“How far is it from here to the rose, Jake?” Roland asked. It was hard to talk with that hum singing in his ears like a wind. Hard to think.
“It’s pretty much in the middle of the lot. Maybe thirty yards, but probably less.”
“The second we hear the chimes,” Roland said, “we run for the fence and Susannah. All three of us. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Eddie said.
“All three of us and Oy,” Jake said.
“No, Oy stays with Susannah.”
Jake frowned, clearly not liking this. Roland hadn’t expected him to. “Jake, Oy also has bare feet . . . and didn’t you say there was broken glass in there?”
“Ye-eahh . . . ” Drawn-out. Reluctant. Then Jake dropped to one knee and looked into Oy’s gold-ringed eyes. “Stay with Susannah, Oy.”
“Oy! Ay!” Oy stay. It was good enough for Jake. He stood up, turned to Roland, and nodded.
“Suze?” Eddie asked. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.” Emphatic. No hesitation. Roland was now almost sure it was Mia in control, pulling the levers and turning the dials. Almost. Even now he wasn’t positive. The hum of the rose made it impossible to be positive of anything except that everything—everything—could be all right.
Eddie nodded, kissed the corner of her mouth, then stepped to the board fence with its odd poem: Oh SUSANNAH-MIO, divided girl of mine. He laced his fingers together into a step. Jake was into it, up, and gone like a breath of breeze.
“Ake!” Oy cried, and then was silent, sitting beside one of Susannah’s bare feet.
“You next, Eddie,” Roland said. He laced his remaining fingers together, meaning to give Eddie the same step Eddie had given Jake, but Eddie simply grabbed the top of the fence and vaulted over. The junkie Roland had first met in a jet plane coming into Kennedy Airport could never have done that.
Roland said, “Stay where you are. Both of you.” He could have meant the woman and the billy-bumbler, but it was only the woman he looked at.
“We’ll be fine,” she said, and bent to stroke Oy’s silky fur. “Won’t we, big guy?”
“Oy!”
“Go see your rose, Roland. While you still can.”
Roland gave her a last considering look, then grasped the top of the fence. A moment later he was gone, leaving Susannah and Oy alone on the most vital and vibrant streetcorner in the entire universe.
ELEVEN
Strange things happened to her as she waited.
Back the way they’d come, near Tower of Power Records, a bank clock alternately flashed the time and temperature: 8:27, 64. 8:27, 64. 8:27, 64. Then, suddenly, it was flashing 8:34, 64. 8:34, 64. She never took her eyes off it, she would swear to that. Had something gone wrong with the sign’s machinery?
Must’ve, she thought. What else could it be? Nothing, she supposed, but why did everything suddenly feel different? Even look different? Maybe it was my machinery that went wrong.
Oy whined and stretched his long neck toward her. As he did, she realized why things looked different. Besides somehow slipping seven uncounted minutes by her, the world had regained its former, all-too-familiar perspective. A lower perspective. She was closer to Oy because she was closer to the ground. The splendid lower legs and feet she’d been wearing when she had opened her eyes on New York were gone.
How had it happened? And when? In the missing seven minutes?
Oy whined again. This time it was almost a bark. He was looking past her, in the other direction. She turned that way. Half a dozen people were crossing Forty-sixth toward them. Five were normal. The sixth was a white-faced woman in a moss-splotched dress. The sockets of her eyes were empty and black. Her mouth hung open seemingly all the way down to her breastbone, and as Susannah watched, a green worm crawled over the lower lip. Those crossing with her gave her her own space, just as the other pedestrians on Second Avenue had given Roland and his friends theirs. Susannah guessed that in both cases, the more normal promenaders sensed something out of the ordinary and steered clear. Only this woman wasn’t todash.
This woman was dead.
TWELVE
The hum rose and rose as the three of them stumbled across the trash-and brick-littered wilderness of the vacant lot. As before, Jake saw faces in every angle and shadow. He saw Gasher and Hoots; Tick-Tock and Flagg; he saw Eldred Jonas’s gunbunnies, Depape and Reynolds; he saw his mother and father and Greta Shaw, their housekeeper, who looked a little like Edith Bunker on TV and who always remembered to cut the crusts off his sandwiches. Greta Shaw who sometimes called him ’Bama, although that was a secret, just between them.
