TWO
The Jake ahead of them—New York Jake, spring-of-1977 Jake—walked slowly, looking everywhere, clearly digging the day. Mid-World Jake remembered exactly how that boy had felt: the sudden relief when the arguing voices in his mind
(I died!)
(I didn’t!)
had finally stopped their squabbling. Back by the board fence that had been, where the two businessmen had been playing tic-tac-toe with a Mark Cross pen. And, of course, there had been the relief of being away from the Piper School and the insanity of his Final Essay for Ms. Avery’s English class. The Final Essay counted a full twenty-five per cent toward each student’s final grade, Ms. Avery had made that perfectly clear, and Jake’s had been gibberish. The fact that his teacher had later given him an A+ on it didn’t change that, only made it clear that it wasn’t just him; the whole world was losing its shit, going nineteen.
Being out from under all that—even for a little while—had been great. Of course he was digging the day.
Only the day’s not quite right, Jake thought—the Jake walking along behind his old self. Something about it . . .
He looked around but couldn’t figure it out. Late May, bright summer sun, lots of strollers and window-shoppers on Second Avenue, plenty of taxis, the occasional long black limo; nothing wrong with any of this.
Except there was.
Everything was wrong with it.
THREE
Eddie felt the kid twitch his sleeve. “What’s wrong with this picture?” Jake asked.
Eddie looked around. In spite of his own adjustment problems (his involved coming back to a New York that was clearly a few years behind his when), he knew what Jake meant. Something was wrong.
He looked down at the sidewalk, suddenly sure he wouldn’t have a shadow. They’d lost their shadows like the kids in one of the stories . . . one of the nineteen fairy tales . . . or was it maybe something newer, like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or Peter Pan? One of what might be called the Modern Nineteen?
Didn’t matter in any case, because their shadows were there.
Shouldn’t be, though, Eddie thought. Shouldn’t be able to see our shadows when it’s this dark.
Stupid thought. It wasn’t dark. It was morning, for Christ’s sake, a bright May morning, sunshine winking off the chrome of passing cars and the windows of the stores on the east side of Second Avenue brightly enough to make you squint your eyes. Yet still it seemed somehow dark to Eddie, as if all this were nothing but fragile surface, like the canvas backdrop of a stage set. “At rise we see the Forest of Arden.” Or a Castle in Denmark. Or the Kitchen of Willy Loman’s House. In this case we see Second Avenue, midtown New York.
Yes, like that. Only behind this canvas you wouldn’t find the workshop and storage areas of backstage but only a great bulging darkness. Some vast dead universe where Roland’s Tower had already fallen.
Please let me be wrong, Eddie thought. Please let this just be a case of culture shock or the plain old heebie-jeebies.
He didn’t think it was.
“How’d we get here?” he asked Jake. “There was no door . . . ” He trailed off, and then asked with some hope: “Maybe it is a dream?”
“No,” Jake said. “It’s more like when we traveled in the Wizard’s Glass. Except this time there was no ball.” A thought struck him. “Did you hear music, though? Chimes? Just before you wound up here?”
Eddie nodded. “It was sort of overwhelming. Made my eyes water.”
“Right,” Jake said. “Exactly.”
Oy sniffed a fire hydrant. Eddie and Jake paused to let the little guy lift his leg and add his own notice to what was undoubtedly an already crowded bulletin board. Ahead of them, that other Jake—Kid Seventy-seven—was still walking slowly and gawking everywhere. To Eddie he looked like a tourist from Michigan. He even craned up to see the tops of the buildings, and Eddie had an idea that if the New York Board of Cynicism caught you doing that, they took away your Bloomingdale’s charge card. Not that he was complaining; it made the kid easy to follow.
And just as Eddie was thinking that, Kid Seventy-seven disappeared.
“Where’d you go? Christ, where’d you go?”
“Relax,” Jake said. (At his ankle, Oy added his two cents’ worth: “Ax!”) The kid was grinning. “I just went into the bookstore. The . . . um . . . Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, it’s called.”
“Where you got Charlie the Choo-Choo and the riddle book?”
“Right.”
Eddie loved the mystified, dazzled grin Jake was wearing. It lit up his whole face. “Remember how excited Roland got when I told him the owner’s name?”
Eddie did. The owner of The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind was a fellow named Calvin Tower.
“Hurry up,” Jake said. “I want to watch.”
Eddie didn’t have to be asked twice. He wanted to watch, too.
FOUR
Jake stopped in the doorway to the bookstore. His smile didn’t fade, exactly, but it faltered.
“What is it?” Eddie asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Dunno. Something’s different, I think. It’s just . . . so much has happened since I was here . . . ”
He was looking at the chalkboard in the window, which Eddie thought was actually a very clever way of selling books. It looked like the sort of thing you saw in diners, or maybe the fish markets.
TODAY’S SPECIALS
From Mississippi! Pan-Fried William Faulkner
Hardcovers Market Price
Vintage Library Paperbacks 75c each
From Maine! Chilled Stephen King
Hardcovers Market Price
Book Club Bargains
Paperbacks 75c each
From California! Hard-Boiled Raymond Chandler
Hardcovers Market Price
Paperbacks 7 for $5.00
Eddie looked beyond this and saw that other Jake—the one without the tan or the look of hard clarity in his eyes—standing at a small display table. Kiddie books. Probably both the Nineteen Fairy Tales and the Modern Nineteen.
Quit it, he told himself. That’s obsessive-compulsive crap and you know it.
Maybe, but good old Jake Seventy-seven was about to make a purchase from that table which had gone on to change—and very likely to save—their lives. He’d worry about the number nineteen later. Or not at all, if he could manage it.
“Come on,” he told Jake. “Let’s go in.”
The boy hung back.
“What’s the matter?” Eddie asked. “Tower won’t be able to see us, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Tower won’t be able to,” Jake said, “but what if he can?” He pointed at his other self, the one who had yet to meet Gasher and Tick-Tock and the old people of River Crossing. The one who had yet to meet Blaine the Mono and Rhea of the C?os.
Jake was looking at Eddie with a kind of haunted curiosity. “What if I see myself?”
Eddie supposed that might really happen. Hell, anything might happen. But that didn’t change what he felt in his heart. “I think we’re supposed to go in, Jake.”
“Yeah . . . ” It came out in a long sigh. “I do, too.”