11
   JAKE STEPPED OUT OF his apartment building at about quarter of seven, which left him with over eight hours to kill. He considered taking the train out to Brooklyn right away, then decided it was a bad idea. A kid out of school was apt to attract more attention in the hinterlands than in the heart of a big city, and if he really had to search for the place and the boy he was supposed to meet there, he was cooked already.
   No problem-o, the boy in the yellow T-shirt and green bandanna had said. You found the key and the rose, didn't you? You'll find me the same way.
   Except Jake could no longer remember just how he had found the key and the rose. He could only remember the joy and the sense of surety which had filled his heart and head. He would just have to hope that would happen again. In the meantime, he'd keep moving. That was the best way to keep from being noticed in New York .
   He walked most of the way to First Avenue, then headed back the way he had come, only sliding uptown little by little as he followed the pattern of the WALK lights (perhaps knowing, on some deep level, that even they served the Beam). Around ten o'clock he found himself in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue . He was hot, tired, and depressed. He wanted a soda, but he thought he ought to hold onto what little money he had for as long as he could. He'd taken every cent out of the box he kept by his bed, but it only amounted to eight dollars, give or take a few cents.
   A group of school-kids were lining up for a tour. Public school, Jake was almost sure—they were dressed as casually as he was. No blazers from Paul Stuart, no ties, no jumpers, no simple little skirts that cost a hundred and twenty-five bucks at places like Miss So Pretty or Tweenity. This crowd was Kmart all the way. On impulse, Jake stood at the end of the line and followed them into the museum.
   The tour took an hour and fifteen minutes. Jake enjoyed it. The museum was quiet. Even better, it was air-conditioned. And the pictures were nice. He was particularly fascinated by a small group of Frederick Remington's Old West paintings and a large picture by Thomas Hart Benton that showed a steam locomotive charging across the great plains toward Chicago while beefy farmers in bib overalls and straw hats stood in their fields and watched. He wasn't noticed by either of the teachers with the group until the very end. Then a pretty black woman in a severe blue suit tapped him on the shoulder and asked who he was.
   Jake hadn't seen her coming, and for a moment his mind froze. Without thinking about what he was doing, he reached into his pocket and closed his hand around the silver key. His mind cleared immediately, and he felt calm again.
   "My group is upstairs," he said, smiling guiltily. "We're supposed to be looking at a bunch of modern art, but I like the stuff down here a lot better, because they're real pictures. So I sort of … you know..."
   "Snuck away?" the teacher suggested. The comers of her lips twitched in a suppressed smile.
   "Well, I'd rather think of it as French leave." These words simply popped out of his mouth.
   The students now staring at Jake only looked puzzled, but this time the teacher actually laughed. "Either yon don't know or have forgotten," she said, "but in the French Foreign Legion they used to shoot deserters. I suggest you rejoin your class at once, young man."
   "Yes, ma'am. Thank you. They'll be almost done now, anyway."
   "What school is it?"
   " Markey Academy," Jake said. This also just popped out.
   He went upstairs, listening to the disembodied echo of foot-falls and low voices in the great space of the rotunda and wondering why he had said that. He had never heard of a place called Markey Academy in his life.

12
   HE WAITED AWHILE IN the upstairs lobby, then noticed a guard looking at him with growing curiosity and decided it wouldn't be wise to wait any longer—he would just have to hope the class he had joined briefly was gone.
   He looked at his wristwatch, put an expression on his face that he hoped looked like Gosh! Look how late it's getting!, and trotted back downstairs. The class—and the pretty black teacher who had laughed at the idea of French leave—was gone, and Jake decided it might be a good idea to get gone himself. He would walk awhile longer—slowly, in deference to the heat—and catch a subway.
   He stopped at a hot-dog stand on the comer of Broadway and Forty-second, trading in a little of his meager cash supply for a sweet sausage and a Nehi. He sat on the steps of a bank building to eat his lunch, and that turned out to be a bad mistake.
   A cop came walking toward him, twirling his nightstick in a complex series of maneuvers. He seemed to be paying attention to nothing but this, but when he came abreast of Jake he abruptly shoved his stick back into his loop and turned to him.
   "Say-hey, big guy," he said. "No school today?"
   Jake had been wolfing his sausage, but the last bite abruptly stuck in his throat. This was a lousy piece of luck … if luck was all it was. They were in Times Square, sleaze capital of America ; there were push­ers, junkies, whores, and chicken-chasers everywhere . .. but this cop was ignoring them in favor of him.
   Jake swallowed with an effort, then said, "It's finals week at my school. I only had one test today. Then I could leave." He paused, not liking the bright, searching look in the cop's eyes. "I had permission," he concluded uneasily.
