“Well, I’ll do what I can for ya, already made up m’mind to that, but I got to ask you somethin now, while I got the chance.”

Eddie and Roland exchanged a brief look. Roland said, “We’ll answer if we can. Which is to say, John of East Stoneham, if we judge that the answer won’t cause you harm.”

John nodded. He seemed to gather himself. “I know you’re not ghosts, because we all saw you back at the store and I just now touched you to shake hands. I can see the shadders you cast.” He pointed at where they lay across the side of the boat. “Real as real. So my question is this: are you walk-ins?”

“Walk-ins,” Eddie said. He looked at Roland, but Roland’s face was completely blank. Eddie looked back at John Cullum, sitting in the stern of the boat and steering them toward the boathouse. “I’m sorry, but I don’t …”

“Been a lot of em around here, last few years,” John said. “Waterford, Stoneham, East Stoneham, Lovell, Sweden … even over in Bridgton and Denmark.” This last township name came out Denmaa-aaak.

He saw they were still puzzled.

“Walk-ins’re people who just appear,” he said. “Sometimes they’re dressed in old-fashioned clothes, as if they came from … ago, I guess you’d say. One was nekkid as a jay-bird, walkin right up the middle of Route 5. Junior Angstrom seen im. Last November this was. Sometimes they talk other languages. One came to Don Russert’s house over in Waterford. Sat right there in the kitchen! Donnie’s a retired history professor from Vanderbilt College and he taped the fella. Fella jabbered quite awhile, then went into the laundry room. Donnie figured he must’a taken it for the bathroom and went after him to turn him around, but the fella was already gone. No door for him to go out of, but gone he was.

“Donnie played that tape of his for just about everyone in the Vandy Languages Department (Depaaa-aatment), and wasn’t none of em recognized it. One said it must be a completely made-up language, like Esperanto. Do you sabby Esperanto, boys?”

Roland shook his head. Eddie said (cautiously), “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t really know what it i—”

“And sometimes,” John said, his voice lowering as they glided into the shadows of the boathouse, “sometimes they’re hurt. Or disfigured. Roont.”

Roland started so suddenly and so hard that the boat rocked. For a moment they were actually in danger of being tipped out. “What? What do you say? Speak again, John, for I would hear it very well.”

John apparently thought it was purely an issue of verbal comprehension, because this time he was at pains to pronounce the word more carefully. “Ruined. Like folks who’d been in a nuclear war, or a fallout zone, or something.”

“Slow mutants,” Roland said. “I think he might be talking about slow muties. Here in this town.”

Eddie nodded, thinking about the Grays and Pubes in Lud. Also thinking about a misshapen beehive and the monstrous insects which had been crawling over it.