"Take it up," Roland said. He was on complete alert, every sense drawn fine, feeling and listening for any slightest change in that endless void hum. He missed the weight of the gun on his hip. Did the people who came here to worship not sense the terrible thing the Old Fella had hidden here? He supposed they must not, or they'd stay away. And he supposed there was really no better place for such a thing; the simple faith of the parishioners might neutralize it to some degree. Might even soothe it and thus deepen its doze.

But it could wake up , Roland thought. Wake up and send them all to the nineteen points of nowhere in the blink of an eye . This was an especially terrible thought, and he turned his mind from it. Certainly the idea of using it to secure protection for the rose seemed more and more like a bitter joke. He had faced both men and monsters in his time, but had never been close to anything like this. The sense of its evil was terrible, almost unmanning. The sense of its malevolent emptiness was far, far worse.

Callahan pressed his thumb into the groove between two boards. There was a faint click and a section of the preacher's cove popped out of place. Callahan pulled the boards free, revealing a square hole roughly fifteen inches long and wide. He rocked back on his haunches, holding the boards across his chest. The hum was much louder now. Roland had a brief image of a gigantic hive with bees the size of waggons crawling sluggishly over it. He bent forward and looked into the Old Fella's hidey-hole.

The thing inside was wrapped in white cloth, fine linen from the look of it.

"An altar boy's surplice," Callahan said. Then, seeing Roland didn't know the word: "A thing to wear." He shrugged. "My heart said to wrap it up, and so I did."

"Your heart surely said true," Roland whispered. He was thinking of the bag Jake had brought out of the vacant lot, the one with nothing but strikes at mid-world lanes on the side. They would need it, aye and aye, but he didn't like to think of the transfer.

Then he put thought aside - fear as well - and folded back the cloth. Beneath the surplice, wrapped in it, was a wooden box.

Despite his fear, Roland reached out to touch that dark, heavy wood. It will be like touching some lightly oiled metal , he thought, and it was. He felt an erotic shiver shake itself deep inside him; it kissed his fear like an old lover and then was gone.

"This is black ironwood," Roland whispered. "I have heard of it. but never seen it."

"In my Tales of Arthur , it's called ghostwood," Callahan whispered back.

"Aye? Is it so?"

Certainly the box had a ghostly air to it, as of something derelict which had come to rest, however temporarily, after long wandering. The gunslinger very much would have liked to give it a second caress - the dark, dense wood begged his hand - but he had heard the vast hum of the thing inside rise a notch before falling back to its former drone. The wise man doesn't poke a sleeping bear with a stick , he told himself. It was true, but it didn't change what he wanted. He did touch the wood once more, lightly, with just the tips of his fingers, then smelled them. There was an aroma of camphor and fire and - he would have sworn it - the flowers of the far north country, the ones that bloom in the snow.

Three objects had been carved on top of the box: a rose, a stone, and a door. Beneath the door was this:

X X X X X

Roland reached out again. Callahan made a move forward, as if to stop him, and then subsided. Roland touched the carving beneath the image of the door. Again the hum beneath it rose - the hum of the black ball hidden inside the box.

"Un... ?" he whispered, and ran the ball of his thumb across the raised symbols again. "Un... found?" Not what he read but what his fingertips heard.

"Yes, I'm sure that's what it says," Callahan whispered back. He looked pleased, but still grasped Roland's wrist and pushed it, wanting the gunslinger's hand away from the box. A fine sweat had broken on his brow and forearms. "It makes sense, in a way. A leaf, a stone, an unfound door. They're symbols in a book from my side. Look Homeward, Angel , it's called."

A leaf, a stone, a door , Roland thought. Only substitute rose for leaf. Yes. That feels right .

"Will you take it?" Callahan asked. Only his voice rose slightly now, out of its whisper, and the gunslinger realized he was begging.

"You've actually seen it, Pere, have you?"

"Aye. Once. It's horrible beyond telling. Like the slick eye of a monster that grew outside God's shadow. Will you take it, gunslinger?"

"Yes."

"When?"

Faintly, Roland heard the chime of bells - a sound so beautifully hideous it made you want to grind your teeth against it. For a moment the walls of Pere Callahan's church wavered. It was as if the thing in the box had spoken to them: Do you see how little it all matters ? How quickly and easily I can take it all away, should I choose to do so? Beware, gunslinger!Beware, shaman! The abyss is all around you. You float or fall into it at my whim .