Eddie saw people from the old neighborhood: Jimmie Polio, the kid with the clubfoot, and Tommy Fredericks, who always got so excited watching the street stickball games that he made faces and the kids called him Halloween Tommy. There was Skipper Brannigan, who would have picked a fight with Al Capone himself, had Capone shown sufficient bad judgment to come to their neighborhood, and Csaba Drabnik, the Mad Fuckin Hungarian. He saw his mother’s face in a pile of broken bricks, her glimmering eyes re-created from the broken pieces of a soft-drink bottle. He saw her friend, Dora Bertollo (all the kids on the block called her Tits Bertollo because she had really big ones, big as fuckin watermelons). And of course he saw Henry. Henry standing far back in the shadows, watching him. Only Henry was smiling instead of scowling, and he looked straight. Holding out one hand and giving Eddie what looked like a thumbs-up. Go on, the rising hum seemed to whisper, and now it whispered in Henry Dean’s voice. Go on, Eddie, show em what you’re made of. Didn’t I tell those other guys? When we were out behind Dahlie’s smokin Jimmie Polio’s cigarettes, didn’t I tell em? “My little bro could talk the devil into settin himself on fire,” I said. Didn’t I? Yes. Yes he had. And that’s the way I always felt, the hum whispered. I always loved you. Sometimes I put you down, but I always loved you. You were my little man.
Eddie began to cry. And these were good tears.
Roland saw all the phantoms of his life in this shadowed, brick-strewn ruin, from his mother and his cradle-amah right up to their visitors from Calla Bryn Sturgis. And as they walked, that sense of rightness grew. A feeling that all his hard decisions, all the pain and loss and spilled blood, had not been for nothing, after all. There was a reason. There was a purpose. There was life and love. He heard it all in the song of the rose, and he too began to cry. Mostly with relief. Getting here had been a hard journey. Many had died. Yet here they lived; here they sang with the rose. His life had not all been a dry dream after all.
They joined hands and stumbled forward, helping each other to avoid the nail-studded boards and the holes into which an ankle could plunge and twist and perhaps break. Roland didn’t know if one could break a bone while in the todash state, but he had no urge to find out.
“This is worth everything,” he said hoarsely.
Eddie nodded. “I’ll never stop now. Might not stop even if I die.”
Jake gave him a thumb-and-forefinger circle at that, and laughed. The sound was sweet in Roland’s ears. It was darker in here than it had been on the street, but the orange streetlights on Second and Forty-sixth were strong enough to provide at least some illumination. Jake pointed at a sign lying in a pile of boards. “See that? It’s the deli sign. I pulled it out of the weeds. That’s why it is where it is.” He looked around, then pointed in another direction. “And look!”
This sign was still standing. Roland and Eddie turned to read it. Although neither of them had seen it before, they both felt a strong sense of déjà vu, nonetheless.
MILLS CONSTRUCTION AND SOMBRA REAL ESTATE ASSOCIATES ARE CONTINUING TO REMAKE THE FACE OF MANHATTAN!
COMING SOON TO THIS LOCATION: TURTLE BAY LUXURY CONDOMINIUMS!
CALL 661-6712 FOR INFORMATION!
YOU WILL BE SO GLAD YOU DID!
As Jake had told them, the sign looked old, in need of either refreshment or outright replacement. Jake had remembered the graffito which had been sprayed across the sign, and Eddie remembered it from Jake’s story, not because it meant anything to him but simply because it was odd. And there it was, just as reported: BANGO SKANK. Some long-gone tagger’s calling card.
“I think the telephone number on the sign’s different,” Jake said.
“Yeah?” Eddie asked. “What was the old one?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Then how can you be sure this one’s different?”
In another place and at another time, Jake might have been irritated by these questions. Now, soothed by the proximity of the rose, he smiled, instead. “I don’t know. I guess I can’t. But it sure seems different. Like the sign in the bookstore window.”
