And really, what could be so special about the number nineteen? Mystery Number, indeed. After some
thought, Susannah had pointed out it was prime, at least, like the numbers that had opened the gate between
them and Blaine the Mono. Eddie had added that it was the only one that came between eighteen and twenty
every time you counted. Jake had laughed at that and told him to stop being a jerk. Eddie, who had been
sitting close to the campfire and carving a rabbit (when it was done, it would join the cat and dog already in
his pack), told Jake to quit making fun of his only real talent.
TWO
They might have been back on the Path of the Beam five or six weeks when they came to a pair of ancient
double ruts that had surely once been a road. It didn't follow the Path of the Beam exactly, but Roland swung
them onto it anyway. It bore closely enough to the Beam for their purposes, he said. Eddie thought being on a
road again might refocus things, help them to shake that maddening becalmed-in-the-Horse-Latitudes
feeling, but it didn't. The road carried them up and across a rising series of fields like steps. They finally
topped a long north-south ridge. On the far side, their road descended into a dark wood. Almost a fairy-tale
wood, Eddie thought as they passed into its shadows. Susannah shot a small deer on their second day in the
forest (or maybe it was the third day… or the fourth), and the meat was delicious after a steady diet of
vegetarian gunslinger burritos, but there were no ores or trolls in the deep glades, and no elves—Keebler or
otherwise. No more deer, either.
"I keep lookin for the candy house," Eddie said. They'd been winding their way through the great old trees
for several days by then. Or maybe it had been as long as a week. All he knew for sure was that they were
still reasonably close to the Path of the Beam. They could see it in the sky… and they could feel it.
"What candy house is this?" Roland asked. "Is it another tale? If so, I'd hear."
Of course he would. The man was a glutton for stories, especially those that led off with a "Once upon a time
when everyone lived in the forest." But the way he listened was a little odd. A little off. Eddie had mentioned
this to Susannah once, and she'd nailed it with a single stroke, as she often did. Susannah had a poet's almost
uncanny ability to put feelings into words, freezing them in place.
"That's 'cause he doesn't listen all big-eyed like a kid at bedtime," she said. "That's just how you want him to
listen, honey-bunch."
"And how does he listen?"
"Like an anthropologist," she had replied promptly. "Like an anthropologist tryin to figure out some strange
culture by their myths and legends."
She was right. And if Roland's way of listening made Eddie uncomfortable, it was probably because in his
heart, Eddie felt that if anyone should be listening like scientists, it should be him and Suze and Jake.
Because they came from a far more sophisticated where and when. Didn't they?
Whether they did or didn't, the four had discovered a great number of stories that were common to both
worlds. Roland knew a tale called "Diana's Dream" that was eerily close to "The Lady or the Tiger," which
all three exiled New Yorkers had read in school. The tale of Lord Perth was similar to the Bible story of
David and Goliath. Roland had heard many tales of the Man Jesus, who died on the cross to redeem the sins
of the world, and told Eddie, Susannah, and Jake that Jesus had His fair share of followers in Mid-World.
There were also songs common to both worlds. "Careless Love" was one. "Hey Jude" was another, although
in Roland's world, the first line of this song was "Hey Jude, I see you, lad."
Eddie passed at least an hour telling Roland the story of Hansel and Gretel, turning the wicked child-eating
witch into Rhea of the Coos almost without thinking of it. When he got to the part about her trying to fatten
the children up, he broke off and asked Roland: "Do you know this one? A version of this one?"
"No," Roland said, "but it's a fair tale. Tell it to the end, please."
Eddie did, finishing with the required They lived happily ever after, and the gunslinger nodded. "No one ever
does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves, don't we?"
"Yeah," Jake said.
Oy was trotting at the boy's heel, looking up at Jake with the usual expression of calm adoration in his gold-
ringed eyes. "Yeah," the bumbler said, copying the boy's rather glum inflection exactly.
