He did, frowning down at her, hoping with all his heart that his first idea - the one that had come to mind as soon as he saw that restlessly rubbing hand - was wrong. Because she had been in the speaking ring, and the demon that denned there had had its way with her while Jake was trying to cross between the worlds. Sometimes - often - demonic contact changed things.
Never for the better, in Roland's experience.
He pulled his rope back up after Eddie had caught Susannah around the waist and helped her to the platform. The gunslinger walked forward to one of the piers which had torn through the train's bullet snout, fashioning the rope's end into a shake-loop as he went. He tossed this over the pier, snubbed it (being careful not to twitch the rope to the left), and then lowered himself to the platform himself, bent at the waist and leaving boot-tracks on Blaine's pink side.
"Too bad to lose the rope and harness," Eddie remarked when Roland was beside them.
"I ain't sorry about that harness," Susannah said. "I'd rather crawl along the pavement until I got chewin-gum all the way up my arms to the elbows."
"We haven't lost anything," Roland said. He snugged his hand into the rawhide foot-loop and snapped it hard to the left. The rope slithered down from the pier, Roland gathering it in almost as fast as it came down.
"Neat trick!" Jake said.
"Eat! Rick!" Oy agreed.
"Cort?" Eddie asked.
"Cort," Roland agreed, smiling.
"The drill instructor from hell," Eddie said. "Better you than me, Roland. Better you than me."
4
As they walked toward the doors leading into the station, that low, liquid warbling sound began again. Roland was amused to see all three of his cohorts wrinkle their noses and pull down the comers of their mouths at the same time; it made them look like blood family as well as ka-tet. Susannah pointed toward the park. The signs looming over the "trees were wavering slightly, the way things did in a heat-haze.
"Is that from the thinny?" Jake asked.
Roland nodded.
"Will we be able to get around it?"
"Yes. Thinnies are dangerous in much the way that swamps full of quicksand and saligs are dangerous.Do you know those things?"
"We know quicksand," Jake said. "And if saligs are long green things with big teeth, we know them, too."
"That's what they are."
Susannah turned to look back at Blaine one last time. "No silly questions and no silly games. The book was right about that." From Blaine she turned her eyes to Roland. "What about Beryl Evans, the woman who wrote Charlie the Choo-Choo? Do you think she's part of this? That we might even meet her? I'd like to thank her. Eddie figured it out, but - "
"It's possible, I suppose," Roland said, "but on measure, I think not. My world is like a huge ship that sank near enough shore for most of the wreckage to wash up on the beach. Much of what we find is fascinating, some of it may be useful, if ka allows, but all of it is still wreckage. Senseless wreckage." He looked around. "Like this place, I think."
"I wouldn't exactly call it wrecked," Eddie said. "Look at the paint on the station - it's a little rusty from the gutters up under the eaves, but it hasn't peeled anywhere that I can see." He stood in front of the doors and ran his fingers down one of the glass panels. They left four clear tracks behind. "Dust and plenty of it, but no cracks. I'd say that this building has been left unmaintained at most since .. . the start of the summer, maybe?"
He looked at Roland, who shrugged and nodded. He was listening with only half an ear and paying attention with only half a mind. The rest of him was fixed upon two things: the warble of the thinny, and keeping away the memories that wanted to swamp him.
"But Lud had been going to wrack and ruin for centuries" Susannah said. "This place ... it may or may not be Topeka, but what it really looks like to me is one of those creepy little towns on The Twilight Zone. You boys probably don't remember that one, but - "
"Yes, I do," Eddie and Jake said in perfect unison, then looked at each other and laughed. Eddie stuck out his hand and Jake slapped it.
"They still show the reruns," Jake said.
"Yeah, all the time," Eddie added. "Usually sponsored by bankruptcy lawyers who look like shorthair terriers. And you're right. This place isn't like Lud. Why would it be? It's not in the same world as Lud. I don't know where we crossed over, but - " He pointed again at the blue Interstate 70 shield, as if that proved his case beyond a shadow of a doubt.
"If it's Topeka, where are the people?" Susannah asked.
Eddie shrugged and raised his hands - who knows?
Jake put his forehead against the glass of the center door, cupped his hands to the sides of his face, and peered in. He looked for several seconds, then saw something that made him pull back fast. "Oh-oh," he said. "No wonder the town's so quiet."
Roland stepped up behind Jake and peered in over the boy's head, cupping his own hands to reduce his reflection. The gunslinger drew two conclusions before even looking at what Jake had seen. The first was that although this was most assuredly a train station, it wasn't really a Blame station . . . not a cradle. The other was that the station did indeed belong to Eddie's, Jake's, and Susannah's world .. . but perhaps not to their where.