a ghostly boy with an old basketball lying near one transparent foot. I have to go now . . . but it was good to meet you. You seem like a nice kid, and I’m not surprised he loves you. Remember, there’s danger, though. Be careful . . . and be quick.
Wait! Jake yelled, and ran across the basketball court toward the disappearing boy. One of his feet struck a shattered robot that looked like a child’s toy tractor. He stumbled and fell to his knees, shredding his pants. He ignored the thin burn of pain. Wait! You have to tell me what all this is about! You have to tell me why these things are happening to me!
Because of the Beam, the boy who was now only a pair of floating eyes replied, and because of the Tower. In the end, all things, even the Beams, serve the Dark Tower. Did you think you would be any different?
Jake flailed and stumbled to his feet. Will I find him? Will I find the gunslinger?
I don’t know, the boy answered. His voice now seemed to come from a million miles away. I only know you must try. About that you have no choice.
The boy was gone. The basketball court in the woods was empty. The only sound was that faint rumble of machinery, and Jake didn’t like it. There was something wrong with that sound, and he thought that what was wrong with the machinery was affecting the rose, or vice-versa. It was all hooked together somehow.
He picked up the old, scuffed-up basketball and shot. It went neatly through the hoop . . . and disappeared.
A river, the strange boy’s voice sighed. It was like a puff of breeze. It came from nowhere and everywhere. The answer is a river.
4
JAKE WOKE IN THE first milky light of dawn, looking up at the ceiling of his room. He was thinking of the guy in The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind—Aaron Deepneau, who’d been hanging around on Bleecker Street back when Bob Dylan only knew how to blow open G on his Hohner. Aaron Deepneau had given Jake a riddle.
What can run but never walks,
Has a mouth but never talks,
Has a bed but never sleeps,
Has a head but never weeps?
Now he knew the answer. A river ran; a river had a mouth; a river had a bed; a river had a head. The boy had told him the answer. The boy in the dream.
And suddenly he thought of something else Deepneau had said: That’s only half the answer. Samson’s riddle is a double, my friend.
Jake glanced at his bedside clock and saw it was twenty past six. It was time to get moving if he wanted to be out of here before his parents woke up. There would be no school for him today; Jake thought that maybe, as far as he was concerned, school had been cancelled forever.
He threw back the bedclothes, swung his feet out onto the floor, and saw that there were scrapes on both knees. Fresh scrapes. He had bruised his left side yesterday when he slipped on the bricks and fell, and he had banged his head when he fainted near the rose, but nothing had happened to his knees.
“That happened in the dream,” Jake whispered, and found he wasn’t surprised at all. He began to dress swiftly.
5
IN THE BACK OF his closet, under a jumble of old laceless sneakers and a heap of Spiderman comic books, he found the packsack he had worn to grammar school. No one would be caught dead with a packsack at Piper—how too, too common, my deah—and as Jake grabbed it, he felt a wave of powerful nostalgia for those old days when life had seemed so simple.
He stuffed a clean shirt, a clean pair of jeans, some underwear and socks into it, then added Riddle-De-Dum! and Charlie the Choo-Choo. He had put the key on his desk before foraging in the closet for his old pack, and the voices came back at once, but they were distant and muted. Besides, he felt sure he could make them go away completely by holding the key again, and that eased his mind.
Okay, he thought, looking into the pack. Even with the books added, there was plenty of room left. What else?
For a moment he thought there was nothing else . . . and then he knew.
6
HIS FATHER’S STUDY SMELLED of cigarettes and ambition.
It was dominated by a huge teakwood desk. Across the room,