There were shocked gasps at this, but Henchick looked at Eddie with eyes that almost seemed to twinkle. “Lewis, Thonnie!” he said, almost jovially. “Bring me the Branni coff.”

Two strapping young men with short beards and hair pulled back in long braids stepped forward. Between them they bore an ironwood coff about four feet long, and heavy, from the way they carried the poles. They set it before Henchick.

“Open it, Eddie of New York.”

Thonnie and Lewis looked at him, questioning and a little afraid. The older Manni men, Eddie saw, were watching with a kind of greedy interest. He supposed it took a few years to become fully invested in the Manni brand of extravagant weirdness; in time Lewis and Thonnie would get there, but they hadn’t made it much past peculiar as yet.

Henchick nodded, a little impatiently. Eddie bent and opened the box. It was easy. There was no lock. Inside was a silk cloth. Henchick removed it with a magician’s flourish and disclosed a plumb-bob on a chain. To Eddie it looked like an old-fashioned child’s top, and was nowhere near as big as he had expected. It was perhaps eighteen inches long from its pointed tip to its broader top and made of some yellowish wood that looked greasy. It was on a silver chain that had been looped around a crystal plug set in the coff’s top.

“Take it out,” Henchick said, and when Eddie looked to Roland, the hair over the old man’s mouth opened and a set of perfect white teeth displayed themselves in a smile of astounding cynicism. “Why do’ee look to your dinh, young snivelment? The magic’s gone out of this place, you said so yourself! And would’ee not know? Why, thee must be all of…I don’t know…twenty-five?”

Snickers from the Manni who were close enough to hear this jape, several of them not yet twenty-five themselves.

Furious with the old bastard—and with himself, as well—Eddie reached into the box. Henchick stayed his hand.

“Touch not the bob itself. Not if thee’d keep thy cream in on one side and thy crap on the other. By the chain, do’ee kennit?”

Eddie almost reached for the bob anyway—he’d already made a fool of himself in front of these people, there was really no reason not to finish the job—but he looked into Jake’s grave gray eyes and changed his mind. The wind was blowing hard up here, chilling the sweat of the climb on his skin, making him shiver. Eddie reached forward again, took hold of the chain, and gingerly unwound it from the plug.

“Lift him out,” Henchick said.

“What’ll happen?”

Henchick nodded, as if Eddie had finally talked some sense. “That’s to see. Lift him out.”

Eddie did so. Given the obvious effort with which the two young men had been carrying the box, he was astounded at how light the bob was. Lifting it was like lifting a feather which had been attached to a four-foot length of fine-link chain. He looped the chain over the back of his fingers and held his hand in front of his eyes. He looked a little like a man about to make a puppet caper.

Eddie was about to ask Henchick again what the old man expected to happen, but before he could, the bob began to sway back and forth in modest arcs.

“I’m not doing that,” Eddie said. “At least, I don’t think I am. It must be the wind.”

“I don’t think it can be,” Callahan said. “There are no flukes to—”

“Hush!” Cantab said, and with such a forbidding look that Callahan did hush.

Eddie stood in front of the cave, with all the arroyo country and most of Calla Bryn Sturgis spread out below him. Dreaming blue-gray in the far distance was the forest through which they had come to get here—the last vestige of Mid-World, where they would never go more. The wind gusted, blowing his hair back from his forehead, and suddenly he heard a humming sound.

Except he didn’t. The humming was inside the hand in front of his eyes, the one with the chain lying upon the spread fingers. It was in his arm. And most of all, in his head.

At the far end of the chain, at about the height of Eddie’s right knee, the bob’s swing grew more pronounced and became the arc of a pendulum. Eddie realized a strange thing: each time the bob reached the end of its swing, it grew heavier. It was like holding onto something that was being pulled by some extraordinary centrifugal force.

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 growingdim 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 butmagnified. 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.

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 hisamigos (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.