Eddie threw an arm around Jake's shoulders. "Too bad you're over here instead of back in New York," he
said. "If you were back in the Apple, Jakey-boy, you'd probably have your own child psychiatrist by now.
You'd be working on these issues about your parents. Getting to the heart of your unresolved conflicts.
Maybe getting some good drugs, too. Ritalin, stuff like that."
"On the whole, I'd rather be here," Jake said, and looked down at Oy.
"Yeah," Eddie said. "I don't blame you."
"Such stories are called 'fairy tales,' " Roland mused.
"Yeah," Eddie replied.
"There were no fairies in this one, though."
"No," Eddie agreed. "That's more like a category name than anything else. In our world you got your mystery
and suspense stories… your science fiction stories… your Westerns… your fairy tales. Get it?"
"Yes," Roland said. "Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in
their mouths?"
"I guess that's close enough," Susannah said.
"Does no one eat stew?" Roland asked.
"Sometimes at supper, I guess," Eddie said, "but when it comes to entertainment, we do tend to stick with one
flavor at a time, and don't let any one thing touch another thing on your plate. Although it sounds kinda
boring when you put it that way."
"How many of these fairy tales would you say there are?"
With no hesitation—and certainly no collusion—Eddie, Susannah, and Jake all said the same word at exactly
the same time: "Nineteen!" And a moment later, Oy repeated it in his hoarse voice: "Nineteen!"
They looked at each other and laughed, because "nineteen" had become a kind of jokey catchword among
them, replacing "bumhug," which Jake and Eddie had pretty much worn out. Yet the laughter had a tinge of
uneasiness about it, because this business about nineteen had gotten a trifle weird. Eddie had found himself
carving it on the side of his most recent wooden animal, like a brand: Hey there, Pard, welcome to our
spread! We call it the Bar-Nineteen. Both Susannah and Jake had confessed to bringing wood for the evening
fire in armloads of nineteen pieces. Neither of them could say why; it just felt right to do it that way,
somehow.
Then there was the morning Roland had stopped them at the edge of the wood through which they were now
traveling. He had pointed at the sky, where one particularly ancient tree had reared its hoary branches. The
shape those branches made against the sky was the number nineteen. Clearly nineteen. They had all seen it,
but Roland had seen it first.
Yet Roland, who believed in omens and portents as routinely as Eddie had once believed in lightbulbs and
Double-A batteries, had a tendency to dismiss his ka-tet's odd and sudden infatuation with the number. They
had grown close, he said, as close as any ka-tet could, and so their thoughts, habits, and little obsessions had
a tendency to spread among them all, like a cold. He believed that Jake was facilitating this to a certain
degree.
"You've got the touch, Jake," he said. "I'm not sure that it's as strong in you as it was in my old friend Alain,
but by the gods I believe it may be."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Jake had replied, frowning in puzzlement. Eddie did—sort of—and
guessed that Jake would know, in time. If time ever began passing in a normal way again, that was.
And on the day Jake brought the muffin-balls, it did.
THREE
They had stopped for lunch (more uninteresting vegetarian burritos, the deer meat now gone and the Keebler
cookies little more than a sweet memory) when Eddie noticed that Jake was gone and asked the gunslinger if
he knew where the kid had gotten off to.
"Peeled off about half a wheel back," Roland said, and pointed along the road with the two remaining fingers
of his right hand. "He's all right. If he wasn't, we'd all feel it." Roland looked at his burrito, then took an
unenthusiastic bite.
Eddie opened his mouth to say something else, but Susannah got there first. "Here he is now. Hi there, sugar,
what you got?"
Jake's arms were full of round things the size of tennis balls. Only these balls would never bounce true; they
had little horns sticking up from them. When the kid got closer, Eddie could smell them, and the smell was
wonderful—like fresh-baked bread.
