That was what all five of them felt most strongly (for Oy felt it, too): the sense of something that was wonderfully and beautifully all right.

Roland and Eddie grasped Susannah by the elbows without so much as an exchanged glance. They lifted her bare feet off the sidewalk and carried her. At Second and Forty-seventh the traffic was against them, but Roland threw up a hand at the oncoming headlights and cried, “Hile! Stop in the name of Gilead!”

And they did. There was a scream of brakes, a crump of a front fender meeting a rear one, and the tinkle of falling glass, but they stopped. Roland and Eddie crossed in a spotlight glare of headlights and a cacophony of horns, Susannah between them with her restored (and already very dirty) feet three inches off the ground. Their sense of happiness and rightness grew stronger as they approached the corner of Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street. Roland felt the hum of the rose racing deliriously in his blood.

Yes,Roland thought. By all the gods, yes. This is it. Perhaps not just a doorway to the Dark Tower, but the Tower itself. Gods, the strength of it! The pull of it! Cuthbert, Alain, Jamie — if only you were here!

Jake stood on the corner of Second and Forty-sixth, looking at a board fence about five feet high. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. From the darkness beyond the fence came a strong harmonic humming. The sound of many voices, all singing together. Singing one vast open note. Here is yes, the voices said. Here is you may. Here is the good turn, the fortunate meeting, the fever that broke just before dawn and left your blood calm. Here is the wish that came true and the understanding eye. Here is the kindness you were given and thus learned to pass on. Here is the sanity and clarity you thought were lost. Here, everything is all right.

Jake turned to them. “Do you feel it?” he asked. “Do you?”

Roland nodded. So did Eddie.

“Suze?” the boy asked.

“It’s almost the loveliest thing in the world, isn’t it?” she said. Almost, Roland thought. She said almost. Nor did he miss the fact that her hand went to her belly and stroked as she said it.

Ten

The posters Jake remembered were there—Olivia Newton-John at Radio City Music Hall, G. Gordon Liddy and the Grots at a place called the Mercury Lounge, a horror movie called War of the Zombies, NO TRESPASSING . But—

“ That’snot the same,” he said, pointing at a graffito in dusky pink. “It’s the same color, and the printing looks like the same person did it, but when I was here before, it was a poem about the Turtle. ‘See the TURTLE of enormous girth, on his shell he holds the earth.’ And then something about following the Beam.”