7
   EDDIE THOUGHT THE MEAL, he ate that day was the best he had had since the mythic birthday feasts of his childhood, when his mother had made it her business to serve everything he liked—meatloaf and roasted potatoes and corn on the cob and devil's food cake with vanilla ice cream on the side.
   The sheer variety of the edibles put before them—especially after the months they had spent eating nothing but lobster meat, deer meat, and the few bitter greens which Roland pronounced safe—undoubtedly had something to do with the pleasure he took in the food, but Eddie didn't think that was the sole answer; he noticed that the kid was packing it away by the plateful (and feeding a chunk of something to the bumbler crouched at his feet every couple of minutes), and Jake hadn't been here a week yet.
   There were bowls of stew (chunks of buffalo meat floating in a rich brown gravy loaded with vegetables), platters of fresh biscuits, crocks of sweet white butter, and bowls of leaves that looked like spinach but weren't... exactly. Eddie had never been crazy about greens, but at the first taste of these, some deprived part of him awoke and cried for them. He ate well of everything, but his need for the green stuff approached greed, and he saw Susannah was also helping herself to them again and again. Among the four of them, the travellers emptied three bowls of the leaves.
   The dinner dishes were swept away by the old women and the albino twins. They returned with chunks of cake piled high on two thick white plates and a bowl of whipped cream. The cake gave off a sweetly fragrant smell that made Eddie feel as if he had died and gone to heaven.
   "Only buffaler cream," Aunt Talitha said dismissively. "No more cows—last one croaked thirty year ago. Buffaler cream ain't no prize­winner, but better'n nothin, by Daisy!"
   The cake turned out to be loaded with blueberries. Eddie thought it beat by a country mile any cake he'd ever had. He finished three pieces, leaned back, and belched ringingly before he could clap a hand over his mouth. He looked around guiltily.
   Mercy, the blind woman, cackled. "I heard that! Someone be thankin’ the cook, Auntie!"
   "Ay," Aunt Talitha said, laughing herself. "So he do."
   The two women who had served the food were returning yet again. One carried a steaming jug; the other had a number of thick ceramic cups balanced precariously on her tray.
   Aunt Talitha was sitting at the head of the table with Roland by her right hand. Now he leaned over and murmured something in her ear. She listened, her smile fading a little, then nodded.
   "Si, Bill, and Till," she said. "You three stay. We are going to have us a little palaver with this gunslinger and his friends, on account of they mean to move along this very afternoon. The rest of you take your coffee in the kitchen and so cut down the babble. Mind you make your manners before you go!"
   Bill and Till, the albino twins, remained sitting at the foot of the table. The others formed a line and moved slowly past the travellers. Each of them shook hands with Eddie and Susannah, then kissed Jake on the cheek. The boy accepted this with good grace, but Eddie could see he was both surprised and embarrassed.
   When they reached Roland, they knelt before him and touched the sandalwood butt of the revolver which jutted from the holster he wore on his left hip. He put his hands on their shoulders and kissed their old brows. Mercy was the last; she flung her arms around Roland's waist and baptized his cheek with a wet, ringing kiss.
   "Gods bless and keep ye, gunslinger! If only I could see ye!"
   "Mind your manners, Mercy!" Aunt Talitha said sharply, but Roland ignored her and bent over the blind woman.
   He took her hands gently but firmly in his own, and raised them to his face. "See me with these, beauty," he said, and closed his eyes as her fingers, wrinkled and misshapen with arthritis, patted gently over his brow, his cheeks, his lips and chin.
   "Ay, gunslinger!" she breathed, lifting the sightless sockets of her eyes to his faded blue ones. "I see you very well! 'Tis a good face, but full of sadness and care. I fear for you and yours."
   "Yet we are well met, are we not?" he asked, and planted a gentle kiss on the smooth, worn skin of her forehead.
   "Ay—so we are. So we are. Thank'ee for your kiss, gunslinger. From my heart I thank'ee."
   "Go on, Mercy," Aunt Talitha said in a gentler voice. "Get your coffee."
   Mercy rose to her feet. The old man with the crutch and peg leg guided her hand to the waistband of his pants. She seized it and, with a final salute to Roland and his band, allowed him to lead her away.
   Eddie wiped at his eyes, which were wet. "Who blinded her?" he asked hoarsely.
   "Harriers," Aunt Talitha said. "Did it with a branding-iron, they did. Said it was because she was looking at em pert. Twenty-five years agone, that was. Drink your coffee, now, all of you! It's nasty when it's hot, but it ain't nothin but roadmud once it's cold."
   Eddie lifted the cup to his mouth and sipped experimentally. He wouldn't have gone so fur us to call it roadmud, hut it wasn't exactly Blue Mountain Blend, either.
   Susannah tasted hers and looked amazed. "Why, this is chicory!" Talitha glanced at her. "I know it not. Dockey is all I know, and dockey-coffee's all we've had since I had the woman's curse—and that curse was lifted from me long, long ago."
   "How old are you, ma'am?" Jake asked suddenly.
   Aunt Talitha looked at him, surprised, then cackled. "In truth, lad, I disremember. I recall sitting in this same place and having a party to celebrate my eighty, but there were over fifty people settin out on this lawn that day, and Mercy still had her eyes." Her own eyes dropped to the humbler lying at Jake's feet. Oy didn't remove his muzzle from Jake's ankle, but he raised his gold-ringed eyes to gaze at her. "A billy-bumbler, by Daisy! It's been long and long since I've seen a humbler in company with people... seems they have lost the memory of the days when they walked with men."
   One of the albino twins bent down to pat Oy. Oy pulled away from him.
   "Once they used to herd sheep," Bill (or perhaps it was Till) said to Jake. "Did ye know that, youngster?"
   Jake shook his head.
   "Do he talk?" the albino asked. "Some did, in the old days."
