This woman was dead.
TWELVE
The hum rose and rose as the three of them stumbled across the trash- and brick-littered wilderness of the
vacant lot. As before, Jake saw faces in every angle and shadow. He saw Gasher and Hoots; Tick-Tock and
Flagg; he saw Eldred Jonas's gunbunnies, Depape and Reynolds; he saw his mother and father and Greta
Shaw, their housekeeper, who looked a little like Edith Bunker on TV and who always remembered to cut the
crusts off his sandwiches. Greta Shaw who sometimes called him 'Bama, although that was a secret, just
between them.
Eddie saw people from the old neighborhood: Jimmie Polio, the kid with the clubfoot, and Tommy
Fredericks, who always got so excited watching the street stickball games that he made faces and the kids
called him Halloween Tommy. There was Skipper Brannigan, who would have picked a fight with Al Capone
himself, had Capone shown sufficient bad judgment to come to their neighborhood, and Csaba Drabnik, the
Mad Fuckin Hungarian. He saw his mother's face in a pile of broken bricks, her glimmering eyes recreated
from the broken pieces of a soft-drink bottle. He saw her friend, Dora Bertollo (all the kids on the block
called her Tits Bertollo because she had really big ones, big as fuckin watermelons). And of course he saw
Henry. Henry standing far back in the shadows, watching him. Only Henry was smiling instead of scowling,
and he looked straight. Holding out one hand and giving Eddie what looked like a thumbs-up. Go on, the
rising hum seemed to whisper, and now it whispered in Henry Dean's voice. Go on, Eddie, show em what
you're made of. Didn't I tell those other guys? When we were out behind Dahlie's smokin Jimmie Polio's
cigarettes, didn't I tell em ? "My little bro could talk the devil into settin himself on fire,"I said. Didn't I?Yes.
Yes he had. And that's the way I always felt, the hum whispered. I always loved you. Sometimes I put you
down, but I always loved you. You were my little man.
Eddie began to cry. And these were good tears.
Roland saw all the phantoms of his life in this shadowed, brick-strewn ruin, from his mother and his cradle-
amah right up to their visitors from Calla Bryn Sturgis. And as they walked, that sense of Tightness grew. A
feeling that all his hard decisions, all the pain and loss and spilled blood, had not been for nothing, after all.
There was a reason. There was a purpose. There was life and love. He heard it all in the song of the rose, and
he too began to cry. Mostly with relief. Getting here had been a hard journey. Many had died. Yet here they
lived; here they sang with the rose. His life had not all been a dry dream after all.
They joined hands and stumbled forward, helping each other to avoid the nail-studded boards and the holes
into which an ankle could plunge and twist and perhaps break. Roland didn't know if one could break a bone
while in the todash state, but he had no urge to find out.
"This is worth everything," he said hoarsely.
Eddie nodded. "I'll never stop now. Might not stop even if I die."
Jake gave him a thumb-and-forefinger circle at that, and laughed. The sound was sweet in Roland's ears. It
was darker in here than it had been on the street, but the orange streetlights on Second and Forty-sixth were
strong enough to provide at least some illumination. Jake pointed at a sign lying in a pile of boards. "See
that? It's the deli sign. I pulled it out of th weeds. That's why it is where it is." He looked around, dien pointed
in anodier direction. "And look!"
This sign was still standing. Roland and Eddie turned to read it. Although neither of them had seen it before,
they both felt a strong sense of deja vu, nonetheless.
MILLS CONSTRUCTION AND SOMBRA REAL ESTATE ASSOCIATES ARE CONTINUING TO
REMAKE THE FACE OF MANHATTAN!
COMING SOON TO THIS LOCATION:
TURTLE BAY LUXURY CONDOMINIUMS!
CALL 661-6712 FOR INFORMATION!
YOU WILL BE SO GLAD YOU DID!
As Jake had told them, the sign looked old, in need of either refreshment or outright replacement. Jake had
remembered the graffito which had been sprayed across the sign, and Eddie remembered it from Jake's story,
not because it meant anything to him but simply because it was odd. And there it was, just as reported: bango
skank. Some long-gone tagger's calling card.
