“I suppose not,” Roland said. “If it’s a group that crosses—two, a trio, perhaps all of us—we should join hands when the chimes start.”

“Andy said we had to concentrate on each other,” Eddie said. “To keep from getting lost.”

Susannah surprised them all by starting to sing. Only to Roland, it sounded more like a galley-chorus—a thing made to be shouted out verse by verse—than an actual song. Yet even without a real tune to carry, her voice was melodious enough: “Children, when ye hear the music of the clarinet…Children, when ye hear the music of the flute! Children, when ye hear the music of the tam-bou-rine…Ye must bow down and wor-ship the iyyy-DOL!”

“What is it?”

“A field-chant,” she said. “The sort of thing my grandparents and great-grandparents might have sung while they were picking ole massa’s cotton. But times change.” She smiled. “I first heard it in a Greenwich Village coffee-house, back in 1962. And the man who sang it was a white blues-shouter named Dave Van Ronk.”

“I bet Aaron Deepneau was there, too,” Jake breathed. “Hell, I bet he was sitting at the next damn table .”

Susannah turned to him, surprised and considering. “Why do you say so, sugar?”

Eddie said, “Because he overheard Calvin Tower saying this guy Deepneau had been hanging around the Village since…what’d he say, Jake?”

“Not the Village, Bleecker Street,” Jake said, laughing a little. “Mr. Tower said Mr. Deepneau was hanging around Bleecker Street back before Bob Dylan knew how to blow more than open G on his Hohner. That must be a harmonica.”

“It is,” Eddie said, “and while I might not bet the farm on what Jake’s saying, I’d go a lot more than pocket-change. Sure, Deepneau was there. It wouldn’t even surprise me to find out that Jack Andolini was tending the bar. Because that’s just how things work in the Land of Nineteen.”

“In any case,” Roland said, “those of us who cross should stay together. And I mean within a hand’s reach, all the time.”

“I don’t think I’ll be there,” Jake said.

“Why do you say so, Jake?” the gunslinger asked, surprised.

“Because I’ll never fall asleep,” Jake said. “I’m too excited.”

But eventually they all slept.

Four

He knows it’s a dream, something brought on by no more than Slightman’s chance remark, and yet he can’t escape it.Always look for the back door, Cort used to tell them, but if there’s a back door in this dream, Roland cannot find it. I heard of Jericho Hill and such blood-and-thunder tales of pretend, that was what Eisenhart’s foreman had said, only Jericho Hill had seemed real enough to Roland. Why would it not? He had been there. It had been the end of them. The end of a whole world.