1

" - home," Eddie muttered. His voice sounded thick and punch-drunk to his own ears. "Back home, because there's no place like home, no indeed."

He tried to open his eyes and at first couldn't. It was as if they were glued shut. He put the heel of his hand to his forehead and pushed up, tightening the skin on his face. It worked; his eyes popped open. He saw neither the throneroom of the Green Palace nor (and this was what he had really expected) the richly appointed but somehow claustrophobic bedroom in which he had just been.

He was outside, lying in a small clearing of winter-white grass. Nearby was a little grove of trees, some still with their last brown leaves clinging to the branches. And one branch with an odd white leaf, an albino leaf. There was a pretty trickle of running water farther into the grove. Standing abandoned in the high grass was Susannah's new and improved wheelchair. There was mud on the tires, Eddie saw, and a few late leaves, crispy and brown, caught in the spokes. A few swatches of grass, too. Overhead was a skyful of still white clouds, every bit as interesting as a laundry-basket full of sheets.

The sky was clear when we went inside the Palace, he thought, and realized time had slipped again. How much or how little, he wasn't sure he wanted to know - Roland's world was like a transmission with its gear-teeth all but stripped away; you never knew when time was going to pop into neutral or race you away in overdrive.

Was this Roland's world, though? And if it was, how had they gotten back to it?

"How should I know?" Eddie croaked, and got slowly to his feet, wincing as he did so. He didn't think he was hungover, but his legs were sore and he felt as if he had just taken the world's heaviest Sunday afternoon nap.

Roland and Susannah lay on the ground under the trees. The gunslinger was stirring, but Susannah lay on her back, arms spread extravagantly wide, snoring in an unladylike way that made Eddie grin. Jake was nearby, with Oy sleeping on his side by one of the kid's knees. As Eddie looked at them, Jake opened his eyes and sat up. His gaze was wide but blank; he was awake, but had been so heavily asleep he didn't know it yet.

"Gruz," Jake said, and yawned.

"Yep," Eddie said, "that works for me." He turned in a slow circle, and had gotten three quarters of the way back to where he'd started when he saw the Green Palace on the horizon. From here it looked very small, and its brilliance had been robbed by the sunless day. Eddie guessed it might be thirty miles away. Leading toward them from that direction were the tracks of Susannah's wheelchair.

He could hear the thinny, but faintly. He thought he could see it, as well - a quicksilver shimmer like bogwater, stretching across the flat, open land .. . and finally drying up about five miles away. Five miles west of here? Given the location of the Green Palace and the fact that they had been travelling east on 1-70, that was the natural assumption, but who really knew, especially with no visible sun to use for orientation?

"Where's the turnpike?" Jake asked. His voice sounded thick and gummy. Oy joined him, stretching first one rear leg, then the other. Eddie saw he had lost one of his booties at some point.

"Maybe it was cancelled due to lack of interest."

"I don't think we're in Kansas anymore," Jake said. Eddie looked at him sharply, but didn't believe the kid was consciously riffing on The Wizard of Oz. "Not the one where the Kansas City Royals play, not the one where the Monarchs play, either."

"What gives you that idea?"

Jake hoisted a thumb toward the sky, and when Eddie looked up, he saw that he had been wrong: it wasn't all still white overcast, boring as a basket of sheets. Directly above their heads, a band of clouds was moiling toward the horizon as steadily as a conveyor belt.

They were back on the Path of the Beam.

2

"Eddie? Where you at, sugar?"

Eddie looked down from the lane of clouds in the sky and saw Susannah sitting up, rubbing the back of her neck. She looked unsure of where she was. Perhaps even of who she was. The red cappies she was wearing looked oddly dull in this light, but they were still the brightest things in Eddie's view ... until he looked down at his own feet and saw the street-boppers with their Cuban heels. Yet these also looked dull, and Eddie no longer thought it was just the day's cloudy light that made them seem so. He looked at Jake's shoes, Oy's remaining three slippers, Roland's cowboy boots (the gunslinger was sitting up now, arms crossed around his knees, looking blankly off into the distance). All the same ruby red, but a lifeless red, somehow. As if some magic essential to them had been used up.

Suddenly, Eddie wanted them off his feet.

