27

EDDIE WENT BACK FOR Susannah's wheelchair. No one had to ask him to do this; he wanted some time alone, to get himself back under control. Now that the shooting was over, every muscle in his body seemed to have picked up its own little thrumming tremor. He did not want either of them to see him this way - not because they might misread it as fear, but because one or both might know it for what it really was: excitement overload. He had liked it. Even when you added in the bat which had almost scalped him, he had liked it.

That's bullshit, buddy. And you know it.

The trouble was, he didn't know it. He had come face to face with something Susannah had found out for herself after shooting the bear: he could talk about how he didn't want to be a gunslinger, how he didn't want to be tramping around this crazy world where the three of them seemed to be the only human life, that what he really wanted more than anything else was to be standing on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, popping his fingers, munching a chili-dog, and listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival blast out of his Walkman earphones as he watched the girls go by, those ultimately sexy New York girls with their pouty go-to-hell mouths and their long legs in short skirts. He could talk about those things until he was blue in the face, but his heart knew other things. It knew that he had enjoyed blowing the electronic menag-erie back to glory, at least while the game was on and Roland's gun was his own private hand-held thunderstorm. He had enjoyed kicking the robot rat, even though it had hurt his foot and even though he had been scared shitless. In some weird way, that part - the being scared part -  actually seemed to add to the enjoyment.

All that was bad enough, but his heart knew something even worse: that if a door leading back to New York appeared in front of him right now, he might not walk through it. Not, at least, until he had seen the Dark Tower for himself. He was beginning to believe that Roland's illness was a communicable disease.

As he wrestled Susannah's chair through the tangle of junk-alders, cursing the branches that whipped at his face and tried to poke his eyes out, Eddie found himself able to admit at least some of these things, and the admission cooled his blood a little. / want to see if it looks the way it did in my dream, he thought. To see something like that. . . that would be really fantastic.

And another voice spoke up inside. I'll bet his other friends - the ones with the names that sound like they came straight from the Round Table in King Arthur's court - I'll bet they felt the same way, Eddie. And they're all dead. Every one of them.

He recognized that voice, like it or not. It belonged to Henry, and that made it a hard voice not to hear.

28

ROLAND, WITH SUSANNAH BALANCED on his right hip, was standing in front of the metal box that looked like a subway entrance closed for the night. Eddie left the wheelchair at the edge of the clearing and walked over. As he did, the steady humming noise and the vibration under his feet became louder. The machinery making the noise, he realized, was either inside the box or under it. It seemed that he heard it not with his ears but somewhere deep inside his head, and in the hollows of his gut.

"So this is one of the twelve portals. Where does it go, Roland? Disney World?"

Roland shook his head. "I don't know where it goes. Maybe nowhere ... or everywhere. There's a lot about my world I don't know - surely you both have realized that. And there are things I used to know which have changed."

"Because the world has moved on?"

"Yes." Roland glanced at him. "Here, that is not a figure of speech. The world really is moving on, and it goes ever faster. At the same time, things are wearing out... falling apart..." He kicked die mechanical corpse of the walking box to illustrate his point.

Eddie thought of the rough diagram of the portals which Roland had drawn in the dirt. "Is this the edge of the world?" he asked, almost timidly. "I mean, it doesn't look much different than anyplace else." He laughed a little. "If there's a drop-off, I don't see it."

Roland shook his head. "It's not that kind of edge. It's the place where one of the Beams starts. Or so I was taught."

"Beams?" Susannah asked. "What Beams?"

"The Great Old Ones didn't make the world, but they did re-make it. Some tale-tellers say the Beams saved it; others say they are the seeds of the world's destruction. The Great Old Ones created the Beams. They are lines of some sort... lines which bind... and hold..."

"Are you talking about magnetism?" Susannah asked cautiously.

His whole face lit up, transforming its harsh planes and furrows into something new and amazing, and for a moment Eddie knew how Roland would look if he actually did reach his Tower.

"Yes! Not just magnetism, but that is a part of it ... and gravity... and the proper alignment of space, size, and dimension. The Beams are the forces which bind these things together."

