“I think I’ll skip the Percs,” Eddie said. “We’re going to Bridgton—”

Roland looked at him, surprised. “We are?”

“We are. I can pick up some aspirin on the way.”

“Astin,” Roland said, with unmistakable affection.

“Are you sure?” Deepneau asked.

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “I am.” He paused, then added: “Say sorry.”

THIRTEEN

Five minutes later the four of them stood in the needle-carpeted dooryard, listening to sirens and looking at the smoke, which had now begun to thin. Eddie was bouncing the keys to John Cullum’s Ford impatiently in one hand. Roland had asked him twice if this trip to Bridgton was necessary, and Eddie had told him twice that he was almost sure it was. The second time he’d added (almost hopefully) that as dinh, Roland could overrule him, if he wished.

“No. If you think we should go see this tale-spinner, we will. I only wish you knew why.”

“I think that when we get there, we’ll both understand.”

Roland nodded, but still looked dissatisfied. “I know you’re as anxious as I am to leave this world—this level of the Tower. For you to want to go against that, your intuition must be strong.”

It was, but there was something else, as well: he’d heard from Susannah again, the message once more coming from her version of the Dogan. She was a prisoner in her own body—at least Eddie thought that was what she was trying to tell him—but she was in the year 1999 and she was all right.

This had happened while Roland was thanking Tower and Deepneau for their help. Eddie was in the bathroom. He’d gone in to take a leak, but suddenly forgot all about that and simply sat on the toilet’s closed lid, head bent, eyes closed. Trying to send a message back to her. Trying to tell her to slow Mia down if she possibly could. He’d gotten the sense of daylight from her—New York in the afternoon—and that was bad. Jake and Callahan had gone through the Unfound Door into New York at night; this Eddie had seen with his own eyes. They might be able to help her, but only if she could slow Mia down.

Burn up the day, he sent to Susannah … or tried to. You have to burn up the day before she takes you to wherever she’s supposed to have the kid. Do you hear me? Suze, do you hear me? Answer if you hear me! Jake and Pere Callahan are coming and you have to hold on!

June, a sighing voice had replied. June of 1999. The girls walk around with their bellies showing and—

Then came Roland’s knock on the bathroom door, and Roland’s voice asking if Eddie was ready to roll. Before the day was over they’d make their way to Turtleback Lane in the town of Lovell—a place where walk-ins were common, according to John Cullum, and reality was apt to be correspondingly thin—but first they were going to make a trip to Bridgton, and hopefully meet the man who seemed to have created Donald Callahan and the town of ’Salem’s Lot.