She looked at him candidly. Roland did not sense even the shadow of a lie in her answer. "Like a rock, as I
usually do. One thing all this traveling is good for—you can throw your damn Nembutal away."
"What's this toadish thing, Roland?" Eddie asked.
"Todash," he said, and explained it to them as well as he could. What he remembered best from Vannay's
teachings was how the Manni spent long periods fasting in order to induce the right state of mind, and how
they traveled around, looking for exactly the right spot in which to induce the todash state. This was
something they determined with magnets and large plumb-bobs.
"Sounds to me like these guys would have been right at home down in Needle Park," Eddie said.
"Anywhere in Greenwich Village," Susannah added.
" 'Sounds Hawaiian, doesn't it?' "Jake said in a grave, deep voice, and they all laughed. Even Roland laughed
a little.
"Todash is another way of traveling," Eddie said when the laughter had stopped. "Like the doors. And the
glass balls. Is that right?"
Roland started to say yes, then hesitated. "I think they might all be variations of the same thing," he said.
"And according to Vannay, the glass balls—the pieces of the Wizard's Rainbow— make going todash easier.
Sometimes too easy."
Jake said, "We really flickered on and off like… like light-bulbs? What you call sparklights?"
"Yes—you appeared and disappeared. When you were gone, there was a dim glow where you'd been, almost
as if something were holding your place for you."
"Thank God if it was," Eddie said. "When it ended… when those chimes started playing again and we kicked
loose… I'll tell you the truth, I didn't think we were going to get back."
"Neither did I," Jake said quietly. The sky had clouded over again, and in the dull morning light, the boy
looked very pale. "I lost you."
"I was never so glad to see anyplace in my life as I was when I opened my eyes and saw this little piece of
road," Eddie said. "And you beside me, Jake. Even Rover looked good to me." He glanced at Oy, then over at
Susannah. "Nothing like this happened to you last night, hon?"
"We'd have seen her," Jake said.
"Not if she todashed off to someplace else," Eddie said.
Susannah shook her head, looking troubled. "I just slept the night away. As I told you. What about you,
Roland?"
"Nothing to report," Roland said. As always, he would keep his own counsel until his instinct told him it was
time to share. And besides, what he'd said wasn't exactly a lie. He looked keenly at Eddie and Jake. "There's
trouble, isn't there?"
Eddie and Jake looked at each other, then back at Roland. Eddie sighed."Yeah, probably."
"How bad? Do you know?"
"I don't think we do. Do we, Jake?"
Jake shook his head.
"But I've got some ideas," Eddie went on, "and if I'm right, we've got a problem. A big one." He swallowed.
Hard. Jake touched his hand, and the gunslinger was concerned to see how quickly and firmly Eddie took
hold of the boy's fingers.
Roland reached out and drew Susannah's hand into his own. He had a brief vision of that hand seizing a frog
and squeezing the guts out of it He put it out of his mind. The woman who had done that was not here now.
"Tell us," he said to Eddie and Jake. "Tell us everything. We would hear it all."
"Every word," Susannah agreed. "For your fathers' sakes."
TWO
They recounted what had happened to them in the New York of 1977. Roland and Susannah listened,
fascinated, as they told of following Jake to the bookstore, and of seeing Balazar and his gentlemen pull up in
front.
"Huh!" Susannah said. "The very same bad boys! It's almost like a Dickens novel."
"Who is Dickens, and what is a novel?" Roland asked.
"A novel's a long story set down in a book," she said. "Dickens wrote about a dozen. He was maybe the best
who ever lived. In his stories, folks in this big city called London kept meeting people they knew from other
places or long ago. I had a teacher in college who hated the way that always happened. He said Dickens's
stories were full of easy coincidences."
"A teacher who either didn't know about ka or didn't believe in it," Roland said.
Eddie was nodding. "Yeah, this is ka, all right. No doubt."
