smashed a crystal serving dish filled with cranberry jelly. A third rolled clean off the far side of the table,
where Mia heard something drag it underneath. There was a brief, squealing squabble, followed by a howl of
pain as something sank its teeth into something else. Then silence. It was brief, though, and soon broken by
Mia's laughter. She wiped her greasy fingers on her bosom, doing it slowly. Enjoying the way the stains of
the mixed meats and juices spread on the expensive silk. Enjoying the ripening curves of her breasts and the
feel of her nipples under her fingertips, rough and hard and excited.
She made her way slowly down the table, talking to herself in many voices, creating a kind of lunatic
chitchat. How they hangin, honey ?
Oh they hanging just fine, thank you so much for asking, Mia. Do you really believe that Oswald was
working alone when he shot Kennedy?
Never in a million years, darling—that was a CIA job the whole way. Them, or those honky millionaires from
the Alabama steel crescent. Bombingham, Alabama, honey, ain't it the truth ? Have you heard the new Joan
Baez record ? My God, yes, doesn't she sing like an angel? I hear that she and Bob Dylan are going to get
themselves married…
And on and on, chitter and chatter. Roland heard Odetta's cultured voice and Detta's rough but colorful
profanity. He heard Susannah's voice, and many others, as well. How many women in her head? How many
personalities, formed and half-formed? He watched her reach over the empty plates that weren't there and
empty glasses (also not there), eating directly from the serving platters, chewing everything with the same
hungry relish, her face gradually picking up the shine of grease, the bodice of her gown (which he did not see
but sensed) darkening as she wiped her fingers there again and again, squeezing the cloth, matting it against
her breasts—these motions were too clear to mistake. And at each stop, before moving on, she would seize
the empty air in front of her and throw a plate he could not see either on the floor at her feet or across the
table at a wall that must exist in her dream.
"There!" she'd scream in the defiant voice of Detta Walker. "There, you nasty old Blue Lady, I done broke it
again! I broke yo' fuckin plate, and how do you like it? How do you like it now?"
Then, stepping to the next place, she might utter a pleasant but restrained little trill of laughter and ask so
and-so how their boy so-and-so was coming along down there at Morehouse, and wasn't it wonderful to have
such a fine school for people of color, just the most wonderful!… thing! And how is your Mamma, dear? Oh I
am so sorry to hear it, we'll all be praying for her recovery.
Reaching across another of those make-believe plates as she spoke. Grabbing up a great tureen filled with
glistening black roe and lemon rinds. Lowering her face into it like a hog dropping its face into the trough.
Gobbling. Raising her face again, smiling delicately and demurely in the glow of the electric torches, the fish
eggs standing out like black sweat on her brown skin, dotting her cheeks and her brow, nestling around her
nostrils like clots of old blood—Oh yes, I think we are making wonderful progress, folks like that Bull
Connor are living in the sunset years now, and the best revenge on them is that they know it—and then she
would throw the tureen backward over her head like a crazed volleyball player, some of the roe raining down
in her hair (Roland could almost see it), and when the tureen smashed against the stone, her polite isn't-this-awonderful-
party face would cramp into a ghoulish Detta Walker snarl and she might scream, "Dere, you
nasty old Blue Lady, how dat feel? You want to stick some of dat caviar up yo dry-ass cunt, you go on and do
it! You go right on! Dat be fine, sho!"
And then she would move on to the next place. And the next. And the next. Feeding herself in the great
banquet hall. Feeding herself and feeding her chap. Never turning to see Roland at all. Never realizing that
this place did not, strictly speaking, even exist.
FOUR
Eddie and Jake had been far from Roland's mind and concerns as the four of them (five, if Oy was counted)
bedded down after feasting on the fried muffin-balls. He had been focused on Susannah. The gunslinger was
quite sure she would go wandering again tonight, and again he would follow after her when she did. Not to
see what she was up to; he knew what it would be in advance.
