No. No such thing. You're a gunslinger, girl. At least that's what he says. What he thinks. And you're not going to change what he thinks by hollering like a schoolgirl just seen a garter snake under a bush. You're just going to sit here and wait. You can do it. You've got Oy for company and you  -

Then she saw the man standing on the other side of the street. Just standing there beside a newsstand. He was naked. A ragged Y-cut, sewn up with large black industrial stitches, began at his groin, rose, and branched at his sternum. His empty eyes gazed at her. Through her. Through the world.

Any possibility that this might only have been a hallucination ended when Oy began to bark. He was staring directly across at the na*ed dead man.

Susannah gave up her silence and began to scream for Eddie.

FOURTEEN

When the rose opened, disclosing the scarlet furnace within its petals and the yellow sun burning at the center, Eddie saw everything that mattered.

"Oh my Lord," Jake sighed from beside him, but he might have been a thousand miles away.

Eddie saw great things and near misses. Albert Einstein as a child, not quite struck by a runaway milk-wagon as he crossed a street. A teenage boy named Albert Schweitzer getting out of a bathtub and not quite stepping on the cake of soap lying beside the pulled plug. A Nazi Oberleutnant burning a piece of paper with the date and place of the D-Day invasion written on it. He saw a man who intended to poison the entire water supply of Denver die of a heart attack in a roadside rest stop on 1-80 in Iowa with a bag of McDonald's french fries on his lap. He saw a terrorist wired up with explosives suddenly turn away from a crowded restaurant in a city that might have been Jerusalem. The terrorist had been transfixed by nothing more than the sky, and the thought that it arced above the just and unjust alike. He saw four men rescue a little boy from a monster whose entire head seemed to consist of a single eye.

But more important than any of these was the vast, accretive weight of small things, from planes which hadn't crashed to men and women who had come to the correct place at the perfect time and thus founded generations. He saw kisses exchanged in doorways and wallets returned and men who had come to a splitting of the way and chosen the right fork. He saw a thousand random meetings that weren't random, ten thousand right decisions, a hundred thousand right answers, a million acts of unacknowledged kindness. He saw the old people of River Crossing and Roland kneeling in the dust for Aunt Talitha's blessing; again heard her giving it freely and gladly. Heard her telling him to lay the cross she had given him at the foot of the Dark Tower and speak the name of Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth. He saw the Tower itself in the burning folds of the rose and for a moment understood its purpose: how it distributed its lines of force to all the worlds that were and held them steady in time's great helix. For every brick that landed on the ground instead of some little kid's head, for every tornado that missed the trailer park, for every missile that didn't fly, for every hand stayed from violence, there was the Tower.

And the quiet, singing voice of the rose. The song that promised all might be well, all might be well, that all manner of things might be well.

But something's wrong with it , he thought.

There was a jagged dissonance buried in the hum, like bits of broken glass. There was a nasty flickering purple glare in its hot heart, some cold light that did not belong diere.

"There are two hubs of existence," he heard Roland say. "Two !" Like Jake, he could have been a thousand miles away. "The Tower... and the rose. Yet they are the same."

"The same," Jake agreed. His face was painted with brilliant light, dark red and bright yellow. Yet Eddie thought he could see that other light, as well - a flickering purple reflection like a bruise. Now it danced on Jake's forehead, now on his cheek, now it swam in the well of his eye; now gone, now reappearing at his temple like the physical manifestation of a bad idea.

"What's wrong with it?" Eddie heard himself ask, but there was no answer. Not from Roland or Jake, not from the rose.

Jake raised one finger and began to count. Counting petals, Eddie saw. But there was really no need to count. They all knew how many petals there were.

"We must have this patch," Roland said. "Own it and then protect it. Until the Beams are reestablished and the Tower is made safe again. Because while the Tower weakens, this is what holds everything together. And this is weakening, too. It's sick. Do you feel it?"

Eddie opened his mouth to say of course he felt it, and that was when Susannah began to scream. A moment later Oy joined his voice to hers, barking wildly.

Eddie, Jake, and Roland looked at each other like sleepers awakened from the deepest of dreams. Eddie made it to his feet first. He turned and stumbled back toward the fence and Second Avenue, shouting her name. Jake followed, pausing only long enough to snatch something out of the snarl of burdocks where the key had been before.

