“Oh Christ,” Eddie said. “I left the world I knew to watch a kid try to put booties on a fucked-up weasel. Shoot me, Roland, before I breed.”
Roland ignored him, watching Jake closely as the boy sat down on the turnpike and called, “Oy! To me!”
The bumbler came willingly enough, and although he had surely been a wild creature before they had met him on the Path of the Beam, he allowed Jake to slip the red leather booties onto his paws without making trouble: in fact, once he got the idea, he stepped into the last two. When all four of the little red shoes were in place (they looked, in fact, the most like Dorothy’s ruby slippers), Oy sniffed at one of them, then looked attentively back at Jake.
Jake clicked his heels together three times, looking at the bumbler as he did so, ignoring the rattle of the gate and the soft chime from the walls of the Green Palace.
“You, Oy!”
“Oy!”
He rolled over on his back like a dog playing dead, then simply looked at his own feet with a kind of disgusted bewilderment. Looking at him, Jake had a sharp memory: trying to pat his stomach and rub his head at the same time, and his father making fun of him when he couldn’t do it right away.
“Roland, help me. He knows what he’s supposed to do, but he doesn’t know how to do it.” Jake glanced up at Eddie. “And don’t make any smart remarks, okay?”
“No,” Eddie said. “No smart remarks, Jake. Do you think just Oy has to do it this time, or is it still a group effort?”
“Just him, I think.”
“But it wouldn’t hurt us to kind of click along with Mitch,” Susannah said.
“Mitch who?” Eddie asked, looking blank.
“Never mind. Go on, Jake, Roland. Give us a count again.”
Eddie grasped Oy’s forepaws. Roland gently grasped the bumbler’s rear paws. Oy looked nervous at this-as if he perhaps expected to be swung briskly into the air and given the old heave-ho-but he didn’t struggle.
“One, two, three.”
Jake and Roland gently patted Oy’s forepaws and rear paws together in unison. At the same time they clicked the heels of their own footwear. Eddie and Susannah did the same.
This time the harmonic was a deep, sweet bong, like a glass church bell. The black glass bar running down the center of the gate did not split open but shattered, spraying crumbs of obsidian glass in all directions.
Some rattled against Oy’s hide. He sprang up in a hurry, yanking out of Jake’s and Roland’s grip and trotting a little distance away. He sat on the broken white line between the travel lane and the passing lane of the highway, his ears laid back, looking at the gate and panting.
“Come on,” Roland said. He went to the left wing of the gate and pushed it slowly open. He stood at the edge of the mirror courtyard, a tall, lanky man in cowpoke jeans, an ancient shirt of no particular color, and improbable red cowboy boots. “Let’s go in and see what the Wizard of Oz has to say for himself.”
“If he’s still here,” Eddie said.
“Oh, I think he’s here,” Roland murmured. “Yes, I think he’s here.”
He ambled toward the main door with the empty sentry-box beside it. The others followed, welded to their own downward reflections by the red shoes like sets of Siamese twins.
Oy came last, skipping nimbly along in his ruby slippers, pausing once to sniff down at his own reflected snout.
“Oy!” he cried to the humbler floating below him, and then hurried after Jake.
Chapter III
THE WIZARD
1
Roland stopped at the sentry-box, glanced in, then picked up the thing which was lying on the floor. The others caught up with him and clustered around. It had looked like a newspaper, and that was just what it was… although an exceedingly odd one. No Topeka Capital-Journal this, and no news of a population-levelling plague.
The Oy Daily Buzz
Vol. MDLXVDI No. 96 “Daily Buzz, Daily Buzz, Handsome Iz as Handsome Duuzz” Weather: Here today, gone tomorrow Lucky Numbers: None Prognosis: Bad
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak blah blah blah good is bad bad is good all the stuffs the same good is bad bad is good all the stuffs the same go slow past the drawers all the stuffs the same blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Blame is a pain all the stuffs the same yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak charyou tree all the stuffs the same blah yak blah blah yak yak blah blah blah yak yak yak baked turkey cooked goose all the stuffs the same blah blah yak yak ride a train die in pain all the stuffs the same blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blame blame blame blame blame blame blah blah blah blah blah blah blah yak yak blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. (Related story p. 6)
Below this was a picture of Roland, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake crossing the mirrored courtyard, as if this had happened the day before instead of only minutes ago. Beneath it was a caption reading: Tragedy in Oz: Travellers Arrive Seeking Fame and Fortune; Find Death Instead.
