Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,38

keeping away the memories that wanted to swamp him.

“But Lud had been going to wrack and ruin for centuries,” Susannah said. “This place . . . it may or may not be Topeka, but what it really looks like to me is one of those creepy little towns on The Twilight Zone. You boys probably don’t remember that one, but—”

“Yes, I do,” Eddie and Jake said in perfect unison, then looked at each other and laughed. Eddie stuck out his hand and Jake slapped it.

“They still show the reruns,” Jake said.

“Yeah, all the time,” Eddie added. “Usually sponsored by bankruptcy lawyers who look like shorthair terriers. And you’re right. This place isn’t like Lud. Why would it be? It’s not in the same world as Lud. I don’t know where we crossed over, but—” He pointed again at the blue Interstate 70 shield, as if that proved his case beyond a shadow of a doubt.

“If it’s Topeka, where are the people?” Susannah asked.

Eddie shrugged and raised his hands—who knows?

Jake put his forehead against the glass of the center door, cupped his hands to the sides of his face, and peered in. He looked for several seconds, then saw something that made him pull back fast. “Oh-oh,” he said. “No wonder the town’s so quiet.”

Roland stepped up behind Jake and peered in over the boy’s head, cupping his own hands to reduce his reflection. The gunslinger drew two conclusions before even looking at what Jake had seen. The first was that although this was most assuredly a train station, it wasn’t really a Blaine station . . . not a cradle. The other was that the station did indeed belong to Eddie’s, Jake’s, and Susannah’s world . . . but perhaps not to their where.

It’s the thinny. We’ll have to be careful.

Two corpses were leaning together on one of the long benches that filled most of the room; but for their hanging, wrinkled faces and black hands, they might have been revellers who had fallen asleep in the station after an arduous party and missed the last train home. On the wall behind them was a board marked DEPARTURES, with the names of cities and towns and baronies marching down it in a line. DENVER, read one. WICHITA, read another. OMAHA, read a third. Roland had once known a one-eyed gambler named Omaha; he had died with a knife in his throat at a Watch Me table. He had stepped into the clearing at the end of the path with his head thrown back, and his last breath had sprayed blood all the way up to the ceiling. Hanging down from the ceiling of this room (which Roland’s stupid and laggard mind insisted on thinking of as a stage rest, as if this were a stop along some half-forgotten road like the one that had brought him to Tull) was a beautiful four-sided clock. Its hands had stopped at 4:14, and Roland supposed they would never move again. It was a sad thought . . . but this was a sad world. He could not see any other dead people, but experience suggested that where there were two dead, there were likely four more dead somewhere out of sight. Or four dozen.

“Should we go in?” Eddie asked.

“Why?” the gunslinger countered. “We have no business here; it doesn’t lie along the Path of the Beam.”

“You’d make a great tour-guide,” Eddie said sourly. “ ‘Keep up, everyone, and please don’t go wandering off into the—’ ”

Jake interrupted with a request Roland didn’t understand. “Do either of you guys have a quarter?” The boy was looking at Eddie and Susannah. Beside him was a square metal box. Written on it in blue was:

The Topeka Capital-Journal covers Kansas like no other!

Your hometown paper! Read it every day!

Eddie shook his head, amused. “Lost all my change at some point. Probably climbing a tree, just before you joined us, in an all-out effort to avoid becoming snack-food for a robot bear. Sorry.”

“Wait a minute . . . wait a minute . . .” Susannah had her purse open and was rummaging through it in a way that made Roland grin broadly in spite of all his preoccupations. It was so damned womanly, somehow. She turned over crumpled Kleenex, shook them to make sure there was nothing caught inside, fished out a compact, looked at it, dropped it back, came up with a comb, dropped that back—

She was too absorbed to look up as Roland strode past her,