1

FOUR DAYS AFTER EDDIE had yanked him through the doorway between worlds, minus his original pair of pants and his sneakers but still in possession of his pack and his life, Jake awoke with something warm and wet nuzzling at his face.

If he had come around to such a sensation on any of the three previous mornings, he undoubtedly would have wakened his companions with his screams, for he had been feverish and his sleep had been haunted by nightmares of the plaster-man. In these dreams his pants did not slide free, the doorkeeper kept its grip, and it tucked him into its unspeakable mouth, where its teeth came down like the bars guarding a castle keep. Jake awoke from these dreams shuddering and moaning helplessly.

The fever had been caused by the spider-bite on the back of his neck. When Roland examined it on the second day and found it worse instead of better, he had conferred briefly with Eddie and had then given Jake a pink pill. "You'll want to take four of these every day for at least a week," he said.

Jake had gazed at it doubtfully. "What is it?"

"Cheflet," Roland said, then looked disgustedly at Eddie. "You tell him. I still can't say it."

"Keflex. You can trust it, Jake; it came from a government-approved pharmacy in good old New York . Roland swallowed a bunch of it, and he's as healthy as a horse. Looks a little like one, too, as you can see."

Jake was astonished. "How did you get medicine in New York ?"

"That's a long story," the gunslinger said. "You'll hear all of it in time, but for now just take the pill."

Jake did. The response was both quick and satisfying. The angry red swelling around the bite began to fade in twenty-four hours, and now the fever was gone as well.

The warm thing nuzzled again and Jake sat up with a jerk, his eyes flying open.

The creature which had been licking his cheek took two hasty steps backward. It was a billy-bumbler, but Jake didn't know that; he had never seen one before now. It was skinnier than the ones Roland's party had seen earlier, and its black�C and gray-striped fur was matted and mangy. There was a clot of old dried blood on one flank. Its gold-ringed black eyes looked at Jake anxiously; its hindquarters switched hopefully back and forth. Jake relaxed. He supposed there were exceptions to the rule, but he had an idea that something wagging its tail - or trying to - was probably not too dangerous.

It was just past first light, probably around five-thirty in the morning. Jake could peg it no closer than that because his digital Seiko no longer worked ... or rather, was working in an extremely eccentric way. When he had first glanced at it after coming through, the Seiko claimed it was 98:71:65, a time which did not, so far as Jake knew, exist. A longer look showed him that the watch was now running backward. If it had been doing this at a steady rate, he supposed it might still have been of some use, but it wasn't. It would unwind its numbers at what seemed like the right speed for awhile (Jake verified this by saying the word "Mississippi" between each number), and then the readout would either stop entirely for ten or twenty seconds - making him think the watch had finally given up the ghost - or a bunch of numbers would blur by all at once.

He had mentioned this odd behavior to Roland and had shown him the watch, thinking it would amaze him, but Roland examined it closely for only a moment or two before nodding in a dismissive way and telling Jake it was an interesting clock, but as a rule no timepiece did very good work these days. So the Seiko was useless, but Jake still found himself loath to throw it away... because, he supposed, it was a piece of his old life, and there were only a few of those left.

Right now the Seiko claimed it was sixty-two minutes past forty on a Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday in both December and March.

The morning was extremely foggy; beyond a radius of fifty or sixty feet, the world simply disappeared. If this day was like the previous three, the sun would show up as a faint white circle in another two hours or so, and by nine-thirty the day would be clear and hot. Jake looked around and saw his travelling companions (he didn't quite dare call them friends, at least not yet) asleep beneath their hide blankets - Roland close by, Eddie and Susannah a larger hump on the far side of the dead campfire.

He once more turned his attention to the animal which had awak-ened him. It looked like a combination raccoon and woodchuck, with a dash of dachshund thrown in for good measure.

"How you doin, boy?" he asked softly.

"Oy!" the billy-bumbler replied at once, still looking at him anx-iously. Its voice was low and deep, almost a bark; the voice of an English footballer with a bad cold in his throat.

