6
   ROLAND HALTED AT THE EDGE of the clearing. Susannah, perched on his shoulders, stared unbelievingly across the open space. The creature stood at the base of the tree where Eddie had been when the two of them left the clearing forty-five minutes ago. She could see only chunks and sections of its body through the screen of branches and dark green needles. Roland's other gunbelt lay beside one of the monster's feet. The holster, she saw, was empty.
   "My God," she murmured.
   The bear screamed like a distraught woman and began shaking the tree. The branches lashed as if in a high wind. Her eyes skated upward and she saw a dark form near the top. Eddie was hugging the trunk as the tree rocked and rolled. As she watched, one of his hands slipped and flailed wildly for purchase.
   "What do we do?" she screamed down at Roland. "It's goan shake him loose! What do we do?"
   Roland tried to think about it, but that queer sensation had returned again—it was always with him now, but stress seemed to make it worse. He felt like two men existing inside one skull. Each man had his own set of memories, and when they began to argue, each insisting that his memories were the true ones, the gunslinger felt as if he were being ripped in two. He made a desperate effort to reconcile these two halves and succeeded … at least for the moment.
   "It's one of the Twelve!" he shouted. "One of the Guardians! Must be! But I thought they were—"
   The bear bellowed up at Eddie again. Now it began to slap at the tree like a punchy fighter. Branches snapped and fell around its feet in a tangle.
   "What?" Susannah screamed. "What's the rest?"
   Roland closed his eyes. Inside his head, a voice shouted, The boy's name was Jake! Another voice shouted back, There WAS no boy! There WAS no boy, and you know it!
   Get away, both of you! he snarled, and then called out aloud: "Shoot it! Shoot it in the ass, Susannah! It'll turn and charge! When it does, look for something on its head! It—"
   The bear squalled again. It gave up slapping the tree and went back to shaking it. Ominous popping, grinding sounds were now coming from the upper part of the trunk.
   When he could be heard again, Roland shouted: "I think it looks like a hat! A little steel hat! Shoot it, Susannah! And don't miss!"
   Terror suddenly filled her—terror and another emotion, one she would never have expected: crushing loneliness.
   "No! I'll miss! You do it, Roland!" She began to fumble his revolver out of the belt she wore, meaning to give it to him.
   "Can't!" Roland shouted. "The angle's bad! You have to do it, Susan­nah! This is the real test, and you'd better pass it!"
   "Roland—"
   "It means to snap the top of the tree off!" he roared at her. "Can't you see that?"
   She looked at the revolver in her hand. Looked across the clearing, at the gigantic bear obscured in the clouds and sprays of green needles. Looked at Eddie, swaying back and forth like a metronome. Eddie proba­bly had Roland's other gun, but Susannah could see no way he could use it without being shaken from his perch like an over-ripe plum. Also, he might not shoot at the right thing.
   She raised the revolver. Her stomach was thick with dread. "Hold me still, Roland," she said. "If you don't—"
   "Don't worry about me!"
   She fired twice, squeezing the shots as Roland had taught her. The heavy reports cut across the sound of the bear shaking the tree like the cracks of a bullwhip. She saw both bullets strike home in the left cheek of the bear's rump, less than two inches apart.
   It shrieked in surprise, pain, and outrage. One of its huge front paws came out of the dense screen of branches and needles and slapped at the hurt place. The hand came away dripping scarlet and rose back out of sight. Susannah could imagine it up there, examining its bloody palm. Then there was a rushing, rustling, snapping sound as the bear turned, bending down at the same time, dropping to all fours in order to achieve maximum speed. For the first time she saw its face, and her heart quailed. Its muzzle was lathered with foam; its huge eyes glared like lamps. Its shaggy head swung to the left... back to the right... and centered upon Roland, who stood with his legs apart and Susannah Dean balanced on his shoulders.
   With a shattering roar, the bear charged.

7
   SAY YOUR LESSON, Susannah Dean, and be true.
   The bear came at them in a rumbling lope; it was like watching a runaway factory machine over which someone had thrown a huge, moth-eaten rug.
   It looks like a hat! A little steel hat!
   She saw it … but it didn't look like a hat to her. It looked like a radar-dish—a much smaller version of the kind she had seen in Movie Tone newsreel stories about how the DEW-line was keeping everyone safe from a Russian sneak attack. It was bigger than the pebbles she had shot off the boulder earlier, but the distance was greater. Sun and shadow ran across it in deceiving dapples.
   I do not aim with my hand; she who aims with her hand has forgotten the face of her father.
   I can't do it!
   I do not shoot with my hand; she who shoots with her hand has forgotten the face of her father.
   I'll miss! I know I'll miss!
   I do not kill with my gun; she who kills with her gun—
   "Shoot it!" Roland roared. "Susannah, shoot it!"