"Welcome to physics in the nuthouse," Eddie said in a low voice.

Susannah ignored this. "And the Dark Tower ? Is it some kind of generator? A central power-source for these Beams?"

"I don't know."

"But you do know that this is point A," Eddie said. "If we walked long enough in a straight line, we'd come to another portal - call it point C - on the other edge of the world. But before we did, we'd come to point B. The center-point. The Dark Tower ."

The gunslinger nodded.

"How long a trip is it? Do you know?"

"No. But I know it's very far, and that the distance grows with every day that passes."

Eddie had bent to examine the walking box. Now he straightened up and stared at Roland. "That can't be." He sounded like a man trying to explain to a small child that there really isn't a boogeyman living in his closet, that there can't be because there isn't any such thing as the boogeyman, not really. "Worlds don't grow, Roland."

"Don't they? When I was a boy, Eddie, there were maps. I remem-ber one in particular. It was called The Greater Kingdoms of the Western Earth. It showed my land, which was called by the name Gilead . It showed the Downland Baronies, which were overrun by riot and civil war in the year after I won my guns, and the hills, and the desert, and the mountains, and the Western Sea . It was a long distance from Gilead to the Western Sea  - a thousand miles or more - but it had taken me over twenty years to cross that distance."

"That's impossible," Susannah said quickly, fearfully. "Even if you walked the whole distance it couldn't take twenty years."

"Well, you have to allow for stops to write postcards and drink beer," Eddie said, but they both ignored him.

"I didn't walk but rode most of the distance on horseback," Roland said. "I was - slowed up, shall we say? - every now and then, but for most of that time I was moving. Moving away from John Farson, who led the revolt which toppled the world I grew up in and who wanted my head on a pole in his courtyard - he had good reason to want that, I suppose, since I and my compatriots were responsible for the deaths of a great many of his followers - and because I stole something he held very dear."

"What, Roland?" Eddie asked curiously.

Roland shook his head. "That's a story for another day ... or maybe never. For now, think not of that but of this: I've come many thousands of miles. Because the world is growing."

"A thing like that just can't happen," Eddie reiterated, but he was badly shaken, all the same. "There'd be earthquakes... floods... tidal waves ... I don't know what all ..."

"Look!" Roland said furiously. "Just look around you! What do you see? A world that is slowing down like a child's top even as it speeds up and moves on in some other way none of us understand. Look at your kills, Eddie! Look at your kills, for your father's sake!"

He took two strides toward the stream, picked up the steel snake, examined it briefly, and tossed it to Eddie, who caught it with his left hand. The snake broke in two pieces as he did so.

"You see? It's exhausted. All the creatures we found here were exhausted. If we hadn't come, they would have died before long, anyway. Just as the hear would have died."

"The bear had some sort of disease," Susannah said.

The gunslinger nodded. "Parasites which attacked the natural parts of its body. But why did they never attack it before?"

Susannah did not reply.

Eddie was examining the snake. Unlike the bear, it appeared to be a totally artificial construction, a thing of metal, circuits, and yards (or maybe miles) of gossamer-thin wire. Yet he could see flecks of rust, not just on the surface of the half-snake he still held, but in its guts as well. And there was a patch of wetness where either oil had leaked out or water had seeped in. This moisture had rotted away some of the wires, and a greenish stuff that looked like moss had grown over several of the thumbnail-sized circuit boards.

Eddie turned the snake over. A steel plate proclaimed it to be the work of North Central Positronics, Ltd. There was a serial number, but no name. Probably too unimportant to name, he thought. Just a sophisti-cated mechanical Roto-Rooter designed to give old Br'er Bear an enema every once In a while, keep him regular, or something equally disgusting.

He dropped the snake and wiped his hands on his pants.

Roland had picked up the tractor-gadget. He yanked at one of the treads. It came off easily, showering a cloud of rust down between his boots. He tossed it aside.