   "Uh-huh. Can I see some ID?"
   Juke's heart sank. Had his mother and father already called the cops? He supposed that, after yesterday's adventure, that was pretty likely. Under ordinary circumstances, the NYPD wouldn't take much notice of another missing kid, especially one that had been gone only half a day, but his father was a big deal at the Network, and he prided himself on the number of strings he could pull. Jake doubted if this cop had his picture... but he might very well have his name.
   "Well," Jake said reluctantly, "I've got my student discount card from Mid-World Lanes, but that's about all."
   "Mid-World Lanes? Never heard of it. Where's that? Queens ?"
   "Mid-Town, I mean," Jake thought. God, this was going north instead of south... and fast. "You know? On Thirty-third?"
   "Uh-huh. That'll do fine." The cop held out his hand.
   A black man with dreadlocks spilling over the shoulders of his canary-yellow suit glanced over. "Bussim, ossifer!" this apparition said cheerfully. "Bussiz lil whitebread ass! Do yo duty, now!"
   "Shut up and get in the wind, Eli," the cop said without looking around.
   Eli laughed, exposing several gold teeth, and moved along.
   "Why don't you ask him for some ID?" Jake asked.
   "Because right now I'm asking you. Snap it up, son."
   The cop either had his name or had sensed something wrong about him—which wasn't so surprising, maybe, since he was the only white in the area who wasn't obviously trolling. Either way, it came to the same: sitting down here to eat his lunch had been dumb. But his feet had hurt, and he'd been hungry, dammit—hungry.
   You're not going to stop me, Jake thought. / can't let you stop me. There's someone I'm supposed to meet this afternoon in Brooklyn... and I'm going to be there.
   Instead of reaching for his wallet, he reached into his front pocket and brought out the key. He held it up to the policeman; the late-morning sunshine bounced little coins of reflected light onto the man's cheeks and forehead. His eyes widened.
   "Heyy!" he breathed. "What you got there, kid?"
   He reached for it, and Jake pulled the key back a little. The reflected circles of light danced hypnotically on the cop's face. "You don't need to take it," Jake said. "You can read my name without doing that, can't you?"
   "Yes, sure."
   The curiosity had left the cop's face. He looked only at the key. His gaze was wide and fixed, but not quite empty. Jake read both amazement and unexpected happiness in his look. That's me, Jake thought, just spread­ing joy and goodwill wherever I go. The question is, what do I do now?
   A young woman (probably not u librarian, judging from the green silk hotpants and see-through blouse she was wearing) came wiggle-wob­bling up the sidewalk on a pair of purple fuck-me shoes with three-inch heels. She glanced first at the cop, then at Jake to see what the cop was looking at. When she got a good look, she stopped cold. One of her hands drifted up and touched her throat. A man bumped into her and told her to watch where the damn-hell she was going. The young woman who was probably not a librarian took no notice whatever. Now Jake saw that four or five other people had stopped as well. All were staring at the key. They were gathering as people sometimes will around a very good three-card-monte dealer plying his trade on a streetcorner.
   You're doing a great job of being inconspicuous, he thought. Oh yeah. He glanced over the cop's shoulder, and his eye caught a sign on the far side of the street. Denby's Discount Drug, it said.
   "My name's Tom Denby," he told the cop. "It says so right here on my discount bowling card—right?"
   "Right, right," the cop breathed. He had lost all interest in Jake; he was only interested in the key. The little coins of reflected light bounced and spun on his face.
   "And you're not looking for anybody named Tom Denby, are you?"
   "No," the cop said. "Never heard of him."
   Now there were at least half a dozen people gathered around the cop, all of them staring with silent wonder at the silver key in Jake's hand.
   "So I can go, can't I?"
   "Huh? Oh! Oh, sure—go, for your father's sake!"
   "Thanks," Jake said, but for a moment he wasn't sure how to go. He was hemmed in by a silent crowd of zombies, and more were joining it all the time. They were only coming to see what the deal was, he realized, but the ones who saw the key just stopped dead and stared.
   He got to his feet and backed slowly up the wide bank steps, holding the key out in front of him like a lion-tamer with a chair. When he got to the wide concrete plaza at the top, he stuffed it back into his pants pockets, turned, and fled.
   He stopped just once on the far side of the plaza, and looked back. The small group of people around the place where he had been standing was coming slowly back to life. They looked around at each other with dazed expressions, then walked on. The cop glanced vacantly to his left, to his right, and then straight up at the sky, as if trying to remember how he had gotten here and what he had been meaning to do. Jake had seen enough. It was time to find a subway station and get his ass over to Brooklyn before anything else weird could happen.

