Oy whined again. This time it was almost a bark. He was looking past her, in the other direction. She turned that way. Halfa dozen people were crossing Forty-sixth toward them. Five were normal. The sixth was a white-faced woman in a moss-splotched dress. The sockets of her eyes were empty and black. Her mouth hung open seemingly all the way down to her breastbone, and as Susannah watched, a green worm crawled over the lower lip. Those crossing with her gave her her own space, just as the other pedestrians on Second Avenue had given Roland and his friends theirs. Susannah guessed that in both cases, the more normal promenaders sensed something out of the ordinary and steered clear. Only this woman wasn't todash.
This woman was dead.
TWELVE
The hum rose and rose as the three of them stumbled across the trash- and brick-littered wilderness of the vacant lot. As before, Jake saw faces in every angle and shadow. He saw Gasher and Hoots; Tick-Tock and Flagg; he saw Eldred Jonas's gunbunnies, Depape and Reynolds; he saw his mother and father and Greta Shaw, their housekeeper, who looked a little like Edith Bunker on TV and who always remembered to cut the crusts off his sandwiches. Greta Shaw who sometimes called him 'Bama, although that was a secret, just between them.
Eddie saw people from the old neighborhood: Jimmie Polio, the kid with the clubfoot, and Tommy Fredericks, who always got so excited watching the street stickball games that he made faces and the kids called him Halloween Tommy. There was Skipper Brannigan, who would have picked a fight with Al Capone himself, had Capone shown sufficient bad judgment to come to their neighborhood, and Csaba Drabnik, the Mad Fuckin Hungarian. He saw his mother's face in a pile of broken bricks, her glimmering eyes recreated from the broken pieces of a soft-drink bottle. He saw her friend, Dora Bertollo (all the kids on the block called her Tits Bertollo because she had really big ones, big as fuckin watermelons). And of course he saw Henry. Henry standing far back in the shadows, watching him. Only Henry was smiling instead of scowling, and he looked straight. Holding out one hand and giving Eddie what looked like a thumbs-up.
Eddie began to cry. And these were good tears.
Roland saw all the phantoms of his life in this shadowed, brick-strewn ruin, from his mother and his cradle-amah right up to their visitors from Calla Bryn Sturgis. And as they walked, that sense of Tightness grew. A feeling that all his hard decisions, all the pain and loss and spilled blood, had not been for nothing, after all. There was a reason. There was a purpose. There was life and love. He heard it all in the song of the rose, and he too began to cry. Mostly with relief. Getting here had been a hard journey. Many had died. Yet here they lived; here they sang with the rose. His life had not all been a dry dream after all.
They joined hands and stumbled forward, helping each other to avoid the nail-studded boards and the holes into which an ankle could plunge and twist and perhaps break. Roland didn't know if one could break a bone while in the todash state, but he had no urge to find out.
'This is worth everything,' he said hoarsely.
Eddie nodded. 'I'll never stop now. Might not stop even if I die.'
Jake gave him a thumb-and-forefinger circle at that, and laughed. The sound was sweet in Roland's ears. It was darker in here than it had been on the street, but the orange streetlights on Second and Forty-sixth were strong enough to provide at least some illumination. Jake pointed at a sign lying in a pile of boards. 'See that? It's the deli sign. I pulled it out of th weeds. That's why it is where it is.' He looked around, dien pointed in anodier direction. 'And look!'
This sign was still standing. Roland and Eddie turned to read it. Although neither of them had seen it before, they both felt a strong sense of
As Jake had told them, the sign looked old, in need of either refreshment or outright replacement. Jake had remembered the graffito which had been sprayed across the sign, and Eddie remembered it from Jake's story, not because it meant anything to him but simply because it was odd. And there it was, just as reported: bango skank. Some long-gone tagger's calling card.
'I think the telephone number on the sign's different,' Jake said.
'Yeah?' Eddie asked. 'What was the old one?'
'I don't remember.'
'Then how can you be sure this one's different?'
In another place and at another time, Jake might have been irritated by these questions. Now, soothed by the proximity of the rose, he smiled, instead. 'I don't know. I guess I can't. But it sure seems different. Like the sign in the bookstore window.'
Roland barely heard. He was walking forward over the piles of bricks and boards and smashed glass in his old cowboy boots, his eyes brilliant even in the shadows. He had seen the rose. There was something lying beside it, in the spot where Jake had found his version of the key, but Roland paid this no heed. He only saw the rose, growing from a clump of grass that had been stained purple with spilled paint. He dropped to his knees before it. A moment later Eddie joined him on his left, Jake on his right.
The rose was tightly furled against the night. Then, as they knelt there, the petals began to open, as if in greeting. The hum rose all around them, like a song of angels.
THIRTEEN
At first Susannah was all right. She held on despite the fact that she had lost over a foot and a half of herself-the self that had arrived here, anyway-and was now forced into her old familiar (and hatefully subservient) posture, half-kneeling and half-sitting on the filthy sidewalk. Her back was propped against the fence surrounding the vacant lot. A sardonic thought crossed her mind-
She held on even after seeing the dead woman cross Forty-sixth Street. The singing helped-what she understood to be the voice of the rose. Oy helped, too, crowding his warmth close to her. She stroked his silky fur, using the reality of him as a steadying-point. She told herself again and again that she was
'I could have imagined that part,' she said to the bumbler. 'Right?'
Oy was dividing his nervous attention between Susannah and the rushing headlights, which might have looked to him like large, predatory animals with shining eyes. He whined nervously.
'Besides, the boys'll be back soon.'
'Oys,' the bumbler agreed, sounding hopeful.
'I couldn't,' she whispered. 'I just couldn't.'
Because some part of her was frightened of the rose. Of getting too close to it. Had that part been in control during the missing seven minutes? Susannah was afraid it had been. If so, it was gone now. Had taken back its legs and just walked off on them into New York, circa 1977. Not good. But it had taken her fear of the rose with it, and that
Another version of Detta Walker, in other words?
The idea made her feel like screaming. She thought she now understood how a woman would feel if, five years or so after an apparently successful cancer operation, the doctor told her a routine X-ray had picked up a shadow on her lung.
'Not again,' she murmured in a low, frantic voice as a fresh group of pedestrians schooled past. They all moved away from the board fence a little, although it reduced the space between them considerably. 'No, not again. It can't be. I'm whole. I'm… I'm
How long had her friends been gone?
She looked downstreet at the flashing clock. It said 8:42, but she wasn't sure she could trust it. It felt longer than that. Much longer. Maybe she should call to them. Just give a halloo. How y'all doin in there?
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