"I'm more interested in the woman who wrote Charlie the Choo-Choo than this storyteller Dickens," Roland
said. "Jake, I wonder if you'd—"
"I'm way ahead of you," Jake said, unbuckling the straps of his pack. Almost reverently, he slid out the
battered book telling the adventures of Charlie the locomotive and his friend, Engineer Bob. They all looked
at the cover. The name below the picture was still Beryl Evans.
"Man," Eddie said. "That is so weird. I mean, I don't want to get sidetracked, or anything…" He paused,
realizing he had just made a railroading pun, then went on. Roland wasn't very interested in puns and jokes,
anyway. "… but that is weird. The one Jake bought—Jake Seventy-seven—was by Claudia something
Bachman."
"Inez," Jake said. "Also, there was a y. A lowercase y. Any of you know what that means?"
None of them did, but Roland said there had been names like it in Mejis. "I believe it was some sort of added
honorific. And I'm not sure it is to the side. Jake, you said the sign in the window was different from before.
How?"
"I can't remember. But you know what? I think if you hypnotized me again—you know, with the bullet—I
could."
"And in time I may," Roland said, "but this morning time is short."
Back to that again, Eddie thought. Yesterday it hardly existed, and now it's short. But it's all about time,
somehow, isn't it"?Rolands old days, our old days, and these new days. These dangerous new days.
"Why?" Susannah asked.
"Our friends," Roland said, and nodded to the south. "I have a feeling they'll be making themselves known to
us soon."
"Are they our friends?" Jake asked.
"That really is to the side," Roland said, and again wondered if that were really true. "For now, let's turn the
mind of our khef to this Bookstore of the Mind, or whatever it's called. You saw the harriers from the
Leaning Tower greensticking the owner, didn't you? This man Tower, or Toren."
"Pressuring him, you mean?" Eddie asked. "Twisting his arm?"
"Yes."
"Sure they were," Jake said.
"Were," Oy put in. "Sure were."
"Bet you anything that Tower and Toren are really the same name," Susannah said. "That toren's Dutch for
'tower.' " She saw Roland getting ready to speak, and held up her hand. "It's the way folks often do things in
our bit of the universe, Roland— change the foreign name to one that's more… well… American."
"Yeah," Eddie said. "So Stempowicz becomes Stamper… Yakov becomes Jacob… or…"
"Or Beryl Evans becomes Claudia y Inez Bachman," Jake said. He laughed but didn't sound very amused.
Eddie picked a half-burned stick out of the fire and began to doodle with it in the dirt. One by one the Great
Letters formed: C… L… A… U. "Big Nose even said Tower was Dutch. 'A squarehead's always a
squarehead, right, boss?' " He looked at Jake for confirmation. Jake nodded, then took the stick and continued
on with it: D… I… A.
"Him being Dutch makes a lot of sense, you know," Susannah said. "At one time, the Dutch owned most of
Manhattan."
"You want another Dickens touch?" Jake asked. He wrote y in the dirt after CLAUDIA, then looked up at
Susannah. "How about the haunted house where I came through into this world?"
"The Mansion," Eddie said.
"The Mansion in Dutch Hill," Jake said.
"Dutch Hill. Yeah, that's right. Goddam."
"Let's go to the core," Roland said. "I think it's the agreement paper you saw. And you felt you had to see it,
didn't you?"
Eddie nodded.
"Did your need feel like a part of following the Beam?"
"Roland, I think it was the Beam."
"The way to the Tower, in other words."
"Yeah," Eddie said. He was thinking about the way clouds flowed along the Beam, the way shadows bent
along the Beam, the way every twig of every tree seemed to turn in its direction. All things serve the Beam,
Roland had told them, and Eddie's need to see the paper Balazar had put in front of Calvin Tower had felt like
a need, harsh and imperative.
"Tell me what it said."
Eddie bit his lip. He didn't feel as scared about this as he had about carving the key which had ultimately
allowed them to rescue Jake and pull him through to this side, but it was close. Because, like the key, this was
important. If he forgot something, worlds might crash.