"I think the telephone number on the sign's different," Jake said.
"Yeah?" Eddie asked. "What was the old one?"
"I don't remember."
"Then how can you be sure this one's different?"
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.
"Oh my Lord," Jake sighed from beside him, but he might have been a thousand miles away.
Eddie saw great things and near misses. Albert Einstein as a child, not quite struck by a runaway milk-wagon
as he crossed a street. A teenage boy named Albert Schweitzer getting out of a bathtub and not quite stepping
on the cake of soap lying beside the pulled plug. A Nazi Oberleutnant burning a piece of paper with the date
and place of the D-Day invasion written on it. He saw a man who intended to poison the entire water supply
of Denver die of a heart attack in a roadside rest stop on 1-80 in Iowa with a bag of McDonald's french fries
on his lap. He saw a terrorist wired up with explosives suddenly turn away from a crowded restaurant in a
city that might have been Jerusalem. The terrorist had been transfixed by nothing more than the sky, and the
thought that it arced above the just and unjust alike. He saw four men rescue a little boy from a monster
whose entire head seemed to consist of a single eye.
But more important than any of these was the vast, accretive weight of small things, from planes which
hadn't crashed to men and women who had come to the correct place at the perfect time and thus founded
generations. He saw kisses exchanged in doorways and wallets returned and men who had come to a splitting
of the way and chosen the right fork. He saw a thousand random meetings that weren't random, ten thousand
right decisions, a hundred thousand right answers, a million acts of unacknowledged kindness. He saw the
old people of River Crossing and Roland kneeling in the dust for Aunt Talitha's blessing; again heard her
giving it freely and gladly. Heard her telling him to lay the cross she had given him at the foot of the Dark
Tower and speak the name of Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth. He saw the Tower itself in the burning
folds of the rose and for a moment understood its purpose: how it distributed its lines of force to all the
worlds that were and held them steady in time's great helix. For every brick that landed on the ground instead
of some little kid's head, for every tornado that missed the trailer park, for every missile that didn't fly, for
every hand stayed from violence, there was the Tower.
And the quiet, singing voice of the rose. The song that promised all might be well, all might be well, that all
manner of things might be well.
But something's wrong with it, he thought.
There was a jagged dissonance buried in the hum, like bits of broken glass. There was a nasty flickering
purple glare in its hot heart, some cold light that did not belong diere.
"There are two hubs of existence," he heard Roland say. "Two!" Like Jake, he could have been a thousand
miles away. "The Tower… and the rose. Yet they are the same."
"The same," Jake agreed. His face was painted with brilliant light, dark red and bright yellow. Yet Eddie
thought he could see that other light, as well—a flickering purple reflection like a bruise. Now it danced on
Jake's forehead, now on his cheek, now it swam in the well of his eye; now gone, now reappearing at his
temple like the physical manifestation of a bad idea.
"What's wrong with it?" Eddie heard himself ask, but there was no answer. Not from Roland or Jake, not
from the rose.
Jake raised one finger and began to count. Counting petals, Eddie saw. But there was really no need to count.
They all knew how many petals there were.
"We must have this patch," Roland said. "Own it and then protect it. Until the Beams are reestablished and
the Tower is made safe again. Because while the Tower weakens, this is what holds everything together. And
this is weakening, too. It's sick. Do you feel it?"
Eddie opened his mouth to say of course he felt it, and that was when Susannah began to scream. A moment
later Oy joined his voice to hers, barking wildly.
Eddie, Jake, and Roland looked at each other like sleepers awakened from the deepest of dreams. Eddie made
it to his feet first. He turned and stumbled back toward the fence and Second Avenue, shouting her name.
Jake followed, pausing only long enough to snatch something out of the snarl of burdocks where the key had
been before.
Roland spared one final, agonized look at the wild rose growing so bravely here in this tumbled wasteland of
bricks and boards and weeds and litter. It had already begun to furl its petals again, hiding the light that