   With the trigger as yet unpulled, she saw the bullet go home, guided from muzzle to target by nothing more or less than her heart's fierce desire that it should fly true. All fear fell away. What was left was a feeling of deep coldness and she had time to think: This is what he feels. My God—how does he stand it?
   "I kill with my heart, motherfucker," she said, and the gunslinger's revolver roared in her hand.

8
   THE SILVERY THING SPUN on a steel rod planted in the bear's skull. Susannah's bullet struck it dead center and the radar-dish blew into a hundred glittering fragments. The pole itself was suddenly engulfed in a burst of crackling blue fire which reached out in a net and seemed to grasp the sides of the bear's face for a moment.
   It rose on its rear legs with a whistling howl of agony, its front paws boxing aimlessly at the air. It turned in a wide, staggering circle and began to flap its arms, as if it had decided to fly away. It tried to roar again but what came out instead was a weird warbling sound like an air-raid siren.
   "It is very well." Roland sounded exhausted. "A good shot, fair and true."
   "Should I shoot it again?" she asked uncertainly. The bear was still blundering around in its mad circle but now its body had begun to tilt sidewards and inwards. It struck a small tree, rebounded, almost fell over, and then began to circle again.
   "No need," Roland said. She felt his hands grip her waist and lift her. A moment later she was sitting on the ground with her thighs folded beneath her. Eddie was slowly and shakily descending the pine, but she didn't see him. She could not take her eyes from the bear.
   She had seen the whales at the Seaquarium near Mystic, Connecti­cut, and believed they had been bigger than this—much bigger, proba­bly—but this was certainly the largest land creature she had ever seen. And it was clearly dying. Its roars had become liquid bubbling sounds, and although its eyes were open, it seemed blind. It flailed aimlessly about the camp, knocking over a rack of curing hides, stamping flat the little shelter she shared with Eddie, caroming off trees. She could see the steel post rising from its head. Tendrils of smoke were rising around it, as if her shot had ignited its brains.
   Eddie reached the lowest branch of the tree which had saved his life and sat shakily astride it. "Holy Mary Mother of God, he said. "I'm looking right at it and I still don t beli—"
   The bear wheeled back toward him. Eddie leaped nimbly from the tree and streaked toward Susannah and Roland. The bear took no notice, it marched drunkenly to the pine which had been Eddie's refuge, tried to grasp it, failed, and sank to its knees. Now they could hear other sounds coming from inside it, sounds that made Eddie think of some huge truck engine stripping its gears.
   A spasm convulsed it, bowed its back. Its front claws rose and gored madly at its own face. Worm-infested blood flew and splattered. Then it fell over, making the ground tremble with its fall, and lay still. After all its strange centuries, the bear the Old People had called Mir—the world beneath the world—was dead.

9
   EDDIE PICKED SUSANNAH UP, held her with his sticky hands locked together at the small of her back, and kissed her deeply. He reeked of sweat and pine-tar. She touched his cheeks, his neck; she ran her hands through his wet hair. She felt an insane urge to touch him everywhere until she was absolutely sure of his reality.
   "It almost had me," he said. "It was like being on some crazy carni­val ride. What a shot! Jesus, Suze—what a shot!'
   "I hope I never have to do anything like that again," she said...but a small voice at the center of her demurred. That voice suggested that she could not wait to do something like that again. And it was cold, that voice. Cold.
   "What was—" he began, turning toward Roland, but Roland was no longer standing there. He was walking slowly toward the bear, which now lay on the ground with its shaggy knees up. From within it came a series of muffled gasps and gurgles as its strange guts continued to slowly run down.
   Roland saw his knife planted deep in a tree near the scarred veteran that had saved Eddie's life. He pulled it free and wiped it clean on the soft deerskin shirt which had replaced the tatters he had been wearing when the three of them had left the beach. He stood by the bear, looking down at it with an expression of pity and wonder.
   Hello, stranger, he thought. Hello, old friend. I never believed in you, not really. I believe Alain did, and I know that Cuthbert did— Cuthbert believed in everything—but I was the hardheaded one. I thought you were only a tale for children... another wind which blew around in my old nurse's hollow head before finally escaping her jab­bering mouth. But you were here all along, another refugee of the old times, like the pump at the way station and the old machines under the mountains. Are the Slow Mutants who worshipped those broken remnants the final descendents of the people who once lived in this forest and finally fled your wrath? I don't know, will never know... but it feels right. Yes. And then I came with my friends—my deadly new friends, who are becoming so much like my deadly old friends. We came, weaving our magic circle around us and around everything we touch, strand by poi­sonous strand, and now here you lie, at our feet. The world has moved on again, and this time, old friend, it's you who have been left behind.