Roland spared one final, agonized look at the wild rose growing so bravely here in this tumbled wasteland of bricks and boards and weeds and litter. It had already begun to furl its petals again, hiding the light that blazed within.

I'll come back , he told it. I swear by the gods of all the worlds, by my mother and father and my friends that were, that I'll come back .

Yet he was afraid.

Roland turned and ran for the board fence, picking his way through the tumbled litter with unconscious agility in spite of the pain in his hip. As he ran, one thought returned to him and beat at his mind like a heart: Two. Two hubs of existence. The rose and the Tower. The Tower and the rose .

All the rest was held between them, spinning in fragile complexity.

FIFTEEN

Eddie threw himself over the fence, landed badly and asprawl, leaped to his feet, and stepped in front of Susannah without even thinking. Oy continued to bark.

"Suze! What? What is it?" He reached for Roland's gun and found nodьng. It seemed that guns did not go todash.

"There!" she cried, pointing across the street. "There! Do you see him? Please, Eddie, please tell me you see him !"

Eddie felt the temperature of his blood plummet. What he saw was a na*ed man who had been cut open and then sewed up again in what could only be an autopsy tattoo. Another man - a living one - bought a paper at the nearby newsstand, checked for traffic, then crossed Second Avenue. Although he was shaking open the paper to look at the headline as he did it, Eddie saw die way he swerved around the dead man. The way people swerved around us , he thought.

"There was another one, too," she whispered. "A woman. She was walking. And there was a worm. I saw a worm c-c-crawling - "

"Look to your right," Jake said tightly. He was down on one knee, stroking Oy back to quietness. In his other hand he held a crumpled pink something. His face was as pale as cottage cheese.

They looked. A child was wandering slowly toward them. It was only possible to tell it was a girl because of the red-and-blue dress she wore. When she got closer, Eddie saw that the blue was supposed to be the ocean. The red blobs resolved themselves into little candy-colored sailboats. Her head had been squashed in some cruel accident, squashed until it was wider than it was long. Her eyes were crushed grapes. Over one pale arm was a white plastic purse. A little girl's best I'm-going-to-the-car-accident-and-don't-know-it purse.

Susannah drew in breath to scream. The darkness she had only sensed earlier was now almost visible. Certainly it was palpable; it pressed against her like earth. Yet she would scream. She must scream. Scream or go mad.

"Not a sound," Roland of Gilead whispered in her ear. "Do not disturb her, poor lost thing. For your life, Susannah!" Susannah's scream expired in a long, horrified sigh.

"They're dead," Jake said in a thin, controlled voice. "Both of them."

"The vagrant dead," Roland replied. "I heard of them from Alain Johns's father. It must have been not long after we returned from Mejis, for after that there wasn't much more time before everything... what is it you say, Susannah? Before everything 'went to hell in a handbasket.' In any case, it was Burning Chris who warned us that if we ever went todash, we might see vags." He pointed across the street where the na*ed dead man still stood. "Such as him yonder have either died so suddenly they don't yet understand what's happened to them, or they simply refuse to accept it. Sooner or later they do go on. I don't think there are many of them."

"Thank God," Eddie said. "It's like something out of a George Romero zombie movie."

"Susannah, what happened to your legs?" Jake asked.

"I don't know," she said. "One minute I had em, and the next minute I was the same as before." She seemed to become aware of Roland's gaze and turned toward him. "You see somethin funny, sugar?"

"We are ka-tet, Susannah. Tell us what really happened."

"What the hell are you trying to imply?" Eddie asked him. He might have had said more, but before he could get started, Susannah grasped his arm.

"Caught me out, didn't you?" she asked Roland. "All right, I'll tell you. According to that fancy dot-clock down there, I lost seven minutes while I was waiting for you boys. Seven minutes and my fine new legs. I didn't want to say anything because..." She faltered, then went on. "Because I was afraid I might be losing my mind."