Jake recoiled, surprised. The billy-bumbler, startled by the quick movement, took several further steps backward, seemed about to flee, and then held its ground. Its hindquarters wagged back and forth more strenuously than ever, and its gold-black eyes continued to regard Jake nervously. The whiskers on its snout trembled.

"This one remembers men," a voice remarked at Jake's shoulder. He looked around and saw Roland squatting just behind him with his forearms resting on his thighs and his long hands dangling between his knees. He was looking at the animal with a great deal more interest than he had shown in Jake's watch.

"What is it?" Jake asked softly. He did not want to startle it away; he was enchanted. "Its eyes are beautiful!"

"Billy-bumbler," Roland said.

"Umber!" the creature ejaculated, and retreated another step.

"It talks!"

"Not really. Bumblers just repeat what they hear - or used to. I haven't heard one do it in years. This fellow looks almost starved. Proba-bly came to forage."

"He was licking my face. Can I feed it?"

"We'll never get rid of it if you do," Roland said, then smiled a little and snapped his fingers. "Hey! Billy!"

The creature mimicked the sound of the snapping fingers somehow; it sounded as if it were clucking its tongue against the roof of its mouth. "Ay!" it called in its hoarse voice. "Ay, Illy!" Now its ragged hindquarters were positively gagging back and forth.

"Go ahead and give it a bite. I knew an old groom once who said a good bumbler is good luck. This looks like a good one."

"Yes," Jake agreed. "It does."

"Once they were tame, and every barony had half a dozen roaming around the castle or manor-house. They weren't good for much except amusing the children and keeping the rat population down. They can be quite faithful - or were in the old days - although I never heard of one that would remain as loyal as a good dog. The wild ones are scavengers. Not dangerous, but a pain in the ass."

"Ass!" cried the bumbler. Its anxious eyes continued to flick back and forth between Jake and the gunslinger.

Jake reached into his pack, slowly, afraid to startle the creature, and drew out the remains of a gunslinger burrito. He tossed it toward the billy-bumbler. The bumbler flinched back and then turned with a small, childlike cry, exposing its furry corkscrew tail. Jake felt sure it would run, but it stopped, looking doubtfully back over its shoulder.

"Come on," Jake said. "Eat it, boy."

"Oy," the bumbler muttered, but it didn't move.

"Give it time," Roland said. "It'll come, I think."

The bumbler stretched forward, revealing a long and surprisingly graceful neck. Its slender black nose twitched as it sniffed the food. At last it trotted forward, and Jake noticed it was limping a little. The bum-bler sniffed the burrito, then used one paw to separate the chunk of deermeat from the leaf. It carried out this operation with a delicacy that was oddly solemn. Once the meat was clear of the leaf, the bumbler wolfed it in a single bite, then looked up at Jake. "Oy!" it said, and when Jake laughed, it shrank away again.

"That's a skinny one," Eddie said sleepily from behind them. At the sound of his voice, the bumbler immediately turned and was gone into the mist.

"You scared it away!" Jake accused.

"Jeez, I'm sorry," Eddie said. He ran a hand through his sleep-corkscrewed hair. "If I'd known it was one of your close personal friends, Jake, I would have dragged out the goddam coffee-cake."

Roland clapped Jake briefly on the shoulder. "It'll be back."

"Are you sure?"

"If something doesn't kill it, yes. We fed it, didn't we?"

Before Jake could reply, the sound of the drums began again. This was the third morning they had heard them, and twice the sound had come to them as afternoon slipped down toward evening: a faint, toneless thudding from the direction of the city. The sound was clearer this morn-ing, if no more comprehensible. Jake hated it. It was as if, somewhere out in that thick and featureless blanket of morning mist, the heart of some big animal was beating.

"You still don't have any idea what that is, Roland?" Susannah asked. She had slipped on her shift, tied back her hair, and was now folding the blankets beneath which she and Eddie had slept.

"No. But I'm sure vve'll find out."

"How reassuring," Eddie said sourly.

