“How should I know?” Eddie croaked, and got slowly to his feet, wincing as he did so. He didn’t think he was hungover, but his legs were sore and he felt as if he had just taken the world’s heaviest Sunday afternoon nap.
Roland and Susannah lay on the ground under the trees. The gunslinger was stirring, but Susannah lay on her back, arms spread extravagantly wide, snoring in an unladylike way that made Eddie grin. Jake was nearby, with Oy sleeping on his side by one of the kid’s knees. As Eddie looked at them, Jake opened his eyes and sat up. His gaze was wide but blank; he was awake, but had been so heavily asleep he didn’t know it yet.
“Gruz,” Jake said, and yawned.
“Yep,” Eddie said, “that works for me.” He turned in a slow circle, and had gotten three quarters of the way back to where he’d started when he saw the Green Palace on the horizon. From here it looked very small, and its brilliance had been robbed by the sunless day. Eddie guessed it might be thirty miles away. Leading toward them from that direction were the tracks of Susannah’s wheelchair.
He could hear the thinny, but faintly. He thought he could see it, as well-a quicksilver shimmer like bogwater, stretching across the flat, open land… and finally drying up about five miles away. Five miles west of here? Given the location of the Green Palace and the fact that they had been travelling east on 1-70, that was the natural assumption, but who really knew, especially with no visible sun to use for orientation?
“Where’s the turnpike?” Jake asked. His voice sounded thick and gummy. Oy joined him, stretching first one rear leg, then the other. Eddie saw he had lost one of his booties at some point.
“Maybe it was cancelled due to lack of interest.”
“I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” Jake said. Eddie looked at him sharply, but didn’t believe the kid was consciously riffing on The Wizard of Oz. “Not the one where the Kansas City Royals play, not the one where the Monarchs play, either.”
“What gives you that idea?”
Jake hoisted a thumb toward the sky, and when Eddie looked up, he saw that he had been wrong: it wasn’t all still white overcast, boring as a basket of sheets. Directly above their heads, a band of clouds was moiling toward the horizon as steadily as a conveyor belt.
They were back on the Path of the Beam.
2
“Eddie? Where you at, sugar?”
Eddie looked down from the lane of clouds in the sky and saw Susannah sitting up, rubbing the back of her neck. She looked unsure of where she was. Perhaps even of who she was. The red cappies she was wearing looked oddly dull in this light, but they were still the brightest things in Eddie’s view… until he looked down at his own feet and saw the street-boppers with their Cuban heels. Yet these also looked dull, and Eddie no longer thought it was just the day’s cloudy light that made them seem so. He looked at Jake’s shoes, Oy’s remaining three slippers, Roland’s cowboy boots (the gunslinger was sitting up now, arms crossed around his knees, looking blankly off into the distance). All the same ruby red, but a lifeless red, somehow. As if some magic essential to them had been used up.
Suddenly, Eddie wanted them off his feet.
He sat down beside Susannah, gave her a kiss, and said: “Good morning, Sleeping Beauty. Or afternoon, if it’s that.” Then, quickly, almost hating to touch them (it was like touching dead skin, somehow), Eddie yanked off the street-boppers. As he did, he saw that they were scuffed at the toes and muddy at the heels, no longer new looking. He’d wondered how they’d gotten here; now, feeling the ache in the muscles of his legs and remembering the wheelchair tracks, he knew. They had walked, by God. Walked in their sleep.
“That,” Susannah said, “is the best idea you’ve had since… well, in a long time.” She stripped off the cappies. Close by, Eddie saw Jake taking off Oy’s booties. “Were we there?” Susannah asked him. “Eddie, were we really there when he…”
“When I killed my mother,” Roland said. “Yes, you were there. As I was. Gods help me, I was there. I did it.” He covered his face with his hands and began to voice a series of harsh sobs.
Susannah crawled across to him in that agile way that was almost a version of walking. She put an arm around him and used her other hand to take his hands away from his face. At first Roland didn’t want to let her do that, but she was persistent, and at last his hands-those killer’s hands-came down, revealing haunted eyes which swam with tears.
Susannah urged his face down against her shoulder. “Be easy, Roland,” she said. “Be easy and let it go. This part is over now. You past it.”
“A man doesn’t get past such a thing,” Roland said. “No, I don’t think so. Not ever.”
“You didn’t kill her,” Eddie said.
“That’s too easy.” The gunslinger’s face was still against Susannah’s shoulder, but his words were clear enough. “Some responsibilities can’t be shirked. Some sins can’t be shirked. Yes, Rhea was there-in a way, at least-but I can’t shift it all to the Coos, much as I might like to.”
“It wasn’t her, either,” Eddie said. “That’s not what I mean.”
Roland raised his head. “What in hell’s name are you talking about?”
“Ka,” Eddie said. “Ka like a wind.”
3
In their packs there was food none of them had put there-cookies with Keebler elves on the packages, Saran Wrapped sandwiches that looked like the kind you could get (if you were desperate, that was) from turnpike vending machines, and a brand of cola neither Eddie, Susannah, nor Jake knew. It tasted like Coke and came in a red and white can, but the brand was Nozz-A-La.
They ate a meal with their backs to the grove and their faces to the distant glam-gleam of the Green Palace, and called it lunch. If we start to lose the light in an hour or so, we can make it supper by voice vote, Eddie thought, but he didn’t believe they’d need to. His interior clock was running again now, and that mysterious but usually accurate device suggested that it was early afternoon.
At one point he stood up and raised his soda, smiling into an invisible camera. “When I’m travelling through the Land of Oz in my new Takuro Spirit, I drink Nozz-A-La!” he proclaimed. “It fills me up but never fills me out! It makes me happy to be a man! It makes me know God! It gives me the outlook of an angel and the balls of a tiger! When I drink Nozz-A-La, I say 'Gosh! Ain’t I glad to be alive!' I say-”
“Sit down, you bumhug,” Jake said, laughing.
“Ug,” Oy agreed. His snout was on Jake’s ankle, and he was watching the boy’s sandwich with great interest.
Eddie started to sit, and then that strange albino leaf caught his eye again. That’s no leaf, he thought, and walked over to it. No, not a leaf but a scrap of paper. He turned it over and saw columns of “blah blah” and “yak yak” and “all the stuff’s the same.” Usually newspapers weren’t blank on one side, but Eddie wasn’t surprised to find this one was-the Oz Daily Buzz had only been a prop, after all.
Nor was the blank side blank. Printed on it in neat, careful letters, was this message:
Below that, a little drawing:
Eddie brought the note back to where the others were eating. Each of them looked at it. Roland held it last, ran his thumb over it thoughtfully, feeling the texture of the paper, then gave it back to Eddie.
“R.F.,” Eddie said. “The man who was running Tick-Tock. This is from him, isn’t it?”
“Yes. He must have brought the Tick-Tock Man out of Lud.”
“Sure,” Jake said darkly. “That guy Flagg looked like someone who’d know a first-class bumhug when he found one. But how did they get here before us? What could be faster than Blaine the Mono, for cripe’s sake?”