Eddie grasped a handful of duff, scooping up fragrant needles and leaving five black marks in the shape of a hand on the forest floor. “Real,” he said. “I can feel it and smell it.” He put the handful of needles to his mouth and ran out his tongue to touch them. “I can taste it. And at the same time, it’s as unreal as a nineteen you might see in the fire, or that cloud in the sky that looks like a turtle. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I understand it very well,” Roland murmured.

“The people are real. You…Susannah…Jake…that guy Gasher who snatched Jake…Overholser and the Slightmans. But the way stuff from my world keeps showing up over here, that’s not real. It’s not sensible or logical, either, but that’s not what I mean. It’s just not real . Why do people over here sing ‘Hey Jude’? I don’t know. That cyborg bear, Shardik—where do I know that name from? Why did it remind me of rabbits? All that shit about the Wizard of Oz, Roland—all that happened to us, I have no doubt of it, but at the same time it doesn’t seem real to me. It seems like todash. Like nineteen. And what happens after the Green Palace? Why, we walk into the woods, just like Hansel and Gretel. There’s a road for us to walk on. Muffin-balls for us to pick. Civilization has ended. Everything is coming unraveled. You told us so. We saw it in Lud. Except guess what? It’s not! Booya, assholes, gotcha again!”

Eddie gave a short laugh. It sounded shrill and unhealthy. When he brushed his hair back from his forehead, he left a dark smear of forest earth on his brow.

“The joke is that, out here a billion miles from nowhere, we come upon a storybook town. Civilized. Decent. The kind of folks you feel you know. Maybe you don’t like em all—Overholser’s a little hard to swallow—but you feel you know em.”

Eddie was right about that, too, Roland thought. He hadn’t even seen Calla Bryn Sturgis yet, and already it reminded him of Mejis. In some ways that seemed perfectly reasonable—farming and ranching towns the world over bore similarities to each other—but in other ways it was disturbing. Disturbing as hell . The sombrero Slightman had been wearing, for instance. Was it possible that here, thousands of miles from Mejis, the men should wear similar hats? He supposed it might be. But was it likely that Slightman’s sombrero should remind Roland so strongly of the one worn by Miguel, the old mozo at Seafront in Mejis, all those years before? Or was that only his imagination?

As for that, Eddie says I have none,he thought.