   "Yes, he does." He looked down at the humbler, who had returned his head to Jake's ankle as soon as the strange hand left his general area. "Say your name, Oy."
   Oy only looked up at him.
   "Oy!" Jake urged, but Oy was silent. Jake looked at Aunt Talitha and the twins, mildly chagrined. "Well, he does... but I guess he only does it when he wants to."
   "That boy doesn't look as if he belongs here," Aunt Talitha said to Roland. "His clothes are strange... and his eyes are strange, as well."
   "He hasn't been here long." Roland smiled at Jake, and Jake smiled uncertainly back. "In a month or two, no one will be able to see his strangeness."
   "Ay? I wonder, so I do. And where does he come from?"
   "Far from here," the gunslinger said. "Very far."
   She nodded. "And when will he go back?"   ^
   "Never," Jake said. "This is my home now."
   "Gods pity you, then," she said, "for the sun is going down on the world. It's going down forever."
   At that Susannah stirred uneasily; one hand went to her belly, as if her stomach was upset.
   "Suze?" Eddie asked. "You all right?"
   She tried to smile, but it was a weak effort; her normal confidence and self-possession seemed to have temporarily deserted her. "Yes, of course. A goose walked over my grave, that's all."
   Aunt Talitha gave her a long, assessing look that seemed to make Susannah uncomfortable... and then smiled. " 'A goose on my grave'— ha! I haven't heard that one in donkey's years."
   "My dad used to say it all the time." Susannah smiled at Eddie—a stronger smile this time. "And anyway, whatever it was is gone now. I'm fine."
   "What do you know about the city, and the lands between here and there?" Roland asked, picking up his coffee cup and sipping. "Are there harriers? And who are these others? These Grays and Pubes?"
   Aunt Talitha sighed deeply.

8
   "YE'D HEAR MUCH, GUNSLINGER, and we know but little. One thing I do know is this: the city's an evil place, especially for this youngster. Any youngster. Is there any way you can steer around it as you go your course?"
   Roland looked up and observed the now familiar shape of the clouds as they flowed along the path of the Beam. In this wide plains sky, that shape, like a river in the sky, was impossible to miss.
   "Perhaps," he said at last, but his voice was oddly reluctant. "I suppose we could skirt around Lud to the southwest and pick up the Beam on the far side."
   "It's the Beam ye follow," she said. "Ay, I thought so."
   Eddie found his own consideration of the city colored by the steadily strengthening hope that when and if they got there, they would find help—abandoned goodies which would aid them in their quest, or maybe even some people who could tell them a little more about the Dark Tower and what they were supposed to do when they got there. The ones called the Grays, for instance—they sounded like the sort of wise old elves he kept imagining.
   The drums were creepy, true enough, reminding him of a hundred low-budget jungle epics (mostly watched on TV with Henry by his side and a bowl of popcorn between them) where the fabulous lost cities the explorers had come looking for were in ruins and the natives had degen­erated into tribes of blood-thirsty cannibals, but Eddie found it impossible to believe something like that could have happened in a city that looked, at least from a distance, so much like New York. If there were not wise old elves or abandoned goodies, there would surely be books, at least; he had listened to Roland talk about how rare paper was here, hut every city Eddie had ever been in was absolutely drowning in books. They might even find some working transportation; the equivalent of a Land Rover would be nice. That was probably just a silly dream, but when you had thousands of miles of unknown territory to cover, a few silly dreams were undoubtedly in order, if only to keep your spirits up. And weren't those things at least possible, damn it?
   He opened his mouth to say some of these things, but Jake spoke before he could.
   "I don't think we can go around," he said, then blushed a little when they all turned to look at him. Oy shifted at his feet.
   "No?" Aunt Talitha said. "And why do ye think that, pray tell?"
   "Do you know about trains?" Jake asked.
   There was a long silence. Bill and Till exchanged an uneasy glance. Aunt Talitha only looked at Jake steadily. Jake did not drop his eyes.
   "I heard of one," she said. "Mayhap even saw it. Over there." She pointed in the direction of the Send. "Long ago, when I was but a child and the world hadn't moved on … or at least not s'far's it has now. Is it Blaine ye speak of, boy?"
   Jake's eyes flashed in surprise and recognition. "Yes! Blaine !" Roland was studying Jake closely.
   "And how would ye know of Blaine the Mono?" Aunt Talitha asked.
   "Mono?" Jake looked blank.
   "Ay, so it was called. How would you know of that old lay?"
   Jake looked helplessly at Roland, then back at Aunt Talitha. "I don't know how I know."
   And that's the truth, Eddie thought suddenly, but it's not all the truth. He knows more than he wants to tell here... and I think he's scared.
   "This is our business, I think," Roland said in a dry, brisk administra­tor's voice. "You must let us work it out for ourselves, Old Mother."
   "Ay," she agreed quickly. "You'll keep your own counsel. Best that such as us not know."
   "What of the city?" Roland prompted. "What do you know of Lud?"
   "Little now, but what we know, ye shall hear." And she poured herself another cup of coffee.

9
   IT WAS THE TWINS, Bill and Till, who actually did most of the talking, one taking up the tale smoothly whenever the other left off. Every now and then Aunt Talitha would add something or correct something, and the twins would wait respectfully until they were sure she was done. Si didn't speak at all—merely sat with his untouched coffee in front of him, plucking at the pieces of straw which bristled up from the wide brim of his sombrero.
   They knew little, indeed, Roland realized quickly, even about the history of their own town (nor did this surprise him; in these latter days, memories faded rapidly and all but the most recent past seemed not to exist), but what they did know was disturbing. Roland was not surprised by this, either.
   In the days of their great-great-grandparents, River Crossing had been much the town Susannah had imagined: a trade-stop at the Great Road, modestly prosperous, a place where goods were sometimes sold but more often exchanged. It had been at least nominally part of River Barony, although even then such things as Baronies and Estates o' Land had been passing.