   The monster's body still radiated a deep, sick heat. Parasites were leaving its mouth and tattered nostrils in hordes, but they died almost at once. Waxy-white piles of them were growing on either side of the bear's head.
   Eddie approached slowly. He had shifted Susannah over to one hip, carrying her as a mother might carry a baby. "What was it, Roland? Do you know?"
   "He called it a Guardian, I think," Susannah said.
   "Yes." Roland's voice was slow with amazement. "I thought they were all gone, must all be gone … if they ever existed outside of the old wives' tales in the first place."
   "Whatever it was, it was one crazy mother," Eddie said.
   Roland smiled a little. "If you'd lived two or three thousand years, you'd be one crazy mother, too."
   "Two or three thousand... Christ!"
   Susannah said, "Is it a bear? Really? And what's that?" She was pointing at what appeared to be a square metal tag set high on one of the bear's thick rear legs. It was almost overgrown with tough tangles of hair, but the afternoon sun had pricked out a single starpoint of light on its stainless steel surface, revealing it.
   Eddie knelt and reached hesitantly toward the tag, aware that strange muffled clicks and clacks were still coming from deep inside the fallen giant. He looked at Roland.
   "Go ahead," the gunslinger told him. "It's finished."
   Eddie pushed a clump of hair aside and leaned closer. Words had been stamped into the metal. They were quite badly eroded, but he found that with a little effort he could read them.
   NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD.
   Granite City Northeast Corridor
   Design 4 GUARDIAN
   Serial # AA 24123 CX 755431297 L 14
   Type/Species BEAR
   SHARDIK
   **NR**SUBNUCLEAR CELLS MUST NOT BE REPLACED**NR**
   "Holy Jesus, this thing is a robot," Eddie said softly.
   "It can't be," Susannah said. "When I shot it, it bled."
   "Maybe so, but your ordinary, garden-variety bear doesn't have a radar-dish growing out of its head. And, so far as I know, your ordinary, garden-variety bear doesn't live to be two or three th—" He broke off suddenly, looking at Roland. When he spoke again, his voice was revolted. "Roland, what are you doing?"
   Roland did not reply; did not need to reply. What he was doing— gouging out one of the bear's eyes with his knife—was perfectly obvious. The surgery was quick, neat, and precise. When it was completed he bal­anced an oozing brown ball of jelly on the blade of his knife for a moment and then flicked it aside. A few more worms made their way out of the staring hole, tried to squirm their way down the bear's muzzle, and died.
   The gunslinger leaned over the eyesocket of Shardik, the great Guardian bear, and peered inside. "Come and look, both of you," he said. "I'll show you a wonder of the latter days."
   "Put me down, Eddie," Susannah said.
   He did so, and she moved swiftly on her hands and upper thighs to where the gunslinger was hunkered down over the bear's wide, slack face. Eddie joined them, looking between their shoul­ders. The three of them gazed in rapt silence for nearly a full minute; the only noise came from the crows which still circled and scolded in the sky.
   Blood oozed from the socket in a few thick, dying trickles. Yet it was not just blood, Eddie saw. There was also a clear fluid which gave off an identifiable scent—bananas. And, embedded in the delicate criss­cross of tendons which shaped the socket, he saw a webwork of what looked like strings. Beyond them, at the back of the socket, was a red spark, blinking on and off. It illuminated a tiny square board marked with silvery squiggles of what could only be solder.
   "It isn't a bear, it's a fucking Sony Walkman," he muttered.
   Susannah looked around at him. "What?"
   "Nothing." Eddie glanced at Roland. "Do you think it's safe to reach in?"
   Roland shrugged. "I think so. If there was a demon in this creature, it's fled."
   Eddie reached in with his little finger; nerves set to draw back if he felt even a tickle of electricity. He touched the cooling meat inside the eyesocket, which was nearly the size of a baseball, and then one of those strings. Except it wasn't a string; it was a gossamer-thin strand of steel. He withdrew his finger and saw the tiny red spark blink once more before going out forever.
   "Shardik," Eddie murmured. "I know that name, but I can't place it. Does it mean anything to you, Suze?"
   She shook her head.
   "The thing is..." Eddie laughed helplessly. "I associate it with rabbits. Isn't that nuts?"
   Roland stood up. His knees popped like gunshots. "We'll have to move camp," he said. "The ground here is spoiled. The other clearing, the one where we go to shoot, will—"
   He took two trembling steps and then collapsed to his knees, palms pressed to the sides of his sagging head.

10
   EDDIE AND SUSANNAH EXCHANGED a single frightened glance and then Eddie leaped to Roland's side. "What is it? Roland, what's wrong?"
   "There was a boy," the gunslinger said in a distant, muttering voice. And then, in the very next breath, "There wasn't a boy."
   "Roland?" Susannah asked. She came to him, slipped an arm around his shoulders, felt him trembling. "Roland, what is it?"