13
   AT QUARTER OF TWO that afternoon he walked slowly up the steps of the subway station and stood on the corner of Castle and Brooklyn Ave­nues, looking at the sandstone towers of Co-Op City . He waited for that feeling of sureness and direction—that feeling that was like being able to remember forward in time—to overtake him. It didn't come. Nothing came. He was just a kid standing on a hot Brooklyn streetcorner with his short shadow lying at his feet like a tired pet.
   Well, I'm here . ., now what do I do?
   Jake discovered he didn't have the slightest idea.

14
   ROLAND'S SMALL BAND OF travellers reached the crest of the long, gentle hill they had been climbing and stood looking southeast. For a long time none of them spoke. Susannah opened her mouth twice, then closed it again. For the first time in her life as a woman, she was completely speechless.
   Before them, an almost endless plain dozed in the long golden light of a summer's afternoon. The grass was lush, emerald green, and very high. Groves of trees with long, slender trunks and wide, spreading tops dotted the plain. Susannah had once seen similar trees, she thought, in a travelogue film about Australia .
   The road they had been following swooped down the far side of the hill and then ran straight as a string into the southeast, a bright white lane cutting through the grass. To the west, some miles off, she could see a herd of large animals grazing peacefully. They looked like buffalo. To the east, the last of the forest made a curved peninsula into the grassland. This incursion was a dark, tangled shape that looked like a forearm with a cocked fist at the end.
   That was the direction, she realized, in which all the creeks and streams they had encountered had been flowing. They were tributaries of the vast river that emerged from that jutting arm of forest and flowed, placid and dreaming under the summer sun, toward the eastern edge of the world. It was wide, that river—perhaps two miles from bank to bank.
   And she could see the city.
   It lay dead ahead, a misty collection of spires and towers rising above the far edge of the horizon. Those airy ramparts might have been a hundred miles away, or two hundred, or four hundred. The air of this world seemed to be totally clear, and that made judging distances a fool's game. All she knew for sure was that the sight of those dim towers filled her with silent wonder... and a drop, aching homesickness for New York . She thought, I believe I'd do most anything just to see the Manhat­tan skyline from the Triborough Bridge again.
   Then she had to smile, because that wasn't the truth. The truth was that she wouldn't trade Roland's world for anything. Its silent mystery and empty spaces were intoxicating. And her lover was here. In New York—the New York of her own time, at least—they would have been objects of scorn and anger, the butt of every idiot's crude, cruel jokes: a black woman of twenty-six and her whitebread lover who was three years younger and who had a tendency to talk like dis and dat when he got excited. Her whitebread lover who had been carrying a heavy monkey on his back only eight months before. Here, there was no one to jeer or laugh. Here, no one was pointing a finger. Here, there were only Roland, Eddie, and herself, the world's last three gunslingers.
   She took Eddie's hand and felt it close over hers, warm and reassuring.
   Roland pointed. "That must be the Send River," he said in a low voice. "I never thought to see it in my life... wasn't even sure it was real, like the Guardians."
   "It's so lovely," Susannah murmured. She was unable to take her eyes from the vast landscape before her, dreaming richly in the cradle of summer. She found her eyes tracing the shadows of the trees, which trailed across the plain for what seemed miles as the sun sank toward the horizon. "It's the way our Great Plains must have looked before they were settled—even before the Indians came." She raised her free hand and pointed toward the place where the Great Road narrowed to a point. "There's your city," she said. "Isn't it?"
   "Yes."
   "It looks okay," Eddie said. "Is that possible, Roland? Could it still be pretty much intact. Did the old-timers build that well?"
   "Anything is possible in these times," Roland said, but he sounded doubtful. "You shouldn't get your hopes up, though, Eddie."
   "Huh? No." But Eddie's hopes were up. That dimly sketched skyline had awakened homesickness in Susannah's heart; in Eddie's it kindled a sudden blaze of supposition. If the city was still there—and it clearly was—it might still be populated, and maybe not just by the subhuman things Roland had met under the mountains, either. The city-dwellers might be
   (Americans, Eddie's subconscious whispered)
   intelligent and helpful; they might, in fact, spell the difference between success and failure for the quest of the pilgrims … or even between life and death. In Eddie's mind a vision (partly cribbed from movies like The Last Starfighter and The Dark Crystal) gleamed brightly: a council of gnarled but dignified City Elders who would serve them a whopping meal drawn from the unspoiled stores of the city (or perhaps from special gardens cradled within environmental bubbles) and who would, as he and Roland and Susannah ate themselves silly, explain exactly what lay ahead and what it all meant. Their parting gift to the wayfarers would be an AAA-approved Tour Guide map with the best route to the Dark Tower marked in red.
