Roland glanced west. “The sun’s going down. Read the story before we lose the light, Jake.”

Jake turned to the first page, showed them the picture of Engineer Bob in Charlie’s cab, and began: “‘Bob Brooks was an engineer for The Mid-World Railway Company, on the St. Louis to Topeka run...’”

24

“‘... AND EVERY NOW AND then the children hear him singing his old song in his soft, gruff voice,’” Jake finished. He showed them the last picture—the happy children who might actually have been screaming— and then closed the book. The sun had gone down; the sky was purple.

“Well, it’s not a perfect fit,” Eddie said, “more like a dream where the water sometimes runs uphill—but it fits well enough to scare me silly. This is Mid-World—Charlie’s territory. Only his name over here isn’t Charlie at all. Over here it’s Blaine the Mono.”

Roland was looking at Jake. “What do you think?” he asked. “Should we go around the city? Stay away from this train?”

Jake thought it over, head down, hands working distractedly through Oy’s thick, silky fur. “I’d like to,” he said at last, “but if I’ve got this stuff about ka right, I don’t think we’re supposed to.”

Roland nodded. “If it’s ka, questions of what we’re supposed to or not supposed to do aren’t even in it; if we tried to go around, we’d find circumstances forcing us back. In such cases it’s better to give in to the inevitable promptly instead of putting it off. What do you think, Eddie?”

Eddie thought as long and as carefully as Jake had done. He didn’t want anything to do with a talking train that ran by itself, and whether you called it Charlie the Choo-Choo or Blaine the Mono, everything Jake had told them and read them suggested that it might be a very nasty piece of work. But they had a tremendous distance to cross, and somewhere, at the end of it, was the thing they had come to find. And with that thought, Eddie was amazed to discover he knew exactly what he thought, and what he wanted. He raised his head and for almost the first time since he had come to this world, he fixed Roland’s faded blue eyes firmly with his hazel ones.

“I want to stand in that field of roses, and I want to see the Tower that stands there. I don’t know what comes next. Mourners please omit flowers, probably, and for all of us. But I don’t care. I want to stand there. I guess I don’t care if Blaine’s the devil and the train runs through hell itself on the way to the Tower. I vote we go.”

Roland nodded and turned to Susannah.

“Well, I didn’t have any dreams about the Dark Tower,” she said, “so I can deal with the question on that level—the level of desire, I suppose you’d say. But I’ve come to believe in ka, and I’m not so numb that I can’t feel it when someone starts rapping on my head with his knuckles and saying, ‘That way, idiot.’ What about you, Roland? What do you think?”