   "The boy," Roland said, looking at her with floating, dazed eyes. "It's the boy. Always the boy."
   "What boy?" Eddie yelled frantically. "What boy?"
   "Go then," Roland said, "there are other worlds than these." And fainted.

 11
   THAT NIGHT THE THREE of them sat around a huge bonfire Eddie and Susannah had built in the clearing Eddie called "the shooting gallery." It would have been a bad place to camp in the wintertime, open to the valley as it was, but for now it was fine. Eddie guessed that here in Roland's world it was still late summer.
   The black vault of the sky arched overhead, speckled by what seemed to be whole galaxies. Almost straight ahead to the south, across the river of darkness that was the valley, Eddie could see Old Mother rising above the distant, unseen horizon. He glanced at Roland, who sat huddled by the fire with three skins wrapped around his shoulders despite the warmth of the night and the heat of the fire. There was an untouched plate of food by his side and a bone cradled in his hands. Eddie glanced back at the sky and thought of a story the gunslinger had told him and Susannah on one of the long days they had spent moving away from the beach, through the foothills, and finally into these deep woods where they had found a temporary refuge.
   Before time began, Roland said, Old Star and Old Mother had been young and passionate newlyweds. Then one day there had been a terrible argument. Old Mother (who in those long-ago days had been known by her real name, which was Lydia ) had caught Old Star (whose real name was Apon) hanging about a beautiful young woman named Cassiopeia. They'd had a real bang-up fight, those two, a hair-pulling, eye-gouging, crockery-throwing fight. One of those thrown bits of crockery had become the earth; a smaller shard the moon, a coal from their kitchen stove had become the sun. In the end, the gods had stepped in so Apon and Lydia might not, in their anger, destroy the universe before it was fairly begun. Cassiopeia, the saucy jade who caused the trouble in the first place ("Yeah, right—it's always the woman," Susannah had said at this point), had been banished to a rocking-chair made of stars forever and ever. Yet not even this had solved the problem. Lydia had been willing to try again, but Apon was stiffnecked and full of pride ("Yeah, always blame the man,” Eddie had grunted at this point). So they had parted, and now they look at each other in mingled hatred and longing from across the star-strewn wreckage of their divorce. Apon and Lydia are three billion years gone, the gunslinger told them; they have become Old Star and Old Mother, the north and south, each pining for the other but both now too proud to beg for reconciliation... and Cassiopeia sits off to the side in her chair, rocking and laughing at them both.
   Eddie was startled by a soft touch on his arm. It was Susannah. "Come on," she said. "We've got to make him talk."
   Eddie carried her to the campfire and put her down carefully on Roland's right side. He sat on Roland's left. Roland looked first at Susan­nah, then at Eddie.
   "How close you both sit to me," he remarked. "Like lovers … or warders in a gaol."
   "It's time for you to do some talking." Susannah's voice was low, clear, and musical. "If we're your companions, Roland—and it seems like we are, like it or not—it's time you started treating us as companions. Tell us what's wrong …"
   "… and what we can do about it," Eddie finished.
   Roland sighed deeply. "I don't know how to begin," he said. "It's been so long since I've had companions … or a tale to tell …"
   "Start with the bear," Eddie said.
   Susannah leaned forward and touched the jawbone Roland held in his hands. It frightened her, but she touched it anyway. "And finish with this."
   "Yes." Roland lifted the bone to eye-level and looked at it for a moment before dropping it back into his lap. "We'll have to speak of this, won't we? It's the center of the thing."
   But the bear came first.

12
   "THIS IS THE STORY I was told when I was a child," Roland said. "When everything was new, the Great Old Ones—they weren't gods, but people who had almost the knowledge of gods—created Twelve Guardians to stand watch at the twelve portals which lead in and out of the world. Sometimes I heard that these portals were natural things, like the constel­lations we see in the sky or the bottomless crack in the earth we called Dragon's Grave, because of the great burst of steam they gave off every thirty or forty days. But other people—one I remember in particular, the head cook in my father's castle, a man named Hax—said they were not natural, that they had been created by the Great Old Ones themselves, in the days before they hanged themselves with pride like a noose and disappeared from the earth. Hax used to say that the creation of the Twelve Guardians was the last act of the Great Old Ones, their attempt to atone for the great wrongs they had done to each other, and to the earth itself."
   "Portals," Eddie mused. "Doors, you mean. We're back to those again. Do these doors that lead in and out of the world open on the world Suze and I came from? Like the ones we found along the beach?"
   "I don't know," Roland said. "For every thing I do know, there are a hundred things I don't. You—both of you—will have to reconcile your­selves to that fact. The world has moved on, we say. When it did, it went like a great receding wave, leaving only wreckage behind... wreckage that sometimes looks like a map."