No, his chief purpose had been protection. Early that afternoon, around the time Jake had returned with his
armload of food, Susannah had begun to show signs Roland knew: speech that was clipped and short,
movements that were a little too jerky to be graceful, an absent tendency to rub at her temple or above her
left eyebrow, as if there was a pain there. Did Eddie not see those signs? Roland wondered. Eddie had been a
dull observer indeed when Roland first met him, but he had changed greatly since then, and…
And he loved her. Loved her. How could he and not see what Roland saw? The signs weren't quite as obvious
as they had been on the beach at the edge of the Western Sea, when Detta was preparing to leap forward and
wrest control from Odetta, but they were there, all right, and not so different, at that.
On the other hand, Roland's mother had had a saying, Love stumbles. It could be that Eddie was simply too
close to her to see. Or doesn't want to, Roland thought. Doesn't want to face the idea that we might have to
go through that whole business again. The business of making her face herself and her divided nature.
Except this time it wasn't about her. Roland had suspected this for a long time—since before their palaver
with the people of River Crossing, in fact—and now he knew. No, it wasn't about her.
And so he'd lain there, listening to their breathing lengthen as they dropped off one by one: Oy, then Jake,
then Susannah. Eddie last.
Well… not quite last. Faintly, very faintly, Roland could hear a murmur of conversation from the folk on the
other side of yonder south hill, the ones who were trailing them and watching them. Nerving themselves to
step forward and make themselves known, very likely. Roland's ears were sharp, but not quite sharp enough
to pick out what they were saying. There were perhaps half a dozen murmured exchanges before someone
uttered a loud shushing hiss. Then there was silence, except for the low, intermittent snuffling of the wind in
the treetops. Roland lay still, looking up into the darkness where no stars shone, waiting for Susannah to rise.
Eventually she did.
But before that, Jake, Eddie, and Oy went todash.
FIVE
Roland and his mates had learned about todash (what there was to learn) from Vannay, the tutor of court in
the long-ago when they had been young. They had been a quintet to begin with: Roland, Alain, Cuthbert,
Jamie, and Wallace, Vannay's son. Wallace, fiercely intelligent but ever sickly, had died of the falling
sickness, sometimes called king's evil. Then they had been four, and under the umbrella of true ka-tet.
Vannay had known it as well, and that knowing was surely part of his sorrow. Cort taught them to navigate
by the sun and stars; Vannay showed them compass and quadrant and sextant and taught them the
mathematics necessary to use them. Cort taught them to fight. With history, logic problems, and tutorials on
what he called "the universal truths," Vannay taught them how they could sometimes avoid having to do so.
Cort taught them to kill if they had to. Vannay, with his limp and his sweet but distracted smile, taught them
that violence worsened problems far more often than it solved them. He called it the hollow chamber, where
all true sounds became distorted by echoes.
He taught them physics—what physics there was. He taught them chemistry—what chemistry was left. He
taught them to finish such sentences as "That tree is like a" and "When I'm running I feel as happy as a" and
"We couldn't help laughing because." Roland hated these exercises, but Vannay wouldn't let him slip away
from them. "Your imagination is a poor thing, Roland," the tutor told him once—Roland might have been
eleven at the time. "I will not let you feed it short rations and make it poorer still."
He had taught them the Seven Dials of Magic, refusing to say if he believed in any of them, and Roland
thought it was tangential to one of these lessons that Vannay had mentioned todash. Or perhaps you
capitalized it, perhaps it was Todash. Roland didn't know for sure. He knew that Vannay had spoken of the
Manni sect, people who were far travelers. And hadn't he also mentioned the Wizard's Rainbow?
Roland thought yes, but he had twice had the pink bend o' the rainbow in his own possession, once as a boy
and once as a man, and although he had traveled in it both times—with his friends on the second occasion—
it had never taken him todash.
Ah, but how would you know? he asked himself. How would you know, Roland, when you were inside it?
Because Cuthbert and Alain would have told him, that was why.
Are you sure?
Some feeling so strange as to be unidentifiable rose in the gunslinger's bosom—was it indignation? horror?
perhaps even a sense of betrayal?—as he realized that no, he wasn't sure. All he knew was that the ball had
taken him deep into itself, and he had been lucky to ever get out again.