Roland barely heard. He was walking forward over the piles of bricks and boards and smashed glass in his old cowboy boots, his eyes brilliant even in the shadows. He had seen the rose. There was something lying beside it, in the spot where Jake had found his version of the key, but Roland paid this no heed. He only saw the rose, growing from a clump of grass that had been stained purple with spilled paint. He dropped to his knees before it. A moment later Eddie joined him on his left, Jake on his right.
The rose was tightly furled against the night. Then, as they knelt there, the petals began to open, as if in greeting. The hum rose all around them, like a song of angels.
THIRTEEN
At first Susannah was all right. She held on despite the fact that she had lost over a foot and a half of herself—the self that had arrived here, anyway—and was now forced into her old familiar (and hatefully subservient) posture, half-kneeling and half-sitting on the filthy sidewalk. Her back was propped against the fence surrounding the vacant lot. A sardonic thought crossed her mind—All I need’s a cardboard sign and a tin cup.
She held on even after seeing the dead woman cross Forty-sixth Street. The singing helped—what she understood to be the voice of the rose. Oy helped, too, crowding his warmth close to her. She stroked his silky fur, using the reality of him as a steadying-point. She told herself again and again that she was not insane. All right, she’d lost seven minutes. Maybe. Or maybe the guts inside that newfangled clock down there had just hiccupped. All right, she’d seen a dead woman crossing the street. Maybe. Or maybe she’d just seen some strung-out junkie, God knew there was no shortage of them in New York—
A junkie with a little green worm crawling out of her mouth?
“I could have imagined that part,” she said to the bumbler. “Right?”
Oy was dividing his nervous attention between Susannah and the rushing headlights, which might have looked to him like large, predatory animals with shining eyes. He whined nervously.
“Besides, the boys’ll be back soon.”
“Oys,” the bumbler agreed, sounding hopeful.
Why didn’t I just go in with em? Eddie would have carried me on his back, God knows he’s done it before, both with the harness and without it.
“I couldn’t,” she whispered. “I just couldn’t.”
Because some part of her was frightened of the rose. Of getting too close to it. Had that part been in control during the missing seven minutes? Susannah was afraid it had been. If so, it was gone now. Had taken back its legs and just walked off on them into New York, circa 1977. Not good. But it had taken her fear of the rose with it, and that was good. She didn’t want to be afraid of something that felt so strong and so wonderful.
Another personality? Are you thinking the lady who brought the legs was another personality?
Another version of Detta Walker, in other words?
The idea made her feel like screaming. She thought she now understood how a woman would feel if, five years or so after an apparently successful cancer operation, the doctor told her a routine X-ray had picked up a shadow on her lung.
“Not again,” she murmured in a low, frantic voice as a fresh group of pedestrians schooled past. They all moved away from the board fence a little, although it reduced the space between them considerably. “No, not again. It can’t be. I’m whole. I’m . . . I’m fixed.”
How long had her friends been gone?
She looked downstreet at the flashing clock. It said 8:42, but she wasn’t sure she could trust it. It felt longer than that. Much longer. Maybe she should call to them. Just give a halloo. How y’all doin in there?
No. No such thing. You’re a gunslinger, girl. At least that’s what he says. What he thinks. And you’re not going to change what he thinks by hollering like a school-girl just seen a garter snake under a bush. You’re just going to sit here and wait. You can do it. You’ve got Oy for company and you—
Then she saw the man standing on the other side of the street. Just standing there beside a newsstand. He was naked. A ragged Y-cut, sewn up with large black industrial stitches, began at his groin, rose, and branched at his sternum. His empty eyes gazed at her. Through her. Through the world.
Any possibility that this might only have been a hallucination ended when Oy began to bark. He was staring directly across at the naked dead man.
Susannah gave up her silence and began to scream for Eddie.
FOURTEEN
When the rose opened, disclosing the scarlet furnace within its petals and the yellow sun burning at the center, Eddie saw everything that mattered.
“Oh my Lord,” Jake sighed from beside him, but he might have been a thousand miles away.