   "Well, make a guess!" Eddie exclaimed, and the raw eagerness in his voice told the gunslinger that Eddie had not given up the idea of returning to his own world—and Susannah's—even now. Not entirely.
   "Leave him be, Eddie," Susannah said. "The man don't guess."
   "Not true—sometimes the man does," Roland said, surprising them both. "When guessing's the only thing left, sometimes he does. The answer is no. I don't think—I don't guess—that these portals are much like the doors on the beach. I don't guess they go to a where or when that we would recognize. I think the doors on the beach—the ones that led into the world you both came from—were like the pivot at the center of a child's teeterboard. Do you know what that is?"
   "Seesaw?" Susannah asked, and tipped her hand back and forth to demonstrate.
   "Yes!" Roland agreed, looking pleased. "Just so. On one end of this sawsee-"
   "Seesaw," Eddie said, smiling a little.
   "Yes. On one end, my ka. On the other, that of the man in black— Walter. The doors were the center, creations of the tension between two opposing destinies. These other portals are things far greater than Walter, or me, or the little fellowship we three have made."
   "Are you saying," Susannah asked hesitantly, "that the portals where these Guardians stand watch are outside ka? Beyond ka?"
   "I'm saying that I believe so." He offered his own brief smile, a thin sickle in the firelight. "That I guess so."
   He was silent a moment, then he picked up a stick of his own. He brushed away the carpet of pine needles and used the stick to draw in the dirt beneath:
   "Here is the world as I was told it existed when I was a child. The Xs are the portals standing in a ring at its eternal edge. If one drew six lines, connecting these portals in pairs—so—"
   He looked up. "Do you see where the lines cross in the center?"
   Eddie felt gooseflesh crawl up his back and down his arms. His mouth was suddenly dry. "Is that it, Roland? Is that—?"
   Roland nodded. His long, lined face was grave. "At this nexus lies the Great Portal, the so-called Thirteenth Gate which rules not just this world but all worlds."
   He tapped the center of the circle.
   "Here is the Dark Tower for which I've searched my whole life.''

13
   THE GUNSLINGER RESUMED: "At each of the twelve lesser portals the Great Old Ones set a Guardian. In my childhood I could have named them all in the rimes my nursemaid—and Hax the cook—taught to me... but my childhood was long ago. There was the Bear, of course, and the Fish... the Lion... the Bat. And the Turtle—he was an important one..."
   The gunslinger looked up into the starry sky, his brow creased in deep thought. Then an amazingly sunny smile broke across his features and he recited:
   "See the TURTLE of enormous girth!
   On his shell he holds the earth.
   His thought is slow but always kind;
   He holds us all within his mind.
   On his back all vows are made;
   He sees the truth but mayn't aid.
   He loves the land and loves the sea,
   And even loves a child like me."
   Roland uttered a small, bemused laugh. "Hax taught that to me, singing it as he stirred the frosting for some cake and gave me little nips of the sweet from the edge of his spoon. Amazing what we remember, isn't it? Anyway, as I grew older, I came to believe that the Guardians didn't really exist—that they were symbols rather than substance. It seems that I was wrong."
   "I called it a robot," Eddie said, "but that's not what it really was. Susannah's right—the only thing robots bleed when you shoot them is Quaker State 10-40. I think it was what people of my world call a cyborg, Roland—a creature that's part machine and part flesh and blood. There was a movie I saw... we told you about movies, didn't we?" '
   Smiling a little, Roland nodded.
   "Well, this movie was called Robocop, and the guy in it wasn't a lot different from the bear Susannah killed. How did you know where she should shoot it?"
   "That I remembered from the old tales as Hax told them," he said. "If it had been up to my nursemaid, Eddie, you'd be in the belly of the bear now. Do they sometimes tell puzzled children in your world to put on their thinking caps?"
   "Yes,'  Susannah said. "They sure do."
   "It's said here, as well, and the saying comes from the story of the Guardians. Each supposedly carried an extra brain on the outside of its head. In a hat." He looked at them with his dreadfully haunted eyes and smiled again. "It didn t look much like a hat, did it?"
   "No," Eddie said, "but the story was close enough to save our bacon."
   "I think now that I've been looking for one of the Guardians ever since I began my quest," Roland said. "When we find the portal this Shardik guarded—and that should only be a matter of following its back-trail—we will finally have a course to follow. We must set the portal to our backs and then simply move straight ahead. At the center of the circle... the Tower."
   Eddie opened his mouth to say. All right, let's talk about this Tower. Finally, once and for all, let's talk about it—what it is, what it means, and, most important of all, what happens to us when we get there. But no sound came out, and after a moment he closed his mouth again. This wasn't the time—not now, with Roland in such obvious pain. Not now, with only the spark of their campfire to keep the night at bay.
