Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,335

. 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 I-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 Cöos, 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