The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower #3)(17)

There was a thick cough from the fire. A fan of sparks twisted outwards. Susannah screamed and rolled away, beating at the orange flecks on her dress as the flames gushed upward toward the starry sky. Eddie didn’t move. He sat transfixed in his vision, held in a cradle of wonder which was both gorgeous and terrible, unmindful of the sparks which danced across his skin. Then the flames sank back.

The bone was gone.

The key was gone.

The rose was gone.

Remember, he thought. Remember the rose . . . and remember the shape of the key. Susannah was sobbing with shock and terror, but he ignored her for the moment and found the stick with which he and Roland had both drawn. And in the dirt he made this shape with a shaking hand:

“WHY DID YOU DO it?” Susannah asked at last. “Why, for God’s sake— and what was it?”

Fifteen minutes had gone by. The fire had been allowed to burn low; the scattered embers had either been stamped out or had gone out on their own. Eddie sat with his arms about his wife: Susannah sat before him, with her back against his chest. Roland was off to one side, knees hugged to his chest, looking moodily into the orange-red coals. So far as Eddie could tell, neither of them had seen the bone change. They had both seen it glowing superhot, and Roland had seen it explode (or had it imploded? to Eddie that seemed closer to what he had seen), but that was all. Or so he believed; Roland, however, sometimes kept his own counsel, and when he decided to play his cards close to the vest, he played them very close indeed, Eddie knew that from bitter experience. He thought of telling them what he had seen—or thought he had seen—-and decided to play his own cards tight and close-up, at least for the time being. Of the jawbone itself there was no sign—not even a splinter. “I did it because a voice spoke in my mind and told me I must,” Roland said. “It was the voice of my father; of all my fathers. When one hears such a voice, not to obey—and at once—is unthinkable. So I was taught. As to what it was, I can’t say . . . not now, at least. I only know that the bone has spoken its final word. I have carried it all this way to hear it.” Or to see it, Eddie thought, and again: Remember. Remember the rose. And remember the shape of the key.

“It almost flash-fried us!” She sounded both tired and exasperated. Roland shook his head. “I think it was more like the sort of firework the barons used to sometimes shoot into the sky at their year-end parties. Bright and startling, but not dangerous.”

Eddie had an idea. “The doubling in your mind, Roland—is it gone? Did it leave when the bone exploded, or whatever it did?” He was almost convinced that it had; in the movies he’d seen, such rough shock-therapy almost always worked. But Roland shook his head. Susannah shifted in Eddie’s arms. “You said you were beginning to understand.” Roland nodded. “I think so, yes. If I’m right, I fear for Jake. Wher-ever he is, whenever he is, I fear for him.”

“What do you mean?” Eddie asked.

Roland got up, went to his roll of hides, and began to spread them out. “Enough stories and excitement for one night. It’s time to sleep. In the morning we’ll follow the bear’s backtrail and see if we can find the portal he was set to guard. I’ll tell you what I know and what I believe has happened—what I believe is happening still—along the way.”

With that he wrapped himself in an old blanket and a new deerskin, rolled away from the fire, and would say no more.

Eddie and Susannah lay down together. When they were sure the gunslinger must be asleep, they made love. Roland heard them going about it as he lay wakeful and heard their quiet after-love talk. Most of it was about him. He lay quietly, open eyes looking into the darkness long after their talk had ceased and their breathing had evened out into a single easy note. It was, he thought, fine to be young and in love. Even in the grave-yard which this world had become, it was fine.

Enjoy it while you can, he thought, because there is more death ahead. We have come to a stream of blood. That it will lead us to a river of the same stuff I have no doubt. And, further along, to an ocean. In this world the graves yawn and none of the dead rest easy.

As dawn began to come up in the east, he closed his eyes. Slept briefly. And dreamed of Jake.

EDDIE ALSO DREAMED—DREAMED he was back in New York, walking along Second Avenue with a book in his hand.

In this dream it was spring. The air was warm, the city was blooming, and homesickness sobbed within him like a muscle with a fishhook caught deep within it. Enjoy this dream, and make it go on as long as you can, he thought. Savor it . . . because this is as close to New York as you’re going to get. You can’t go home, Eddie. That part’s done.

He looked down at the book and was utterly unsurprised to find it was You Can’t Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe. Stamped into the dark red cover were three shapes; key, rose, and door. He stopped for a moment, flipped the book open, and read the first line. The man in black fled across the desert, Wolfe had written, and the gunslinger followed.

Eddie closed it and walked on. It was about nine in the morning, he judged, maybe nine-thirty, and traffic on Second Avenue was light. Taxis honked and wove their way from lane to lane with spring sunshine twinkling off their windshields and bright yellow paintjobs. A bum on the corner of Second and Fifty-second asked him for a handout and Eddie tossed the book with the red cover into his lap. He observed (also without surprise) that the bum was Enrico Balazar. He was sitting cross-legged in front of a magic shop. HOUSE OF CARDS, the sign in the window read, and the display inside showed a tower which had been built of Tarot cards. Standing on top was a model of King Kong. There was a tiny radar-dish growing out of the great ape’s head.