   There had been buffalo-hunters in those days, although the trade had been dying out; the herds were small and badly mutated. The meat of these mutant beasts was not poison, but it had been rank and bitter. Yet River Crossing, located between a place they simply called The Land­ing and the village of Jimtown, had been a place of some note. It was on the Great Road and only six days travel from the city by land and three by barge. "Unless the river were low," one of the twins said. "Then it took longer, and my gran'da said there was times when there was barges grounded all the way upriver to Tom's Neck."
   The old people knew nothing of the city's original residents, of course, or the technologies they had used to build the towers and turrets; these were the Great Old Ones, and their history had been lost in the furthest reaches of the past even when Aunt Talitha's great-great-grandfa­ther had been a boy.
   "The buildings are still standing," Eddie said. "I wonder if the machines the Great Golden Oldies used to build them still run."
   "Mayhap," one of the twins said. "If so, young fella, there don't be ary man or woman that lives there now who'd still know how to run em … or so I believe, so I do."
   "Nay," his brother said argumentatively, "I doubt the old ways are entirely lost to the Grays 'n Pubes, even now." He looked at Eddie. "Our da' said there was once electric candles in the city. There are those who say they mought still burn."
   "Imagine that," Eddie replied wonderingly, and Susannah pinched his leg, hard, under the table.
   "Yes," the other twin said. He spoke seriously, unaware of Eddie's sarcasm. "You pushed a button and they came on—bright, heatless can­dles with ary wicks or reservoirs for oil. And I've heard it said that once, in the old days, Quick, the outlaw prince, actually Hew up into the sky in a mechanical bird. But one of its wings broke and he died in a great fall, like Icarus."
   Susannah's mouth dropped open. "You know the story of Icarus?"
   "Ay, lady," he said, clearly surprised she should find this strange. "He of the beeswax wings."
   "Children's stories, both of them," Aunt Talitha said with a sniff. "I know the story of the endless lights is true, for I saw them with my own eyes when I was but a green girl, and they may still glow from time to time, ay; there are those I trust who say they've seen diem on clear nights, although it's been long years since I have myself. But no man ever flew, not even the Great Old Ones."
   Nonetheless, there were strange machines in the city, built to do peculiar and sometimes dangerous things. Many of them might still run, but the elderly twins reckoned that none now in the city knew how to start them up, for they hadn't been heard in years.
   Maybe that could change, though, Eddie thought, his eyes gleaming. If, that is, an enterprising, travel-minded young man with a little knowl­edge of strange machinery and endless lights came along. It could be just a matter of finding the ON switches. I mean, it really could be that simple. Or maybe they just blew a bunch of fuses—think of that, friends and neighbors! Just replace half a dozen 400-amp Busses and light the whole place up like a Reno Saturday night!
   Susannah elbowed him and asked, in a low voice, what was so funny. Eddie shook his head and put a finger to his lips, earning an irritated look from the love of his life. The albinos, meanwhile, were continuing their story, handing its thread back and forth with the unconscious ease which probably nothing but lifetime twinship can provide.
   Four or five generations ago, they said, the city had still been quite heavily populated and reasonably civilized, although the residents drove wagons and buckboards along the wide boulevards the Great Old Ones had constructed for their fabulous horseless vehicles. The city-dwellers were artisans and what the twins called "manufactories," and trade both on the river and over it had been brisk.
   "Over it?" Roland asked.
   "The bridge over the Send still stands," Aunt Talitha said, "or did twenty year ago."
   "Ay, old Bill Muffin and his boy saw it not ten year agone," Si agreed, making his first contribution to the conversation.
   "What sort of bridge?" the gunslinger asked.
   "A great thing of steel cables," one of the twins said. "It stands in the sky like the web of some great spider." He added shyly: "I should like to see it again before I die."
   "Probably fallen in by now," Aunt Talitha said dismissively, "and good riddance. Devil's work." She turned to the twins. "Tell them what's happened since, and why the city's so dangerous now—apart from any haunts that may den there, that is, and I'll warrant there's a power of em. These folks want to get on, and the sun's on the wester."

 10
   THE REST OF THE story was but another version of a tale Roland of Gilead had heard many times and had, in some measure, lived through himself. It was fragmentary and incomplete, undoubtedly shot through with myth and misinformation, its linear progress distorted by the odd changes—both temporal and directional—which were now taking place in the world, and it could be summed up in a single compound sentence: Once there was a world we knew, but that world has moved on.
   These old people of River Crossing knew of Gilead no more than Roland knew of the River Barony, and the name of John Parson, the man who had brought ruin and anarchy on Roland's land, meant nothing to them, but all stories of the old world's passing were similar... too similar, Roland thought, to be coincidence.
   A great civil war—perhaps in Garlan, perhaps in a more distant land called Porla—had erupted three, perhaps even four hundred years ago. Its ripples had spread slowly outward, pushing anarchy and dissension ahead of them. Few if any kingdoms had been able to stand against those slow waves, and anarchy had come to this part of the world as surely as night follows sunset. At one time, whole armies had been on the roads, sometimes in advance, sometimes in retreat, always confused and without long-term goals. As time passed, they crumbled into smaller groups, and these degenerated into roving bands of harriers. Trade faltered, then broke down entirely. Travel went from a matter of inconvenience to one of danger. In the end, it became almost impossible. Communication with the city thinned steadily and had all but ceased a hundred and twenty years ago.
   Like a hundred other towns Roland had ridden through—first with Cuthbert and the other gunslingers cast out of Gilead, then alone, in pursuit of the man in black—River Crossing had been cut off and thrown on its own resources.
