Eddie returned to John Cullum's old car the way he'd sometimes come out of nightmares as a teenager: tangled up and panting with fright, totally disoriented, not sure of who he was, let alone where.
He had a second to realize that, incredible as it seemed, he and Roland were floating in each other's arms like unborn twins in the womb, only this was no womb. A pen and a paperclip were drifting in front of his eyes. So was a yellow plastic case he recognized as an eight-track tape. Don't waste your time, John, he thought. No true thread there, that's a dead-end gadget if there ever was one.
Something was scratching the back of his neck. Was it the domelight of John Cullum's scurgy old Galaxie? By God he thought it w-
Then gravity reasserted itself and they fell, with meaningless objects raining down all around them. The floormat which had been floating around in the Ford's cabin landed draped over the steering wheel. Eddie's midsection hit the top of the front seat and air exploded out of him in a rough whoosh.
Roland landed beside him, and on his bad hip. He gave a single barking cry and then began to pull himself back into the front seat.
Eddie opened his mouth to speak. Before he could, Callahan's voice filled his head: Hile, Roland! Hile, gunslinger!
How much psychic effort had it cost the Pere to speak from that other world? And behind it, faint but there, the sound of besual, triumphant cries. Howls that were not quite words.
Eddie's wide and startled eyes met Roland's faded blue ones. He reached out for the gunslinger's left hand, thinking-
He's going. Great God, I think the Pere is going.
May you find your Tower, Roland, and breach it-
"-and may you climb to the top," Eddie breathed.
They were back in John Cullum's car and parked-askew but otherwise peacefully enough-at the side of Kansas Road in the shady early-evening hours of a summer's day, but what Eddie saw was the orange hell-light of that restaurant that wasn't a restaurant at all but a den of cannibals. The thought that there could be such things, that people walked past their hiding place each and every day, not knowing what was inside, not feeling the greedy eyes that perhaps marked them and measured them-
Then, before he could think further, he cried out with pain as phantom teeth settled into his neck and cheeks and midriff; as his mouth was violently kissed by nettles and his testicles were skewered. He screamed, clawing at the air with his free hand, until Roland grabbed it and forced it down.
"Stop, Eddie. Stop. They're gone." A pause. The connection broke and the pain faded. Roland was right, of course. Unlike the Pere, they had escaped. Eddie saw that Roland's eyes were shiny with tears. "He's gone, too. The Pere."
"The vampires? You know, the cannibals? Did... Did they...?" Eddie couldn't finish the thought. The idea of Pere Callahan as one of them was too awful to speak aloud.
"No, Eddie. Not at all. He-" Roland pulled the gun he still wore. The scrolled steel sides gleamed in the late light. He tucked the barrel deep beneath his chin for a moment, looking at Eddie as he did it.
"He escaped them," Eddie said.
"Aye, and how angry they must be."
Eddie nodded, suddenly exhausted. And his wounds were aching again. No, sobbing. "Good," he said. "Now put that thing back where it belongs before you shoot yourself witfi it." And as Roland did: "What just happened to us? Did we go todash or was it another Beamquake?"
"I think it was a bit of both," Roland said. "There's a thing called aven kal, which is like a tidal-wave that runs along the Path of the Beam. We were lifted on it."
"And allowed to see what we wanted to see."
Roland thought about this for a moment, then shook his head with great firmness. "We saw what the Beam wanted us to see. Where it wants us to go."
"Roland, did you study this stuff when you were a kid? Did your old pal Vannay teach classes in... I don't know, The Anatomy of Beams and Bends O'The Rainbow?"
Roland was smiling. 'Yes, I suppose that we were taught such things in both History and Summa Logicales."
Roland didn't answer. He was looking out the window of Cullum's car, still trying to get his breath back-both the physical and the figurative. It really wasn't that hard to do, not here; being in this part of Bridgton was like being in the neighborhood of a certain vacant lot in Manhattan. Because there was a generator near here. Not sai King, as Roland had first believed, but the potential of sai King... of what sai King might be able to create, given world enough and time. Wasn't King also being carried on aven kal, perhaps generating the very wave that lifted him?
A man can't pull himself up by his own bootstraps no matter how hard he tries, Cort had lectured when Roland, Cuthbert, Alain, and Jamie had been little more than toddlers. Cort speaking in the tone of cheery self-assurance that had gradually hardened to harshness as his last group of lads grew toward their trials of manhood. But maybe about bootstraps Cort had been wrong.