There's no ball here, he thought, and again it was that other voice—the dry, implacable voice of his old
limping tutor, whose grief for his only son had never really ended—that answered him, and the words were
the same:
Are you sure? Gunslinger, are you sure?
SIX
It started with a low crackling sound. Roland's first thought was the campfire: one of them had gotten some
green fir boughs in there, the coals had finally reached them, and they were producing that sound as the
needles smoldered. But—
The sound grew louder, became a kind of electric buzzing. Roland sat up and looked across the dying fire.
His eyes widened and his heart began to speed up.
Susannah had turned from Eddie, had drawn away a little, too. Eddie had reached out and so had Jake. Their
hands touched. And, as Roland looked at them, they commenced fading in and out of existence in a series of
jerky pulses. Oy was doing the same thing. When they were gone, they were replaced by a dull gray glow
that approximated the shapes and positions of their bodies, as if something was holding their places in reality.
Each time they came back, there would be flat crackling buzz. Roland could see thieir closed eyelids ripple
as the balls rolled beneath.
Dreaming. But not just dreaming. This was todash, the passing between two worlds. Supposedly the Manni
could do it. And supposedly some pieces of the Wizard's Rainbow could make you do it, whether you wanted
to or not. One piece of it in particular.
They could get caught between and fall, Roland diought. Vannay said that, too. He said that going todash
was full of peril.
What else had he said? Roland had no time to recall, for at that moment Susannah sat up, slipped the soft
leather caps Roland had made her over the stumps of her legs, then hoisted herself into her wheelchair. A
moment later she was rolling toward the ancient trees on the nordi side of the road. It was directly away from
the place where the watchers were camped; there was that much to be grateful for.
Roland stayed where he was for a moment, torn. But in the end, his course was clear enough. He couldn't
wake them up while they were in the todash state; to do so would be a horrible risk. All he could do was
follow Susannah, as he had on other nights, and hope she didn't get herself into trouble.
You might also do some thinking about what happens next. That was Vannay's dry, lecturely voice. Now that
his old tutor was back, he apparently meant to stay for awhile. Reason was never your strong point, but you
must do it, nevertheless. You'll want to wait until your visitors make themselves known, of course—until you
can be sure of what they want—but eventually, Roland, you must act. Think first, however. Sooner would be
better than later. Yes, sooner was always better than later. There was another loud, buzzing crackle. Eddie
and Jake were back, Jake lying with his arm curled around Oy, and then they were gone again, nothing left
where they had been but a faint ectoplasmic shimmer. Well, never mind. His job was to follow Susannah. As
for Eddie and Jake, there would be water if God willed it.
Suppose you come back here and they're gone ? It happens, Vannay said so. What will you tell her if she
wakes and finds them both gone, her husband and her adopted son ?
It was nothing he could worry about now. Right now there was Susannah to worry about, Susannah to keep
safe.
SEVEN
On the north side of the road, old trees with enormous trunks stood at considerable distances from each other.
Their branches might entwine and create a solid canopy overhead, but at ground level there was plenty of
room for Susannah's wheelchair, and she moved along at a good pace, weaving between the vast ironwoods
and pines, rolling downhill over a fragrant duff of mulch and needles.
Not Susannah. Not Delta or Odetta, either. This one calls herself Mia.
Roland didn't care if she called herself Queen o' Green Days, as long as she came back safe, and the other
two were still there when she did.
He began to smell a brighter, fresher green: reeds and water-weeds. With it came the smell of mud, the thump
of frogs, the sarcastic hool! hool salute of an owl, the splash of water as something jumped. This was
followed by a thin shriek as something died, maybe the jumper, maybe the jumped-upon. Underbrush began
to spring up in the duff, first dotting it and then crowding it out. The tree-cover thinned. Mosquitoes and
chiggers whined. Binnie-bugs stitched the air. The bog-smells grew stronger.
The wheels of the chair had passed over the duff without leaving any trace. As duff gave way to straggling
