Chapter II: The Dogan, Part I
ONE
When Roland and Eddie entered Our Lady of Serenity the following morning, daylight was only a distant
rumor on the northeast horizon. Eddie lit their way down the center aisle with a 'sener, his lips pressed tightly
together. The thing they had come for was humming. It was a sleepy hum, but he hated the sound of it just
the same. The church itself felt freaky. Empty, it seemed too big, somehow. Eddie kept expecting to see
ghostly figures (or perhaps a complement of the vagrant dead) sitting in the pews and looking at them with
otherworldly disapproval.
But the hum was worse.
When they reached the front, Roland opened his purse and took out the bowling bag which Jake had kept in
his knapsack until yesterday. The gunslinger held it up for a moment and they could both read what was
printed on the side: NOTHING BUT STRIKES AT MID-WORLD LANES.
"Not a word from now until I tell you it's all right," Roland said. "Do you understand?"
"Yes."
Roland pressed his thumb into the groove between two of the floorboards and the hidey-hole in the preacher's
cove sprang open. He lifted the top aside. Eddie had once seen a movie on TV about guys disposing of live
explosives during the London Blitz—UXB, it had been called—and Roland's movements now recalled that
film strongly to his mind. And why not? If they were right about what was in this hiding place—and Eddie
knew they were—then it was an unexploded bomb.
Roland folded back the white linen surplice, exposing the box. The hum rose. Eddie's breath stopped in his
throat. He felt the skin all over his body grow cold. Somewhere close, a monster of nearly unimaginable
malevolence had half-opened one sleeping eye.
The hum dropped back to its former sleepy pitch and Eddie breathed again.
Roland handed him the bowling bag, motioning for Eddie to hold it open. With misgivings (part of him
wanted to whisper in Roland's ear that they should forget the whole thing), Eddie did as he was bidden.
Roland lifted the box out, and once again the hum rose. In the rich, if limited, glow of the 'sener, Eddie could
see sweat on the gunslinger's brow. He could feel it on his own. If Black Thirteen awoke and pitched them
out into some black limbo…
I won't go. I'll fight to stay with Susannah.
Of course he would. But he was still relieved when Roland slipped the elaborately carved ghostwood box
into the queer metallic bag they'd found in the vacant lot. The hum didn't disappear entirely, but subsided to a
barely audible drone. And when Roland gently pulled the drawstring running around the top of the bag,
closing its mouth, the drone became a distant whisper. It was like listening to a seashell.
Eddie sketched the sign of the cross in front of himself. Smiling faintly, Roland did the same.
Outside the church, the northeast horizon had brightened appreciably — there would be real daylight after
all, it seemed.
"Roland."
The gunslinger turned toward him, eyebrows raised. His left fist was closed around the bag's throat; he was
apparently not willing to trust the weight of the box to the bag's drawstring, stout as it looked.
"If we were todash when we found that bag, how could we have picked it up?"
Roland considered this. Then he said, "Perhaps the bag is todash, too."
"Still?"
Roland nodded. "Yes, I think so. Still."
"Oh." Eddie thought about it. "That's spooky."
"Changing your mind about revisiting New York, Eddie?" Eddie shook his head. He was scared, though.
Probably more scared than he'd been at any time since standing up in the aisle of the Barony Coach to riddle
Blaine.
TWO
By the time they were halfway along the path leading to the Doorway Cave (It's upsy, Henchick had said, and
so it had been, and so it was), it was easily ten o' the clock and remarkably warm. Eddie stopped, wiped the
back of his neck with his bandanna, and looked out over the twisting arroyos to the north. Here and there he
could see black, gaping holes and asked Roland if they were the garnet mines. The gunslinger told him they
were. "
"And which one have you got in mind for the kiddies? Can we see it from here?"
"As a matter of fact, yes." Roland drew the single gun he was wearing and pointed it. "Look over the sight."