"I think these might be good to eat," Jake said. "They smell like the fresh sourdough bread my mother and
Mrs. Shaw—the housekeeper—got at Zabar's." He looked at Susannah and Eddie, smiling a little. "Do you
guys know Zabar's?"
"I sure do," Susannah said. "Best of everything, mmm-hmmm. And they do smell fine. You didn't eat any yet,
did you?"
"No way." He looked questioningly at Roland.
The gunslinger ended the suspense by taking one, plucking off the horns, and biting into what was left.
"Muffin-balls," he said. "I haven't seen any in gods know how long. They're wonderful." His blue eyes were
gleaming. "Don't want to eat the horns; they're not poison but they're sour. We can fry them, if there's a little
deerfat left. That way they taste almost like meat."
"Sounds like a good idea," Eddie said. "Knock yourself out. As for me, I think I'll skip the mushroom muff-
divers, or whatever they are."
"They're not mushrooms at all," Roland said. "More like a kind of ground berry."
Susannah took one, nibbled, then helped herself to a bigger bite. "You don't want to skip these, sweetheart,"
she said. "My Daddy's friend, Pop Mose, would have said 'These are prime.' " She took another of the
muffin-balls from Jake and ran a thumb over its silky surface.
"Maybe," he said, "but there was this book I read for a report back in high school—I think it was called We
Have Always Lived in the Castle—where this nutty chick poisoned her whole family with things like that."
He bent toward Jake, raising his eyebrows and stretching the corners of his mouth in what he hoped was a
creepy smile. "Poisoned her whole family and they died in AG-o-ny!"
Eddie fell off the log on which he had been sitting and began to roll around on the needles and fallen leaves,
making horrible faces and choking sounds. Oy ran around him, yipping Eddie's name in a series of high-
pitched barks.
"Quit it," Roland said. "Where did you find these, Jake?"
"Back there," he said. "In a clearing I spotted from the path. It's full of these things. Also, if you guys are
hungry for meat… I know I am… there's all kinds of sign. A lot of the scat's fresh." His eyes searched
Roland's face. "Very… fresh… scat." He spoke slowly, as if to someone who wasn't fluent in the language.
A little smile played at the corners of Roland's mouth. "Speak quiet but speak plain," he said. "What worries
you, Jake?"
When Jake replied, his lips barely made the shapes of the words. "Men watching me while I picked the
muffin-balls." He paused, then added: "They're watching us now."
Susannah took one of the muffin-balls, admired it, then dipped her face as if to smell it like a flower. "Back
the way we came? To the right of the road?"
"Yes," Jake said.
Eddie raised a curled fist to his mouth as if to stifle a cough, and said: "How many?"
"I think four."
"Five," Roland said. "Possibly as many as six. One's a woman. Another a boy not much older than Jake."
Jake looked at him, startled. Eddie said, "How long have they been there?"
"Since yesterday," Roland said. "Cut in behind us from almost dead east."
"And you didn't tell us?" Susannah asked. She spoke rather sternly, not bothering to cover her mouth and
obscure the shapes of the words.
Roland looked at her with the barest twinkle in his eye. "I was curious as to which of you would smell them
out first. Actually, I had my money on you, Susannah."
She gave him a cool look and said nothing. Eddie thought there was more than a little Detta Walker in that
look, and was glad not to be on the receiving end.
"What do we do about them?" Jake asked.
"For now, nothing," the gunslinger said.
Jake clearly didn't like this. "What if they're like Tick-Tock's katet? Gasher and Hoots and those guys?"
"They're not."
"How do you know?'
"Because they would have set on us already and they'd be fly-food."
There seemed no good reply to that, and they took to the road again. It wound through deep shadows, finding
its way among trees that were centuries old. Before they had been walking twenty minutes, Eddie heard the
sound of their pursuers (or shadowers): snapping twigs, rustling underbrush, once even a low voice. Slewfeet,
in Roland's terminology. Eddie was disgusted with himself for remaining unaware of them for so long. He