   At this point Si roused himself, and his voice captured the travellers at once. He spoke in the hoarse, cadenced tones of a lifelong teller of tales—one of those divine fools born to merge memory and mendacity into dreams as airily gorgeous as cobwebs strung with drops of dew.
   "We last sent tribute to the Barony castle in the time of my greatgran'da," he said. "Twenty-six men went with a wagon of hides—there was no hard coin anymore by then, o' course, and 'twas the best they could do. It was a long and dangerous journey of almost eighty wheels, and six died on the way. Half fell to harriers bound for the war in the city; the other half died either of disease or devilgrass.
   "When they finally arrived, they found the castle deserted but for the rooks and black-birds. The walls had been broken; weeds o'ergrew the Court o' State. There had been a great slaughter on the fields to the west; it were white with bones and red with rusty armor, so my da's gran'da said, and the voices of demons cried out like the east wind from the jawbones o' those who'd fallen there. The village beyond the castle had been burned to the ground and a thousand or more skulls were posted along the walls of the keep. Our folk left their bounty o' hides without the shattered barbican gate—for none would venture inside that place of ghosts and moaning voices—and began the homeward way again. Ten more fell on that journey, so that of the six-and-twenty who left only ten returned, my great-gran'da one of them... but he picked up a ring­worm on his neck and bosom that never left until the day he died. It were the radiation sickness, or so they said. After that, gunslinger, none left the town. We were on our own."
   They grew used to the depredations of the harriers, Si continued in his cracked but melodious voice. Watches were posted; when bands of riders were seen approaching—almost always moving southeast along the Great Road and the path of the Beam, going to the war which raged endlessly in Lud—the townspeople hid in a large shelter they had dug beneath the church. Casual damages to the town were not repaired, lest they make those roving bands curious. Most were beyond curiosity; they only rode through at a gallop, bows or battle-axes slung over their shoul­ders, bound for the killing-zones.
   "What war is it that you speak of?" Roland asked.
   "Yes," Eddie said, "and what about that drumming sound?"
   The twins again exchanged a quick, almost superstitious glance.
   "We know not of the god-drums," Si told them. "Ary word or watch. The war of the city, now …"
   The war had originally been the harriers and outlaws against a loose confederation of artisans and "manufactories" who lived in the city. The residents had decided to fight instead of allowing the harriers to loot them, burn their shops, and then turn the survivors out into the Big Empty, where they would almost certainly die. And for some years they had successfully defended Lud against the vicious but badly organized groups of raiders which tried to storm across the bridge or invade by boat and barge.
   "The city-folk used the old weapons," one of the twins said, "and though their numbers were small, the harriers could not stand against such things with their bows and maces and battle-axes."
   "Do you mean the city-people used guns?" Eddie asked.
   One of the albinos nodded. "Ay, guns, but not just guns. There were things that hurled the firebangs over a mile or more. Explosions like dynamite, only more powerful. The outlaws—who are now the Grays, as you must ken—could do nothing but lay siege beyond the river, and that was what they did."
   Lud became, in effect, the last fortress-refuge of the latter world. The brightest and most able travelled there from the surrounding coun­tryside by ones and twos. When it came to intelligence tests, sneaking through the tangled encampments and front lines of the besiegers was the newcomers' final exam. Most came unarmed across the no-man's-land of the bridge, and those who made it that far were let through. Some were found wanting and sent packing again, of course, but those who had a trade or a skill (or brains enough to learn one) were allowed to stay. Farming skills were particularly prized; according to the stories, every large park in Lud had been turned into a vegetable garden. With the countryside cut off, it was grow food in the city or starve amid the glass towers and metal alleys. The Great Old Ones were gone, their machines were a mystery, and the silent wonders which remained were inedible.
   Little by little, the character of the war began to change. The bal­ance of power had shifted to the besieging Grays—so called because they were, on average, much older than the city-dwellers. Those latter were also growing older, of course. They were still known as Pubes, but in most cases their puberty was long behind them. And they eventually either forgot how the old weapons worked or used them up.
   "Probably both," Roland grunted.
   Some ninety years ago—within the lifetimes of Si and Aunt Talitha— a final band of outlaws had appeared, one so large that the outriders had gone galloping through River Crossing at dawn and the drogues did not pass until almost sundown. It was the last army these parts had ever seen, and it was led by a warrior prince named David Quick—the same fellow who supposedly later fell to his death from the sky. He had orga­nized the raggle-taggle remnants of the outlaw bands which still hung about the city, killing anyone who showed opposition to his plans. Quick's army of Grays used neither boat nor bridge to attempt entry into the city, but instead built a pontoon bridge twelve miles below it and attacked on the flank.
   "Since then the war has guttered like a chimney-fire," Aunt Talitha finished. "We hear reports every now and then from someone who has managed to leave, ay, so we do. These come a little more often now, for the bridge, they say, is undefended and I think the fire is almost out. Within the city, the Pubes and Grays squabble over the remaining spoils, only I reckon that the descendents of the harriers who followed Quick over the pontoon bridge are the real Pubes now, although they are still called Grays. The descendents of the original city-dwellers must now be almost as old as we are, although there are still some younkers who go to be among them, drawn by the old stories and the lure of the knowl­edge which may still remain there.
   "These two sides still keep up their old enmity, gunslinger, and both would desire this young man you call Eddie. If the dark-skinned woman is fertile, they would not kill her even though her legs are short-ended; they would keep her to bear children, for children are fewer now, and although the old sicknesses are passing, some are still born strange."
   At this, Susannah stirred, seemed about to say something, then only drank the last of her coffee and settled back into her former listening position.
   "But if they would desire the young man and woman, gunslinger, I think they would lust for the boy."
   Jake bent and began to stroke Oy's fur again. Roland saw his face and knew what he was thinking: it was the passage under the mountains all over again, just another version of the Slow Mutants.
