“Right. We’re also pretty sure that we can’t double back in time in that world; it’s later every time we go there. Right?”
Jake nodded emphatically. “Because that world’s not like the others . . . unless maybe it was just being sent todash by Black Thirteen that made us feel that way?”
“I don’t think so,” Eddie said. “That little piece of Second Avenue between the vacant lot and maybe on up to Sixtieth is a very important place. I think it’s a doorway. One big doorway.”
Jake Chambers was looking more and more excited. “Not all the way up to Sixtieth. Not that far. Second Avenue between Forty-sixth and Fifty-fourth, that’s what I think. On the day I left Piper, I felt something change when I got to Fifty-fourth Street. It’s those eight blocks. The stretch with the record store on it, and Chew Chew Mama, and The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind. And the vacant lot, of course. That’s the other end. It . . . I don’t know . . . ”
Eddie said, “Being there takes you into a different world. Some kind of key world. And I think that’s why time always runs one way—”
Roland held up his hand. “Stop.”
Eddie stopped, looking at Roland expectantly, smiling a little. Roland was not smiling. Some of his previous sense of well-being had passed away. Too much to do, gods damn it. And not enough time in which to do it.
“You want to see how near time has run to the day the agreement becomes null and void,” he said. “Have I got that right?”
“You do.”
“You don’t need to go to New York physically to do that, Eddie. Todash would serve nicely.”
“Todash would do fine to check the day and the month, sure, but there’s more. We’ve been dumb about that vacant lot, you guys. I mean really dumb.”
TEN
Eddie believed they could own the vacant lot without ever touching Susannah’s inherited fortune; he thought Callahan’s story showed quite clearly how it could be done. Not the rose; the rose was not to be owned (by them or anyone) but to be protected. And they could do it. Maybe.
Frightened or not, Calvin Tower had been waiting in that deserted laundrymat to save Pere Callahan’s bacon. And frightened or not, Calvin Tower had refused—as of May 31st, 1977, anyway—to sell his last piece of real property to the Sombra Corporation. Eddie thought that Calvin Tower was, in the words of the song, holding out for a hero.
Eddie had also been thinking about the way Callahan had hidden his face in his hands the first time he mentioned Black Thirteen. He wanted it the hell out of his church . . . but so far he’d kept it anyway. Like the bookshop owner, the Pere had been holding out. How stupid they had been to assume Calvin Tower would ask millions for his lot! He wanted to be shed of it. But not until the right person came along. Or the right ka-tet.
“Suziella, you can’t go because you’re pregnant,” Eddie said. “Jake, you can’t go because you’re a kid. All other questions aside, I’m pretty sure you couldn’t sign the kind of contract I’ve been thinking about ever since Callahan told us his story. I could take you with me, but it sounds like you’ve got something you want to check into over here. Or am I wrong about that?”
“You’re not wrong,” Jake said. “But I’d almost go with you, anyway. This sounds really good.”
Eddie smiled. “Almost only counts with grenados and horseshoes, kid. As for sending Roland, no offense, boss, but you’re not all that suave in our world. You . . . um . . . lose something in the translation.”
Susannah burst out laughing.
“How much are you thinking of offering him?” Jake asked. “I mean, it has to be something, doesn’t it?”
“A buck,” Eddie said. “I’ll probably have to ask Tower to loan it to me, but—”
“No, we can do better than that,” Jake said, looking serious. “I’ve got five or six dollars in my knapsack, I’m pretty sure.” He grinned. “And we can offer him more, later on. When things kind of settle down on this side.”
“If we’re still alive,” Susannah said, but she also looked excited. “You know what, Eddie? You just might be a genius.”
“Balazar and his friends won’t be happy if sai Tower sells us his lot,” Roland said.
“Yeah, but maybe we can persuade Balazar to leave him alone,” Eddie said. A grim little smile was playing around the corners of his mouth. “When it comes right down to it, Roland, Enrico Balazar’s the kind of guy I wouldn’t mind killing twice.”
“When do you want to go?” Susannah asked him.
“The sooner the better,” Eddie said. “For one thing, not knowing how late it is over there in New York is driving me nuts. Roland? What do you say?”
