Days? Not on your bottom.
"Never mind Carter," Eddie said. "Look at the date."
Roland tried, but it kept swimming in and out. It would almost settle into Great Letters that he could read,
and then fall back into gibberish. "What is it, for your father's sake?"
"June second," Jake said. He looked at Eddie. "But if time's the same here and over on the other side,
shouldn't it be June first?"
"But it's not the same," Eddie said grimly. "It's not. Time goes by faster on this side. Game on. And the gameclock's
running fast."
Roland considered. "If we come here again, it's going to be later each time, isn't it?"
Eddie nodded.
Roland went on, talking to himself as much as to the others. "Every minute we spend on the other side—the
Calla side—a minute and a half goes by over here. Or maybe two."
"No, not two," Eddie said. "I'm sure it's not going double-time." But his uneasy glance back down at the date
on the newspaper suggested he wasn't sure at all.
"Even if you're right," Roland said, "all we can do now is go forward."
"Toward the fifteenth of July," Susannah said. "When Balazar and his gentlemen stop playing nice."
"Maybe we ought to just let these Calla-folk do their own thing," Eddie said. "I hate to say that, Roland, but
maybe we should."
"We can't do that, Eddie."
"Why not?"
"Because Callahan's got Black Thirteen," Susannah said. "Our help is his price for turning it over. And we
need it."
Roland shook his head. "He'll turn it over in any case—I thought I was clear about that. He's terrified of it."
"Yeah," Eddie said. "I got that feeling, too."
"We have to help them because it's the Way of Eld," Roland told Susannah. "And because the way of ka is
always the way of duty."
He thought he saw a glitter far down in her eyes, as though he'd said something funny. He supposed he had,
but Susannah wasn't the one he had amused. It had been either Detta or Mia who found those ideas funny.
The question was which one. Or had it been both?
"I hate how it feels here," Susannah said. "That dark feeling."
"It'll be better at the vacant lot," Jake said. He started walking, and the others followed. "The rose makes
everything better. You'll see."
NINE
When Jake crossed Fiftieth, he began to hurry. On the downtown side of Forty-ninth, he began to jog. At the
corner of Second and Forty-eighth, he began to run. He couldn't help it. He got a little walk help at Forty-
eighth, but the sign on the post began to flash red as soon as he reached the far curb.
"Jake, wait up!" Eddie called from behind him, but Jake didn't. Perhaps couldn't. Certainly Eddie felt the pull
of the thing; so did Roland and Susannah. There was a hum rising in the air, faint and sweet. It was
everything the ugly black feeling around them was not.
To Roland the hum brought back memories of Mejis and Susan Delgado. Of kisses shared in a mattress of
sweet grass.
Susannah remembered being with her father when she was little, crawling up into his lap and laying the
smooth skin of her cheek against the rough weave of his sweater. She remembered how she would close her
eyes and breathe deeply of the smell that was his smell and his alone: pipe tobacco and winter-green and the
Musterole he rubbed into his wrists, where the arthritis first began to bite him at the outrageous age of
twenty-five. What these smells meant to her was that everything was all right.
Eddie found himself remembering a trip to Atlantic City when he'd been very young, no more than five or
six. Their mother had taken them, and at one point in the day she and Henry had gone off to get ice cream
cones. Mrs. Dean had pointed at the boardwalk and had said, You put your fanny right there, Mister Man, and
keep it there until we get back. And he did. He could have sat there all day, looking down the slope of the
beach at the gray pull and flow of the ocean. The gulls rode just above the foam, calling to each other. Each
time the waves drew back, they left a slick expanse of wet brown sand so bright he could hardly look at it
without squinting. The sound of the waves was both large and lulling. I could stay here forever, he
remembered thinking. I could stay here forever because it's beautiful and peaceful and… and all right.
Everything here is all right.
That was what all five of them felt most strongly (for Oy felt it, too): the sense of something mat was
wonderfully and beautifully all right.