   Eddie did not know the phrase deus ex machina, but he knew—had now grown up enough to know—that such wise and kindly folk lived mostly in comic books and B-movies. The idea was intoxicating, all the same: an enclave of civilization in this dangerous, mostly empty world; wise old elf-men who would tell them just what the fuck it was they were supposed to be doing. And the fabulous shapes of the city disclosed in that hazy skyline made the idea seem at least possible. Even if the city was totally deserted, the population wiped out by some long-ago plague or outbreak of chemical warfare, it might still serve them as a kind of giant toolbox—a huge Army-Navy Surplus Store where they could outfit themselves for the hard passages Eddie was sure must lie ahead. Besides, he was a city boy, born and bred, and the sight of all those tall towers just naturally got him up.
   "All right!" he said, almost laughing out loud in his excitement. "Hey-ho, let's go! Bring on those wise fuckin elves!"
   Susannah looked at him, puzzled but smiling. "What you ravin about, white boy?"
   "Nothing. Never mind. I just want to get moving. What do you say, Roland? Want to—"
   But something on Roland's face or just beneath it—some lost, dreaming thing—caused him to fall silent and put one arm around Susan­nah's shoulders, as if to protect her.

15
   AFTER ONE BRIEF, DISMISSIVE glance at the city skyline, Roland's gaze had been caught by something a good deal closer to their current posi­tion, something that filled him with disquiet and foreboding. He had seen such things before, and the last time he'd come across one, Jake had been with him. He remembered how they had finally come out of the desert, the trail of the man in black leading them through the foothills and toward the mountains. Hard going, it had been, but at least there had been water again. And grass.
   One night he had awakened to find Jake gone. He had heard stran­gled, desperate cries coming from a willow-grove hard by a narrow trickle of stream. By the time he had fought his way through to the clearing at the center of the grove, the boy's cries had ceased. Roland had found him standing in a place exactly like the one which lay below and ahead. A place of stones; a place of sacrifice; a place where an Oracle lived... and spoke when it was forced to … and killed whenever it could.
   "Roland?" Eddie asked. "What is it? What's wrong?"
   "Do you see that?" Roland pointed. "It's a speaking ring. The shapes you see are tall standing stones." He found himself staring at Eddie, whom he had first met in the frightening but wonderful air-carriage of that strange other world where the gunslingers wore blue uniforms and there was an endless supply of sugar, paper, and wonderful drugs like astin. Some strange expression—some foreknowledge—was dawning on Eddie's face. The bright hope which had lit his eyes as he surveyed the city whiffed out, leaving him with a look both gray and bleak. It was the expression of a man studying the gallows on which he will soon be hanged.
   First Jake, and now Eddie, the gunslinger thought. The wheel which turns our lives is remorseless; always it comes around to the same place again.
   "Oh shit," Eddie said. His voice was dry and scared. "I think that's the place where the kid is going to try and come through."
   The gunslinger nodded. "Very likely. They're thin places, and they're also attractive places. I followed him to such a place once before. The Oracle that kept there came very close to killing him."
   "How do you know this?" Susannah asked Eddie. "Was it a dream?"
   He only shook his head. "I don't know. But the minute Roland pointed that goddamn place out..." He broke off and looked at the gunslinger. "We have to get there, just as fast as we can." Eddie sounded both frantic and fearful.
   "Is it going to happen today?" Roland asked. "Tonight?"
   Eddie shook his head again, and licked his lips. "I don't know that, either. Not for sure. Tonight? I don't think so. Time … it isn't the same over here as it is where the kid is. It goes slower in his where and when. Maybe tomorrow." He had been battling panic, but now it broke free. He turned and grabbed Roland's shirt with his cold, sweating fingers. "But I'm supposed to finish the key, and I haven't, and I'm supposed to do something else, and I don't have a clue about what it is. And if the kid dies, it'll be my fault!"
   The gunslinger locked his own hands over Eddie's and pulled them away from his shirt. "Get control of yourself."
   "Roland, don't you understand—"
   "I understand that whining and puling won't solve your problem. I understand that you have forgotten the face of your father."
   "Quit that bullshit! I don't care dick about my father!" Eddie shouted hysterically, and Roland hit him across the face. His hand made a sound like a breaking branch.
   Eddie's head rocked back; his eyes widened with shock. He stared at the gunslinger, then slowly raised his hand to touch the reddening handprint on his cheek. "You bastard!" he whispered. His hand dropped to the butt of the revolver he still wore on his left hip. Susannah tried to put her own hands over it; Eddie pushed them away.
   And now I must teach again, Roland thought, only this time I teach for my own life, I think, as well as for his.