He sat down beside Susannah, gave her a kiss, and said: "Good morning, Sleeping Beauty. Or afternoon, if it's that." Then, quickly, almost hating to touch them (it was like touching dead skin, somehow), Eddie yanked off the street-boppers. As he did, he saw that they were scuffed at the toes and muddy at the heels, no longer new looking. He'd wondered how they'd gotten here; now, feeling the ache in the muscles of his legs and remembering the wheelchair tracks, he knew. They had walked, by God. Walked in their sleep.

"That," Susannah said, "is the best idea you've had since . . . well, in a long time." She stripped off the cappies. Close by, Eddie saw Jake taking off Oy's booties. "Were we there?" Susannah asked him. "Eddie, were we really there when he..."

"When I killed my mother," Roland said. "Yes, you were there. As I was. Gods help me, I was there. I did it." He covered his face with his hands and began to voice a series of harsh sobs.

Susannah crawled across to him in that agile way that was almost a version of walking. She put an arm around him and used her other hand to take his hands away from his face. At first Roland didn't want to let her do that, but she was persistent, and at last his hands - those killer's hands - came down, revealing haunted eyes which swam with tears.

Susannah urged his face down against her shoulder. "Be easy, Roland," she said. "Be easy and let it go. This part is over now. You past it."

"A man doesn't get past such a thing," Roland said. "No, I don't think so. Not ever."

"You didn't kill her," Eddie said.

"That's too easy." The gunslinger's face was still against Susannah's shoulder, but his words were clear enough. "Some responsibilities can't be shirked. Some sins can't be shirked. Yes, Rhea was there - in a way, at least - but I can't shift it all to the Coos, much as I might like to."

"It wasn't her, either," Eddie said. "That's not what I mean."

Roland raised his head. "What in hell's name are you talking about?"

"Ka, " Eddie said. "Ka like a wind."

3

In their packs there was food none of them had put there - cookies with Keebler elves on the packages, Saran Wrapped sandwiches that looked like the kind you could get (if you were desperate, that was) from turnpike vending machines, and a brand of cola neither Eddie, Susannah, nor Jake knew. It tasted like Coke and came in a red and white can, but the brand was Nozz-A-La.

They ate a meal with their backs to the grove and their faces to the distant glam-gleam of the Green Palace, and called it lunch. If we start to lose the light in an hour or so, we can make it supper by voice vote, Eddie thought, but he didn't believe they'd need to. His interior clock was running again now, and that mysterious but usually accurate device suggested that it was early afternoon.

At one point he stood up and raised his soda, smiling into an invisible camera. "When I'm travelling through the Land of Oz in my new Takuro Spirit, I drink Nozz-A-La!" he proclaimed. "It fills me up but never fills me out! It makes me happy to be a man! It makes me know God! It gives me the outlook of an angel and the balls of a tiger! When I drink Nozz-A-La, I say 'Gosh! Ain't I glad to be alive!' I say - "

"Sit down, you bumhug," Jake said, laughing.

"Ug," Oy agreed. His snout was on Jake's ankle, and he was watching the boy's sandwich with great interest.

Eddie started to sit, and then that strange albino leaf caught his eye again. That's no leaf, he thought, and walked over to it. No, not a leaf but a scrap of paper. He turned it over and saw columns of "blah blah" and "yak yak" and "all the stuff's the same." Usually newspapers weren't blank on one side, but Eddie wasn't surprised to find thisone was - the oz Daily Buzz had only been a prop, after all.

Nor was the blank side blank. Printed on it in neat, careful letters, was this message:

Below that, a little drawing:

Eddie brought the note back to where the others were eating. Each of them looked at it. Roland held it last, ran his thumb over it thoughtfully, feeling the texture of the paper, then gave it back to Eddie.

"R.F.," Eddie said. "The man who was running Tick-Tock. This is from him, isn't it?"

"Yes. He must have brought the Tick-Tock Man out of Lud."

"Sure," Jake said darkly. "That guy Flagg looked like someone who'd know a first-class bumhug when he found one. But how did they get here before us? What could be faster than Blaine the Mono, for cripe's sake?"

"A door," Eddie said. "Maybe they came through one of those special doors."

"Bingo," Susannah said. She held her hand out, palm up, and Eddie slapped it.

"In any case, what he suggests is not bad advice," Roland said. "I urge you to consider it most seriously. And if you want to go back to your world, I will allow you to go."