"Everything in the world is either coming to rest or falling to pieces," he said flatly. "At the same time, the forces which interlock and give the world its coherence - in time and size as well as in space - are weakening. We knew that even as children, but we had no idea what the time of the end would be like. How could we? Yet now I am living in those times, and I don't believe they affect my world alone. They affect yours, Eddie and Susannah; they may affect a billion others. The Beams are breaking down. I don't know if that's a cause or only another symptom, but I know it's true. Come! Draw close! Listen!"

As Eddie approached the metal box with its alternating diagonal slashes of yellow and black, a strong and unpleasant memory seized him - for the first time in years he found himself thinking of a crumbling Victorian wreck in Dutch Hill, about a mile away from the neighborhood he and Henry had grown up. This wreck, which was known as The Mansion to the neighborhood kids, occupied a plot of weedy, untended lawn on Rhinehold Street . Eddie guessed that practically all the kids in the borough had heard spooky stories about The Mansion. The house stood slumped beneath its steep roofs, seeming to glare at passersby from the deep shadows thrown by its eaves. The windows were gone, of course - kids can throw rocks through windows without getting too close to a place - hut it had not been spray-painted, and it had not become a make-out spot or a shooting gallery. Oddest of all was the simple fact of its continued existence: no one had set it on fire to collect the insurance or just to see it bum. The kids said it was haunted, of course, and as Eddie stood on the sidewalk with Henry one day, looking at it (they had made the pilgrimage specifically to see this object of fabulous rumor, although Henry had told their mother they were only going for Hoodsie Rockets at Dahlberg's with some of his friends), it had seemed that it really might be haunted. Hadn't he felt some strong and unfriendly force seeping from that old Victorian's shadowy windows, windows that seemed to look at him with the fixed stare of a dangerous lunatic? Hadn't he felt some subtle wind stirring the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck? Hadn't he had the clear intuition that if he stepped inside that place, the door would slam and lock behind him and the walls would begin to close in, grinding the bones of dead mice to powder, wanting to crush his bones the same way?

Haunting. Haunted.

He felt that same old sense of mystery and danger now, as he approached the metal box. Gooseflesh began to ripple up his legs and down his arms; the hair on the back of his neck bushed out and became rough, overlapping hackles. He felt that same subtle wind blowing past him, although the leaves on the trees which ringed the clearing were perfectly still.

Yet he walked toward the door anyway (for that was what it was, of course, another door, although this one was locked and always would be against the likes of him), not stopping until his ear was pressed against it.

It was as if he had dropped a tab of really strong acid half an hour ago and it was just beginning to come on heavy. Strange colors flowed across the darkness behind his eyeballs. He seemed to hear voices mur-muring up to him from long hallways like stone throats, halls which were lit with guttering electric torches. Once these flambeaux of the modern age had thrown a bright glare across everything, but now they were only sullen cores of blue light. He sensed emptiness... desertion... desola-tion... death.

The machinery rumbled on and on, but wasn't there a rough under-tone to the sound? A land of desperate thudding beneath the hum, like the arrhythmia of a diseased heart? A feeling that the machinery produc-ing this sound, although far more sophisticated even than that within the bear had been, was somehow falling out of tune with itself?

"All is silent in the halls of the dead," Eddie heard himself whisper in a falling, fainting voice. "All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. Behold the stairways which stand in darkness; behold the rooms of ruin.

These are the halls of the dead where the spiders spin and the great circuits tall quiet, one by one."

Roland pulled him roughly back, and Eddie looked at him with dazed eyes.

"That's enough," Roland said.

"Whatever they put in there isn't doing so well, is it?" Eddie heard himself ask. His trembling voice seemed to come from far away. He could still feel the power coming out of that box. It called to him.

"No. Nothing in my world is doing so well these days."

"If you boys are planning to camp here for the night, you'll have to do without the pleasure of my company," Susannah said. Her face was a white blur in the ashy aftermath of twilight. "I'm going over yonder. I don't like the way that thing makes me feel."

"We'll all camp over yonder," Roland said. "Let's go."

"What a good idea," Eddie said. As they moved away from the box, the sound of the machinery began to dim. Eddie felt its hold on him weakening, although it still called to him, invited him to explore the half-lit hallways, the standing stairways, the rooms of ruin where the spiders spun and the control panels were going dark, one by one.