Charlie. Yet it had a sound that belonged in this business; a sound more of his world than of Jake’s, Susannah’s, and Eddie’s, from whence the tale had come.
3
Jake kept expecting the Green Palace to begin looking normal as they drew closer to it, the way the attractions in Disney World began to look normal as you drew close to them-not ordinary, necessarily, but normal, things which were as much a part of the world as the comer bus stop or mailbox or park bench, stuff you could touch, stuff you could write fuck piper on, if you took a notion.
But that didn’t happen, wasn’t going to happen, and as they neared the Green Palace, Jake realized something else: it was the most beautiful, radiant thing he had ever seen in his life. Not trusting it-and he did not- didn’t change the fact. It was like a drawing in a fairy-tale book, one so good it had become real, somehow. And, like the thinny, it hummed… except that this sound was far fainter, and not unpleasant.
Pale green walls rose to battlements that jutted and towers that soared, seeming almost to touch the clouds floating over the Kansas plains. These towers were topped with needles of a darker, emerald green; it was from these that the red pennants nickered. Upon each pennant the symbol of the open eye
had been traced in yellow.
It’s the mark of the Crimson King, Jake thought. It’s really his sigul, not John Farson’s. He didn’t know how he knew this (how could he, when Alabama’s Crimson Tide was the only Crimson anything he knew?), but he did.
“So beautiful,” Susannah murmured, and when Jake glanced at her, he thought she was almost crying. “But not nice, somehow. Not right. Maybe not downright bad, the way the thinny is, but…”
“But not nice,” Eddie said. “Yeah. That works. Not a red light, maybe, but a bright yellow one just the same.” He rubbed the side of his face (a gesture he had picked up from Roland without even realizing it) and looked puzzled. “It feels almost not serious-a practical joke.”
“I doubt it’s a joke,” Roland said. “Do you think it’s a copy of the place where Dorothy and her ka-tet met the false wizard?”
Again, the three erstwhile New Yorkers seemed to exchange a single glance of consultation. When it was over, Eddie spoke for all of them. “Yeah. Yeah, probably. It’s not the same as the one in the movie, but if this thing came out of our minds, it wouldn’t be. Because we see the one from L. Frank Baum’s book, too. Both from the illustrations in the book…”
“And the ones from our imaginations,” Jake said.
“But that’s it,” Susannah said. “I’d say we’re definitely off to see the Wizard.”
“You bet,” Eddie said. “Because-because-because-because-because-”
“Because of the wonderful things he does!” Jake and Susannah finished in unison, then laughed, delighted with each other, while Roland frowned at them, feeling puzzled and looking left out.
“But I have to tell you guys,” Eddie said, “that it’s only gonna take about one more wonderful thing to send me around to the dark side of the Psycho Moon. Most likely for good.”
4
As they drew closer, they could see Interstate 70 stretching away into the pale green depths of the castle’s slightly rounded outer wall; it floated there like an optical illusion. Closer yet, and they could hear the pennants snapping in the breeze and see their own ripply reflections, like drowned folk who somehow walk at the bottoms of watery tropical graves.
There was an inner redoubt of dark blue glass-it was a color Jake associated with the bottles fountain-pen ink came in-and a rust-hued wall-walk between the redoubt and the outer wall. That color made Susannah think of the bottles Hires root-beer had come in when she was a little girl.
The way in was blocked by a barred gate that was both huge and ethereal: it looked like wrought iron which had been turned to glass. Each cunningly made stake was a different color, and these colors seemed to come from the inside, as if the bars were filled with some bright gas or liquid.
The travellers stopped before it. There was no sign of the turnpike beyond it; instead of roadway, there was a courtyard of silver glass-a huge flat mirror, in fact. Clouds floated serenely through its depths; so did the image of the occasional swooping bird. Sun reflected off this glass courtyard and ran across the green castle walls in ripples. Un the far side, the wall of the palace’s inner ward rose in a glimmery green cliff, broken by narrow loophole windows of jet-black glass. There was also an arched entry in this wall that made Jake think of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
To the left of the main doorway was a sentry-box made of cream-colored glass shot through with hazy orange threads. Its door, painted with red stripes, stood open. The phone-booth-sized room inside was empty, although there was something on the floor which looked to Jake like a newspaper.
Above the entry, flanking its darkness, were two crouching, leering gargoyles of darkest violet glass. Their pointed tongues poked out like bruises.
The pennants atop the towers flapped like schoolyard flags.
Crows cawed over empty cornfields now a week past the Reap.
Distant, the thinny whined and warbled.
“Look at the bars of this gate,” Susannah said. She sounded breathless and awestruck. “Look very closely.”