   Somewhere in the distance a crow hailed its harsh cry into the stillness, and Roland thought for a moment of his hawk, David. Now Eddie was his hawk... and like David, he would not scruple to tear out his eye if he gave so much as a single inch.
   Or his throat.
   "Will you shoot me? Is that how you'd have it end, Eddie?"
   "Man, I'm so fucking tired of your jive," Eddie said. His eyes were blurred with tears and fury.
   "You haven't finished the key, but not because you are afraid to finish. You're afraid of finding you can't finish. You're afraid to go down to where the stones stand, but not because you're afraid of what may come once you enter the circle. You're afraid of what may not come. You're not afraid of the great world, Eddie, but of the small one inside yourself. You haven't forgotten the face of your father. So do it. Shoot me if you dare. I'm tired of watching you blubber."
   "Stop it!" Susannah screamed at him. "Can't you see he'll do it? Can't you see you're forcing him to do it?"
   Roland cut his eyes toward her. "I'm forcing him to decide." He looked back at Eddie, and his deeply lined face was stem. "You have come from the shadow of the heroin and the shadow of your brother, my friend. Come from the shadow of yourself, if you dare. Come now. Come out or shoot me and have done with it."
   For a moment he thought Eddie was going to do just that, and it would all end right here, on this high ridge, beneath a cloudless summer sky with the spires of the city glimmering on the horizon like blue ghosts. Then Eddie's cheek began to twitch. The firm line of his lips softened and began to tremble. His hand fell from the sandalwood butt of Roland's gun. His chest hitched once … twice... three times. His mouth opened and all his despair and terror came out in one groaning cry as he blun­dered toward the gunslinger.
   "I'm afraid, you numb fuck! Don't you understand that? Roland, I'm afraid!"
   His feet tangled together, He fell forward. Roland caught him and held him close, smelling the sweat and dirt on his skin, smelling his tears and terror.
   The gunslinger embraced him for a moment, then turned him toward Susannah. Eddie dropped to his knees beside her chair, his head hanging wearily. She put a hand on the back of his neck, pressing his head against her thigh, and said bitterly to Roland, "Sometimes I hate you, big white man."
   Roland placed the heels of his hands against his forehead and pressed hard. "Sometimes I hate myself."
   "Don't ever stop you, though, do it?"
   Roland didn't reply. He looked at Eddie, who lay with his cheek pressed against Susannah's thigh and his eyes tightly shut. His face was a study in misery. Roland fought away the dragging weariness that made him want to leave the rest of this charming discussion for another day. If Eddie was right, there was no other day. Jake was almost ready to make his move. Eddie had been chosen to midwife the boy into this world. If he wasn't prepared to do that, Jake would die at the point of entry, as surely as an infant must strangle if the mother-root is tangled about its neck when the contractions begin,
   "Stand up, Eddie."
   For a moment he thought Eddie would simply go on crouching there and hiding his face against the woman's leg. If so, everything was lost... and that was ka, too. Then, slowly, Eddie got to his feet. He stood there with everything—hands, shoulders, head, hair—hanging, not good, but he was up, and that was a start.
   "Look at me."
   Susannah stirred uneasily, but this time she said nothing.
   Slowly, Eddie raised his head and brushed the hair out of his eyes with a trembling hand.
   "This is for you. I was wrong to take it at all, no matter how deep my pain." Roland curled his hand around the rawhide strip and yanked, snapping it. He held the key out to Eddie. Eddie reached for it like a man in a dream, but Roland did not immediately open his hand. "Will you try to do what needs to be done?"
   "Yes." His voice was almost inaudible.
   "Do you have something to tell me?"
   "I'm sorry I'm afraid." There was something terrible in Eddie's voice, something which hurt Roland's heart, and he supposed, he knew what it was: here was the last of Eddie's childhood, expiring painfully among the three of them. It could not be seen, but Roland could hear its weakening cries. He tried to make himself deaf to them.
   Something else I've done in the name of the Tower. My score grows ever longer, and the day when it will all have to be totted up, like a long­time drunkard's bill in an alehouse, draws ever nearer. How will I ever pay?
   "I don't want your apology, least of all for being afraid," he said.
   "Without fear, what would we be? Mad dogs with foam on our muzzles and shit drying on our hocks."
   "What do you want, then?" Eddie cried. "You've taken everything else — everything I have to give! No, not even that, because in the end, I gave it to you! So what else do you want from me?"
   Roland held the key which was their half of Jake Chambers's salva­tion locked in his fist and said nothing. His eyes held Eddie's, and the sun shone on the green expanse of plain and the blue-gray reach of the Send River, and somewhere in the distance the crow hailed again across the golden leagues of this fading summer afternoon.
   After a while, understanding began to dawn in Eddie Dean's eyes.
