Eddie had bent to examine the walking box. Now he straightened up and stared at Roland. “That can’t be.” He sounded like a man trying to explain to a small child that there really isn’t a boogeyman living in his closet, that there can’t be because there isn’t any such thing as the boogeyman, not really. “Worlds don’t grow, Roland.”

“Don’t they? When I was a boy, Eddie, there were maps. I remember one in particular. It was called The Greater Kingdoms of the Western Earth. It showed my land, which was called by the name Gilead. It showed the Downland Baronies, which were overrun by riot and civil war in the year after I won my guns, and the hills, and the desert, and the mountains, and the Western Sea. It was a long distance from Gilead to the Western Sea-a thousand miles or more-but it had taken me over twenty years to cross that distance.”

“That’s impossible,” Susannah said quickly, fearfully. “Even if you walked the whole distance it couldn’t take twenty years.”

“Well, you have to allow for stops to write postcards and drink beer,” Eddie said, but they both ignored him.

“I didn’t walk but rode most of the distance on horseback,” Roland said. “I was-slowed up, shall we say?-every now and then, but for most of that time I was moving. Moving away from John Farson, who led the revolt which toppled the world I grew up in and who wanted my head on a pole in his courtyard-he had good reason to want that, I suppose, since I and my compatriots were responsible for the deaths of a great many of his followers-and because I stole something he held very dear.”

“What, Roland?” Eddie asked curiously.

Roland shook his head. “That’s a story for another day… or maybe never. For now, think not of that but of this: I’ve come many thousands of miles. Because the world is growing.”

“A thing like that just can’t happen,” Eddie reiterated, but he was badly shaken, all the same. “There’d be earthquakes… floods… tidal waves… I don’t know what all…”

“Look!” Roland said furiously. “Just look around you! What do you see? A world that is slowing down like a child’s top even as it speeds up and moves on in some other way none of us understand. Look at your kills, Eddie! Look at your kills, for your father’s sake!”

He took two strides toward the stream, picked up the steel snake, examined it briefly, and tossed it to Eddie, who caught it with his left hand. The snake broke in two pieces as he did so.

“You see? It’s exhausted. All the creatures we found here were exhausted. If we hadn’t come, they would have died before long, anyway. Just as the hear would have died.”

“The bear had some sort of disease,” Susannah said.

The gunslinger nodded. “Parasites which attacked the natural parts of its body. But why did they never attack it before?”

Susannah did not reply.

Eddie was examining the snake. Unlike the bear, it appeared to be a totally artificial construction, a thing of metal, circuits, and yards (or maybe miles) of gossamer-thin wire. Yet he could see flecks of rust, not just on the surface of the half-snake he still held, but in its guts as well. And there was a patch of wetness where either oil had leaked out or water had seeped in. This moisture had rotted away some of the wires, and a greenish stuff that looked like moss had grown over several of the thumbnail-sized circuit boards.

Eddie turned the snake over. A steel plate proclaimed it to be the work of North Central Positronics, Ltd. There was a serial number, but no name. Probably too unimportant to name, he thought. Just a sophisticated mechanical Roto-Rooter designed to give old Br’er Bear an enema every once In a while, keep him regular, or something equally disgusting.

He dropped the snake and wiped his hands on his pants.

Roland had picked up the tractor-gadget. He yanked at one of the treads. It came off easily, showering a cloud of rust down between his boots. He tossed it aside.

“Everything in the world is either coming to rest or falling to pieces,” he said flatly. “At the same time, the forces which interlock and give the world its coherence-in time and size as well as in space-are weakening. We knew that even as children, but we had no idea what the time of the end would be like. How could we? Yet now I am living in those times, and I don’t believe they affect my world alone. They affect yours, Eddie and Susannah; they may affect a billion others. The Beams are breaking down. I don’t know if that’s a cause or only another symptom, but I know it’s true. Come! Draw close! Listen!”

As Eddie approached the metal box with its alternating diagonal slashes of yellow and black, a strong and unpleasant memory seized him-for the first time in years he found himself thinking of a crumbling Victorian wreck in Dutch Hill, about a mile away from the neighborhood he and Henry had grown up. This wreck, which was known as The Mansion to the neighborhood kids, occupied a plot of weedy, untended lawn on Rhinehold Street. Eddie guessed that practically all the kids in the borough had heard spooky stories about The Mansion. The house stood slumped beneath its steep roofs, seeming to glare at passersby from the deep shadows thrown by its eaves. The windows were gone, of course-kids can throw rocks through windows without getting too close to a place-hut it had not been spray-painted, and it had not become a make-out spot or a shooting gallery. Oddest of all was the simple fact of its continued existence: no one had set it on fire to collect the insurance or just to see it bum. The kids said it was haunted, of course, and as Eddie stood on the sidewalk with Henry one day, looking at it (they had made the pilgrimage specifically to see this object of fabulous rumor, although Henry had told their mother they were only going for Hoodsie Rockets at Dahlberg’s with some of his friends), it had seemed that it really might be haunted. Hadn’t he felt some strong and unfriendly force seeping from that old Victorian’s shadowy windows, windows that seemed to look at him with the fixed stare of a dangerous lunatic? Hadn’t he felt some subtle wind stirring the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck? Hadn’t he had the clear intuition that if he stepped inside that place, the door would slam and lock behind him and the walls would begin to close in, grinding the bones of dead mice to powder, wanting to crush his bones the same way?

Haunting. Haunted.

He felt that same old sense of mystery and danger now, as he approached the metal box. Gooseflesh began to ripple up his legs and down his arms; the hair on the back of his neck bushed out and became rough, overlapping hackles. He felt that same subtle wind blowing past him, although the leaves on the trees which ringed the clearing were perfectly still.

Yet he walked toward the door anyway (for that was what it was, of course, another door, although this one was locked and always would be against the likes of him), not stopping until his ear was pressed against it.

It was as if he had dropped a tab of really strong acid half an hour ago and it was just beginning to come on heavy. Strange colors flowed across the darkness behind his eyeballs. He seemed to hear voices murmuring up to him from long hallways like stone throats, halls which were lit with guttering electric torches. Once these flambeaux of the modern age had thrown a bright glare across everything, but now they were only sullen cores of blue light. He sensed emptiness… desertion… desolation… death.

The machinery rumbled on and on, but wasn’t there a rough undertone to the sound? A land of desperate thudding beneath the hum, like the arrhythmia of a diseased heart? A feeling that the machinery producing this sound, although far more sophisticated even than that within the bear had been, was somehow falling out of tune with itself?

“All is silent in the halls of the dead,” Eddie heard himself whisper in a falling, fainting voice. “All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. Behold the stairways which stand in darkness; behold the rooms of ruin.