   "You they'd just as soon kill," Aunt Talitha said, "for you are a gunslinger, a man out of his own time and place, neither fish nor fowl, and no use to either side. But a boy can be taken, used, schooled to remember some things and to forget all the others. They've all forgotten whatever it was they had to fight about in the first place; the world has moved on since then. Now they just fight to the sound of them awful drumbeats, some few still young, most of them old enough for the rocking chair, like us here, all of them stupid grots who only live to kill and kill to live." She paused. "Now that you've heard us old cullies to the end, are ye sure it would not be best to go around, and leave them to their business?"
   Before Roland could reply, Jake spoke up in a clear, firm voice. "Tell what you know about Blaine the Mono," he said. "Tell about Blaine and Engineer Bob."

11
   "ENGINEER WHO?" EDDIE ASKED, but Jake only went on looking at the old people.
   "Track lies over yonder," Si answered at last. He pointed toward the river. "One track only, set up high on a colyum of man-made stone, such as the Old Ones used to make their streets and walls."
   "A monorail!" Susannah exclaimed. " Blaine the Monorail!"
   " Blaine is a pain," Jake muttered.
   Roland glanced at him but said nothing.
   "Does this train run now?" Eddie asked Si.
   Si shook his head slowly. His face was troubled and uneasy. "No, young sir—but in my lifetime and Auntie's, it did. When we were green and the war of the city still went forrad briskly. We'd hear it before we saw it—a low humming noise, a sound like ye sometimes hear when a bad summer storm's on the way—one that's full of lightning."
   "Ay," Aunt Talitha said. Her face was lost and dreaming.
   "Then it'd come— Blaine the Mono, twinkling in the sun, with a nose like one of the bullets in your revolver, gunslinger. Maybe two wheels long. I know that sounds like it couldn't be, and maybe it wasn't (we were green, ye must remember, and that makes a difference), but I still think it was, for when it came, it seemed to run along the whole horizon. Fast, low, and gone before you could even see it proper!
   "Sometimes, on days when the weather were foul and the air low, it'd shriek like a harpy as it came out of the west. Sometimes it'd come in the night with a long white light spread out before it, and that shriek would wake all of us. It were like the trumpet they say will raise the dead from their graves at the end of the world, so it was."
   "Tell em about the bang, Si!" Bill or Till said in a voice which trembled with awe. "Tell em about the godless bang what always came after!"
   "Ay, I was just getting to that," Si answered with a touch of annoy­ance. "After it passed by, there would be quiet for a few seconds... sometimes as long as a minute, maybe... and then there'd come an explosion that rattled die boards and knocked cups off the shelves and sometimes even broke the glass in the window-panes. But never did anyone see ary flash nor fire. It was like an explosion in the world of spirits."
   Eddie tapped Susannah on the shoulder, and when she turned to him he mouthed two words: Sonic boom. It was nuts—no train he had ever heard of travelled faster than the speed of sound—but it was also the only thing that made sense.
   She nodded and turned back to Si.
   "It's the only one of the machines the Great Old Ones made that I've ever seen running with my own eyes," he said in a soft voice, "and if it weren't the devil's work, there be no devil. The last time I saw it was the spring I married Mercy, and that must have been sixty year agone."
   "Seventy," Aunt Talitha said with authority.
   "And this train went into the city," Rolund said. "From back the way we came... from the west... from the forest."
   "Ay," a new voice said unexpectedly, "but there was another... one that went out from the city .. . and mayhap that one still runs."

12
   THEY TURNED. MERCY STOOD by a bed of flowers between the back of the church and the table where they sat. She was walking slowly toward the sound of their voices, with her hands spread out before her.
   Si got clumsily to his feet, hurried to her as best he could, and took her hand. She slipped an arm about his waist and they stood there looking like the world's oldest wedding couple.
   "Auntie told you to take your coffee inside!" he said.
   "Finished my coffee long ago," Mercy said. "It's a bitter brew and I hate it. Besides—I wanted to hear the palaver." She raised a trembling finger and pointed it in Roland's direction. "I wanted to hear his voice. It's fair and light, so it is."
   "I cry your pardon, Auntie," Si said, looking at the ancient woman a little fearfully. "She was never one to mind, and the years have made her no better."
   Aunt Talitha glanced at Roland. He nodded, almost imperceptibly. "Let her come forward and join us," she said.
   Si led her over to the table, scolding all the while. Mercy only looked over his shoulder with her sightless eyes, her mouth set in an intractable line.
   When Si had gotten her seated, Aunt Talitha leaned forward on her forearms and said, "Now do you have something to say, old sister-sai, or were you just beating your gums?"
   "I hear what I hear. My ears are as sharp as they ever were, Tali­tha—sharper!"
   Roland's hand dropped to his belt for a moment. When he brought it back to the table, he was holding a cartridge in his fingers. He tossed it to Susannah, who caught it. "Do you, sai?" he asked.
   "Well enough," she said, turning in his direction, "to know that you just threw something. To your woman, I think—the one with the brown skin. Something small. What was it, gunslinger? A biscuit?"
   "Close enough," he said, smiling. "You hear as well as you say. Now tell us what you meant."
   "There is another mono," she said, "unless 'tis the same one, running a different course. Either way, a different course was run by some mono... until seven or eight year ago, anyways. I used to hear it leaving the city and going out into the waste lands beyond."
   "Dungheap!" one of the albino twins ejaculated. "Nothing goes to the waste lands! Nothing can live there!"
   She turned her face to him. "Is a train alive, Till Tudbury?" she asked. "Does a machine fall sick with sores and puking?"
   Well, Eddie thought of saying, there was this bear...
   He thought it over a little more and decided it might be better to keep his silence.