"Roland, I can't believe you," Eddie said. "This, after you dragged me and Suze over here, kicking and screaming? You know what my brother would say about you? That you're as contrary as a hog on ice-skates."

"I did what I did before I learned to know you as friends," Roland said. "Before I learned to love you as I loved Alain and Cuthbert. And before I was forced to ... to revisit certain scenes. Doing that has ..." He paused, looking down at his feet (he had put his old boots back on again) and thinking hard. At last he looked up again. "There was a part of me that hadn't moved or spoken in a good many years. 1 thought it was dead. It isn't. I have learned to love again, and I'm aware that this is probably my last chance to love. I'm slow - Vannay and Cort knew that; so did my father - but I'm not stupid."

"Then don't act that way," Eddie said. "Or treat us as if we were."

"What you call 'the bottom line,' Eddie, is this: I get my friends killed. And I'm not sure I can even risk doing that again. Jake especially.. . I... never mind. I don't have the words. For the first time since I turned around in a dark room and killed my mother, I may have found something more important than the Tower. Leave it at that."

"All right, I guess I can respect that."

"So can I," Susannah said, "but Eddie's right about ka." She took the note and ran a finger over it thoughtfully. "Roland, you can't talk about that - ka, I mean - then turn around and take it back again, just because you get a little low on willpower and dedication."

"Willpower and dedication are good words," Roland remarked. "There's a bad one, though, that means the same thing. That one is obsession."

She shrugged it away with an impatient twitch of her shoulders. "Sugarpie, either this whole business is ka, or none of it is. And scary as ka might be - the idea of fate with eagle eyes and a bloodhound's nose -  I find the idea of no ka even scarier." She tossed the R.F. note aside on the matted grass.

"Whatever you call it, you're just as dead if it runs you over," Roland said. "Rimer . . . Thorin . . . Jonas . . . my mother . . . Cuthbert . . . Susan. Just ask them. Any of them. If you only could."

"You're missing the biggest part of this," Eddie said. "You can't send us back. Don't you realize that, you big galoot? Even if there was a door, we wouldn't go through it. Am I wrong about that?"

He looked at Jake and Susannah. They shook their heads. Even Oy shook his head. No, he wasn't wrong.

"We've changed," Eddie said. "We..." Now he was the one who didn't know how to go on. How to express his need to see the Tower . . . and his other need, just as strong, to go on carrying the gun with the sandal-wood insets. The big iron was how he'd come to think of it. Like in that old Marty Robbins song about the man with the big iron on his hip. "It's ka," he said. It was all he could think of that was big enough to cover it.

"Kaka," Roland replied, after a moment's consideration. The three of them stared at him, mouths open. Roland of Gilead had made a joke.

4

"There's one thing I don't understand about what we saw," Susannah said hesitantly. "Why did your mother hide behind that drape when you came in, Roland? Did she mean to..." She bit her lip, then brought it out. "Did she mean to kill you?"

"If she'd meant to kill me, she wouldn't have chosen a belt as her weapon. The very fact that she had made me a present - and that's what it was, it had my initials woven into it - suggests that she meant to ask my forgiveness. That she had had a change of heart."

Is that what you know, or only what you want to believe? Eddie thought. It was a question he would never ask. Roland had been tested enough, had won their way back to the Path of the Beam by reliving that terrible final visit to his mother's apartment, and that was enough.

"I think she hid because she was ashamed," the gunslinger said."orbecause she needed a moment to think of what to say to me. Of how to explain."

"And the ball?" Susannah asked him gently. "Was it on the vanity table, where we saw it? And did she steal it from your father?"

"Yes to both," Roland said. "Although . . . did she steal it?" He seemed to ask this question of himself. "My father knew a great many things, but he sometimes kept what he knew to himself."

"Like him knowing that your mother and Marten were seeing each other," Susannah said.

"Yes."

"But, Roland . .. you surely don't believe that your father would knowingly have allowed you to ... to ..."

Roland looked at her with large, haunted eyes. His tears had gone, but when he tried to smile at her question, he was unable. "Have knowingly allowed his son to kill his wife?" he asked. "No, I can't say that. Much as I'd like to, I can't. That he should have caused such a thing to have happened, to have deliberately set it in motion, like a man playing Castles . . . that I cannot believe. But would he allow ka to run its course? Aye, most certainly."

