The first voice which arose from the depths of the cave belonged to the great sage and eminent junkie.
"Oh, wookit the wittle sissy!" Henry moaned. To Eddie, he sounded like Ebenezer Scrooge's dead partner in A Christmas Carol , funny and scary at the same time. "Does the wittle sissy think he's going back to Noo-Ork? You'll go a lot farther than that if you try it, bro. Better hunker where you are...just do your little carvings... be a good little homo..." The dead brother laughed. The live one shivered.
"Eddie?" Roland asked.
"Listen to your brother, Eddie!" his mother cried from the cave's dark and sloping throat. On the rock floor, scatters of small bones gleamed. "He gave up his life for you, his whole life , the least you could do is listen to him!"
"Eddie, are you all right?"
Now came the voice of Csaba Drabnik, known in Eddie's crowd as the Mad Fuckin Hungarian. Csaba was telling Eddie to give him a cigarette or he'd pull Eddie's f**kin pants down. Eddie tore his attention away from this frightening but fascinating gabble with an effort.
"Yeah," he said. "I guess so."
"The voices are coming from your own head. The cave finds them and amplifies them somehow. Sends them on. It's a little upsetting, I know, but it's meaningless."
"Why'd you let em kill me, bro?" Henry sobbed. "I kept thinking you'd come, but you never did!"
"Meaningless," Eddie said. "Okay, got it. What do we do now?"
"According to both stories I've heard of this place - Callahan's and Henchick's - the door will open when I open the box."
Eddie laughed nervously. "I don't even want you to take the box out of the bag , how's that for chickenshit?"
"If you've changed your mind..."
Eddie was shaking his head. "No. I want to go through with it." He flashed a sudden, bright grin. "You're not worried about me scoring, are you? Finding the man and getting high?"
From deep in the cave, Henry exulted, "It's China White, bro! Them niggers sell the best!"
"Not at all," Roland said. "There are plenty of things I am worried about, but you returning to your old habits isn't one of them."
"Good." Eddie stepped a little farther into the cave, looking at the free-standing door. Except for the hieroglyphics on the front and the crystal knob with the rose etched on it, this one looked exactly like the ones on the beach. "If you go around - ?"
"If you go around, the door's gone," Roland said. "There is a hell of a drop-off, though... all the way to Na'ar, for all I know. I'd mind that, if I were you."
"Good advice, and Fast Eddie says thankya." He tried the crystal doorknob and found it wouldn't budge in either direction. He had expected that, too. He stepped back.
Roland said, "You need to think of New York. Of Second Avenue in particular, I think. And of the time. The year of nineteen and seven-seven."
"How do you think of a year ?"
When Roland spoke, his voice betrayed a touch of impatience. "Think of how it was on the day you and Jake followed Jake's earlier self, I suppose."
Eddie started to say that was the wrong day, it was too early, then closed his mouth. If they were right about the rules, he couldn't go back to that day, not todash, not in the flesh, either. If they were right, time over there was somehow hooked to time over here, only running a little faster. If they were right about the rules... if there were rules...
Well, why don't you just go and see?
"Eddie? Do you want me to try hypnotizing you?" Roland had drawn a shell from his gunbelt. "It can make you see the past more clearly."
"No. I think I better do this straight and wide-awake."
Eddie opened and closed his hands several times, taking and releasing deep breaths as he did so. His heart wasn't running particularly fast - was going slow, if anything - but each beat seemed to shiver through his entire body. Christ, all this would have been so much easier if there were just some controls you could set, like in Professor Peabody's Wayback Machine or that movie about the Morlocks!
"Hey, do I look all right?" he asked Roland. "I mean, if I land on Second Avenue at high noon, how much attention am I going to attract?"
"If you appear in front of people," Roland said, "probably quite a lot. I'd advise you to ignore anyone who wants to palaver with you on the subject and vacate the area immediately."
"That much I know. I meant how do I look clotheswise?"