was going to happen or not happen in the next few seconds.
Jake had not been brought into the gunslinger’s world through any magic door; he had come through a cruder, more understandable portal: he had been born into Roland’s world by dying in his own.
He had been murdered.
More specifically, he had been pushed.
Pushed into the street; run over by a car while on his way to school, his lunch-sack in one hand and his books in the other.
Pushed by the man in black.
He’s going to do it! He’s going to do it right now! That’s to be my punishment for murdering him in my world—to see him murdered in this one before I can stop it!
But the rejection of brutish destiny had been the gunslinger’s work all his life—it had been his ka, if you pleased—and so he came forward without even thinking, acting with reflexes so deep they had nearly become instincts.
And as he did a thought both horrible and ironic flashed into his mind: What if the body he had entered was itself that of the man in black? What if, as he rushed forward to save the boy, he saw his own hands reach out and push? What if this sense of control was only an illusion, and Walter’s final gleeful joke that Roland himself should murder the boy?
3
For one single moment Jack Mort lost the thin strong arrow of his concentration. On the edge of leaping forward and shoving the kid into the traffic, he felt something which his mind mistranslated just as the body may refer pain from one part of itself to another.
When the gunslinger came forward, Jack thought some sort of bug had landed on the back of his neck. Not a wasp or a bee, nothing that actually stung, but something that bit and itched. Mosquito, maybe. It was on this that he blamed his lapse in concentration at the crucial moment. He slapped at it and returned to the boy.
He thought all this happened in a bare wink; actually, seven seconds passed. He sensed neither the gunslinger’s swift advance nor his equally swift retreat, and none of the people around him (going-to-work people, most from the subway station on the next block, their faces still puffy with sleep, their half-dreaming eyes turned inward) noticed Jack’s eyes turn from their usual deep blue to a lighter blue behind the prim gold-rimmed glasses he wore. No one noticed those eyes darken to their normal cobalt color either, but when it happened and he refocused on the boy, he saw with frustrated fury as sharp as a thorn that his chance was gone. The light had changed.
He watched the boy crossing with the rest of the sheep, and then Jack himself turned back the way he had come and began shoving himself upstream against the tidal flow of pedestrians.
“Hey, mister! Watch ou—”
Some curd-faced teenaged girl he barely saw. Jack shoved her aside, hard, not looking back at her caw of anger as her own armload of schoolbooks went flying. He went walking on down Fifth Avenue and away from Forty-Third, where he had meant for the boy to die today. His head was bent, his lips pressed together so tightly he seemed to have no mouth at all but only the scar of a long-healed wound above his chin. Once clear of the bottleneck at the corner, he did not slow down but strode even more rapidly along, crossing Forty-Second, Forty-First, Fortieth. Somewhere in the middle of the next block he passed the building where the boy lived. He gave it barely a glance, although he had followed the boy from it every school-morning for the last three weeks, followed him from the building to the corner three and a half blocks further up Fifth, the corner he thought of simply as the Pushing Place.
The girl he bumped was screaming after him, but Jack Mort didn’t notice. An amateur lepidopterist would have taken no more notice of a common butterfly.
Jack was, in his way, much like an amateur lepidopterist.
By profession, he was a successful C.P.A.
Pushing was only his hobby.
4
The gunslinger returned to the back of the man’s mind and fainted there. If there was relief, it was simply that this man was not the man in black, was not Walter.
All the rest was utter horror . . . and utter realization.
Divorced of his body, his mind—his ka—was as healthy and acute as ever, but the sudden knowing struck him like a chisel-blow to the