Jake sees something else, too: the boy gunslinger is wearing the red cowboy boots. He doesn’t know it, though. Because this isn’t really happening.

Yet somehow it is. They are inside the wizard’s glass, they are inside the pink storm (those pink halos revolving around the light fixtures remind Jake of The Falls of the Hounds, and the moonbows revolving in the mist), and this is happening all over again.

“Roland!” Eddie calls from where he and Susannah stand by the tapestry. Susannah gasps and squeezes his shoulder, wanting him to be silent, but Eddie ignores her. “No, Roland! Don’t! Bad idea!”

“No! Olan!” Oy yaps.

Roland ignores both of them, and he passes by Jake a hand’s breadth away without seeing him. For Roland, they are not here; red boots or no red boots, this ka-tet is far in his future.

He stops at a door near the end of the corridor, hesitates, then raises his fist and knocks. Eddie starts down the corridor toward him, still holding Susannah’s hand... now he looks almost as if he is dragging her.

“Come on, Jake,” says Eddie.

“No, I don’t want to.”

“It’s not about what you want, and you know it. We’re supposed to see. If we can’t stop him, we can at least do what we came here to do. Now come on!”

Heart heavy with dread, his stomach clenched in a knot, Jake comes along. As they approach Roland—the guns look enormous on his slim hips, and his unlined but already tired face somehow makes Jake feel like weeping—the gunslinger knocks again.

“She ain’t there, sugar!” Susannah shouts at him. “She ain’t there or she ain’t answering the door, and which one it is don’t matter to you! Leave it! Leave her! She ain’t worth it! Just bein your mother don’t make her worth it! Go away!”

But he doesn’t hear her, either, and he doesn’t go away. As Jake, Eddie, Susannah, and Oy gather unseen behind him, Roland tries the door to his mother’s room and finds it unlocked. He opens it, revealing a shadowy chamber decorated with silk hangings. On the floor is a rug that looks like the Persians beloved of Jake’s mother... only this rug, Jake knows, comes from the Province of Kashamin.

On the far side of the parlor, by a window which has been shuttered against the winter winds, Jake sees a low-backed chair and knows it is the one she was in on the day of Roland’s manhood test; it is where she was sitting when her son observed the love-bite on her neck.

The chair is empty now, but as the gunslinger takes another step into the room and turns to look toward the apartment’s bedroom, Jake observes a pair of shoes—black, not red—beneath the drapes flanking the shuttered window.