   Roland nodded.
   "I have forgotten the face..." Eddie paused. Dipped his head. Swallowed. Looked up at the gunslinger once more. The thing which had been dying among them had moved on now — Roland knew it. That thing was gone. Just like that. Here, on this sunny wind-swept ridge at the edge of everything, it had gone forever. "I have forgotten the face of my father, gunslinger... and I cry your pardon."
   Roland opened his hand and returned the small burden of the key to him who ka had decreed must carry it. "Speak not so, gunslinger," he said in the High Speech. "Your father sees you very well... loves you very well... and so do I."
   Eddie closed his own hand over the key and turned away with his tears still drying on his face. "Let's go," he said, and they began to move down the long hill toward the plain which stretched beyond.

16
   JAKE WALKED SLOWLY ALONG Castle Avenue, past pizza shops and bars and bodegas where old women with suspicious faces poked the potatoes and squeezed the tomatoes. The straps of his pack had chafed the skin beneath his arms, and his feet hurt. He passed beneath a digital ther­mometer which announced it was eighty-five. It felt more like a hundred and five to Jake.
   Up ahead, a police car turned onto the Avenue. Jake at once became extremely interested in a display of gardening supplies in the window of a hardware store. He watched the reflection of the blue-and-white pass in the window and didn't move until it was gone.
   Hey, Jake, old buddy—where, exactly, are you going?
   He hadn't the slightest idea. He felt positive that the boy he was looking for—the boy in the green bandanna and the yellow T-shirt that said NEVER A DULL MOMENT IN MID-WORLD—was somewhere close by, but so what? To Jake he was still nothing but a needle hiding in the haystack which was Brooklyn .
   He passed an alley which had been decorated with a tangle of spray-painted graffiti. Mostly they were names—EL TIANTE 91, SPEEDY GONZALES, MOTORVAN MIKE—but a few mottos and words to the wise had been dropped in here and there, and Jake's eyes fixed on two of these.
   A ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE
   had been written across the bricks in spray-paint which had weathered to the same dusky-pink shade of the rose which grew in the vacant lot where Tom and Gerry's Artistic Deli had once stood. Below it, in a blue so dark it was almost black, someone had spray-painted this oddity:
   I CRY YOUR PARDON.
   What does that mean? Jake wondered. He didn't know—something from the Bible, maybe—but it held like the eye of a snake is reputed to hold a bird. At last he walked on, slowly and thoughtfully. It was almost two-thirty, and his shadow was beginning to grow longer.
   Just ahead, he saw an old man walking down the street, keeping to the shade as much as possible and leaning on a gnarled cane. Behind the thick glasses he wore, his brown eyes swam like oversized eggs.
   "I cry your pardon, sir," Jake said without thinking or even really hearing himself.
   The old man turned to look at him, blinking in surprise and fear. "Liff me alone, boy," he said. He raised his walking-stick and brandished it clumsily in Jake's direction.
   "Would you know if there's a place called Markey Academy anyplace around here, sir?" This was utter desperation, but it was the only thing he could think to ask.
   The old man slowly lowered his stick—it was the sir that had done it. He looked at Jake with the slightly lunatic interest of the old and almost senile. "How come you not in school, boy?"
   Jake smiled wearily. This one was getting very old. "Finals Week. I came down here to look up an old friend of mine who goes to Markey Academy, that's all. Sorry to have bothered you."
   He stepped around the old man (hoping he wouldn't decide to whop him one across the ass with his cane just for good luck) and was almost down to the corner when the old man yelled: "Boy! Boyyyyy!"
   Jake turned around.
   "There is no Markey Akidimy down here," the old man said. "Twen­ty-two years I'm living here, so I should know. Markey Avenue, yes, but no Markey Akidimy."
   Jake's stomach cramped with sudden excitement. He took a step back toward the old, man, who at once raised his cane into a defensive position again. Jake stopped at once, leaving a twenty-foot safety zone between them. "Where's Markey Avenue, sir? Can you tell me that?"
   "Of gorse," the old man said. "Didn't I just say I'm livink here twenty-two years? Two blogs down. Turn left at the Majestic Theatre. But I'm tellink you now, there iss no Markey Akidimy."
   "Thank you, sir! Thank you!"
   Jake turned around and looked up Castle Avenue . Yes—he could see the unmistakable shape of a movie marquee jutting out over the sidewalk a couple of blocks up. He started to run toward it, then decided that might attract attention and slowed down to a fast walk.
   The old man watched him go. "Sir!" he said to himself in a tone of mild amazement. "Sir, yet!"
   He chuckled rustily and moved on.