Then thekammen were gone.

"When?" Callahan reached over the box in its hole and grasped Roland's shirt. "When ?"

"Soon," Roland said.

Too soon , his heart replied.

Chapter V: The Tale of Gray Dick

ONE

Now it's twenty-three , Roland thought that evening as he sat behind Eisenhart's Rocking B, listening to the boys shout and Oy bark. Back in Gilead, this sort of porch behind the main house, facing the barns and the fields, would have been called the work-stoop. Twenty-three days until the Wolves. And how many until Susannah foals ?

A terrible idea concerning that had begun to form in his head. Suppose Mia, the new she inside Susannah's skin, were to give birth to her monstrosity on the very day the Wolves appeared? One wouldn't think that likely, but according to Eddie, coincidence had been cancelled. Roland thought he was probably right about that. Certainly there was no way to gauge the thing's period of gestation. Even if it had been a human child, nine months might no longer be nine months. Time had grown soft.

"Boys!" Eisenhart bawled. "What in the name of the Man Jesus am I going to tell my wife if you kill yer sad selfs jumpin out of that barn?"

"We're okay!" Benny Slightman called. "Andy won't let us get hurt!" The boy, dressed in bib overalls and barefooted, was standing in the open bay of the barn, just above the carved letters which said Rocking B. "Unless... do you really want us to stop, sai?"

Eisenhart glanced toward Roland, who saw Jake standing just behind Benny, impatiently waiting his chance to risk his bones. Jake was also dressed in bib overalls - a pair of his new friend's, no doubt - and the look of them made Roland smile.

Jake wasn't the sort of boy you imagined in such clothes, somehow.

"It's nil to me, one way or the other, if that's what you want to know," Roland said.

"Garn, then!" the rancher called. Then he turned his attention to the bits and pieces of hardware spread out on the boards. "What do'ee think? Will any of em shoot?"

Eisenhart had produced all three of his guns for Roland's inspection. The best was the rifle the rancher had brought to town on the night Tian Jaffords had called the meeting. The other two were pistols of the sort Roland and his friends had called "barrel-shooters" as children, because of the oversized cylinders which had to be revolved with the side of the hand after each shot. Roland had disassembled Eisenhart's shooting irons with no initial comment. Once again he had set out gun-oil, this time in a bowl instead of a saucer.

"I said - "

"I heard you, sai," Roland said. "Your rifle is as good as I've seen this side of the great city. The barrel-shooters..." He shook his head. "That one with the nickel plating might fire. The other you might as well stick in the ground. Maybe it'll grow something better."

"Hate to hear you speak so," Eisenhart said. "These were from my Da' and his Da' before him and on back at least this many." He raised seven fingers and one thumb. "That's back to before the Wolves, ye ken. They was always kept together and passed to the likeliest son by dead-letter. When I got em instead of my elder brother, I was some pleased."

"Did you have a twin?" Roland asked.

"Aye, Verna," Eisenhart said. He smiled easily and often and did so now beneath his great graying bush of a mustache, but it was painful - the smile of a man who doesn't want you to know he's bleeding somewhere inside his clothes. "She was lovely as dawn, so she was. Passed on these ten year or more. Went painful early, as the roont ones often do."

"I'm sorry."

"Say thankya."

The sun was going down red in the southwest, turning the yard the color of blood. There was a line of rockers on the porch. Eisenhart was settled in one of them. Roland sat cross-legged on the boards, housekeeping Eisenhart's inheritance. That the pistols would probably never fire meant nothing to the gunslinger's hands, which had been trained to this work long ago and still found it soothing.

Now, with a speed that made the rancher blink, Roland put the weapons back together in a rapid series of clicks and clacks. He set them aside on a square of sheepskin, wiped his fingers on a rag, and sat in the rocker next to Eisenhart's. He guessed that on more ordinary evenings, Eisenhart and his wife sat out here side by side, watching the sun abandon the day.

Roland rummaged through his purse for his tobacco pouch, found it, and built himself a cigarette with Callahan's fresh, sweet tobacco. Rosalita had added her own present, a little stack of delicate cornshuck wraps she called "pulls." Roland thought they wrapped as good as any cigarette paper, and he paused a moment to admire the finished product before tipping the end into the match Eisenhart had popped alight with one horny thumbnail. The gunslinger dragged deep and exhaled a long plume that rose but slowly in the evening air, which was still and surprisingly muggy for summer's end. "Good," he said, and nodded.