“I like that,” Eddie said, adjusting Roland’s revolver in the holster he wore low on his hip. “Comfort and encouragement after days of confusion. Like a hot drink on a cold fucking night.”
“Don’t be afraid of this,” Roland said. “This is a joke.”
“I’m not afraid,” Eddie said, “but it’s a little more than a joke. I lived with Henry Dean for a lot of years, and I know when there’s a plot to psych me out afoot. I know it very well.” He looked curiously at Roland. “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you ’re the one who looks scared, Roland.”
“I’m terrified,” Roland said simply.
2
The arched entryway made Susannah think of a song which had been popular ten years or so before she had been yanked out of her world and into Roland’s. Saw an eyeball peepin through a smoky cloud behind the Green Door, the lyric went. When I said “Joe sent me,” someone laughed out loud behind the Green Door. There were actually two doors here instead of one, and no peephole through which an eyeball could look in either. Nor did Susannah try that old speakeasy deal about how Joe had sent her. She did, however, bend forward to read the sign hanging from one of the circular glass door-pulls. bell out of order, please knock, it said.
“Don’t bother,” she said to Roland, who had actually doubled up his fist to do as the sign said. “It’s from the story, that’s all.”
Eddie pulled her chair back slightly, stepped in front of it, and took hold of the circular pulls. The doors opened easily, the hinges rolling in silence. He took a step forward into what looked like a shadowy green grotto, cupped his hands to his mouth, and called: “Hey!”
The sound of his voice rolled away and came back changed… small, echoing, lost. Dying, it seemed.
“Christ,” Eddie said. “Do we have to do this?”
“If we want to get back to the Beam, I think so.” Roland looked paler than ever, but he led them in. Jake helped Eddie lift Susannah’s chair over the sill (a milky block of jade-colored glass) and inside. Oy’s little shoes flashed dim red on the green glass floor. They had gone only ten paces when the doors slammed shut behind them with a no-question-about-it boom that rolled past them and went echoing away into the depths of the Green Palace.
3
There was no reception room; only a vaulted, cavernous hallway that seemed to go on forever. The walls were lit with a faint green glow. This is just like the hallway in the movie, Jake thought, the one where the Cowardly Lion got so scared when he stepped on his own tail.
And, adding a little extra touch of verisimilitude Jake could have done without, Eddie spoke up in a trembly (and better than passable) Bert Lahr imitation: “Wait a minute, fellas, I wuz just thinkin-I really don’t wanna see the Wizard this much. I better wait for you outside!”
“Stop it,” Jake said sharply.
“Oppit!” Oy agreed. He walked directly at Jake’s heel, swinging his head watchfully from side to side as he went. Jake could hear no sound except for their own passage… yet he sensed something: a sound that wasn’t. It was, he thought, like looking at a wind-chime that wants only the slightest puff of breeze to set it tinkling.
“Sorry,” Eddie said. “Really.” He pointed. “Look down there.”
About forty yards ahead of them, the green corridor did end, in a narrow green doorway of amazing height-perhaps thirty feet from the floor to its pointed tip. And from behind it, Jake could now hear a steady thrumming sound. As they drew closer and the sound grew louder, his dread grew. He had to make a conscious effort to take the last dozen steps to the door. He knew this sound; he knew it from the run he’d made with Gasher under Lud, and from the run he and his friends had made on Blaine the Mono. It was the steady beat-beat-beat of slo-trans engines.
“It’s like a nightmare,” he said in a small, close-to-tears voice. “We’re right back where we started.”
“No, Jake,” the gunslinger said, touching his hair. “Never think it. What you feel is an illusion. Stand and be true.”
The sign on this door wasn’t from the movie, and only Susannah knew it was from Dante. abandon hope, all ye who enter here, it said.
Roland reached out with his two-fingered right hand and pulled the thirty-foot door open.
