turned in Jake’s direction. Holy crow! he thought, dismayed. What if this is his building?
It was. Jake just had time to turn around and began to scan the names beside the rank of buzzers before Eddie Dean brushed past him, so close that Jake could smell the sweat he had worked up on the basketball court. He half-sensed, half-saw the curious glance the boy tossed in his direction. Then Eddie was in the lobby and headed for the elevators with his school-pants bundled under one arm and the scuffed basketball under the other.
Jake’s heart was thudding heavily in his chest. Shadowing people was a lot harder in real life than it was in the detective novels he sometimes read. He crossed the street and stood between two apartment buildings half a block up. From here he could see both the entrance to the Dean brothers’ building and the playground. The playground was filling up now, mostly with little kids. Henry leaned against the chainlink, smoking a cigarette and trying to look full of teenage angst. Every now and then he would stick out a foot as one of the little kids bolted toward him at an all-out run, and before Eddie returned, he had succeeded in tripping three of them. The last of these went sprawling full-length, smacking his face on the concrete, and ran wailing up the street with a bloody forehead. Henry flicked his cigarette butt after him and laughed cheerfully.
Just an all-around fun guy, Jake thought.
After that, the little kids wised up and began giving him a wide berth. Henry strolled out of the playground and down the street to the apartment building Eddie had entered five minutes before. As he reached it, the door opened and Eddie came out. He had changed into a pair of jeans and a fresh T-shirt; he had also tied a green bandanna, the same one he had been wearing in Jake’s dream, around his forehead. He was waving a couple of dollar bills triumphantly. Henry snatched them, then asked Eddie something. Eddie nodded, and the two boys set off.
Keeping half a block between himself and them, Jake followed.
23
THEY STOOD IN THE high grass at the edge of the Great Road, looking at the speaking ring.
Stonehenge, Susannah thought, and shuddered. That’s what it looks like. Stonehenge.
Although the thick grass which covered the plain grew around the bases of the tall gray monoliths, the circle they enclosed was bare earth, littered here and there with white things.
“What are those?” she asked in a low voice. “Chips of stone?”
“Look again,” Roland said.
She did, and saw that they were bones. The bones of small animals, maybe. She hoped.
Eddie switched the sharpened stick to his left hand, dried the palm of his right against his shirt, and then switched it back again. He opened his mouth, but no sound came from his dry throat. He cleared it and tried again. “I think I’m supposed to go in and draw something in the dirt.”
Roland nodded. “Now?”
“Soon.” He looked into Roland’s face. “There’s something here, isn’t there? Something we can’t see.”
“It’s not here right now,” Roland said. “At least, I don’t think it is. But it will come. Our khef—our life-force—will draw it. And, of course, it will be jealous of its place. Give me my gun back, Eddie.”
Eddie unbuckled the belt and handed it over. Then he turned back to the circle of twenty-foot-high stones. Something lived in there, all right. He could smell it, a stench that made him think of damp plaster and moldering sofas and ancient mattresses rotting beneath half-liquid coats of mildew. It was familiar, that smell.
The Mansion—I smelled it there. The day I talked Henry into taking me over to see The Mansion on Rhinehold Street, in Dutch Hill.
Roland buckled his gunbelt, then bent to knot the tiedown. He looked up at Susannah as he did it. “We may need Detta Walker,” he said. “Is she around?”
“That bitch always around.” Susannah wrinkled her nose.
“Good. One of us is going to have to protect Eddie while he does what he’s supposed to do. The other is going to be so much useless baggage. This is a demon’s place. Demons are not human, but they are male and female, just the same. Sex is both their weapon and their weakness. No matter what the sex of the demon may be, it will go for Eddie. To protect its place. To keep its place from being used by an outsider. Do you understand?”