"What happened to the ball?" Jake asked.

"I don't know. I fainted. When I awoke, my mother and 1 were still alone, one dead and one alive. No one had come to the sound of the shots - the walls of that place were thick stone, and that wing mostly empty as well. Her blood had dried. The belt she'd made me was covered with it, but I took it, and I put it on. I wore that bloodstained gift for many years, and how I lost it is a tale for another day - I'll tell it to you before we have done, for it bears on my quest for the Tower.

"But although no one had come to investigate the gunshots, someone had come for another reason. While I lay fainted away by my mother's corpse, that someone came in and took the wizard's glass away."

"Rhea?" Eddie asked.

"I doubt she was so close in her body ... but she had a way of making friends, that one. Aye, a way of making friends. I saw her again, you know." Roland explained no further, but a stony gleam arose in his eyes. Eddie had seen it before, and knew it meant killing.

Jake had retrieved the note from R.F. and now gestured at the little drawing beneath the message. "Do you know what this means?"

"I have an idea it's the sigul of a place I saw when I first travelled in the wizard's glass. The land called Thunderclap." He looked around at them, one by one. "I think it's there that we'll meet this man - this thing -  named Flagg again."

Roland looked back the way they had come, sleepwalking in their fine red shoes. "The Kansas we came through was his Kansas, and the plague that emptied out that land was his plague. At least, that's what I believe."

"But it might not stay there," Susannah said.

"It could travel," Eddie said.

"To our world," Jake said.

Still looking back toward the Green Palace, Roland said: "To your world, or any other."

"Who's the Crimson King?" Susannah asked abruptly.

"Susannah, I know not."

They were quiet, then, watching Roland look toward the palace where he had faced a false wizard and a true memory and somehow opened the door back to his own world by so doing.

Our world, Eddie thought, slipping an arm around Susannah. Our world now. If we go back to America, and perhaps we'll have to before this is over, we 'II arrive as strangers in a strange land, no matter what when it is. This is our world now. The world of the Beams, and the Guardians, and the Dark Tower.

"We got some daylight left," he said to Roland, and put a hesitant hand on the gunslinger's shoulder. When Roland immediately covered it with his own hand, Eddie smiled. "You want to use it, or what?"

"Yes," Roland said. "Let's use it." He bent and shouldered his pack.

"What about the shoes?" Susannah asked, looking doubtfully at the little red pile they had made.

"Leave them here," Eddie said. "They've served their purpose. Into your wheelchair, girl." He put his arms around her and helped her in.

"All God's children have shoes," Roland mused. "Isn't that what you said, Susannah?"

"Well," she said, settling herself, "the correct dialect adds a soupcon of flavor, but you've got the essence, honey, yes."

"Then we'll undoubtedly find more shoes as God wills it," Roland said.

Jake was looking into his knapsack, taking inventory of the foodstuffs that had been added by some unknown hand. He held up a chicken leg in a Baggie, looked at it, then looked at Eddie. "Who do you suppose packed this stuff?"

Eddie raised his eyebrows, as if to ask Jake how he could possibly be so stupid. "The Keebler Elves," he said. "Who else? Come on, let's go."

5

They clustered near the grove, five wanderers on the face of an empty land. Ahead of them, running across the plain, was a line in the grass which exactly matched the lane of rushing clouds in the sky. This line was nothing so obvious as a path . . . but to the awakened eye, the way that everything bent in the same direction was as clear as a painted stripe.

The Path of the Beam. Somewhere ahead, where this Beam intersected all the others, stood the Dark Tower. Eddie thought that, if the wind were right, he would almost be able to smell its sullen stone.

And roses - the dusky scent of roses.

He took Susannah's hand as she sat in her chair; Susannah took Roland's; Roland took Jake's. Oy stood two paces before them, head up, scenting the autumn air that combed his fur with unseen fingers, his gold-ringed eyes wide.

"We are ka-tet," Eddie said. It crossed his mind to wonder at how much he'd changed; how he had become a stranger, even to himself. "We are one from many."

"Ka-tet, " Susannah said. "We are one from many."

"One from many," Jake said. "Come on, let's go."

Bird and bear and hare and fish, Eddie thought.

