What he said was true. The gunslinger’s initial feelings for Eddie had wavered between caution and contempt for what Roland saw as his weakness of character. Respect had come more slowly. It had begun in Balazar’s office, when Eddie had fought naked. Very few men Roland had known could have done that. It had grown with his realization of how much Eddie was like Cuthbert. Then, on the mono, Eddie had acted with a kind of desperate creativity that Roland could admire but never equal. Eddie Dean was possessed of Cuthbert Allgood’s always puzzling and sometimes annoying sense of the ridiculous; he was also possessed of Alain Johns’s deep flashes of intuition. Yet in the end, Eddie was like neither of Roland’s old friends. He was sometimes weak and self-centered, but possessed of deep reservoirs of courage and courage’s good sister, what Eddie himself sometimes called “heart.”

But it was his intuition Roland wanted to tap now.

“All right, then,” Eddie said. “Don’t stop me. Don’t ask questions. Just listen.”

Roland nodded. And hoped Susannah and Jake wouldn’t come back, at least not just yet.

“I look in the sky—up there where the clouds are breaking right this minute—and I see the number nineteen written in blue.”

Roland looked up. And yes, it was there. He saw it, too. But he also saw a cloud like a turtle, and another hole in the thinning dreck that looked like a gunnywagon.

“I look in the trees and see nineteen. Into the fire, see nineteen. Names make nineteen, like Overholser’s and Callahan’s. But that’s just what I can say, what I can see, what I can get hold of.” Eddie was speaking with desperate speed, looking directly into Roland’s eyes. “Here’s another thing. It has to do with todash. I know you guys sometimes think everything reminds me of getting high, and maybe that’s right, but Roland, going todash is like being stoned.”

Eddie always spoke to him of these things as if Roland had never put anything stronger than graf into his brain and body in all his long life, and that was far from the truth. He might remind Eddie of this at another time, but not now.

“Just being here in your world is like going todash. Because…ah, man, this is hard…Roland, everything here is real, but it’s not.”

Roland thought of reminding Eddie this wasn’t his world, not anymore—for him the city of Lud had been the end of Mid-World and the beginning of all the mysteries that lay beyond—but again kept his mouth closed.