THE TALK WENT ON until sundown, stopping only long enough for them to eat a cold meal, and by the time it was over, Eddie felt as if he had gone twelve hard rounds with Sugar Ray Leonard. He no longer doubted that they had been “sharing khef,” as Roland put it; he and Jake actually seemed to have been living each other’s life in their dreams, as if they were two halves of the same whole. Roland began with what had happened under the mountains, where Jake’s first life in this world had ended. He told of his own palaver with the man in black, and Walter’s veiled words about a Beast and someone he called the Ageless Stranger. He told of the strange, daunting dream which had come to him, a dream in which the whole universe had been swallowed in a beam of fantastic white light. And how, at the end of that dream, there had been a single blade of purple grass. Eddie glanced sideways at Jake and was stunned by the knowledge— the recognition—in the boy’s eyes.
ROLAND HAD BABBLED PARTS of this story to Eddie in his time of delir-ium, but it was entirely new to Susannah, and she listened with wide eyes. As Roland repeated the things Walter had told him, she caught glints of her own world, like reflections in a smashed mirror: automobiles, cancer, rockets to the moon, artificial insemination. She had no idea who the Beast might be, but she recognized the name of the Ageless Stranger as a variation upon the name of Merlin, the magician who had supposedly orchestrated the career of King Arthur. Curiouser and curiouser.
Roland told of how he had awakened to find Walter long years dead—time had somehow slipped forward, perhaps a hundred years, per-haps five hundred. Jake listened in fascinated silence as the gunslinger told of reaching the edge of the Western Sea, of how he had lost two of the fingers on his right hand, and how he had drawn Eddie and Susannah before encountering Jack Mort, the dark third.
The gunslinger motioned to Eddie, who took up the tale with the coming of the great bear.
“Shardik?” Jake interjected. “But that’s the name of a book! A book in our world! It was written by the man who wrote that famous book about the rabbits—” “Richard Adams!” Eddie shouted. “And the book about the bunnies was Watership Down! I knew I knew that name! But how can that be, Roland? How is it that the people in your world know about things in ours?” “There are doors, aren’t there?” Roland responded. “Haven’t we seen four of them already? Do you think they never existed before, or never will again?” “But—“
“All of us have seen the leavings of your world in mine, and when I was in your city of New York, I saw the marks of my world in yours. I saw gunslingers. Most were lax and slow, but they were gunslingers all the same, clearly members of their own ancient ka-tet.”
“Roland, they were just cops. You ran rings around them.” “Not the last one. When Jack Mort and I were in the underground railway station, that one almost took me down. Except for blind luck— Mort’s flint-and-steel—he would have done. That one … I saw his eyes. He knew the face of his father. I believe he knew it very well. And then … do you remember the name of Balazar’s nightclub?”
“Sure,” Eddie said uneasily. “The Leaning Tower. But it could have been coincidence; you yourself said ka doesn’t rule everything.” Roland nodded. “You really are like Cuthbert—I remember some-thing he said when we were boys. We were planning a midnight lark in the cemetery, but Alain wouldn’t go. He said he was afraid of offending the shades of his fathers and mothers. Cuthbert laughed at him. He said he wouldn’t believe in ghosts until he caught one in his teeth.”
“Good for him!” Eddie exclaimed. “Bravo!” Roland smiled. “I thought you’d like that. At any rate, let’s leave this ghost for now. Go on with your story.”
Eddie told of the vision which had come to him when Roland threw the jawbone into the fire—the vision of the key and the rose. He told of his dream, and how he had walked through the door of Tom and Gerry’s Artistic Deli and into the field of roses which was dominated by the tall, soot-colored Tower. He told of the blackness which had issued from its windows, forming a shape in the sky overhead, speaking directly to Jake now, because Jake was listening with hungry concentration and growing wonder. He tried to convey some sense of the exaltation and terror which had permeated the dream, and saw from their eyes—Jake’s most of all— that he was either doing a better job of that than he could have hoped for … or that they’d had dreams of their own. He told of following Shardik’s backtrail to the Portal of the Bear, and how, when he put his head against it, he’d found himself remember-ing the day he had talked his brother into taking him to Dutch Hill, so he could see The Mansion. He told about die cup and the needle, and how the pointing needle had become unnecessary once they realized they could see the Beam at work in everything it touched, even the birds in the sky.