“Takuro spirits,” Eddie murmured, mostly to himself. Then: “Look, let’s just take em along. If we’re supposed to put em on, I think we’ll know when the time comes. In the meantime, I think we ought to beware of bumhugs bearing gifts.”

It cracked Jake up, as Eddie had known it would; sometimes a word or an image got into your funnybone like a virus and just lived there awhile. Tomorrow the word “bumhug” might mean nothing to the kid; for the rest of today, however, he was going to laugh every time he heard it. Eddie intended to use it a lot, especially when ole Jake wasn’t expecting it.

They picked up the red shoes which had been left for them in the eastbound lanes (Jake took Oy’s) and moved on again toward the shimmering glass castle.

Oz, Roland thought. He searched his memory, but he didn’t think it was a name he had ever heard before, or a word of the High Speech that had come in disguise, as char had come disguised as Charlie. Yet it had a sound that belonged in this business; a sound more of his world than of Jake’s, Susannah’s, and Eddie’s, from whence the tale had come.

3

Jake kept expecting the Green Palace to begin looking normal as they drew closer to it, the way the attractions in Disney World began to look normal as you drew close to them—not ordinary, necessarily, but normal, things which were as much a part of the world as the corner bus stop or mailbox or park bench, stuff you could touch, stuff you could write FUCK PIPER on, if you took a notion.

But that didn’t happen, wasn’t going to happen, and as they neared the Green Palace, Jake realized something else: it was the most beautiful, radiant thing he had ever seen in his life. Not trusting it—and he did not—didn’t change the fact. It was like a drawing in a fairy-tale book, one so good it had become real, somehow. And, like the thinny, it hummed... except that this sound was far fainter, and not unpleasant.

Pale green walls rose to battlements that jutted and towers that soared, seeming almost to touch the clouds floating over the Kansas plains. These towers were topped with needles of a darker, emerald green; it was from these that the red pennants flickered. Upon each pennant the symbol of the open eye

had been traced in yellow.

It’s the mark of the Crimson King, Jake thought. It’s really his sigul, not John Farson’s. He didn’t know how he knew this (how could he, when Alabama’s Crimson Tide was the only Crimson anything he knew?), but he did.