The trouble was, he didn’t know it. He had come face to face with something Susannah had found out for herself after shooting the bear: he could talk about how he didn’t want to be a gunslinger, how he didn’t want to be tramping around this crazy world where the three of them seemed to be the only human life, that what he really wanted more than anything else was to be standing on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, popping his fingers, munching a chili-dog, and listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival blast out of his Walkman earphones as he watched the girls go by, those ultimately sexy New York girls with their pouty go-to-hell mouths and their long legs in short skirts. He could talk about those things until he was blue in the face, but his heart knew other things. It knew that he had enjoyed blowing the electronic menagerie back to glory, at least while the game was on and Roland’s gun was his own private hand-held thunderstorm. He had enjoyed kicking the robot rat, even though it had hurt his foot and even though he had been scared shitless. In some weird way, that part—the being scared part— actually seemed to add to the enjoyment.

All that was bad enough, but his heart knew something even worse: that if a door leading back to New York appeared in front of him right now, he might not walk through it. Not, at least, until he had seen the Dark Tower for himself. He was beginning to believe that Roland’s illness was a communicable disease.

As he wrestled Susannah’s chair through the tangle of junk-alders, cursing the branches that whipped at his face and tried to poke his eyes out, Eddie found himself able to admit at least some of these things, and the admission cooled his blood a little. I want to see if it looks the way it did in my dream, he thought. To see something like that... that would be really fantastic.

And another voice spoke up inside. I’ll bet his other friends—the ones with the names that sound like they came straight from the Round Table in King Arthur’s court—I’ll bet they felt the same way, Eddie. And they’re all dead. Every one of them.

He recognized that voice, like it or not. It belonged to Henry, and that made it a hard voice not to hear.

28

ROLAND, WITH SUSANNAH BALANCED on his right hip, was standing in front of the metal box that looked like a subway entrance closed for the night. Eddie left the wheelchair at the edge of the clearing and walked over. As he did, the steady humming noise and the vibration under his feet became louder. The machinery making the noise, he realized, was either inside the box or under it. It seemed that he heard it not with his ears but somewhere deep inside his head, and in the hollows of his gut.

“So this is one of the twelve portals. Where does it go, Roland? Disney World?”