THREE
Eddie felt the kid twitch his sleeve. "What's wrong with this picture?" Jake asked.
Eddie looked around. In spite of his own adjustment problems (his involved coming back to a New York that was clearly a few years behind his when), he knew what Jake meant. Something was wrong.
He looked down at the sidewalk, suddenly sure he wouldn't have a shadow. They'd lost their shadows like the kids in one of the stories... one of the nineteen fairy tales... or was it maybe something newer, like The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe or Peter Pan ? One of what might be called the Modern Nineteen?
Didn't matter in any case, because their shadows were there.
Shouldn't be, though , Eddie thought. Shouldn't be able to see our shadows when it's this dark .
Stupid thought. It wasn't dark. It was morning , for Christ's sake, a bright May morning, sunshine winking off the chrome of passing cars and the windows of the stores on the east side of Second Avenue brightly enough to make you squint your eyes. Yet still it seemed somehow dark to Eddie, as if all this were nothing but fragile surface, like the canvas backdrop of a stage set. "At rise we see the Forest of Arden." Or a Castle in Denmark. Or the Kitchen of Willy Loman's House. In this case we see Second Avenue, midtown New York.
Yes, like that. Only behind this canvas you wouldn't find the workshop and storage areas of backstage but only a great bulging darkness. Some vast dead universe where Roland's Tower had already fallen.
Please let me be wrong , Eddie thought. Please let this just be a case of culture shock or the plain old heebie-jeebies .
He didn't think it was.
"How'd we get here?" he asked Jake. "There was no door..." He trailed off, and then asked with some hope: "Maybe it is a dream?"
"No," Jake said. "It's more like when we traveled in the Wizard's Glass. Except this time there was no ball." A thought struck him. "Did you hear music, though? Chimes? Just before you wound up here?"
Eddie nodded. "It was sort of overwhelming. Made my eyes water."
"Right," Jake said. "Exactly."
Oy sniffed a fire hydrant. Eddie and Jake paused to let the little guy lift his leg and add his own notice to what was undoubtedly an already crowded bulletin board. Ahead of them, that other Jake - Kid Seventy-seven - was still walking slowly and gawking everywhere. To Eddie he looked like a tourist from Michigan. He even craned up to see the tops of the buildings, and Eddie had an idea that if the New York Board of Cynicism caught you doing that, they took away your Bloomingdale's charge card. Not that he was complaining; it made the kid easy to follow.
And just as Eddie was thinking that, Kid Seventy-seven disappeared.
"Where'd you go? Christ, where'd you go?"
"Relax," Jake said. (At his ankle, Oy added his two cents' worth: "Ax!") The kid was grinning. "I just went into the bookstore. The... um... Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, it's called."
"Where you got Charlie the Choo-Choo and the riddle book?"
"Right."
Eddie loved the mystified, dazzled grin Jake was wearing. It lit up his whole face. "Remember how excited Roland got when I told him the owner's name?"
Eddie did. The owner of The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind was a fellow named Calvin Tower.
"Hurry up," Jake said. "I want to watch."
Eddie didn't have to be asked twice. He wanted to watch, too.
FOUR
Jake stopped in the doorway to the bookstore. His smile didn't fade, exactly, but it faltered.
"What is it?" Eddie asked. "What's wrong?"
"Dunno. Something's different, I think. It's just... so much has happened since I was here..."
He was looking at the chalkboard in the window, which Eddie thought was actually a very clever way of selling books. It looked like the sort of thing you saw in diners, or maybe the fish markets.
TODAY'S SPECIALS
From Mississippi! Pan-Fried William Faulkner
Hardcovers Market Price Vintage Library Paperbacks 75c each
From Maine! Chilled Stephen King
Hardcovers Market Price
Book Club Bargains
Paperbacks 75c each
From California! Hard-Boiled Raymond Chandler
Hardcovers Market Price
Paperbacks 7 for $5.00
Eddie looked beyond this and saw that other Jake - the one without the tan or the look of hard clarity in his eyes - standing at a small display table. Kiddie books. Probably both the Nineteen Fairy Tales and the Modern Nineteen.
Quit it , he told himself. That's obsessive-compulsive crap and you know it .
Maybe, but good old Jake Seventy-seven was about to make a purchase from that table which had gone on to change - and very likely to save - their lives. He'd worry about the number nineteen later. Or not at all, if he could manage it.
"Come on," he told Jake. "Let's go in."
The boy hung back.