Eddie did and saw a deep draw which made the shape of a jagged double S. It was filled to the top with
velvety shadows; he guessed there might be only half an hour or so at midday when the sun reached the
bottom. Farther to the north, it appeared to dead-end against a massive rock-face. He supposed the mine
entrance was there, but it was too dark to make out. To the southeast this arroyo opened on a dirt track that
wound its way back to East Road. Beyond East Road were fields sloping down to fading but still green plots
of rice. Beyond the rice was the river.
"Makes me think of the story you told us," Eddie said. "Eye-bolt Canyon."
"Of course it does."
"No thinny to do the dirty work, though."
"No," Roland agreed. "No thinny."
"Tell me the truth: Are you really going to stick this town's kids in a mine at the end of a dead-end arroyo?"
"No."
"The folken think you… that we mean to do that. Even the dish-throwing ladies think that."
"I know they do," Roland said. "I want them to."
"Why?"
"Because I don't believe there's anything supernatural about the way the Wolves find the children. After
hearing Gran-pere Jaffords's story, I don't think there's anything supernatural about the Wolves, for that
matter. No, there's a rat in this particular corn-crib. Someone who goes squealing to the powers that be in
Thunderclap."
"Someone different each time, you mean. Each twenty-three or twenty-four years."
"Yes."
"Who'd do that?" Eddie asked. "Who could do that?"
"I'm not sure, but I have an idea."
"Took? Kind of a handed-down thing, from father to son?"
"If you're rested, Eddie, I think we'd better press on."
"Overholser? Maybe that guy Telford, the one who looks like a TV cowboy?"
Roland walked past him without speaking, his new shor'boots gritting on the scattered pebbles and rock-
splinters. From his good left hand, the pink bag swung back and forth. The thing inside was still whispering
its unpleasant secrets.
"Chatty as ever, good for you," Eddie said, and followed him.
THREE
The first voice which arose from the depths of the cave belonged to the great sage and eminent junkie.
"Oh, wookit the wittle sissy!" Henry moaned. To Eddie, he sounded like Ebenezer Scrooge's dead partner in
A Christmas Carol, funny and scary at the same time. "Does the wittle sissy think he's going back to Noo-
Ork? You'll go a lot farther than that if you try it, bro. Better hunker where you are…just do your little
carvings… be a good little homo…" The dead brother laughed. The live one shivered.
"Eddie?" Roland asked.
"Listen to your brother, Eddie!" his mother cried from the cave's dark and sloping throat. On the rock floor,
scatters of small bones gleamed. "He gave up his life for you, his whole life, the least you could do is listen to
him!"
"Eddie, are you all right?"
Now came the voice of Csaba Drabnik, known in Eddie's crowd as the Mad Fuckin Hungarian. Csaba was
telling Eddie to give him a cigarette or he'd pull Eddie's fuckin pants down. Eddie tore his attention away
from this frightening but fascinating gabble with an effort.
"Yeah," he said. "I guess so."
"The voices are coming from your own head. The cave finds them and amplifies them somehow. Sends them
on. It's a little upsetting, I know, but it's meaningless."
"Why'd you let em kill me, bro?" Henry sobbed. "I kept thinking you'd come, but you never did!"
"Meaningless," Eddie said. "Okay, got it. What do we do now?"
"According to both stories I've heard of this place—Callahan's and Henchick's—the door will open when I
open the box."
Eddie laughed nervously. "I don't even want you to take the box out of the bag, how's that for chickenshit?"
"If you've changed your mind…"
Eddie was shaking his head. "No. I want to go through with it." He flashed a sudden, bright grin. "You're not
worried about me scoring, are you? Finding the man and getting high?"
From deep in the cave, Henry exulted, "It's China White, bro! Them niggers sell the best!"
"Not at all," Roland said. "There are plenty of things I am worried about, but you returning to your old habits
isn't one of them."
"Good." Eddie stepped a little farther into the cave, looking at the free-standing door. Except for the
hieroglyphics on the front and the crystal knob with the rose etched on it, this one looked exactly like the
ones on the beach. "If you go around—?"