Eddie saw great things and near misses. Albert Einstein as a child, not quite struck by a runaway milk-wagon as he crossed a street. A teenage boy named Albert Schweitzer getting out of a bathtub and not quite stepping on the cake of soap lying beside the pulled plug. A Nazi Oberleutnant burning a piece of paper with the date and place of the D-Day invasion written on it. He saw a man who intended to poison the entire water supply of Denver die of a heart attack in a roadside rest stop on I-80 in Iowa with a bag of McDonald’s french fries on his lap. He saw a terrorist wired up with explosives suddenly turn away from a crowded restaurant in a city that might have been Jerusalem. The terrorist had been transfixed by nothing more than the sky, and the thought that it arced above the just and unjust alike. He saw four men rescue a little boy from a monster whose entire head seemed to consist of a single eye.
But more important than any of these was the vast, accretive weight of small things, from planes which hadn’t crashed to men and women who had come to the correct place at the perfect time and thus founded generations. He saw kisses exchanged in doorways and wallets returned and men who had come to a splitting of the way and chosen the right fork. He saw a thousand random meetings that weren’t random, ten thousand right decisions, a hundred thousand right answers, a million acts of unacknowledged kindness. He saw the old people of River Crossing and Roland kneeling in the dust for Aunt Talitha’s blessing; again heard her giving it freely and gladly. Heard her telling him to lay the cross she had given him at the foot of the Dark Tower and speak the name of Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth. He saw the Tower itself in the burning folds of the rose and for a moment understood its purpose: how it distributed its lines of force to all the worlds that were and held them steady in time’s great helix. For every brick that landed on the ground instead of some little kid’s head, for every tornado that missed the trailer park, for every missile that didn’t fly, for every hand stayed from violence, there was the Tower.
And the quiet, singing voice of the rose. The song that promised all might be well, all might be well, that all manner of things might be well.
But something’s wrong with it, he thought.
There was a jagged dissonance buried in the hum, like bits of broken glass. There was a nasty flickering purple glare in its hot heart, some cold light that did not belong there.
“There are two hubs of existence,” he heard Roland say. “Two!” Like Jake, he could have been a thousand miles away. “The Tower . . . and the rose. Yet they are the same.”
“The same,” Jake agreed. His face was painted with brilliant light, dark red and bright yellow. Yet Eddie thought he could see that other light, as well—a flickering purple reflection like a bruise. Now it danced on Jake’s forehead, now on his cheek, now it swam in the well of his eye; now gone, now reappearing at his temple like the physical manifestation of a bad idea.
“What’s wrong with it?” Eddie heard himself ask, but there was no answer. Not from Roland or Jake, not from the rose.
Jake raised one finger and began to count. Counting petals, Eddie saw. But there was really no need to count. They all knew how many petals there were.
“We must have this patch,” Roland said. “Own it and then protect it. Until the Beams are reestablished and the Tower is made safe again. Because while the Tower weakens, this is what holds everything together. And this is weakening, too. It’s sick. Do you feel it?”
Eddie opened his mouth to say of course he felt it, and that was when Susannah began to scream. A moment later Oy joined his voice to hers, barking wildly.
Eddie, Jake, and Roland looked at each other like sleepers awakened from the deepest of dreams. Eddie made it to his feet first. He turned and stumbled back toward the fence and Second Avenue, shouting her name. Jake followed, pausing only long enough to snatch something out of the snarl of burdocks where the key had been before.
Roland spared one final, agonized look at the wild rose growing so bravely here in this tumbled wasteland of bricks and boards and weeds and litter. It had already begun to furl its petals again, hiding the light that blazed within.
I’ll come back, he told it. I swear by the gods of all the worlds, by my mother and father and my friends that were, that I’ll come back.
Yet he was afraid.
Roland turned and ran for the board fence, picking his way through the tumbled litter with unconscious agility in spite of the pain in his hip. As he ran, one thought returned to him and beat at his mind like a heart: Two. Two hubs of existence. The rose and the Tower. The Tower and the rose.
All the rest was held between them, spinning in fragile complexity.