him the watch, thinking it
would amaze him, but Roland examined it closely for only a moment or two before
nodding in a dismissive way and telling Jake it was an interesting clock, but as a rule no
timepiece did very good work these days. So the Seiko was useless, but Jake still found
himself loath to throw it away . . . because, he supposed, it was a piece of his old life, and
there were only a few of those left.
Right now the Seiko claimed it was sixty-two minutes past forty on a Wednesday,
Thursday, and Saturday in both December and March.
The morning was extremely foggy; beyond a radius of fifty or sixty feet, the world simply
disappeared. If this day was like the previous three, the sun would show up as a faint white
circle in another two hours or so, and by nine-thirty the day would be clear and hot. Jake
looked around and saw his travelling companions (he didn’t quite dare call them friends, at
least not yet) asleep beneath their hide blankets—Roland close by, Eddie and Susannah a
larger hump on the far side of the dead campfire.
He once more turned his attention to the animal which had awak- ened him. It looked like a
combination raccoon and woodchuck, with a dash of dachshund thrown in for good
measure.
“How you doin, boy?” he asked softly.
“Oy!” the billy-bumbler replied at once, still looking at him anx- iously. Its voice was low and deep, almost a bark; the voice of an English footballer with a bad cold in his throat.
Jake recoiled, surprised. The billy-bumbler, startled by the quick movement, took several
further steps backward, seemed about to flee, and then held its ground. Its hindquarters
wagged back and forth more strenuously than ever, and its gold-black eyes continued to
regard Jake nervously. The whiskers on its snout trembled.
“This one remembers men,” a voice remarked at Jake’s shoulder. He looked around and
saw Roland squatting just behind him with his forearms resting on his thighs and his long
hands dangling between his knees. He was looking at the animal with a great deal more
interest than he had shown in Jake’s watch.
“What is it?” Jake asked softly. He did not want to startle it away; he was enchanted. “Its eyes are beautiful!”
“Billy-bumbler,” Roland said.
“Umber!” the creature ejaculated, and retreated another step.
“It talks!”
“Not really. Bumblers just repeat what they hear—or used to. I haven’t heard one do it in
years. This fellow looks almost starved. Proba- bly came to forage.”
“He was licking my face. Can I feed it?”
“We’ll never get rid of it if you do,” Roland said, then smiled a little and snapped his fingers. “Hey! Billy!”
The creature mimicked the sound of the snapping fingers somehow; it sounded as if it
were clucking its tongue against the roof of its mouth. “Ay!” it called in its hoarse voice.
“Ay, Illy!” Now its ragged hindquarters were positively gagging back and forth.
“Go ahead and give it a bite. I knew an old groom once who said a good bumbler is good
luck. This looks like a good one.”
“Yes,” Jake agreed. “It does.”
“Once they were tame, and every barony had half a dozen roaming around the castle or
manor-house. They weren’t good for much except amusing the children and keeping the rat
population down. They can be quite faithful—or were in the old days—although I never
heard of one that would remain as loyal as a good dog. The wild ones are scavengers. Not
dangerous, but a pain in the ass.”
“Ass!” cried the bumbler. Its anxious eyes continued to flick back and forth between Jake and the gunslinger.
Jake reached into his pack, slowly, afraid to startle the creature, and drew out the remains
of a gunslinger burrito. He tossed it toward the billy-bumbler. The bumbler flinched back
and then turned with a small, childlike cry, exposing its furry corkscrew tail. Jake felt sure
it would run, but it stopped, looking doubtfully back over its shoulder.
“Come on,” Jake said. “Eat it, boy.”
“Oy,” the bumbler muttered, but it didn’t move.
“Give it time,” Roland said. “It’ll come, I think.”
The bumbler stretched forward, revealing a long and surprisingly graceful neck. Its
slender black nose twitched as it sniffed the food. At last it trotted forward, and Jake
noticed it was limping a little. The bum- bler sniffed the burrito, then used one paw to
separate the chunk of deermeat from the leaf. It carried out this operation with a delicacy
that was oddly solemn. Once the meat was clear of the leaf, the bumbler wolfed it in a
single bite, then looked up at Jake. “Oy!” it said, and when Jake laughed, it shrank away again.
“That’s a skinny one,” Eddie said sleepily from behind them. At the sound of his voice, the bumbler immediately turned and was gone into the mist.