   "We would have heard it," the other twin was insisting hotly. "A noise like the one Si always tells of—"
   "This one didn't make no bang," she admitted, "but I heard that other sound, that humming noise like the one you hear sometimes after lightning has struck somewhere close. When the wind was strong, blowing out from the city, I heard it." She thrust out her chin and added: "I did hear the bang once, too. From far, far out. The night Big Charlie Wind came and almost blew the steeple off the church. Must have been two hundred wheels from here. Maybe two hundred and fifty."
   "Bulldink!" the twin cried. "You been chewing the weed!"
   "I'll chew on you, Bill Tudbury, if you don't shut up your honkin. You've no business sayin bulldink to a lady, either. Why—"
   "Stop it, Mercy!" Si hissed, but Eddie was barely listening to this exchange of rural pleasantries. What the blind woman had said made sense to him. Of course there would be no sonic boom, not from a train which started its run in Lud; he couldn't remember exactly what the speed of sound was, but he thought it was somewhere in the neighbor­hood of six hundred and fifty miles an hour. A train starting from a dead stop would take some time getting up to that speed, and by the time it reached it, it would be out of earshot... unless the listening conditions happened to be just right, as Mercy claimed they had been on the night when the Big Charlie Wind—whatever that was—had come.
   And there were possibilities here. Blaine the Mono was no Land Rover, but maybe... maybe …
   "You haven't heard the sound of this other train for seven or eight years, sai?" Roland asked. "Are you sure it wasn't much longer?"
   "Couldn't have been," she said, "for the last time was the year old Bill Muffin took blood-sick. Poor Bill!"
   "That's almost ten year agone," Aunt Talitha said, and her voice was queerly gentle.
   "Why did you never say you heard such a thing?" Si asked. He looked at the gunslinger. "You can't believe everything she says, lord— always longing to be in the middle of the stage is my Mercy."
   "Why, you old slumgullion!" she cried, and slapped his arm. "I didn't say because I didn't want to o'ertop the story you're so proud of, but now that it matters what I heard, I'm bound to tell!"
   "I believe you, sai," Roland said, "but are you sure you haven't heard the sounds of the mono since then?"
   "Nay, not since then. I imagine it's finally reached the end of its path."
   "I wonder," Roland said. "Indeed, I wonder very much." He looked down at the table, brooding, suddenly far away from all of them,
   Choo-choo, Jake thought, and shivered.

13
   HALF AN HOUR LATER they were in the town square again, Susannah in her wheelchair, Jake adjusting the straps of his pack while Oy sat at his heel, watching him attentively. Only the town elders had attended the dinner-party in the little Eden behind the Church of the Blood Everlast­ing, it seemed, because when they returned to the square, another dozen people were waiting. They glanced at Susannah and looked a bit longer at Jake (his youth apparently more interesting to them than her dark skin), but it was clearly Roland they had come to see; their wondering eyes were full of ancient awe.
   He's a living remnant of a past they only know from stories, Susan­nah thought. They look at him the way religious people would look at one of the saints—Peter or Paul or Matthew—if he decided to drop by the Saturday night bean supper and tell them stories of how it was, traipsing around the Sea of Galilee with Jesus the Carpenter.
   The ritual which had ended the meal was now repeated, only this time everyone left in River Crossing participated. They shuffled forward in a line, shaking hands with Eddie and Susannah, kissing Jake on the cheek or forehead, then kneeling in front of Roland for his touch and his blessing. Mercy threw her arms about him and pressed her blind face against his stomach. Roland hugged her back and thanked her for her news.
   "Will ye not stay the night with us, gunslinger? Sunset comes on apace, and it's been long since you and yours spent the night beneath a roof, I'll warrant."
   "It has been, but it's best we go on. Thankee-sai."
   "Will ye come again if ye may, gunslinger?"
   "Yes," Roland said, but Eddie did not need to look into his strange friend's face to know the chances were small. "If we can."
   "Ay." She Imaged him a final time, then passed on with her hand resting on Si's sunburned shoulder. "Fare ye well."
   Aunt Talitha came last. When she began to kneel, Roland caught her by the shoulders. "No, sai. You shall not do." And before Eddie's amazed eyes, Roland knelt before her in the dust of the town square. "Will you bless me, Old Mother? Will you bless all of us as we go our course?"
   "Ay," she said. There was no surprise in her voice, no tears in her eyes, but her voice throbbed with deep feeling, all the same. "I see your heart is true, gunslinger, and that you hold to the old ways of your kind; ay, you hold to them very well. I bless you and yours and will pray that no harm will come to you. Now take this, if you will." She reached into the bodice of her faded dress and removed a silver cross at the end of a fine-link silver chain. She took it off
   Now it was Roland's turn to be surprised. "Are you sure? I did not come to take what belongs to you and yours, Old Mother."
   "I'm sure as sure can be. I've worn this day and night for over a hundred years, gunslinger. Now you shall wear it, and lay it at the foot of the Dark Tower, and speak the name of Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth." She slipped the chain over his head. The cross dropped into the open neck of his deerskin shirt as if it belonged there. "Go now. We have broken bread, we have held palaver, we have your blessing, and you have ours. Go your course in safety. Stand and be true." Her voice trembled and broke on the last word.
   Roland rose to his feet, then bowed and tapped his throat three times. "Thankee-sai."
   She bowed back, but did not speak. Now there were tears coursing down her cheeks.
   "Ready?" Roland asked.
   Eddie nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.
   "All right," Roland said. "Let's go."
   They walked down what remained of the town's high street, Jake pushing Susannah's wheelchair. As they passed the last building (TRADE & CHANGE, the faded sign read), he looked back. The old people were still gathered about the stone marker, a forlorn cluster of humanity in the middle of this wide, empty plain. Jake raised his hand. Up to this point he had managed to hold himself in, but when several of the old folks—Si, Bill, and Till among them—raised their own hands in return, Jake burst into tears himself.
