"No, but - "
Before he could finish, a deep rumbling came from the earth. The porch suddenly began to rise and fall like a boat on a heavy sea. They could hear the boards groaning. From the kitchen came the sound of rattling china like chattering teeth. Oy raised his head and whined. His foxy little face was comically startled, his ears laid back along his skull. In Callahan's parlor, something fell over and shattered.
Eddie's first thought, illogical but strong, was that Jake had killed Suze simply by declaring her still alive.
For a moment the shaking intensified. A window shattered as its frame was twisted out of shape. There was a crump from the darkness. Eddie assumed - correctly - that it was the ruined privy, now falling down completely. He was on his feet without realizing it. Jake was standing beside him, gripping his wrist. Eddie had drawn Roland's gun and now they both stood as if ready to begin shooting.
There was a final grumbling from deep in the earth, and then the porch settled under their feet. At certain key points along the Beam, people were waking up and looking around, dazed. In the streets of one New York when, a few car alarms were going off. The following day's papers would report a minor earthquake: broken windows, no reported casualties. Just a little shake of the fundamentally sound bedrock.
Jake was looking at Eddie, eyes wide. And knowing.
The door opened behind them and Callahan came out onto the porch, dressed in flimsy white underpants that fell to his knees. The only other thing on him was the gold crucifix around his neck.
"It was an earthquake, wasn't it?" he said. "I felt one in northern California once, but never since coming to the Calla."
"It was a hell of a lot more than an earthquake," Eddie said, and pointed. The screened-in porch looked east, and over there the horizon was lit by silent artillery bursts of green lightning. Downhill from the rectory, the door of Rosalita's snug creaked open and then banged shut. She and Roland came up the hill together, she in her chemise and the gunslinger in a pair of jeans, both barefoot in the dew.
Eddie, Jake, and Callahan went down to them. Roland was looking fixedly at the already diminishing flickers of lightning in the east, where the land of Thunderclap waited for them, and the Court of the Crimson King, and, at the end of End-World, the Dark Tower itself.
If,Eddie thought.If it still stands.
"Jake was just saying that if Susannah died, we'd know it," Eddie said. "That there'd be what you call a sigul. Then comes this." He pointed to the Pere's lawn, where a new ridge had humped up, peeling the sod apart in one ten-foot line to show the puckered brown lips of the earth. A chorus of dogs was barking in town, but there were no sounds from thefolken, at least not yet; Eddie supposed a goodly number had slept through the whole thing. The sleep of the drunken victorious. "But it wasn't anything to do with Suze. Was it?"
"Not directly, no."
"And it wasn't ours," Jake put in, "or the damage would have been a lot worse. Don't you think?"
Roland nodded.
Rosa looked at Jake with a mixture of puzzlement and fright. "Wasn't ourwhat, boy? What are you talking about? It wasn't an earthquake, sure!"
"No," Roland said, "aBeam quake. One of the Beams holding up the Tower - which holds up everything - just let go. Just snapped."
Even in the faint light from the four 'seners flickering on the porch, Eddie saw Rosalita Munoz's face lose its color. She crossed herself. "ABeam? One of theBeams? Say no! Say not true!"
Eddie found himself thinking of some long-ago baseball scandal. Of some little boy begging,Say it ain't so, Joe.
"I can't," Roland told her, "because it is."
"How many of these Beams are there?" Callahan asked.
Roland looked at Jake, and nodded slightly:Say your lesson, Jake of New York - speak and be true.
"Six Beams connecting twelve portals," Jake said. "The twelve portals are at the twelve ends of the earth. Roland, Eddie, and Susannah really started their quest from the Portal of the Bear, and picked me up between there and Lud."
"Shardik," Eddie said. He was watching the last flickers of lightning in the east. "That was the bear's name."
"Yes, Shardik," Jake agreed. "So we're on the Beam of the Bear. All the Beams come together at the Dark Tower. Our Beam, on the other side of the Tower...?" He looked at Roland for help. Roland, in turn, looked at Eddie Dean. Even now, it seemed, Roland was not done teaching them the Way of Eld.
Eddie either didn't see the look or chose to ignore it, but Roland would not be put off. "Eddie?" he murmured.
"We're on the Path of the Bear, Way of the Turtle," Eddie said absently. "I don't know why it would ever matter, since the Tower's as far as we're going, but on the other side it's the Path of the Turtle, Way of the Bear." And he recited:
"See the TURTLE of enormous girth!
On his shell he holds the earth,
His thought is slow but always kind;
He holds us all within his mind."