"Man, I can't remember it all, not word for word—"
Roland made an impatient gesture. "If I need that, I'll hypnotize you and get it word for word."
"Do you think it matters?" Susannah asked.
"I think it all matters," Roland said.
"What if hypnosis doesn't work on me?" Eddie asked. "What if I'm not, like, a good subject?"
"Leave that to me," Roland said.
"Nineteen," Jake said abruptly. They all turned toward him. He was looking at the letters he and Eddie had
drawn in the dirt beside the dead campfire. "Claudia y Inez Bachman. Nineteen letters."
THREE
Roland considered for a moment, then let it pass. If the number nineteen was somehow part of this, its
meaning would declare itself in time. For now there were other matters.
"The paper," he said. "Let's stay with that for now. Tell me everything about it you can remember."
"Well, it was a legal agreement, with the seal at the bottom and everything." Eddie paused, struck by a fairly
basic question. Roland probably got this part of it—he'd been a kind of law enforcement officer, after all—
but it wouldn't hurt to be sure. "You know about lawyers, don't you?"
Roland spoke in his driest tone. "You forget that I came from Gilead, Eddie. The most inner of the Inner
Baronies. We had more merchants and farmers and manufactors than lawyers, I think, but the count would
have been close."
Susannah laughed. "You make me think of a scene from Shakespeare, Roland. Two characters—might have
been Falstaff and Prince Hal, I'm not sure—are talkin about what they're gonna do when they win the war
and take over. And one of em says, 'First we'll kill all the lawyers.' "
"It would be a fairish way to start," Roland said, and Eddie found his thoughtful tone rather chilling. Then the
gunslinger turned to him again. "Go on. If you can add anything, Jake, please do. And relax, both of you, for
your fathers' sakes. For now I only want a sketch."
Eddie supposed he'd known that, but hearing Roland say it made him feel better. "All right. It was a
Memorandum of Agreement. That was right at the top, in big letters. At the bottom it said Agreed to, and
there were two signatures. One was Calvin Tower. The other was Richard someone. Do you remember,
Jake?"
"Sayre," Jake said. "Richard Patrick Sayre." He paused briefly, lips moving, then nodded. "Nineteen letters."
"And what did it say, this agreement?" Roland asked.
"Not all that much, if you want to know the truth," Eddie said. "Or that's what it seemed like to me, anyway.
Basically it said that Tower owned a vacant lot on the corner of Forty-sixth Street and Second Avenue—"
"The vacant lot," Jake said. "The one with the rose in it."
"Yeah, that one. Anyway, Tower signed this agreement on July 15th, 1976. Sombra Corporation gave him a
hundred grand. What he gave them, so far as I could tell, was a promise not to sell the lot to anyone but
Sombra for the next year, to take care of it—pay the taxes and such—and then to give Sombra first right of
purchase, assuming he hasn't sold it to them by then, anyway. Which he hadn't when we were there, but the
agreement still had a month and a half to run."
"Mr. Tower said the hundred thousand was all spent," Jake put in.
"Was there anything in the agreement about this Sombra Corporation having a topping privilege?" Susannah
asked.
Eddie and Jake thought it over, exchanged a glance, then shook their heads.
"Sure?" Susannah asked.
"Not quite, but pretty sure," Eddie said. "You think it matters?"
"I don't know," Susannah said. "The kind of agreement you're talking about… well, without a topping
privilege, it just doesn't seem to make sense. What does it boil down to, when you stop to think about it? 'I,
Calvin Tower, agree to think about selling you my vacant lot. You pay me a hundred thousand dollars and I'll
think about it for a whole year. When I'm not drinking coffee and playing chess with my friends, that is. And
when the year's up, maybe I'll sell it to you and maybe I'll keep it and maybe I'll just auction it off to the
highest bidder. And if you don't like it, sweetcheeks, you just go spit.' "
"You're forgetting something," Roland said mildly.
"What?" Susannah asked.
"This Sombra is no ordinary law-abiding combination. Ask yourself if an ordinary law-abiding combination