"If you go around, the door's gone," Roland said. "There is a hell of a drop-off, though… all the way to Na'ar,
for all I know. I'd mind that, if I were you."
"Good advice, and Fast Eddie says thankya." He tried the crystal doorknob and found it wouldn't budge in
either direction. He had expected that, too. He stepped back.
Roland said, "You need to think of New York. Of Second Avenue in particular, I think. And of the time. The
year of nineteen and seven-seven."
"How do you think of a year?"
When Roland spoke, his voice betrayed a touch of impatience. "Think of how it was on the day you and Jake
followed Jake's earlier self, I suppose."
Eddie started to say that was the wrong day, it was too early, then closed his mouth. If they were right about
the rules, he couldn't go back to that day, not todash, not in the flesh, either. If they were right, time over
there was somehow hooked to time over here, only running a little faster. If they were right about the rules…
if there were rules…
Well, why don't you just go and see?
"Eddie? Do you want me to try hypnotizing you?" Roland had drawn a shell from his gunbelt. "It can make
you see the past more clearly."
"No. I think I better do this straight and wide-awake."
Eddie opened and closed his hands several times, taking and releasing deep breaths as he did so. His heart
wasn't running particularly fast—was going slow, if anything—but each beat seemed to shiver through his
entire body. Christ, all this would have been so much easier if there were just some controls you could set,
like in Professor Peabody's Wayback Machine or that movie about the Morlocks!
"Hey, do I look all right?" he asked Roland. "I mean, if I land on Second Avenue at high noon, how much
attention am I going to attract?"
"If you appear in front of people," Roland said, "probably quite a lot. I'd advise you to ignore anyone who
wants to palaver with you on the subject and vacate the area immediately."
"That much I know. I meant how do I look clotheswise?"
Roland gave a small shrug. "I don't know, Eddie. It's your city, not mine."
Eddie could have demurred. Brooklyn was his city. Had been, anyway. As a rule he hadn't gone into
Manhattan from one month to the next, thought of it almost as another country. Still, he supposed he knew
what Roland meant. He inventoried himself and saw a plain flannel shirt with horn buttons above dark-blue
jeans with burnished nickel rivets instead of copper ones, and a button-up fly. (Eddie had seen zippers in Lud,
but none since.) He reckoned he would pass for normal on the street. New York normal, at least. Anyone who
gave him a second look would think cafe waiter/artist-wannabe playing hippie on his day off. He didn't think
most people would even bother with the first look, and that was absolutely to the good. But there was one
thing he could add—
"Have you got a piece of rawhide?" he asked Roland.
From deep in the cave, the voice of Mr. Tubther, his fifth-grade teacher, cried out with lugubrious intensity.
"You had potential! You were a wonderful student, and look at what you turned into! Why did you let your
brother spoil you?"
To which Henry replied, in sobbing outrage: "He let me die! He killed me!"
Roland swung his purse off his shoulder, put it on the floor at the mouth of the cave beside the pink bag,
opened it, rummaged through it. Eddie had no idea how many things were in there; he only knew he'd never
seen the bottom of it. At last the gunslinger found what Eddie had asked for and held it out.
While Eddie tied back his hair with the hank of rawhide (he thought it finished off the artistic-hippie look
quite nicely), Roland took out what he called his swag-bag, opened it, and began to empty out its contents.
There was the partially depleted sack of tobacco Callahan had given him, several kinds of coin and currency,
a sewing kit, the mended cup he had turned into a rough compass not far from Shardik's clearing, an old
scrap of map, and the newer one the Tavery twins had drawn. When the bag was empty, he took the big
revolver with the sandalwood grip from the holster on his left hip. He rolled the cylinder, checked the loads,
nodded, and snapped the cylinder back into place. Then he put the gun into the swag-bag, yanked the lacings
tight, and tied them in a clove hitch that would come loose at a single pull. He held the bag out to Eddie by
the worn strap.
At first Eddie didn't want to take it. "Nah, man, that's yours."
"These last weeks you've worn it as much as I have. Probably more."