With Oy in the lead, they once more set out for the Dark Tower, walking along the Path of the Beam.

AFTERWORD



The scene in which Roland bests his old teacher, Cort, and goes off to roister in the less savory section of Gilead was written in the spring of 1970. The one in which Roland's father shows up the following morning was written in the summer of 1996. Although only sixteen hours pass between the two occurrences in the world of the story, twenty-six years had passed in the life of the story's teller. Yet the moment finally came, and I found myself confronting myself across a whore's bed - the unemployed schoolboy with the long black hair and beard on one side, the successful popular novelist ("America's shlockmeister," as I am affectionately known by my legions of admiring critics) on the other.

I mention this only because it sums up the essential weirdness of the Dark Tower experience for me. I have written enough novels and short stories to fill a solar system of the imagination, but Roland's story is my Jupiter - a planet that dwarfs all the others (at least from my own perspective), a place of strange atmosphere, crazy landscape, and savage gravitational pull. Dwarfs the others, did I say? I think there's more to it than that, actually. I am coming to understand that Roland's world (or worlds) actually contains all the others of my making; there is a place in Mid-World for Randall Flagg, Ralph Roberts, the wandering boys from The Eyes of the Dragon, even Father Callahan, the damned priest from 'Salem 's Lot, who rode out of New England on a Greyhound Bus and wound up dwelling on the border of a terrible Mid-World land called Thunderclap. This seems to be where they all finish up, and why not? Mid-World was here first, before all of them, dreaming under the blue gaze of Roland's bombardier eyes.

This book has been too long in coming - a good many readers who enjoy Roland's adventures have all but howled in frustration - and for that I apologize. The reason is best summed up by Susannah's thought as she prepares to tell Blaine the first riddle of their contest: It is hard to begin. There's nothing in these pages that I agree with more.

I knew that Wizard and Glass meant doubling back to Roland's young days, and to his first love affair, and I was scared to death of that story. Suspense is relatively easy, at least for me; love is hard. Consequently I dallied, I temporized, I procrastinated, and the book remained unwritten.

I began at last, working in motel rooms on my Macintosh PowerBook, while driving cross-country from Colorado to Maine after finishing my work on the miniseries version of The Shining. It occurred to me as I drove north through the deserted miles of western Nebraska (where I also happened to be, driving back from Colorado, when I got the idea for a story called "Children of the Corn"), that if I didn't start soon, I would never write the book at all.

But I no longer know the truth of romantic love, I told myself. I know about marriage, and mature love, but forty-eight has a way of forgetting the heat and passion of seventeen.

I will help you with that part, came the reply. I didn't know who that voice belonged to on that day outside Thetford, Nebraska, but I do now, because I have looked into his eyes across a whore's bed in a land that exists very clearly in my imagination. Roland's love for Susan Delgado (and hers for him) is what was told to me by the boy who began this story. If it's right, thank him. If it's wrong, blame whatever got lost in the translation.

Also thank my friend Chuck Verrill, who edited the book and hung with me every step of the way. His encouragement and help were invaluable, as was the encouragement of Elaine Koster, who has published all of these cowboy romances in paperback.

Most thanks of all go to my wife, who supports me in this madness as best she can and helped me on this book in a way she doesn't even know. Once, in a dark time, she gave me a funny little rubber figure that made me smile. It's Rocket J. Squirrel, wearing his blue aviator's hat and with his arms bravely outstretched. I put that figure on my manuscript as it grew (and grew ... and grew), hoping some of the love that came with it would kind of fertilize the work. It must have worked, at least to a degree; the book is here, after all. I don't know if it's good or bad - I lost all sense of perspective around page four hundred - but it's here. That alone seems like a miracle. And I have started to believe I might actually live to complete this cycle of stories. (Knock on wood.)

There are three more to be told, I think, two set chiefly in Mid-World and one almost entirely in our world - that's the one dealing with the vacant lot on the comer of Second and Forty-sixth, and the rose that grows there. That rose, I must tell you, is in terrible danger.

In the end; Roland's ka-tet will come to the nightscape which is Thunderclap . . . and to what lies beyond it. All may not live to reach the Tower, but I believe that those who do reach it will stand and be true.

- Stephen King

Lovell, Maine, October 27, 1996

P/S: Copyright -->www_novelfreereadonline_Com

***