He pressed his face into the warm hollow of Susannah’s neck and closed his eyes.
Not long after, Roland ceased his babbling. Eddie raised his head and looked over. The gunslinger appeared to be sleeping naturally again. Eddie looked at Susannah and saw that she had also gone to sleep. He lay down beside her, gently kissed the swell of her breast, and closed his own eyes.
Not you, buddy; you’re gonna be awake a long, long time.
But they had been on the move for two days and Eddie was bone-tired. He drifted off . . . drifted down.
Back to the dream, he thought as he went. I want to go back to Second Avenue . . . back to Tom and Gerry’s. That’s what I want.
The dream did not return that night, however.
30
THEY ATE A QUICK breakfast as the sun came up, repacked and redistributed the gear, and then returned to the wedge-shaped clearing. It didn’t look quite so spooky in the clear light of morning, but all three of them were still at pains to keep well away from the metal box with its warning slashes of black and yellow. If Roland had any recollection of the bad dreams which had haunted him in the night, he gave no sign. He had gone about the morning chores as he always did, in thoughtful, stolid silence.
“How do you plan to keep to a straight-line course from here?” Susannah asked the gunslinger.
“If the legends are right, that should be no problem. Do you remember when you asked about magnetism?”
She nodded.
He rummaged deep into his purse and at last emerged with a small square of old, supple leather. Threaded through it was a long silver needle.
“A compass!” Eddie said. “You really are an Eagle Scout!”
Roland shook his head. “Not a compass. I know what they are, of course, but these days I keep my directions by the sun and stars, and even now they serve me quite well.”
“Even now?” Susannah asked, a trifle uneasily.
He nodded. “The directions of the world are also in drift.”
“Christ,” Eddie said. He tried to imagine a world where true north was slipping slyly off to the east or west and gave up almost at once. It made him feel a little ill, the way looking down from the top of a high building had always made him feel a little ill.
“This is just a needle, but it is steel and it should serve our purpose as well as a compass. The Beam is our course now, and the needle will show it.” He rummaged in his purse again and came out with a poorly made pottery cup. A crack ran down one side. Roland had mended this artifact, which he had found at the old campsite, with pine-gum. Now he went to the stream, dipped the cup into it, and brought it back to where Susannah sat in her wheelchair. He put the cup down carefully on the wheelchair’s arm, and when the surface of the water inside was calm, he dropped the needle in. It sank to the bottom and rested there.
“Wow!” Eddie said. “Great! I’d fall at your feet in wonder, Roland, but I don’t want to spoil the crease in my pants.”
“I’m not finished. Hold the cup steady, Susannah.”
She did, and Roland pushed her slowly across the clearing. When she was about twelve feet in front of the door, he turned the chair carefully so she was facing away from it.
“Eddie!” she cried. “Look at this!”
He bent over the pottery cup, marginally aware that water was already oozing through Roland’s makeshift seal. The needle was rising slowly to the surface. It reached it and bobbed there as serenely as a cork would have done. Its direction lay in a straight line from the portal behind them and into the old, tangled forest ahead. “Holy shit—a floating needle. Now I really have seen everything.”
“Hold the cup, Susannah.”
She held it steady as Roland pushed the wheelchair further into the clearing, at right angles to the box. The needle lost its steady point, bobbed randomly for a moment, then sank to the bottom of the cup again. When Roland pulled the chair backward to its former spot, it rose once more and pointed the way.
“If we had iron filings and a sheet of paper,” the gunslinger said, “we could scatter the filings on the paper’s surface and watch them draw together into a line which would point that same course.”