That's not what you're afraid of , Roland thought. Not exactly . ' Eddie gave her a brief hug and a kiss on the cheek. He glanced nervously across the street at the nude corpse (the little girl with the squashed head had, thankfully, wandered off down Forty-sixth Street toward the United Nations), then back at the gunslinger. "If what you said before is true, Roland, this business of time slipping its cogs is very bad news. What if instead of just seven minutes, it slips three months? What if the next time we get back here, Calvin Tower's sold his lot? We can't let that happen. Because that rose, man... that rose..." Tears had begun to slip out of Eddie's eyes.

"It's the best thing in the world," Jake said, low.

"In all the worlds," Roland said. Would it ease Eddie and Jake to know that this particular time-slip had probably been in Susannah's head? That Mia had come out for seven minutes, had a look around, and then dived back into her hole like Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day? Probably not. But he saw one thing in Susannah's haggard face: she either knew what was going on, or suspected very strongly. It must be hellish for her , he thought.

"We have to do better than this if we're really going to change things," Jake said. "This way we're not much better than vags ourselves."

"We have to get to '64, too," Susannah said. "If we're going to get hold of my dough, that is. Can we, Roland? If Callahan's got Black Thirteen, will it work like a door?"

What it will work is mischief , Roland thought. Mischief and worse . But before he could say that (or anything else), the todash chimes began. The pedestrians on Second Avenue heard them no more than they saw the pilgrims gathered by the board fence, but the corpse across the street slowly raised his dead hands and placed them over his dead ears, his mouth turn-ing down in a grimace of pain. And then they could see through him.

"Hold onto each other," Roland said. "Jake, get your hand into Oy's fur, and deep! Never mind if it hurts him!"

Jake did as Roland said, the chimes digging deep into his head. Beautiful but painful.

"Like a root canal without Novocain," Susannah said. She turned her head and for one moment she could see through the board fence. It had become transparent. Beyond it was the rose, its petals now closed but still giving off its own quietly gorgeous glow. She felt Eddie's arm slip around her shoulders.

"Hold on, Suze - whatever you do, hold on."

She grasped Roland's hand. For a moment longer she could see Second Avenue, and then everything was gone. The chimes ate up the world and she was flying through blind darkness with Eddie's arm around her and Roland's hand squeezing her own.

SIXTEEN

When the darkness let them go, they were almost forty feet down the road from their camp. Jake sat up slowly, then turned to Oy. "You all right, boy?"

"Oy."

Jake patted the bumbler's head. He looked around at the others. All here. He sighed, relieved.

"What's this?" Eddie asked. He had taken Jake's other hand when the chimes began. Now, caught in their interlocked fingers, was a crumpled pink object. It felt like cloth; it also felt like metal.

"I don't know," Jake said.

"You picked it up in the lot, just after Susannah screamed," Roland said. "I saw you."

Jake nodded. "Yeah. I guess maybe I did. Because it was where the key was, before."

"What is it, sugar?"

"Some kind of bag." He held it by the straps. "I'd say it was my bowling bag, but that's back at the lanes, with my ball inside it. Back in 1977."

"What's written on the side?" Eddie asked.

But they couldn't make it out. The clouds had closed in again and there was no moonlight. They walked back to their camp together, slowly, shaky as invalids, and Roland built up the fire. Then they looked at the writing on the side of the rose-pink bowling bag.

NOTHING BUT STRIKES AT MID-WORLD LANES

was what it said.

"That's not right," Jake said. "Almost, but not quite. What it says on my bag is nothing but strikes mid-town lanes. Timmy gave it to me one day when I bowled a two-eighty-two. He said I wasn't old enough for him to buy me a beer."

"A bowling gunslinger," Eddie said, and shook his head. "Wonders never cease, do they?"

Susannah took the bag and ran her hands over it. "What kind of weave is this? Feels like metal. And it's heazry ."

Roland, who had an idea what the bag was for - although not who or what had left it for them - said, "Put it in your knapsack with the books, Jake. And keep it very safe."

"What do we do next?" Eddie asked.

"Sleep," Roland said. "I think we're going to be very busy for the next few weeks. We'll have to take our sleep when and where we find it."

"But - "

"Sleep," Roland said, and spread out his skins.

Eventually they did, and all of them dreamed of the rose. Except for Mia, who got up in the night's last dark hour and slipped away to feast in the great banquet hall. And there she feasted very well.

She was, after all, eating for two.

Part Two Telling Tales

Chapter I: The Pavilion