EIGHT
The man with the blue eyes sounded calm as he spoke to the boy, but he didn't look calm to Irene Tassenbaum; not at all. And those singing voices she'd first noticed outside the East Stoneham General Store had changed. Their song was still sweet, but wasn't there a note of desperation in it now, as well? She thought so. A high, pleading quality that made her temples throb.
"How can you know that?" the boy called Jake shouted at the man-his father, she assumed. "How can you be so f**king sure?"
Instead of answering the kid's question, the one called Roland looked at her. Mrs. Tassenbaum felt the skin of her arms and back break out in gooseflesh.
"Drive down, sai, may it do ya."
She looked doubtfully at the steep slope of the Cara Laughs driveway. "If I do, I might not get this bucket of bolts back up."
"You'll have to," Roland said.
NINE
The man cutting the grass was King's bondservant, Roland surmised, or whatever passed for such in this world. He was white-haired under his straw hat but straight-backed and hale, wearing his years with little effort. When the truck drove down the steep driveway to the house, the man paused with one arm resting on the handle of the mower. When the passenger door opened and the gunslinger got out, he used the switch to turn the mower off. He also removed his hat-without being exactly aware that he was doing it, Roland thought. Then his eyes registered the gun that hung at Roland's hip, and widened enough to make the crow's-feet around them disappear.
"Howdy, mister," he said cautiously. He thinks I'm a walk-in,
Roland thought. Just as she did.
And they were walk-ins of a sort, he and Jake; they just happened to have come to a time and place where such things were common.
And where time was racing.
Roland spoke before the man could go on. "Where are they? Where is he? Stephen King? Speak, man, and tell me the truth!"
The hat slipped from the old man's relaxing fingers and fell beside his feet on the newly cut grass. His hazel eyes stared into Roland's, fascinated: the bird looking at the snake.
"Fambly's across the lake, at that place they gut on t'other side," he said. "T'old Schindler place. Havin some kind of pa'ty, they are. Steve said he'd drive over after his walk." And he gestured to a small black car parked on the driveway extension, its nose just visible around the side of the house.
"Where is he walking? Do ya know, tell this lady!"
The old man looked briefly over Roland's shoulder, then back to the gunslinger. "Be easier was I t'drive ya there m'self."
Roland considered this, but only briefly. Easier to begin with, yes. Maybe harder on the other end, where King would either be saved or lost. Because they'd found the woman in ka's road.
However minor a role she might have to play, it was her they had found first on the Path of the Beam. In the end it was as simple as that. As for the size of her part, it was better not to judge such things in advance. Hadn't he and Eddie believed John Cullum, met in that same roadside store some three wheels north of here, would have but a minor role to play in their story? Yet it had turned out to be anything but.
All of this crossed his consciousness in less than a second, information (hunch, Eddie would have called it) delivered in a kind of brilliant mental shorthand.
"No," he said, and jerked a thumb back over his shoulder.
"Tell her. Now."
TEN
The boy-Jake-had fallen back against the seat with his hands lying limp at his sides. The peculiar dog was looking anxiously up into the kid's face, but the kid didn't see him. His eyes were closed, and Irene Tassenbaum at first thought he'd fainted.
"Son?...Jake?"
"I have him," the boy said without opening his eyes. "Not Stephen King-I can't touch him-but the other one. I have to slow him down. How can I slow him down?"
Mrs. Tassenbaum had listened to her husband enough at work-holding long, muttered dialogues with himself-to know a self-directed enquiry when she heard one. Also, she had no idea of whom the boy was speaking, only that it wasn't Stephen King. Which left about six billion other possibilities, globally speaking.
Nevertheless, she did answer, because she knew what always slowed her down.
"Too bad he doesn't need to go to the bathroom," she said.
ELEVEN
Strawberries aren't out in Maine, not this early in the season, but there are raspberries. Justine Anderson (of May brook, New York) and Elvira Toothaker (her Lovell friend) are walking along the side of Route 7