17
   ROLAND'S BAND STOPPED AT dusk. The gunslinger dug a shallow pit and lit a fire. They didn't need it for cooking purposes, but they needed it, nonetheless. Eddie needed it. If he was going to finish his carving, he would need light to work by.
   The gunslinger looked around and saw Susannah, a dark silhouette against the fading aquamarine sky, but he didn't see Eddie.
   "Where is he?" he asked.
   "Down the road apiece. You leave him alone now, Roland—you've done enough."
   Roland nodded, bent over the firepit, and struck at a piece of flint with a worn steel bar. Soon the kindling he had gathered was blazing. He added small sticks, one by one, and waited for Eddie to return.

18
   HALF A MILE BACK the way they had come, Eddie sat cross-legged in the middle of the Great Road with his unfinished key in one hand, watching the sky. He glanced down the road, saw the spark of the fire, and knew exactly what Roland was doing... and why. Then he turned his gaze to the sky again. He had never felt so lonely or so afraid.
   The sky was huge—he could not remember ever seeing so much uninterrupted space, so much pure emptiness. It made him feel very small, and he supposed there was nothing at all wrong with that. In the scheme of things, he was very small.
   The boy was close now. He thought he knew where Jake was and what he was about to do, and it filled him with silent wonder. Susannah had come from 1963. Eddie had come from 1987. Between them... Jake. Trying to come over. Trying to be born.
   I met him, Eddie thought. I must have met him, and I think I remember. . . sort of. It was just before Henry went into the Army, right? He was taking courses at Brooklyn Vocational Institute, and he was heav­ily into black—black jeans, black motorcycle boots with steel caps, black T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Henry's James Dean look. Smoking Area Chic. I used to think that, but I never said it out loud, because I didn't want him pissed at me.
   He realized that what he had been waiting for had happened while he was thinking: Old Star had come out. In fifteen minutes, maybe less, it would be joined by a whole galaxy of alien jewelry, but for now it gleamed alone in the ungathered darkness.
   Eddie slowly held up the key until Old Star gleamed within its wide central notch. And then he recited the old formula of his world, the one his mother had taught him as she knelt beside him at the bedroom window, both of them looking out at the evening star which rode the oncoming darkness above the rooftops and fire-escapes of Brooklyn: "Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight; wish I may, wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight."
   Old Star glowed in the notch of the key, a diamond caught in ash.
   "Help me find some guts," Eddie said. "That's my wish. Help me find the guts to try and finish this damned thing."
   He sat there a moment longer, then got to his feet and walked slowly back to camp. He sat down as close to the fire as he could get, took the gunslinger's knife without a word to either him or Susannah, and began to work. Tiny, curling slivers of wood rolled up from the s-shape at the end of the key. Eddie worked fast, turning the key this way and that, occasionally closing his eyes and letting his thumb slip along the mild curves. He tried not to think about what might happen if the shape were to go wrong—that would freeze him for sure.
   Roland and Susannah sat behind him, watching silently. At last Eddie put the knife aside. His face was running with sweat. "This kid of yours," he said. "This Jake. He must be a gutty brat."
   "He was brave under the mountains," Roland said. "He was afraid, but never gave an inch."
   "I wish I could be that way."
   Roland shrugged. "At Balazar's you fought well even though they had taken your clothes. It's very hard for a man to fight naked, but you did it."
   Eddie tried to remember the shootout in the nightclub, but it was just a blur in his mind—smoke, noise, and light shining through one wall in confused, intersecting rays. He thought that wall had been torn apart by automatic-weapons fire, but couldn't remember for sure.
   He held the key up so its notches were sharply outlined against the flames. He held it that way for a long time, looking mostly at the s-shape. It looked exactly as he remembered it from his dream and from the momentary vision he had seen in the fire... but it didn't feel exactly right. Almost, but not quite.
   That's just Henry again. That's just all those years of never being quite good enough. You did it, buddy—it's just that the Henry inside doesn't want to admit it.
   He dropped the key onto the square of hide and folded the edges carefully around it. "I'm done. I don't know if it's right or not, but I guess it's as right as I can make it." He felt oddly empty now that he no longer had the key to work on—purposeless and directionless.
   "Do you want something to eat, Eddie?" Susannah asked quietly.
   There's your purpose, he thought. There's your direction. Sitting right over there, with her hands folded in her lap. All the purpose and direction you'll ever—
   But now something else rose in his mind—it came all at once. Not a dream... not a vision …
   No, not either of those. It's a memory. It's happening again—you're remembering forward in time.
   "I have to do something else first," he said, and got up.
   On the far side of the fire, Roland had stacked some odd lots of scavenged wood. Eddie hunted through them and found a dry stick about two feet long and four inches or so through the middle. He took it, returning to his place by the fire, and picked up Roland's knife again. This time he worked faster because he was simply sharpening the stick, turning it into something that looked like a small tent-peg.