   "So now we come to the other part," Roland said heavily. "I have finally found my course—after all the long years I have found my course—but at the same time I seem to be losing my sanity. I can feel it crumbling away beneath my feet, like a steep embankment which has been loosened by rain. This is my punishment for letting a boy who never existed fall to his death. And that is also ka."
   "Who is this boy, Roland?" Susannah asked.
   Roland glanced at Eddie. "Do you know?"
   Eddie shook his head.
   "But I spoke of him," Roland said. "In fact, I raved of him, when the infection was at its worst and I was near dying." The gunslinger's voice suddenly rose half an octave, and his imitation of Eddie's voice was so good that Susannah felt a coil of superstitious fright. " 'If you don't shut up about that goddam kid, Roland, I'll gag you with your own shirt! I'm sick of hearing about him!' Do you remember saying that, Eddie?"
   Eddie thought it over carefully. Roland had spoken of a thousand things as the two of them made their tortuous way up the beach from the door marked THE PRISONER to the one marked THE LADY OF THE SHADOWS, and he had mentioned what seemed like a thousand names in his fever-heated monologues—Alain, Cort, Jamie de Curry, Cuthbert (this one more often than all the others), Hax, Martin (or per­haps it was Marten, like the animal), Walter, Susan, even a guy with the unlikely name of Zoltan. Eddie had gotten very tired of hearing about these people he had never met (and didn't care to meet), but of course Eddie had had a few problems of his own at that time, heroin withdrawal and cosmic jet-lag being only two of them. And, if he was to be fair, he guessed Roland had gotten as tired of Eddie's own Fractured Fairy Tales—the ones about how he and Henry had grown up together and turned into junkies together—as Eddie had of Roland's.
   But he couldn't remember ever telling Roland he would gag him with his own shirt if he didn't stop talking about some kid.
   "Nothing comes to you?" Roland asked. "Nothing at all?"
   Was there something? Some far-off tickle, like the feeling of deja vu he'd gotten when he saw the slingshot hiding inside the chunk of wood jutting out of the stump? Eddie tried to find that tickle, but it was gone. He decided it had never been there in the first place; he only wanted it to be there, because Roland was hurting so badly.
   "No," he said. "Sorry, man."
   "But I did tell you." Roland's tone was calm, but urgency ran and pulsed beneath it like a scarlet thread. "The boy's name was Jake. I sacrificed him—killed him—in order that I might finally catch up with Walter and make him talk. I killed him under the mountains."
   On this point Eddie could be more positive. "Well, maybe that's what happened, but it's not what you said happened. You said you went under the mountains alone, on some land of crazy handcar. You talked about that a lot while we were coming up the beach, Roland. About how scary it was to be alone."
   "I remember. But I also remember telling you about the boy, and how he fell from the trestle into the chasm. And it's the distance between those two memories that is pulling my mind apart."
   "I don't understand any of this," Susannah said worriedly.
   "I think," Roland said, "that I'm just beginning to."
   He threw more wood on the fire, sending thick sheaves of red sparks spiralling up into the dark sky, and then settled back between them. "I'll tell you a story that's true," he said, "and then I'll tell you a story that isn't true... but should be.
   "I bought a mule in Pricetown, and when I finally got to lull, the last town before the desert, it was still fresh..."

14
   SO THE GUNSLINGER EMBARKED on the most recent part of his long tale. Eddie had heard isolated fragments of the story, but he listened in utter fascination, as did Susannah, for whom it was completely new. He told them about the bar with the endless game of Watch Me going on in the corner, the piano player named Sheb, the woman named Allie with the scar on her forehead... and about Nort, the weed-eater who had died and then been brought back to some sort of tenebrous life by the man in black. He told them about Sylvia Pittston, that avatar of religious insanity, and about the final apocalyptic slaughter, in which he, Roland the Gunslinger, had killed every man, woman, and child in town.
   "Holy crispy crap!" Eddie said in a low, shaky voice. "Now I know why you were so low on shells, Roland."
   "Be quiet!" Susannah snapped. "Let him finish!"
   Roland went on, telling his story as stolidly as he had crossed the desert after passing the hut of the last Dweller, a young man whose wild, strawberry-colored hair had reached almost to his waist. He told them about how his mule had finally died. He even told them about how the Dweller's pet bird, Zoltan, had eaten the mule's eyes.
   He told them about the long desert days and the short desert nights which had come next, and how he had followed the cool remains of Walter's campfires, and how he had come at last, reeling and dying of dehydration, to the way station.
   "It was empty. It had been empty, I think, since the days when yonder great bear was still a newly made thing. I stayed a night and pushed on. That's what happened... but now I'll tell you another story."
   "The one that isn't true but should be?" Susannah asked.