   Eddie put an arm around his shoulders. "Just keep walking, sport," he said in an uneasy voice. "That's the only way to do it."
   "They're so old!" Jake sobbed. "How can we just leave them like this? It's not right!"
   "It's ka," Eddie said without thinking.
   "Is it? Well ka suh-suh-sucks!"
   "Yeah, hard," Eddie agreed... but he kept walking. So did Jake, and he didn't look back again. He was afraid they would still be there, standing at the center of their forgotten town, watching until Roland and his friends were out of view. And he would have been right.

14
   THEY HAD MADE LESS than seven miles before the sky began to darken and sunset colored the western horizon blaze orange. There was a grove of Susannah's eucalyptus trees nearby; Jake and Eddie foraged there for wood.
   "I just don't see why we didn't stay," Jake said. "The blind lady invited us, and we didn't get very far, anyway. I'm still so full I'm practi­cally waddling."
   Eddie smiled. "Me, too. And I can tell you something else: your good friend Edward Cantor Dean is looking forward to a long and lei­surely squat in this grove of trees first thing tomorrow morning. You wouldn't believe how tired I am of eating deermeat and crapping rabbit-turds. If you'd told me a year ago that a good dump would be the high point of my day, I would have laughed in your face."
   "Is your middle name really Cantor?"
   "Yes, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't spread it around."
   "I won't. Why didn't we stay, Eddie?"
   Eddie sighed. "Because we would have found out they needed firewood."
   "Huh?"
   "And after we got the firewood, we would've found they also needed fresh meat, because they served us the last of what they had. And we'd be real creeps not to replace what we ate, right? Especially when we're packing guns and the best they can probably do is a bunch of bows and arrows fifty or a hundred years old. So we would have gone hunting for them. By then it would be night again, and when we got up the next day, Susannah would be saying we ought to at least make a few repairs before we moved on—oh, not to the front of the town, that'd be danger­ous, but maybe in the hotel or wherever it is they live. Only a few days, and what's a few days, right?"
   Roland materialized out of the gloom. He moved as quietly as ever, but he looked tired and preoccupied. "I thought maybe you two fell into a quickpit," he said.
   "Nope. I've just been telling Jake the facts as I see them."
   "So what would have been wrong with that?" Jake– asked. "This Dark Tower thingy has been wherever it is for a long time, right? It's not going anywhere, is it?"
   "A few days, then a few more, then a few more." Eddie looked at the branch he had just picked up and threw it aside disgustedly. I'm starting to sound just like him, he thought. And yet he knew that he was only speaking the truth. "Maybe we'd see that their spring is getting silted up, and it wouldn't be polite to go until we'd dug it out for them. But why stop there when we could take another couple of weeks and build a jackleg waterwheel, right? They're old, and have no more foot." He glanced at Roland, and his voice was tinged with reproach. "I tell you what—when I think of Bill and Till there stalking a herd of wild buffalo, I get the shivers."
   "They've been doing it a long time," Roland said, "and I imagine they could show us a thing or two. They'll manage. Meantime, let's get that wood—it's going to be a chilly night."
   But Jake wasn't done with it yet. He was looking closely—almost sternly—at Eddie. "You're saying we could never do enough for them, aren't you?"
   Eddie stuck out his lower lip and blew hair off his forehead. "Not exactly. I'm saving it would never be any easier to leave than it was today. Harder, maybe, but no easier."
   "It still doesn't seem right."
   They reached the place that would become, once the fire was lit, just another campsite on the road to the Dark Tower . Susannah had eased herself out of her chair and was lying on her back with her hands behind her head, looking up at the stars. Now she sat up and began to arrange the wood in the way Roland had shown her months ago.
   "Right is what all this is about," Roland said. "But if you look too long at the small rights, Jake—the ones that lie close at hand— it's easy to lose sight of the big ones that stand farther off. Things are out of joint—going wrong and getting worse. We see it all around us, but the answers are still ahead. While we were helping the twenty or thirty people left in River Crossing, twenty or thirty thousand more might be suffering or dying somewhere else. And if there is any place in the universe where these things can be set right, it's at the Dark Tower ."
   "Why? How?" Jake asked. "What is this Tower, anyway?"
   Roland squatted beside the fire Susannah had built, produced his flint and steel, and began to flash sparks into the kindling. Soon small flames were growing amid the twigs and dried handfuls of grass. "I can't answer those questions," he said. "I wish I could."
   That, Eddie thought, was an exceedingly clever reply. Roland had said I can't answer... but that wasn’t the same thing as I don't know. Far from it.

15
   SUPPER CONSISTED OF WATER and greens. They were all still recovering from the heavy meal they'd eaten in River Crossing; even Oy refused the scraps Jake offered him after the first one or two.
   "How come you wouldn't talk back there?" Jake scolded the bum-bier. "You made me look like an idiot!"
   "Id-yit!" Oy said, and put his muzzle on Jake's ankle.
   "He's talking better all the time," Roland remarked. "He's even starting to sound like you, Jake."
   "Ake," Oy agreed, not lifting his muzzle. Jake was fascinated by the gold rings in Oy's eyes; in the flickering light of the fire, they seemed to revolve slowly.
   "But he wouldn't talk to the old people."
   "Bumblers are choosy about that sort of thing," Roland said. "They're odd creatures. If I had to guess, I'd say this one was driven away by its own pack."
   "Why do you think so?"
   Roland pointed at Oy's flank. Jake had cleaned off the blood (Oy hadn't enjoyed this, but had stood for it) and the bite was healing, although the bumbler still limped a little. "I'd bet an eagle that's the bite of another bumbler."
   "But why would his own pack—"
   "Maybe they got tired of his chatter," Eddie said. He had lain down beside Susannah and put an arm about her shoulders.