"Aye? May it do ya fine. I never got the taste for it myself."

The barn was far bigger than the ranchhouse, at least fifty yards long and fifty feet high. The front was festooned with reapcharms in honor of the season; stuffy-guys with huge sharproot heads stood guard. From above the open bay over the main doors, the butt of the head-beam jutted. A rope had been fastened around this. Below, in the yard, the boys had built a good-sized stack of hay. Oy stood on one side of it, Andy on the other. They were both looking up as Benny Slightman grabbed the rope, gave it a tug, then retreated back into the loft and out of sight. Oy began to bark in anticipation. A moment later Benny came pelting forward with the rope wrapped in his fists and his hair flying out behind him.

"Gilead and the Eld! " he cried, and leaped from the bay. He swung into the red sunset air with his shadow trailing behind him.

"Ben-Ben! "Oy barked. "Ben-Ben-Ben!"

The boy let go, flew into the haystack, disappeared, then popped up laughing. Andy offered him a metal hand but Benny ignored it, flopping out onto the hardpacked earth. Oy ran around him, barking.

"Do they always call so at play?" Roland asked.

Eisenhart snorted laughter. "Not at all! Usually it's a cry of Oriza, or Man Jesus, or 'hail the Calla,' or all three. Your boy's been filling Slightman's boy full of tales, thinks I."

Roland ignored the slightly disapproving note in this and watched Jake reel in the rope. Benny lay on the ground, playing dead, until Oy licked his face. Then he sat up, giggling. Roland had no doubt that if the boy had gone off-course, Andy would have snagged him.

To one side of the barn was a remuda of work-horses, perhaps twenty in all. A trio of cowpokes in chaps and battered shor'boots were leading the last half-dozen mounts toward it. On the other side of the yard was a slaughter-pen filled with steers. In the following weeks they would be butchered and sent downriver on the trading boats.

Jake retreated into the loft, then came pelting forward. "New York !" he shouted. "Times Square! Empire State Building! Twin Towers! Statue of Liberty !" And he launched himself into space along the arc of the rope. They watched him disappear, laughing, into the pile of hay.

"Any particular reason you wanted your other two to stay with the Jaffordses?" Eisenhart asked. He spoke idly, but Roland thought this was a question that interested him more than a little.

"Best we spread ourselves around. Let as many as possible get a good look at us. Time is short. Decisions must be made." All of which was true, but there was more, and Eisenhart probably knew it. He was shrewder than Overholser. He was also dead set against standing up to the Wolves - at least so far. This didn't keep Roland from liking the man, who was big and honest and possessed of an earthy countryman's sense of humor. Roland thought he might come around, if he could be shown they had a chance to win.

On their way out to the Rocking B, they had visited half a dozen smallhold farms along the river, where rice was the main crop. Eisenhart had performed the introductions good-naturedly enough. At each stop Roland had asked the two questions he had asked the previous night, at the Pavilion: Will you open to us, if we open to you ? Do you see us for what we are, and accept us for what we do ? All of them had answered yes. Eisenhart had also answered yes. But Roland knew better than to ask the third question of any. There was no need to, not yet. They still had over three weeks.

"We bide, gunslinger," Eisenhart said. "Even in the face of the Wolves, we bide. Once there was Gilead and now there's Gilead nummore - none knows better'n you - but still we bide. If we stand against the Wolves, all that may change. To you and yours, what happens along the Crescent might not mean's'much as a fart in a high wind one way or't'other. If ye win and survive, you'll move along. If ye lose and die, we have nowhere to go."

"But - "

Eisenhart raised his hand. "Hear me, I beg. Would'ee hear me?"

Roland nodded, resigned to it. And for him to speak was probably for the best. Beyond them, the boys were running back into the barn for another leap. Soon the coming dark would put an end to their game. The gunslinger wondered how Eddie and Susannah were making out. Had they spoken to Tian's Gran-pere yet? And if so, had he told them anything of value?

"Suppose they send fifty or even sixty, as they have before, many and many-a? And suppose we wipe them out? And then, suppose that a week or a month later, after you're gone, they send five hundred against us?"

Roland considered the question. As he was doing so, Margaret Eisenhart joined them. She was a slim woman, fortyish, small-breasted, dressed in jeans and a shirt of gray silk. Her hair, pulled back in a bun against her neck, was black threaded with white. One hand hid beneath her apron.