   Roland nodded. "In this made-up story—this fable—a gunslinger named Roland met a boy named Jake at the way station. This boy was from your world, from your city of New York, and from a when some­place between Eddie's 1987 and Odetta Holmes's 1963."
   Eddie was leaning forward eagerly. "Is there a door in this story, Roland? A door marked THE BOY, or something like that?"
   Roland shook his head. "The boy's doorway was death. He was on his way to school when a man—a man I believed to be Walter—pushed him into the street, where he was run over by a car. He heard this man say something like 'Get out of the way, let me through, I'm a priest.' Jake saw this man—just for an instant—and then he was in my world."
   The gunslinger paused, looking into the fire.
   "Now I want to leave this story of the boy who was never there and go back to what really happened for a minute. All right?"
   Eddie and Susannah exchanged a puzzled glance and then Eddie made an "after you, my dear Alphonse" gesture with his hand.
   "As I have said, the way station was deserted. There was, however, a pump that still worked. It was at the back of the stable where the coach-horses were kept. I followed my ears to it, but I would have found it even if it had been completely silent. I swelled the water, you see. After enough time in the desert, when you are on the edge of dying from thirst, you can really do that. I drank and then slept. When I woke, I drank again. I wanted to push on at once—the need to do that was like a fever. The medicine you brought me from your world—the astin—is wonderful stuff, Eddie, but there are fevers beyond the power of any medicine to cure, and this was one of them. I knew my body needed rest, but it still took every ounce of my willpower to stay there even one night. In the morning I felt rested, and so I refilled my waterskins and pushed on. I took nothing from that place but water. That's the most important part of what really happened."
   Susannah spoke in her most reasonable, pleasant, and Odetta Holmes—like voice. "All right, that's what really happened. You refilled your waterskins and went on. Now tell us the rest of what didn't happen, Roland."
   The gunslinger put the jawbone in his lap for a moment, curled his hands into fists, and rubbed his eyes with them—a curiously childlike gesture. Then he grasped the jawbone again, as if for courage, and went on.
   "I hypnotized the boy who wasn't there," he said. "I did it with one of my shells. It's a trick I've known for years, and I learned it from a very unlikely source—Marten, my father's court magician. The boy was a good subject. While he was tranced, he told me the circumstances of his death, as I've told them to you. When I'd gotten as much of his story as I felt I could without upsetting or actually hurting him, I gave him a command that he should not remember anything about his dying when he woke up again."
   "Who'd want to?" Eddie muttered.
   Roland nodded. "Who, indeed? The boy passed from his trance directly into a natural sleep. I also slept. When we woke, I told the boy that I meant to catch the man in black. He knew who I meant; Walter had also stopped at the way station. Jake was afraid and hid from him. I'm sure Walter knew he was there, but it suited his purpose to pretend he didn't. He left the boy behind like a set trap.
   "I asked him if there was anything to eat there. It seemed to me there must be. He looked healthy enough, and the desert climate is wonderful when it comes to preserving things. He had a little dried meat, and he said there was a cellar. He hadn't explored that, because he was afraid." The gunslinger looked at them grimly. "He was right to be afraid. I found food... and I also found a Speaking Demon."
   Eddie looked down at the jawbone with widening eyes. Orange fire­light danced on its ancient curves and hoodoo teeth. "Speaking Demon? Do you mean that thing?"
   "No," he said. "Yes. Both. Listen and you shall understand."
   He told them about the inhuman groans he'd heard coming from the earth beyond the cellar; how he had seen sand running from between two of the old blocks which made up the cellar walls. He told them of approaching the hole that was appearing there as Jake screamed for him to come up.
   He had commanded the demon to speak... and so the demon had, in the voice of Allie, the woman with the scar on her forehead, the woman who had kept the bar in Tull. Go slow past the Drawers, gun­slinger. While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.
   "The Drawers?" Susannah asked, startled.
   "Yes." Roland looked at her closely. "That means something to you, doesn't it?"
   "Yes... and no."
   She spoke with great hesitation. Some of it, Roland divined, was simple reluctance to speak of things which were painful to her. He thought most of it, however, was a desire not to confuse issues which were already confused by saying more than she actually knew. He admired that. He admired her.
   "Say what you can be sure of," he said. "No more than that."
   "All right. The Drawers was a place Detta Walker knew about. A place Detta thought about. It's a slang term, one she picked up from listening to the grownups when they sat out on the porch and drank beer and talked about the old days. It means a place that's spoiled, or useless, or both. There was something in the Drawers—in the idea of the Draw­ers—that called to Detta. Don't ask me what; I might have known once, but I don't anymore. And don't want to.
   "Detta stole my Aunt Blue's china plate—the one my folks gave her for a wedding present—and took it to the Drawers—her Drawers—to break it. That place was a gravel-pit filled with trash. A dumping-ground. Later on, she sometimes picked up boys at roadhouses."
