“A thinny?” Jake asked, looking around nervously.
“Places where the fabric of existence is almost entirely worn away. There are more since the force of the Dark Tower began to fail. Do you remember what we saw below us when we left Lud?”
They nodded solemnly, remembering ground which had fused to black glass, ancient pipes which gleamed with turquoise witchlight, misshapen bird-freaks with wings like great leathern sails. Roland suddenly could not bear to have them grouped around him as they were, looking down on him as folk might look down on a rowdy who had fallen in a barroom brawl.
He lifted his hands to his friends—his new friends. Eddie took them and helped him to his feet. The gunslinger fixed his enormous will on not swaying and stood steady.
“Who was Susan?” Susannah asked. The crease down the center of her forehead suggested she was troubled, and probably by more than a coincidental similarity of names.
Roland looked at her, then at Eddie, then at Jake, who had dropped to one knee so he could scratch behind Oy’s ears.
“I’ll tell you,” he said, “but this isn’t the place or time.”
“You keep sayin that,” Susannah said. “You wouldn’t just be putting us off again, would you?”
Roland shook his head. “You shall hear my tale—this part of it, at least—but not on top of this metal carcass.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “Being up here is like playing on a dead dinosaur or something.
I keep thinking Blaine’s going to come back to life and start, I don’t know, screwing around with our heads again.”
“That sound is gone,” Eddie said. “The thing that sounded like a wah-wah pedal.”
“It reminded me of this old guy I used to see in Central Park,”
Jake said.
“The man with the saw?” Susannah asked. Jake looked up at her, his eyes round
with surprise, and she nodded. “Only he wasn’t old when I used to see him. It’s not just the geography that’s wacky here. Time’s kind of funny, too.”
Eddie put an arm around her shoulders and gave her a brief squeeze. “Amen to that.”
Susannah turned to Roland. Her look was not accusing, but there was a level and open measurement in her eyes that the gunslinger could not help but admire. “I’m holding you to your promise, Roland. I want to know about this girl that got my name.”
“You shall hear,” Roland repeated. “For now, though, let’s get off this monster’s back.”
3
That was easier said than done. Blaine had come to rest slightly askew in an outdoor version of the Cradle of Lud (a littered trail of torn pink metal lay along one side of this, marking the end of Blaine’s last journey), and it was easily twenty-five feet from the roof of the Barony Coach to the cement. If there was a descent-ladder, like the one which had popped conveniently through the emergency hatch, it had jammed when they crunched to a halt.
Roland unslung his purse, rummaged, and removed the deerskin harness they used for carrying Susannah when the going got too rough for her wheelchair. The chair, at least, would not worry them anymore, the gunslinger reflected; they had left it behind in their mad scramble to board Blaine.
“What you want that for?” Susannah asked truculently. She always sounded truculent when the harness came into view. I hate them honky mahfahs down in Miss’ippi worse’n I hate that harness, she had once told Eddie in the voice of Detta Walker, but sometimes it be a close thing, sugar.
“Soft, Susannah Dean, soft,” the gunslinger said, smiling a little. He unbraided the network of straps which made up the harness, set the seat-piece aside, then pigtailed the straps back together. He wedded this to his last good hank of rope with an old-fashioned sheetbend knot. As he worked, he listened for the warbling of the thinny … as the four of them had listened for the god-drums; as he and Eddie had listened for the lobstrosities to begin asking their lawyerly questions (“Dad-a-cham? Did-a-chee? Dum-a-chum?”) as they came tumbling out of the
waves each night.
Ka is a wheel, he thought. Or, as Eddie liked to say, whatever went around came around.
When the rope was finished, he fashioned a loop at the bottom of the braided section. Jake stepped a foot into it with perfect confidence, gripped the rope with one hand, and settled Oy into the crook of his other arm. Oy looked around nervously, whined, stretched his neck, licked Jake’s face.
“You’re not afraid, are you?” Jake asked the humbler.
” ‘Fraid,” Oy agreed, but he was quiet enough as Roland and Eddie lowered Jake down the side of the Barony Coach. The rope wasn’t quite long enough to take him all the way down, but Jake had no trouble twisting his foot free and dropping the last four feet. He set Oy down. The bumbler trotted off, sniffing, and lifted his leg against the side of the terminal building. This was nowhere near as grand as the Cradle of Lud, but it had an old-fashioned look that Roland liked—white boards, overhanging eaves, high, narrow windows, what looked like slate shingles. It was a Western look. Written in gold gilt on a sign which stretched above the terminal’s line of doors was this message:
ATCHISON, TOPEKA, AND SANTA FE
Towns, Roland supposed, and that last one sounded familiar to him; had there not been a Santa Fe in the Barony of Mejis? But that led back toward Susan, lovely Susan at the window with her hair unbraided and all down her back, the smell of her like jasmine and rose and honeysuckle and old sweet hay, smells of which the oracle in the mountains had been able to make only the palest mimicry. Susan lying back and looking solemnly up at him, then smiling and putting her hands behind her head so that her breasts rose, as if aching for his hands.
If you love me, Roland, then love me . . . bird and bear and hare and fish…
“. . . next?”
He looked around at Eddie, having to use all of his will to pull himself back from Susan Delgado’s when. There were thinnies here in Topeka, all right, and of many sorts. “My mind was wandering, Eddie. Cry your pardon.”
“Susannah next? That’s what I asked.”
Roland shook his head. “You next, then Susannah. I’ll go last.”
“Will you be okay? With your hand and all?”
“I’ll be fine.”
Eddie nodded and stuck his foot into the loop. When Eddie had first come into Mid-World, Roland could have lowered him easily by himself, two fingers short the full complement or no, but Eddie had been without his drug for months now, and had put on ten or fifteen pounds of muscle. Roland accepted Susannah’s help gladly enough, and together they lowered him down.
“Now you, lady,” Roland said, and smiled at her. It felt more natural to smile these days.
“Yes.” But for the nonce she only stood there, biting her lower lip.
“What is it?”
Her hand went to her stomach and rubbed there, as if it ached or griped her. He thought she would speak, but she shook her head and said, “Nothing.”
“I don’t believe that. Why do you rub your belly? Are you hurt? Were you hurt when we stopped?”
She took her hand off her tunic as if the flesh just south of her navel had grown hot. “No. I’m fine.”
“Are you?”
Susannah seemed to think this over very carefully. “We’ll talk,” she said at last.
“We’ll palaver, if you like that better. But you were right before, Roland—this isn’t the place or time.”
“All four of us, or just you and me and Eddie?”
“Just you and me, Roland,” she said, and poked the stump of her leg through the loop. “Just one hen and one rooster, at least to start with. Now lower away, if you please.”
He did, frowning down at her, hoping with all his heart that his first idea—the one that had come to mind as soon as he saw that restlessly rubbing hand—was wrong. Because she had been in the speaking ring, and the demon that denned there had had its way with her while Jake was trying to cross between the worlds.
Sometimes— often— demonic contact changed things.
Never for the better, in Roland’s experience.
He pulled his rope back up after Eddie had caught Susannah around the waist and helped her to the platform. The gunslinger walked forward to one of the piers which had torn through the train’s bullet snout, fashioning the rope’s end into a shake-loop as he went. He tossed this over the pier, snubbed it (being careful not to twitch the rope to the left), and then lowered himself to the platform himself,
bent at the waist and leaving boot-tracks on Blaine’s pink side.
“Too bad to lose the rope and harness,” Eddie remarked when Roland was beside them.