Wizard and Glass

6

'First aid can wait,' Eddie said. He put his arm around Jake's shoulders and led the boy to the ladder. 'Can you use that hand to climb with?'

'Yes. But I can't bring Oy. Roland, will you?'

'Yes.' Roland picked Oy up and tucked him into his shirt as he had while descending a shaft under the city in pursuit of Jake and Gasher. Oy peeked out at Jake with his bright, gold-ringed eyes. 'Up you go.'

Jake climbed. Roland followed close enough so that Oy could sniff the kid's heels by stretching out his long neck.

'Suze?' Eddie asked. 'Need a boost?'

'And get your nasty hands all over my well-turned fanny? Not likely, white boy!' Then she dropped him a wink and began to climb, pulling herself up easily with her muscular arms and balancing with the stumps of her legs. She went fast, but not too fast for Eddie; he reached up and gave her a soft pinch where the pinching was good. 'Oh, my purity!' Susannah cried, laughing and rolling her eyes. Then she was gone. Only Eddie was left, standing by the foot of the ladder and looking around at the luxury coach which he had believed might well be their ka-tet's coffin.

You did it, kiddo. Henry said. Made him set himself on fire. I knew you could, fuckin-A. Remember when I said that to those scag-bags behind Dahlie's? Jimmie Polio and those guys? And how they laughed? But you did it. Sent him home with a fuckin rupture.

Well, it worked, anyway, Eddie thought, and touched the butt of Roland's gun without even being aware of it. Well enough for us to walk away one more time.

He climbed two rungs, then looked back down. The Barony Coach already felt dead. Long dead, in fact, just another artifact of a world that had moved on.

'Adios, Blaine,' Eddie said. 'So long, partner.'

And he followed his friends out through the emergency exit in the roof.

CHAPTER IV TOPEKA

1

Jake stood on the slightly tilted roof of Blame the Mono, looking southeast along the Path of the Beam. The wind riffled his hair (now quite long and decidedly un-Piperish) back from his temples and forehead in waves. His eyes were wide with surprise.

He didn't know what he had expected to see—a smaller and more provincial version of Lud, perhaps—but what he had not expected was what loomed above the trees of a nearby park. It was a green roadsign (against the dull gray autumn sky, it almost screamed with color) with a blue shield mounted on it:

Roland joined him, lifted Oy gently out of his shirt, and put him down. The humbler sniffed the pink surface of Blaine's roof, then looked toward the front of the mono. Here the train's smooth bullet shape was broken by crumpled metal which had peeled back in jagged wings. Two dark slashes—they began at the mono's tip and extended to a point about ten yards from where Jake and Roland stood—gored the roof in parallel lines. At the end of each was a wide, flat metal pole painted in stripes of yellow and black. These seemed to jut from the top of the mono at a point just forward of the Barony Coach. To Jake they looked a little like football goalposts.

'Those are the piers he talked about hitting,' Susannah murmured.

Roland nodded.

'We got off lucky, big boy, you know it? If this thing had been going much faster …'

'Ka, ' Eddie said from behind them. He sounded as if he might be smiling.

Roland nodded. 'Just so. Ka.'

Jake dismissed the transteel goalposts and turned back toward the sign. He was half convinced it would be gone, or that it would say something else (mid-world toll road, perhaps, or beware of demons), but it was still there and still said the same thing.

'Eddie? Susannah? Do you see that?'

They looked along his pointing finger. For a moment—one long enough for Jake to fear he was having a hallucination—neither of them said anything. Then, softly, Eddie said: 'Holy shit. Are we back home? If we are, where are all the people? And if something like Blaine has been stopping off in Topeka— our Topeka, Topeka, Kansas—how come I haven't seen anything about it on Sixty Minutes?'

'What's Sixty Minutes'?' Susannah asked. She was shading her eyes, looking southeast toward the sign.

'TV show,' Eddie said. 'You missed it by five or ten years. Old white guys in ties. Doesn't matter. That sign—'

'It's Kansas, all right,' Susannah said. 'Our Kansas. I guess.' She had spotted another sign, just visible over the trees. Now she pointed until Jake, Eddie, and Roland had all seen it:

'There a Kansas in your world, Roland?'

'No,' Roland replied, looking at the signs, 'we're far beyond the boundaries of the world I knew. I was far beyond most of the world I knew long before I met you three. This place . ..'

He stopped and cocked his head to one side, as if he was listening to some sound almost too distant to hear. And the expression on his face … Jake didn't like it much.

'Say, kiddies!' Eddie said brightly. 'Today we're studying Wacky Geography in Mid-World. You see, boys and girls, in Mid-World you start in New York, travel southeast to Kansas, and then continue along the Path of the Beam until you come to the Dark Tower . .. which happens to be smack in the middle of everything. First, fight the giant lobsters! Next, ride the psychotic train! And then, after a visit to our snackbar for a popkin or two—'

'Do you hear anything?' Roland broke in. 'Any of you?'

Jake listened. He heard the wind combing through the trees of the nearby park—their leaves had just begun to turn—and he heard the click of Oy's toenails as he strolled back toward them along the roof of the Barony Coach. Then Oy stopped, so even that sound—

A hand seized him by the arm, making him jump. It was Susannah. Her head was tilted, her eyes wide. Eddie was also listening. Oy, too; his ears were up and he was whining far down in his throat.

Jake felt his arms ripple with gooseflesh. At the same time he felt his mouth tighten in a grimace. The sound, though very faint, was the auditory version of biting a lemon. And he'd heard something like it before. Back when he was only five or six, there had been a crazy guy in Central Park who thought he was a musician . . . well, there were lots of crazy guys in Central Park who thought they were musicians, but this was the only one Jake had ever seen who played a workshop tool. The guy had had a sign beside his upturned hat which read world's greatest SAW-PLAYER! SOUNDS HAWAIIAN DOESN'T IT! PLEASE CONTRIBUTE TO MY WELFARE!

Greta Shaw had been with Jake the first time he encountered the saw-player, and Jake remembered how she had hurried past the guy. Just sitting there like a cellist in a symphony orchestra he'd been, only with a rust-