“I guess I am.”

“You, Jake?”

Instead of answering with words, Jake picked up the other Oxford (Roland had no doubt that all the shoes, including Oy’s, would fit perfectly) and clapped them briskly together three times. It meant nothing to Roland, but both Eddie and Susannah reacted violently, looking around, looking especially at the sky, as if expecting a storm born out of this bright autumn sunshine. They ended up looking at the glass palace again... and then at each other, in that knowing, round-eyed way that made Roland feel like shaking them both until their teeth rattled. Yet he waited. Sometimes that was all a man could do.

“After you killed Jonas, you looked into the ball,” Eddie said, turning to him.

“Yes.”

“Travelled in the ball.”

“Yes, but I don’t want to talk about that again now; it has nothing to do with these—”

“I think it does,” Eddie said. “You flew inside a pink storm. Inside a pink gale, you could say. Gale is a word you might use for a storm, isn’t it? Especially if you were making up a riddle.”

“Sure,” Jake said. He sounded dreamy, almost like a boy who talks in his sleep. “When does Dorothy fly over the Wizard’s Rainbow? When she’s a Gale.”

“We ain’t in Kansas anymore, sugar,” Susannah said, and then voiced a strange, humorless bark which Roland supposed was a species of laughter. “May look a little like it, but Kansas was never... you know, this thin.”

“I don’t understand you,” Roland said. But he felt cold, and his heart was beating too fast. There were thinnies everywhere now, hadn’t he told them that? Worlds melting into one another as the forces of the Tower weakened? As the day when the rose would be plowed under drew nearer?

“You saw things as you flew,” Eddie said. “Before you got to the dark land, the one you called Thunderclap, you saw things. The piano-player, Sheb. Who turned up again later in your life, didn’t he?”

“Yes, in Tull.”

“And the dweller with the red hair?”

“Him, too. He had a bird named Zoltan. But when we met, he and I, we said the normal. ‘Life for you, life for your crop,’ that sort of thing. I thought I heard the same when he flew by me in the pink storm, but he really said something else.” He glanced at Susannah. “I saw your wheelchair, too. The old one.”

“And you saw the witch.”

“Yes. I—”

In a creaky chortle that reminded Roland unnervingly of Rhea, Jake Chambers cried: “I’ll get you, my pretty! And your little dog, too!”

Roland stared at him, trying not to gape.

“Only in the movie, the witch wasn’t riding a broom,” Jake said. “She was on her bike, the one with the basket on the back.”