Roland got to his feet. "Come on. Let's not waste the day."

2

THE FOG BEGAN TO unravel after they had been on the road for an hour or so. They took turns pushing Susannah's chair, and it jolted unhappily along, for the road was now mined with large, rough cobblestones. By midmorning the day was fair, hot, and cloudless; the city skyline stood out clearly on the southeastern horizon. To Jake it didn't look much different from the skyline of New York, although he thought these build-ings might not be as high. If the place had fallen apart, as most things in Roland's world apparently had, you certainly couldn't tell it from here. Like Eddie, Jake had begun to entertain the unspoken hope that they might find help there ... or at least a good hot meal.

To their left, thirty or forty miles away, they could see the broad sweep of the Send River . Birds circled above it in large flocks. Every now and then one would fold its wings and drop like a stone, probably on a fishing expedition. The road and the river were moving slowly toward one another, although the junction point could not yet be seen.

They could see more buildings ahead. Most looked like farms, and all appeared deserted. Some of them had fallen down, but these wrecks seemed to be the work of time rather than violence, furthering Eddie's and Jake's hopes of what they might find in the city - hopes each had kept strictly within himself, lest the others scoff. Small herds of shaggy beasts grazed their way across the plains. They kept well away from the road except to cross, and this they did quickly, at a gallop, like packs of small children afraid of traffic. They looked like bison to Jake... except he saw several which had two heads. He mentioned this to the gunslinger and Roland nodded.

"Muties."

"Like under the mountains?" Jake heard the fear in his own voice and knew the gunslinger must, also, but he was helpless to keep it out. He remembered that endless nightmare journey on the handcart very well.

"I think that here the mutant strains are being bred out. The things we found under the mountains were still getting worse."

"What about up there?" Jake pointed toward the city. "Will there be mutants there, or - " He found it was as close as he could come to voicing his hope.

Roland shrugged. "I don't know, Jake. I'd tell you if I did."

They were passing an empty building - almost surely a farmhouse -  that had been partially burnt. But that amid have been lighting, Jake thought, and wondered which it was he was trying to do - explain to himself or fool himself.

Roland, perhaps reading his mind, put an arm around Jake's shoul-ders. "No use even trying to guess, Jake," he said. "Whatever happened here happened long ago." He pointed. "That over there was probably a corral. Now it's just a few sticks poking out of the grass."

"The world has moved on, right?"

Roland nodded.

"What about the people? Did they go to the city, do you think?"

"Some may have," Roland said. "Some are still around."

"What?" Susannah jerked around to look at him, startled.

Roland nodded. "We've been watched the last couple of days. There aren't a lot of folk denning in these old buildings, but there are some. There'll be more as we get closer to civilization." He paused. "Or what used to be civilization."

"How do you know they're there?" Jake asked.

"Smelled them. Seen a few gardens hidden behind banks of weeds grown purposely to hide the crops. And at least one working windmill way back in a grove of trees. Mostly, though, it's just a feeling... like shade on your face instead of sunshine. It'll come to you three in time, I imagine."

"Do you think they're dangerous?" Susannah asked. They were approaching a large, ramshackle building that might once have been a storage shed or an abandoned country market, and she eyed it uneasily, her hand dropping to the butt of the gun she wore on her chest.

"Will a strange dog bite?" the gunslinger countered.

"What's that mean?" Eddie asked. "I hate it when you start up with your Zen Buddhist shit, Roland."

"It means I don't know," Roland said. "Who is this man Zen Bud-dhist? Is he wise like me?"

Eddie looked at Roland for a long, long time before deciding the gunslinger was making one of his rare jokes. "Ah, get outta here," he said. He saw one corner of Roland's mouth twitch before he turned away. As Eddie started to push Susannah's chair again, something else caught his eye. "Hey, Jake!" he called. "I think you made a friend!"

Jake looked around, and a big grin overspread his face. Forty yards to the rear, the scrawny billy-bumbler was limping industriously after them, sniffing at the weeds which grew between the crumbling cobbles of the Great Road .