Roland and Eddie grasped Susannah by the elbows without so much as an exchanged glance. They lifted her
bare feet off the sidewalk and carried her. At Second and Forty-seventh the traffic was against them, but
Roland threw up a hand at the oncoming headlights and cried, "Hile! Stop in the name of Gilead!"
And they did. There was a scream of brakes, a crump of a front fender meeting a rear one, and the tinkle of
falling glass, but they stopped. Roland and Eddie crossed in a spotlight glare of headlights and a cacophony
of horns, Susannah between them with her restored (and already very dirty) feet three inches off the ground.
Their sense of happiness and tightness grew stronger as they approached the corner of Second Avenue and
Forty-sixth Street. Roland felt the hum of the rose racing deliriously in his blood.
Yes, Roland thought. By all the gods, yes. This is it. Perhaps not just a doorway to the Dark Tower, but the
Tower itself. Gods, the strength of it! the pull of it! Cuthbert, Alain, Jamie—if only you were here!
Jake stood on the corner of Second and Forty-sixth, looking at a board fence about five feet high. Tears were
streaming down his cheeks. From the darkness beyond the fence came a strong harmonic humming. The
sound of many voices, all singing together. Singing one vast open note. Here is yes, the voices said. Here is
you may. Here is the good turn, the fortunate meeting, the fever that broke just before dawn and left your
blood calm. Here is the wish that came true and the understanding eye. Here is the kindness you were given
and thus learned to pass on. Here is the sanity and clarity you thought were lost. Here, everything is all right.
Jake turned to them. "Do you feel it?" he asked. "Do you?"
Roland nodded. So did Eddie.
"Suze?" the boy asked.
"It's almost the loveliest thing in the world, isn't it?" she said. Almost, Roland thought. She said almost. Nor
did he miss the fact that her hand went to her belly and stroked as she said it.
TEN
The posters Jake remembered were there—Olivia Newton-John at Radio City Music Hall, G. Gordon Liddy
and the Grots at a place called the Mercury Lounge, a horror movie called War of the Zombies, no
trespassing. But—
"That's not the same," he said, pointing at a graffito in dusky pink. "It's the same color, and the printing looks
like the same person did it, but when I was here before, it was a poem about the Turtle. 'See the TURTLE of
enormous girth, on his shell he holds the earth.' And then something about following the Beam."
Eddie stepped closer and read this: "Oh SUSANNAH-MIO, divided girl of mine, Done parked her RIG in the
DIXIE PIG, in the year of '99." He looked at Susannah. "What in the hell does that mean? Any idea, Suze?"
She shook her head. Her eyes were very large. Frightened eyes, Roland thought. But which woman was
frightened? He couldn't tell. He only knew that Odetta Susannah Holmes had been divided from the
beginning, and that "mio" was very close to Mia. The hum coming from the darkness behind the fence made
it hard to think of these things. He wanted to go to the source of the hum right now. Needed to, as a man
dying of thirst needs to go to water.
"Come on," Jake said. "We can climb right over. It's easy."
Susannah looked down at her bare, dirty feet, and took a step backward. "Not me," she said. "I can't. Not
without shoes."
Which made perfect sense, but Roland thought there was more to it than that. Mia didn't want to go in there.
Mia understood something dreadful might happen if she did. To her, and to her baby. For a moment he was
on the verge of forcing the issue, of letting the rose take care of both the thing growing inside her and her
troublesome new personality, one so strong that Susannah had shown up here with Mia's legs.
No, Roland. That was Alain's voice. Alain, who had always been strongest in the touch. Wrong time, wrong
place.
"I'll stay with her," Jake said. He spoke with enormous regret but no hesitation, and Roland was swept by his
love for the boy he had once allowed to die. That vast voice from the darkness beyond the fence sang of that
love; he heard it. And of simple forgiveness rather than the difficult forced march of atonement? He thought
it was.
"No," she said. "You go on, honeybunch. I'll be fine." She smiled at them. "This is my city too, you know. I
can look out for myself. And besides—" She lowered her voice as if confiding a great secret. "I think we're
kind of invisible."