   "Can we get moving before daybreak?" he asked the gunslinger. "I think we should get to that circle as soon as we can."
   "Yes. Sooner, if we must. I don't want to move in the dark—a speaking ring is an unsafe place to be at night—but if we have to, we have to."
   "From the look on your face, big boy, I doubt if those stone circles are very safe any time," Susannah said.
   Eddie put the knife aside again. The dirt Roland had taken out of the shallow hole he'd made for the campfire was piled up by Eddie's right foot. Now he used the sharp end of the stick to carve a question-mark shape in the dirt. The shape was crisp and clear.
   "Okay," he said, brushing it away. "All done."
   "Have something to eat, then," Susannah said.
   Eddie tried, but he wasn't very hungry. When he finally went to sleep, nestled against Susannah's warmth, his rest was dreamless but very thin. Until the gunslinger shook him awake at four in the morning, he heard the wind racing endlessly over the plain below them, and it seemed to him that he went with it, flying high into the night, away from these cares, while Old Star and Old Mother rode serenely above him, painting his cheeks with frost.

19
   "IT'S TIME," ROLAND SAID.
   Eddie sat up. Susannah sat up beside him, rubbing her palms over her face. As Eddie's head cleared, his mind was filled with urgency. "Yes. Let's go, and fast."
   "He's getting close, isn't he?"
   "Very close." Eddie got to his feet, grasped Susannah around the waist, and boosted her into her chair.
   She was looking at him anxiously. "Do we still have enough time to get there?"
   Eddie nodded. "Barely."
   Three minutes later they were headed down the Great Road again. It glimmered ahead of them like a ghost. And an hour after that, as the first light of dawn began to touch the sky in the east, a rhythmic sound began far ahead of them.
   The sound of drums, Roland thought.
   Machinery, Eddie thought. Some huge piece of machinery.
   It's a heart, Susannah thought. Some huge, diseased, beating heart .. . and it's in that city, where we have to go.
   Two hours later, the sound stopped as suddenly as it had begun. White, featureless clouds had begun to fill the sky above them, first veiling the early sun, then blotting it out. The circle of standing stones lay less than five miles ahead now, gleaming in the shadowless light like the teeth of a fallen monster.

20
   SPAGHETTI WEEK AT THE MAJESTIC!
   the battered, dispirited marquee jutting over the corner of Brooklyn and Markey Avenues proclaimed.
   2 SERGIO LEONE CLASSIX!
   A FISTFUL OF $$ PLUS GOOD BAD & UGLY!
   99 Cents ALL SHOWS
   A gum-chewing cutie with rollers in her blonde hair sat in the box office listening to Led Zep on her transistor and reading one of the tabloids of which Mrs. Shaw was so fond. To her left, in the theater's remaining display case, there was a poster showing Glint Eastwood.
   Jake knew he should get moving— three o'clock was almost here— but he paused a moment anyway, staring at the poster behind the dirty, cracked glass. Eastwood was wearing a Mexican serape. A cigar was clamped in his teeth. He had thrown one side of the serape back over his shoulder to free his gun. His eyes were a pale, faded blue. Bombar­dier's eyes.
   It's not him, Jake thought, but it's almost him. It's the eyes, mostly .. . the eyes are almost the same.
   "You let me drop," he said to the man in the old poster, the man who was not Roland. "You let me die. What happens this time?"
   "Hey, kid," the blonde ticket-seller called, making Jake start. "You gonna come in or just stand there and talk to yourself?"
   "Not me," Jake said. "I've already seen those two."
   He got moving again, turning left on Markey Avenue .
   Once again he waited for the feeling of remembering forward to seize him, but it didn't come. This was just a hot, sunny street lined with sandstone-colored apartment buildings that looked like prison cellblocks to Jake. A few young women were walking along, pushing baby-carriages in pairs and talking desultorily, but the street was otherwise deserted. It was unseasonably hot for May—too hot to stroll.
   What am I looking for? What?
   From behind him came a burst of raucous male laughter. It was followed by an outraged female shriek: "You give that back\"
   Jake jumped, thinking the owner of the voice must mean him.
   "Give it back, Henry! I'm not kidding!"
   Jake turned and saw two boys, one at least eighteen and the other a lot younger... twelve or thirteen. At the sight of this second boy, Jake's heart did something that felt like a loop-the-loop in his chest. The lad was wearing green corduroys instead of madras shorts, but the yellow T-shirt was the same, and he had a battered old basketball under one arm. Although his back was to Jake, Jake knew he had found the boy from last night's dream.