   Susannah dropped her head for a moment, her lips pressed tightly together. Then she looked up again and went on.
   "White boys. And when they took her back to their cars in the parking lot, she cock-teased them and then ran off. Those parking lots... they were the Drawers, too. It was a dangerous game, but she was young enough, quick enough, and mean enough to play it to the hilt and enjoy it. Later, in New York, she'd go on shoplifting expeditions... you know about that. Both of you. Always to the fancy stores—Macy's, Gimbel's, Bloomingdale's—and steal trinkets. And when she made up her mind to go on one of those sprees, she'd think: I'm goan to the Drawers today. Goan steal me some shitfum de white folks. Goan steal me sumpin forspecial and den break dot sumbitch."
   She paused, lips trembling, looking into the fire. When she looked around again, Roland and Eddie saw tears standing in her eyes.
   "I'm crying, but don't let that fool you. I remember doing those things, and I remember enjoying them. I guess I'm crying because I know I'd do it all again, if the circumstances were right."
   Roland seemed to have regained some of his old serenity, his weird equilibrium. "We have a proverb in my country, Susannah: 'The wise thief always prospers.'"
   "I don't see nothing wise about stealing a bunch of paste jewelry," she said sharply.
   "Were you ever caught?"
   "No—"
   He spread his hands as if to say, there you have it.
   "So for Detta Walker, the Drawers were bad places?" Eddie asked. "Is that right? Because it doesn't exactly feel right."
   "Bad and good at the same time. They were powerful places, places where she... she reinvented herself; I suppose you could say... hut they were lost places, too. And this is all off the subject of Roland's ghost-boy, isn't it?"
   "Maybe not," Roland said. "We had Drawers as well, you see, in my world. It was slang for us, too, and the meanings are very similar."
   "What did it mean to you and your friends?" Eddie asked.
   "That varied slightly from place to place and situation to situation. It might mean a trash-midden. It might mean a whorehouse or a place where men came to gamble or chew devil-weed. But the most common' meaning that I know is also the simplest."
   He looked at them both.
   "The Drawers are places of desolation," he said. "The Drawers are the waste lands."

15
   THIS TIME SUSANNAH THREW more wood on the fire. In the south, Old Mother blazed on brilliantly, not flickering. She knew from her school studies what that meant: it was a planet, not a star. Venus? She wondered. Or is the solar system of which this world is a part as different as everything else?
   Again that feeling of unreality—the feeling that all this must surely be a dream—washed over her.
   "Go on," she said. "What happened after the voice warned you about the Drawers and the little boy?"
   "I punched my hand into the hole the sand had come from, as I was taught to do if such a thing ever happened to me. What I plucked forth was a jawbone... but not this one. The jawbone I took from the wall of the way station was much larger; from one of the Great Old Ones, I have almost no doubt."
   "What happened to it?" Susannah asked quietly.
   "One night I gave it to the boy," Roland said. The fire painted his cheeks with hot orange highlights and dancing shadows. "As a protec­tion—a kind of talisman. Later I felt it had served its purpose and threw it away."
   "So whose jawbone you got there, Roland?" Eddie asked.
   Roland held it up, looked at it long and thoughtfully, and let it drop back. "Later, after Jake... after he died … I caught up with the men I had been chasing."
   "With Walter," Susannah said.
   "Yes. We held palaver; he and I … long palaver. I fell asleep at some point, and when I woke up, Walter was dead. A hundred years dead at least, and probably more. There was nothing left of him but bones, which was fitting enough, since we were in a place of bones."
   "Yeah, it must have been a pretty long palaver, all right," Eddie said dryly.
   Susannah frowned slightly at this, but Roland only nodded. "Long and long," he said, looking into the fire.
   "You came to in the morning and reached the Western Sea that very evening," Eddie said. "That night the lobstrosities came, right?"
   Roland nodded again. "Yes. But before I left the place where Walter and I had spoken … or dreamed … or whatever it was we did … I took this from the skull of his skeleton." He lifted the bone and the orange light again skated off the teeth.
   Walter's jawbone, Eddie thought, and felt a little chill work through him. The jawbone of the man in black. Remember this, Eddie my boy, the next time you get to thinking Roland's maybe just another one of the guys. He's been carrying it around with him all this time like some kind of a … a cannibal's trophy. Jee-sus.
   "I remember what I thought when I took it," Roland said. "I remem­ber very well; it is the only memory I have of that time which hasn't doubled on me. I thought, 'It was bad luck to throw away what I found when I found the boy. This will replace it.' Only then I heard Walter's laughter—his mean, tittery laughter. I heard his voice, too."
   "What did he say?" Susannah asked.
   " 'Too late, gunslinger,'" Roland said. "That's what he said. 'Too late—your luck will be bad from now until the end of eternity—that is your ka.' "