Jake bent toward the yellow bar until his nose nearly touched it and a faint yellow stripe ran down the middle of his face. At first he saw nothing, and then he gasped. What he had taken for motes of some kind were creatures-living creatures-imprisoned inside the bar, swimming in tiny schools. They looked like fish in an aquarium, but they also (their heads, Jake told himself, I think it’s mostly their heads) looked oddly, disquietingly human. As if, Jake thought, he were looking into a vertical golden sea, all the ocean in a glass rod-and living myths no bigger than grains of dust swimming within it. A tiny woman with a fish’s tail and long blonde hair streaming out behind her swam to her side of the glass, seemed to peer out at the giant boy (her eyes were round, startled, and beautiful), and then flipped away again.
Jake felt suddenly dizzy and weak. He closed his eyes until the feeling of vertigo went away, then opened them again and looked around at the others. “Cripes! Are they all the same?”
“All different, I think,” said Eddie, who had already peered into two or three. He bent close to the purple rod, and his cheeks lit up as if in the glow of an old-fashioned fluoroscope. “These guys here look like birds- little tiny birds.”
Jake looked and saw that Eddie was right: inside the gate’s purple upright were flocks of birds no bigger than summer minges. They swooped giddily about in their eternal twilight, weaving over and under one another, their wings leaving tiny silver trails of bubbles.
“Are they really there?” Jake asked breathlessly. “Are they, Roland, or are we only imagining them?”
“I don’t know. But I know what this gate has been made to look like.”
“So do I,” Eddie said. He surveyed the shining posts, each with its own column of imprisoned light and life. Each of the gate’s wings consisted of six colored bars. The one in the center-broad and flat instead of round, and made to split in two when the gate was opened-was the thirteenth. This one was dead black, and in this one nothing moved.
Oh, maybe not that you can see, but there are things moving around in there, all right, Jake thought. There’s life in there, terrible life. And maybe there are roses, too. Drowned ones.
“It’s a Wizard’s Gate,” Eddie said. “Each bar has been made to look like one of the balls in Maerlyn’s Rainbow. Look, here’s the pink one.”
Jake leaned toward it, hands propped on his thighs. He knew what would be inside even before he saw them: horses, of courses. Tiny herds of them, galloping through that strange pink stuff that was neither light nor liquid. Horses running in search of a Drop they would never find, mayhap.
Eddie stretched his hands out to grasp the sides of the central post, the black one.
“Don’t!” Susannah called sharply.
Eddie ignored her, but Jake saw his chest stop for a moment and his lips tighten as he wrapped his hands around the black bar and waited for something-some force perhaps sent Special Delivery all the way from the Dark Tower itself-to change him, or even to strike him dead. When nothing happened, he breathed deep again, and risked a smile. “No electricity, but… “He pulled; the gate held fast. “No give, either. I see where it splits down the middle, but I get nothing. Want to take a shot, Roland?”
Roland reached for the gate, but Jake put a hand on his arm and stopped him before the gunslinger could do more than give it a preliminary shake. “Don’t bother. That’s not the way.”
“Then what is?”
Instead of answering, Jake sat down in front of the gate, near the place where this strange version of 1-70 ended, and began putting on the shoes which had been left for him. Eddie watched a moment, then sat down beside him. “I guess we ought to try it,” he said to Jake, “even though it’ll probably turn out to be just another bumhug.”
Jake laughed, shook his head, and began to tighten the laces of the blood-red Oxfords. He and Eddie both knew it was no bumhug. Not this time.
5
“Okay,” Jake said when they had all put on their red shoes (he thought they looked extraordinarily stupid, especially Eddie’s pair). “I’ll count to three, and we’ll click our heels together. Like this.” He clicked the Oxfords together once, sharply… and the gate shivered like a loosely fastened shutter blown by a strong wind. Susannah cried out. There followed a low, sweet chiming sound from the Green Palace, as if the walls themselves had vibrated.
“I guess this’ll do the trick, all right,” Eddie said. “I warn you, though, I’m not singing ‘somewhere Over the Rainbow.’ That’s not in my contract.”
“The rainbow is here,” the gunslinger said softly, stretching his diminished hand out to the gate.
It wiped the smile off Eddie’s face. “Yeah, I know. I’m a little scared, Roland.”
“So am I,” the gunslinger said, and indeed, Jake thought he looked pale and ill.
“Go on, sugar,” Susannah said. “Count before we all lose our nerve.” “One… two… three.”
They clicked their heels together solemnly and in unison: tock, tock, tock. The gate shivered more violently this time, the colors in the uprights brightening perceptibly. The chime that followed was higher, sweeter- the sound of fine crystal tapped with the haft of a knife. It echoed in dreamy harmonics that made Jake shiver, half with pleasure and half with pain.
But the gate didn’t open.
“What-” Eddie began.
“I know,” Jake said. “We forgot Oy.”
