Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,41

world a year later.

He held it for a long time, fingers slipping back and forth across the date, as if the passage of his finger would somehow cause it to change. Then he looked up at them and shook his head. “No. I can’t explain this town, this paper, or the dead people in that station, but I can set you straight about one thing—everything was fine in New York when I left. Wasn’t it, Roland?”

The gunslinger looked a trifle sour. “Nothing in your city seemed very fine to me, but the people who lived there did not seem to be survivors of such a plague as this, no.”

“There was something called Legionnaires’ disease,” Eddie said. “And AIDS, of course—”

“That’s the sex one, right?” Susannah asked. “Transmitted by fruits and drug addicts?”

“Yes, but calling gays fruits isn’t the done thing in my when,” Eddie said. He tried a smile, but it felt stiff and unnatural on his face and he put it away again.

“So this . . . this never happened,” Jake said, tentatively touching the face of Christ on the back page of the paper.

“But it did,” Roland said. “It happened in June-sowing of the year one thousand nine hundred and eighty-six. And here we are, in the aftermath of that plague. If Eddie’s right about the length of time that has gone by, the plague of this ‘superflu’ was this past June-sowing. We’re in Topeka, Kansas, in the Reap of eighty-six. That’s the when of it. As to the where, all we know is that it’s not Eddie’s. It might be yours, Susannah, or yours, Jake, because you left your world before this arrived.” He tapped the date on the paper, then looked at Jake. “You said something to me once. I doubt if you remember, but I do; it’s one of the most important things anyone has ever said to me: ‘Go, then, there are other worlds than these.’ ”

“More riddles,” Eddie said, scowling.

“Is it not a fact that Jake Chambers died once and now stands before us, alive and well? Or do you doubt my story of his death under the mountains? That you have doubted my honesty from time to time is something I know. And I suppose you have your reasons.”

Eddie thought it over, then shook his head. “You lie when it suits your purpose, but I think that when you told us about Jake, you were too fucked up to manage anything but the truth.”

Roland was startled to find himself hurt by what Eddie had said—You lie when it suits your purpose—but he went on. After all, it was essentially true.

“We went back to time’s pool,” the gunslinger said, “and pulled him out before he could drown.”

“You pulled him out,” Eddie corrected.

“You helped, though,” Roland said, “if only by keeping me alive, you helped, but let that go for now. It’s beside the point. What’s more to it is that there are many possible worlds, and an infinity of doors leading into them. This is one of those worlds; the thinny we can hear is one of those doors . . . only one much bigger than the ones we found on the beach.”

“How big?” Eddie asked. “As big as a warehouse loading door, or as big as the warehouse?”

Roland shook his head and raised his hands palms to the sky—who knows?

“This thinny,” Susannah said. “We’re not just near it, are we? We came through it. That’s how we got here, to this version of Topeka.”

“We may have,” Roland admitted. “Did any of you feel something strange? A sensation of vertigo, or transient nausea?”

They shook their heads. Oy, who had been watching Jake closely, also shook his head this time.

“No,” Roland said, as if he had expected this. “But we were concentrating on the riddling—”

“Concentrating on not getting killed,” Eddie grunted.

“Yes. So perhaps we passed through without being aware. In any case, thinnies aren’t natural—they are sores on the skin of existence, able to exist because things are going wrong. Things in all worlds.”

“Because things are wrong at the Dark Tower,” Eddie said.

Roland nodded. “And even if this place—this when, this where—is not the ka of your world now, it might become that ka. This plague—or others even worse—could spread. Just as the thinnies will continue to spread, growing in size and number. I’ve seen perhaps half a dozen in my years of searching for the Tower, and heard maybe two dozen more. The first . . . the first one I ever