Eddie was once again looking at her in that searching way, as if to ask her how she could not go with them,
bare feet or no bare feet, but this time Roland wasn't worried. Mia's secret was safe, at least for the time
being; the call of the rose was too strong for Eddie to be able to think of much else. He was wild to get going.
"We should stay together," Eddie said reluctantly. "So we don't get lost going back. You said so yourself,
Roland."
"How far is it from here to the rose, Jake?" Roland asked. It was hard to talk with that hum singing in his ears
like a wind. Hard to think.
"It's pretty much in the middle of the lot. Maybe thirty yards, but probably less."
"The second we hear the chimes," Roland said, "we run for the fence and Susannah. All three of us. Agreed?"
"Agreed," Eddie said.
"All three of us and Oy,"Jake said.
"No, Oy stays with Susannah."
Jake frowned, clearly not liking this. Roland hadn't expected him to. "Jake, Oy also has bare feet… and didn't
you say there was broken glass in there?"
"Ye-eahh…" Drawn-out. Reluctant. Then Jake dropped to one knee and looked into Oy's gold-ringed eyes.
"Stay with Susannah, Oy."
"Oy! Ay!" Oy stay. It was good enough for Jake. He stood up, turned to Roland, and nodded.
"Suze?" Eddie asked. "Are you sure?"
"Yes." Emphatic. No hesitation. Roland was now almost sure it was Mia in control, pulling the levers and
turning the dials. Almost. Even now he wasn't positive. The hum of the rose made it impossible to be positive
of anything except that everything—everything—could be all right.
Eddie nodded, kissed the corner of her mouth, then stepped to the board fence with its odd poem: Oh
SUSANNAH-MIO, divided girl of mine. He laced his fingers together into a step. Jake was into it, up, and
gone like a breath of breeze.
"Ake!" Oy cried, and then was silent, sitting beside one of Susannah's bare feet.
"You next, Eddie," Roland said. He laced his remaining fingers together, meaning to give Eddie the same step
Eddie had given Jake, but Eddie simply grabbed the top of the fence and vaulted over. The junkie Roland had
first met in a jet plane coming into Kennedy Airport could never have done that.
Roland said, "Stay where you are. Both of you." He could have meant the woman and the billy-bumbler, but
it was only the woman he looked at.
"We'll be fine," she said, and bent to stroke Oy's silky fur. "Won't we, big guy?"
"Oy!"
"Go see your rose, Roland. While you still can."
Roland gave her a last considering look, then grasped the top of the fence. A moment later he was gone,
leaving Susannah and Oy alone on the most vital and vibrant streetcorner in the entire universe.
ELEVEN
Strange things happened to her as she waited.
Back the way they'd come, near Tower of Power Records, a bank clock alternately flashed the time and
temperature: 8:27, 64. 8:27, 64. 8:27, 64. Then, suddenly, it was flashing 8:34, 64. 8:34, 64. She never took
her eyes off it, she would swear to that. Had something gone wrong with the sign's machinery?
Must've, she thought. What else could it be? Nothing, she supposed, but why did everything suddenly feel
different? Even look different? Maybe it was my machinery that went wrong.
Oy whined and stretched his long neck toward her. As he did, she realized why things looked different.
Besides somehow slipping seven uncounted minutes by her, the world had regained its former, all-toofamiliar
perspective. A lower perspective. She was closer to Oy because she was closer to the ground. The
splendid lower legs and feet she'd been wearing when she had opened her eyes on New York were gone.
How had it happened1? And when? In the missing seven minutes'?
Oy whined again. This time it was almost a bark. He was looking past her, in the other direction. She turned
that way. Halfa dozen people were crossing Forty-sixth toward them. Five were normal. The sixth was a
white-faced woman in a moss-splotched dress. The sockets of her eyes were empty and black. Her mouth
hung open seemingly all the way down to her breastbone, and as Susannah watched, a green worm crawled
over the lower lip. Those crossing with her gave her her own space, just as the other pedestrians on Second
Avenue had given Roland and his friends theirs. Susannah guessed that in both cases, the more normal
promenaders sensed something out of the ordinary and steered clear. Only this woman wasn't todash.
