Eddie looked uncertainly at Roland, who nodded. Eddie glanced at Susannah again, his eyes full of dark pain and darker fear, and then deliberately turned his back on both of them and fell to his knees again. He reached forward with the sharpened stick which had become a makeshift pencil, ignoring the cold rain falling on his arms and the back of his neck. The stick began to move, making lines and angles, creating a shape Roland knew at once.

It was a door.

26

JAKE REACHED OUT, PUT his hands on the splintery gate, and pushed. It swung slowly open on screaming, rust-clotted hinges. Ahead of him was an uneven brick path. Beyond the path was the porch. Beyond the porch was the door. It had been boarded shut.

He walked slowly toward the house, heart telegraphing fast dots and dashes in his throat. Weeds had grown up between the buckled bricks. He could hear them rustling against his bluejeans. All his senses seemed to have been turned up two notches. You’re not really going in there, are you? a panic-stricken voice in his head asked.

And the answer that occurred to him seemed both totally nuts and perfectly reasonable: All things serve the Beam.

The sign on the lawn read

ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING UNDER PENALTY OF LAW!

The yellowing, rust-stained square of paper nailed to one of the boards crisscrossing the front door was more succinct:

BY ORDER OF NYC HOUSING AUTHORITY THIS PROPERTY CONDEMNED

Jake paused at the foot of the steps, looking up at the door. He had heard voices in the vacant lot and now he could hear them again... but this was a choir of the damned, a babble of insane threats and equally insane promises. Yet he thought it was all one voice. The voice of the house; the voice of some monstrous doorkeeper, roused from its long unpeaceful sleep.

He thought briefly of his father’s Ruger, even considered pulling it out of his pack, but what good would it do? Behind him, traffic passed back and forth on Rhinehold Street and a woman was yelling for her daughter to stop holding hands with that boy and bring in the wash, but here was another world, one ruled by some bleak being over whom guns could have no power.

Be true, Jake—stand.

“Okay,” he said in a low, shaky voice. “Okay, I’ll try. But you better not drop me again.”

Slowly, he began to mount the porch steps.

27

THE BOARDS WHICH BARRED the door were old and rotten, the nails rusty. Jake grabbed hold of the top set at the point where they crossed each other and yanked. They came free with a squall that was the gate all over again. He tossed them over the porch rail and into an ancient flowerbed where only witchgrass and dogweed grew. He bent, grasped the lower crossing... and paused for a moment.

A hollow sound came through the door; the sound of some animal slobbering hungrily from deep inside a concrete pipe. Jake felt a sick sheen of sweat begin to break out on his cheeks and forehead. He was so frightened that he no longer felt precisely real; he seemed to have become a character in someone else’s bad dream.