   "Maybe they did," Roland said, "especially if he was the only one of them who was still trying to talk. The others might have decided he was too bright—or too uppity—for their taste. Animals don't know as much about jealousy as people, but they're not ignorant of it, either."
   The object of this discussion closed his eyes and appeared to go to sleep... but Jake noticed his ears began twitching when the talk resumed.
   "How bright are they?" Jake asked.
   Roland shrugged. "The old groom I told you about—the one who said a good bumbler is good luck—swore he had one in his youth that could add. He said it told sums either by scratching on the stable floor or pushing stones together with its muzzle." He grinned. It lit his whole face, chasing away the gloomy shadows which had lain there ever since they left River Crossing. "Of course, grooms and fishermen are born to lie."
   A companionable silence fell among them, and Jake could feel drowsiness stealing over him. He thought he would sleep soon, and that was fine by him. Then the drums began, coming out of the southeast in rhythmic pulses, and he sat back up. They listened without speaking.
   "That's a rock and roll backbeat," Eddie said suddenly. "I know it is. Take away the guitars and that's what you've got left. In fact, it sounds quite a lot like Z.Z. Top."
   "Z.Z. who?" Susannah asked.
   Eddie grinned. "They didn't exist in your when," he said. "I mean, they probably did, but in '63 they would have been just a bunch of kids going to school down in Texas ." He listened. "I'll be goddamned if that doesn't sound just like the backbeat to something like 'Sharp-Dressed Man' or 'Velcro Fly.' "
   " Velcro Fly'?" Jake said. "That's a stupid name for a song."
   "Pretty funny, though," Eddie said. "You missed it by ten years or so, sport."
   "We'd better roll over," Roland said. "Morning comes early."
   "I can't sleep with that shit going on," Eddie said. He hesitated, then said something which had been on his mind ever since the morning when they had pulled Jake, whitefaced and shrieking, through the door­way and into this world. "Don't you think it's about time we exchanged stories, Roland? We might find out we know more than we think."
   "Yes, it's almost time for that. But not in the dark." Roland rolled onto his side, pulled up a blanket, and appeared to go to sleep.
   "Jesus," Eddie said. "Just like that." He blew a disgusted little whistle between his teeth.
   "He's right," Susannah said. "Come on, Eddie—go to sleep."
   He grinned and kissed the tip of her nose. "Yes, Mummy."
   Five minutes later he and Susannah were dead to the world, drums or no drums. Jake found that his own sleepiness had stolen away, how­ever. He lay looking up at die strange stars and listening to that steady, rhythmic throbbing coming out of the darkness. Maybe it was the Pubes, boogying madly to a song called "Velcro Fly" while they worked them­selves into a sacrificial killing frenzy.
   He thought of Blaine the Mono, a train so fast that it travelled across the huge, haunted world trailing a sonic boom behind it, and that led him naturally enough to thoughts of Charlie the Choo-Choo, who had been retired to a forgotten siding when the new Burlington Zephyr arrived, rendering him obsolete. He thought of the expression on Char­lie's face, the one that was supposed to be cheery and pleasant but somehow wasn't. He thought about The Mid-World Railway Company, and the empty lands between St. Louis and Topeka . He thought about how Charlie had been all ready to go when Mr. Martin needed him, and how Charlie could blow his own whistle and feed his own firebox. He wondered again if Engineer Bob had sabotaged the Burlington Zephyr in order to give his beloved Charlie a second chance.
   At last—and as suddenly as it had begun—the rhythmic drumming stopped, and Jake drifted off to sleep.

16
   HE DREAMED, BUT NOT of the plaster-man.
   He dreamed instead that he was standing on a stretch of blacktop highway somewhere in the Big Empty of western Missouri . Oy was with him. Railroad warning signals—white X-shapes with red lights in their centers—flanked the road. The lights were flashing and bells were ringing.
   Now a humming noise began to rise out of the southeast getting steadily louder. It sounded like lightning in a bottle.
   Here it comes, he told Oy.
   Urns! Oy agreed.
   And suddenly a vast pink shape two wheels long was slicing across the plain toward them. It was low and bullet-shaped, and when Jake saw it, a terrible fear filled his heart. The two big windows flashing in the sun at the front of the train looked like eyes.
   Don't ask it silly questions, Jake told Oy. It won't play silly games. It's just an awful choo-choo train, and its name is Blaine the Pain.
   Suddenly Oy leaped onto the tracks and crouched there with his ears flattened back. His golden eyes were blazing. His teeth were bared in a desperate snarl.
   No! Jake screamed. No, Oy!
   But Oy paid no attention. The pink bullet was bearing down on the1 tiny, defiant shape of the billy-bumbler now, and that humming seemed to be crawling all over Jake's skin, making his nose bleed and shattering the fillings in his teeth.
   He leaped for Oy, Blaine the Mono (or was it Charlie the Choo-Choo?) bore down on them, and he woke up suddenly, shivering, bathed in sweat. The night seemed to be pressing down upon him like a physical weight. He rolled over and felt frantically for Oy. For a terrible moment he thought the bumbler was gone, and then his fingers found the silky fur. Oy uttered a squeak and looked at him with sleepy curiosity.
   "That's all right," Jake whispered in a dry voice. "There's no train. It was just a dream. Go back to sleep, boy."
   "Oy," the humbler agreed, and closed his eyes again.
   Jake rolled over on his back and lay looking up at the stars. Blaine is more than a pain, he thought. It's dangerous. Very dangerous.
   Yes, perhaps.
   No perhaps about it! his mind insisted frantically.
   All right, Blaine was a pain—given. But his Final Essay had had something else to say on the subject of Blaine, hadn't it?
   Blaine is the truth. Blaine is the truth. Blaine is the truth.
   "Oh Jeez, what a mess," Jake whispered. He closed his eyes and was asleep again in seconds. This time his sleep was dreamless.