“I say tomorrow,” Roland said. “We’ll take the ball up to the cave, and then we’ll see if you can go through the door to Calvin Tower’s where and when. Your idea is a good one, Eddie, and I say thankya.”
Jake said, “What if the ball sends you to the wrong place? The wrong version of 1977, or . . . ” He hardly knew how to finish. He was remembering how thin everything had seemed when Black Thirteen had first taken them todash, and how endless darkness seemed to be waiting behind the painted surface realities around them. “. . . or someplace even farther?” he finished.
“In that case, I’ll send back a postcard.” Eddie said it with a shrug and a laugh, but for just a moment Jake saw how frightened he was. Susannah must have seen it, too, because she took Eddie’s hand in both of hers and squeezed it.
“Hey, I’ll be fine,” Eddie said.
“You better be,” Susannah replied. “You just better.”
CHAPTER II:
THE DOGAN, PART 1
ONE
When Roland and Eddie entered Our Lady of Serenity the following morning, daylight was only a distant rumor on the northeast horizon. Eddie lit their way down the center aisle with a ’sener, his lips pressed tightly together. The thing they had come for was humming. It was a sleepy hum, but he hated the sound of it just the same. The church itself felt freaky. Empty, it seemed too big, somehow. Eddie kept expecting to see ghostly figures (or perhaps a complement of the vagrant dead) sitting in the pews and looking at them with otherworldly disapproval.
But the hum was worse.
When they reached the front, Roland opened his purse and took out the bowling bag which Jake had kept in his knapsack until yesterday. The gunslinger held it up for a moment and they could both read what was printed on the side: NOTHING BUT STRIKES AT MID-WORLD LANES.
“Not a word from now until I tell you it’s all right,” Roland said. “Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Roland pressed his thumb into the groove between two of the floorboards and the hidey-hole in the preacher’s cove sprang open. He lifted the top aside. Eddie had once seen a movie on TV about guys disposing of live explosives during the London Blitz—UXB, it had been called—and Roland’s movements now recalled that film strongly to his mind. And why not? If they were right about what was in this hiding place—and Eddie knew they were—then it was an unexploded bomb.
Roland folded back the white linen surplice, exposing the box. The hum rose. Eddie’s breath stopped in his throat. He felt the skin all over his body grow cold. Somewhere close, a monster of nearly unimaginable malevolence had half-opened one sleeping eye.
The hum dropped back to its former sleepy pitch and Eddie breathed again.
Roland handed him the bowling bag, motioning for Eddie to hold it open. With misgivings (part of him wanted to whisper in Roland’s ear that they should forget the whole thing), Eddie did as he was bidden. Roland lifted the box out, and once again the hum rose. In the rich, if limited, glow of the ’sener, Eddie could see sweat on the gunslinger’s brow. He could feel it on his own. If Black Thirteen awoke and pitched them out into some black limbo . . .
I won’t go. I’ll fight to stay with Susannah.
Of course he would. But he was still relieved when Roland slipped the elaborately carved ghostwood box into the queer metallic bag they’d found in the vacant lot. The hum didn’t disappear entirely, but subsided to a barely audible drone. And when Roland gently pulled the drawstring running around the top of the bag, closing its mouth, the drone became a distant whisper. It was like listening to a seashell.
Eddie sketched the sign of the cross in front of himself. Smiling faintly, Roland did the same.
Outside the church, the northeast horizon had brightened appreciably—there would be real daylight after all, it seemed.
“Roland.”
The gunslinger turned toward him, eyebrows raised. His left fist was closed around the bag’s throat; he was apparently not willing to trust the weight of the box to the bag’s drawstring, stout as it looked.
“If we were todash when we found that bag, how could we have picked it up?”
Roland considered this. Then he said, “Perhaps the bag is todash, too.”
“Still?”
Roland nodded. “Yes, I think so. Still.”
“Oh.” Eddie thought about it. “That’s spooky.”
“Changing your mind about revisiting New York, Eddie?”
Eddie shook his head. He was scared, though. Probably more scared than he’d been at any time since standing up in the aisle of the Barony Coach to riddle Blaine.