“Yes. So perhaps we passed through without being aware. In any case, thinnies aren’t natural—they are sores on the skin of existence, able to exist because things are going wrong. Things in all worlds.”

“Because things are wrong at the Dark Tower,” Eddie said.

Roland nodded. “And even if this place—this when, this where—is not the ka of your world now, it might become that ka. This plague—or others even worse—could spread. Just as the thinnies will continue to spread, growing in size and number. I’ve seen perhaps half a dozen in my years of searching for the Tower, and heard maybe two dozen more. The first... the first one I ever saw was when I was still very young. Near a town called Hambry.” He rubbed his hand up his cheek again, and was not surprised to find sweat amid the bristles.

Love me, Roland. If you love me, then love me.

“Whatever happened to us, it bumped us out of your world, Roland,” Jake said. “We’ve fallen off the Beam. Look.” He pointed at the sky. The clouds were moving slowly above them, but no longer in the direction Blaine’s smashed snout was pointing. Southeast was still southeast, but the signs of the Beam which they had grown so used to following were gone.

“Does it matter?” Eddie asked. “I mean... the Beam may be gone, but the Tower exists in all worlds, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Roland said, “but it may not be accessible from all worlds.”

The year before beginning his wonderful and fulfilling career as a heroin addict, Eddie had done a brief and not-very-successful turn as a bicycle messenger. Now he remembered certain office-building elevators he’d been in while making deliveries, buildings with banks or investment firms in them, mostly. There were some floors where you couldn’t stop the car and get off unless you had a special card to swipe through the slot below the numbers. When the elevator came to those locked-off floors, the number in the window was replaced by an X.

“I think,” Roland said, “we need to find the Beam again.”

“I’m convinced,” Eddie said. “Come on, let’s get going.” He took a couple of steps, then turned back to Roland with one eyebrow raised. “Where?”

“The way we were going,” Roland said, as if that should have been obvious, and walked past Eddie in his dusty, broken boots, headed for the park across the way.

Chapter V

TURNPIKIN’

1

Roland walked to the end of the platform, kicking bits of pink metal out of his way as he went. At the stairs, he paused and looked back at them somberly. “More dead. Be ready.”

“They’re not... um... runny, are they?” Jake asked.

Roland frowned, then his face cleared as he understood what Jake meant. “No. Not runny. Dry.”