In another place and at another time, Jake might have been irritated by these questions. Now, soothed by the proximity of the rose, he smiled, instead. "I don't know. I guess I can't. But it sure seems different. Like the sign in the bookstore window."
Roland barely heard. He was walking forward over the piles of bricks and boards and smashed glass in his old cowboy boots, his eyes brilliant even in the shadows. He had seen the rose. There was something lying beside it, in the spot where Jake had found his version of the key, but Roland paid this no heed. He only saw the rose, growing from a clump of grass that had been stained purple with spilled paint. He dropped to his knees before it. A moment later Eddie joined him on his left, Jake on his right.
The rose was tightly furled against the night. Then, as they knelt there, the petals began to open, as if in greeting. The hum rose all around them, like a song of angels.
THIRTEEN
At first Susannah was all right. She held on despite the fact that she had lost over a foot and a half of herself - the self that had arrived here, anyway - and was now forced into her old familiar (and hatefully subservient) posture, half-kneeling and half-sitting on the filthy sidewalk. Her back was propped against the fence surrounding the vacant lot. A sardonic thought crossed her mind - All I need's a cardboard sign and a tin cup .
She held on even after seeing the dead woman cross Forty-sixth Street. The singing helped - what she understood to be the voice of the rose. Oy helped, too, crowding his warmth close to her. She stroked his silky fur, using the reality of him as a steadying-point. She told herself again and again that she was not insane. All right, she'd lost seven minutes. Maybe . Or maybe the guts inside that newfangled clock down there had just hiccupped. All right, she'd seen a dead woman crossing the street. Maybe . Or maybe she'd just seen some strung-out junkie, God knew there was no shortage of them in New York -
A junkie with a little green worm crawling out of her mouth ?
"I could have imagined that part," she said to the bumbler. "Right?"
Oy was dividing his nervous attention between Susannah and the rushing headlights, which might have looked to him like large, predatory animals with shining eyes. He whined nervously.
"Besides, the boys'll be back soon."
"Oys," the bumbler agreed, sounding hopeful.
Why didn't I just go in with em ? Eddie would have carried me on his back, God knows he's done it before, both with the harness and without it.
"I couldn't," she whispered. "I just couldn't."
Because some part of her was frightened of the rose. Of getting too close to it. Had that part been in control during the missing seven minutes? Susannah was afraid it had been. If so, it was gone now. Had taken back its legs and just walked off on them into New York, circa 1977. Not good. But it had taken her fear of the rose with it, and that was good. She didn't want to be afraid of something that felt so strong and so wonderful.
Another personality ? Are you thinking the lady who brought the legs was another personality ?
Another version of Detta Walker, in other words?
The idea made her feel like screaming. She thought she now understood how a woman would feel if, five years or so after an apparently successful cancer operation, the doctor told her a routine X-ray had picked up a shadow on her lung.
"Not again," she murmured in a low, frantic voice as a fresh group of pedestrians schooled past. They all moved away from the board fence a little, although it reduced the space between them considerably. "No, not again. It can't be. I'm whole. I'm... I'm fixed ."
How long had her friends been gone?
She looked downstreet at the flashing clock. It said 8:42, but she wasn't sure she could trust it. It felt longer than that. Much longer. Maybe she should call to them. Just give a halloo. How y'all doin in there?
No. No such thing. You're a gunslinger, girl. At least that's what he says. What he thinks. And you're not going to change what he thinks by hollering like a schoolgirl just seen a garter snake under a bush. You're just going to sit here and wait. You can do it. You've got Oy for company and you -
Then she saw the man standing on the other side of the street. Just standing there beside a newsstand. He was naked. A ragged Y-cut, sewn up with large black industrial stitches, began at his groin, rose, and branched at his sternum. His empty eyes gazed at her. Through her. Through the world.
Any possibility that this might only have been a hallucination ended when Oy began to bark. He was staring directly across at the naked dead man.
Susannah gave up her silence and began to scream for Eddie.
FOURTEEN
When the rose opened, disclosing the scarlet furnace within its petals and the yellow sun burning at the center, Eddie saw everything that mattered.