Then, before he could think further, hecried out with pain as phantom teeth settled into his neck and cheeks andmidriff; as his mouth was violently kissed by nettles and his testicles wereskewered. He screamed, clawing at the air with his free hand, until Rolandgrabbed it and forced it down.

“Stop, Eddie. Stop. They’re gone.” A pause.The connection broke and the pain faded. Roland was right, of course. Unlikethe Pere, they had escaped. Eddie saw that Roland’s eyes were shiny with tears.“He’s gone, too. The Pere.”

“The vampires? You know, the cannibals?Did… Did they…?” Eddie couldn’t finish the thought. The idea of Pere Callahanas one of them was too awful to speak aloud.

“No, Eddie. Not at all. He—” Rolandpulled the gun he still wore. The scrolled steel sides gleamed in the latelight. He tucked the barrel deep beneath his chin for a moment, looking atEddie as he did it.

“He escaped them,” Eddie said.

“Aye, and how angry they must be.”

Eddie nodded, suddenly exhausted. And hiswounds were aching again. No, sobbing. “Good,” he said. “Now put thatthing back where it belongs before you shoot yourself with it.” And as Rolanddid: “What just happened to us? Did we go todash or was it another Beamquake?”

“I think it was a bit of both,” Rolandsaid. “There’s a thing called aven kal, which is like a tidal-wave thatruns along the Path of the Beam. We were lifted on it.”

“And allowed to see what we wanted to see.”

Roland thought about this for a moment,then shook his head with great firmness. “We saw what the Beam wanted usto see. Where it wants us to go.”

“Roland, did you study this stuff when youwere a kid? Did your old pal Vannay teach classes in… I don’t know, The Anatomyof Beams and Bends o’ the Rainbow?”

Roland was smiling. “Yes, I suppose that wewere taught such things in both History and Summa Logicales.”

“Logicka-what?”

Roland didn’t answer. He was looking outthe window of Cullum’s car, still trying to get his breath back—both thephysical and the figurative. It really wasn’t that hard to do, not here; beingin this part of Bridgton was like being in the neighborhood of a certain vacantlot in Manhattan. Because there was a generator near here. Not sai King, asRoland had first believed, but the potential of sai King… of what saiKing might be able to create, given world enough and time. Wasn’t King alsobeing carried on aven kal, perhaps generating the very wave that liftedhim?

A man can’t pull himself up by his ownbootstraps no matter how hard he tries, Cort had lectured when Roland,Cuthbert, Alain, and Jamie had been little more than toddlers. Cort speaking inthe tone of cheery self-assurance that had gradually hardened to harshness ashis last group of lads grew toward their trials of manhood. But maybe aboutbootstraps Cort had been wrong. Maybe, under certain circumstances, a man couldpull himself up by them. Or give birth to the universe from his navel, as Ganwas said to have done. As a writer of stories, was King not a creator? And atbottom, wasn’t creation about making something from nothing—seeing theworld in a grain of sand or pulling one’s self up by one’s own bootstraps?

And what was he doing, sitting here andthinking long philosophical thoughts while two members of his tet were lost?

“Get this carriage going,” Roland said,trying to ignore the sweet humming he could hear—whether the Voice of theBeam or the Voice of Gan the Creator, he didn’t know. “We’ve got to get toTurtleback Lane in this town of Lovell and see if we can’t find our way throughto where Susannah is.”

And not just for Susannah, either. If Jakesucceeded in eluding the monsters in the Dixie Pig, he would also head to whereshe lay. Of this Roland had no doubt.

Eddie reached for the transmissionlever—despite all its gyrations, Cullum’s old Galaxie had never quitrunning—and then his hand fell away from it. He turned and looked atRoland with a bleak eye.

“What ails thee, Eddie? Whatever it is,spill it quick. The baby’s coming now—may have come already. Soon they’llhave no more use for her!”

“I know,” Eddie said. “But we can’t go toLovell.” He grimaced as if what he was saying was causing him physical pain.Roland guessed it probably was. “Not yet.”

Two

They sat quiet for a moment, listening tothe sweetly tuned hum of the Beam, a hum that sometimes became joyous voices.They sat looking into the thickening shadows in the trees, where a millionfaces and a million stories lurked, O can you say unfound door, can you saylost.

Eddie half-expected Roland to shout athim—it wouldn’t be the first time—or maybe clout him upside thehead, as the gunslinger’s old teacher, Cort, had been wont to do when hispupils were slow or contrary. Eddie almost hoped he would. A good shot to thejaw might clear his head, by Shardik.

Only muddy thinking’s not the troubleand you know it, he thought. Your head is clearer than his. If itwasn’t, you could let go of this world and go on hunting for your lost wife.

At last Roland spoke. “What is it, then?This?” He bent and picked up the folded piece of paper with Aaron Deepneau’spinched handwriting on it. Roland looked at it for a moment, then flicked itinto Eddie’s lap with a little grimace of distaste.

“You know how much I love her,” Eddie saidin a low, strained voice. “You know that.”

Roland nodded, but without looking at him.He appeared to be staring down at his own broken and dusty boots, and the dirtyfloor of the passenger-side footwell. Those downcast eyes, that gaze whichwould not turn to him who’d come almost to idolize Roland of Gilead, sort ofbroke Eddie Dean’s heart. Yet he pressed on. If there had ever been room formistakes, it was gone now. This was the endgame.

“I’d go to her this minute if I thought itwas the right thing to do. Roland, this second! But we have tofinish our business in this world. Because this world is one-way. Once we leavetoday, July 9th, 1977, we can never come here again. We—”

“Eddie, we’ve been through all of this.”Still not looking at him.

“Yes, but do you understand it? Onlyone bullet to shoot, one ‘Riza to throw. That’s why we came to Bridgton in thefirst place! God knows I wanted to go to Turtleback Lane as soon as John Cullumtold us about it, but I thought we had to see the writer, and talk to him. AndI was right, wasn’t I?” Almost pleading now. “Wasn’t I?”

Roland looked at him at last, and Eddie wasglad. This was hard enough, wretched enough, without having to bear theturned-away, downcast gaze of his dinh.

“And it may not matter if we stay a littlelonger. If we concentrate on those two women lying together on those two beds,Roland—if we concentrate on Suze and Mia as we last saw them—thenit’s possible we can cut into their history at that point. Isn’t it?”

After a long, considering moment duringwhich Eddie wasn’t conscious of drawing a single breath, the gunslinger nodded.Such could not happen if on Turtleback Lane they found what the gunslinger hadcome to think of as an “old-ones door,” because such doors were dedicated,and always came out at the same place. But were they to find a magicdoor somewhere along Turtleback Lane in Lovell, one that had been left behindwhen the Prim receded, then yes, they might be able to cut in where theywanted. But such doors could be tricky, too; this they had found out forthemselves in the Cave of Voices, when the door there had sent Jake andCallahan to New York instead of Roland and Eddie, thereby scattering all theirplans into the Land of Nineteen.

“What else must we do?” Roland said. Therewas no anger in his voice, but to Eddie he sounded both tired and unsure.

“Whatever it is, it’s gonna be hard. Thatmuch I guarantee you.”