But it could wake up,Roland thought. Wake up and send them all to the nineteen points of nowhere in the blink of an eye. This was an especially terrible thought, and he turned his mind from it. Certainly the idea of using it to secure protection for the rose seemed more and more like a bitter joke. He had faced both men and monsters in his time, but had never been close to anything like this. The sense of its evil was terrible, almost unmanning. The sense of its malevolent emptiness was far, far worse.

Callahan pressed his thumb into the groove between two boards. There was a faint click and a section of the preacher’s cove popped out of place. Callahan pulled the boards free, revealing a square hole roughly fifteen inches long and wide. He rocked back on his haunches, holding the boards across his chest. The hum was much louder now. Roland had a brief image of a gigantic hive with bees the size of waggons crawling sluggishly over it. He bent forward and looked into the Old Fella’s hidey-hole.

The thing inside was wrapped in white cloth, fine linen from the look of it.

“An altar boy’s surplice,” Callahan said. Then, seeing Roland didn’t know the word: “A thing to wear.” He shrugged. “My heart said to wrap it up, and so I did.”

“Your heart surely said true,” Roland whispered. He was thinking of the bag Jake had brought out of the vacant lot, the one with NOTHING BUT STRIKES AT MID-WORLD LANES on the side. They would need it, aye and aye, but he didn’t like to think of the transfer.

Then he put thought aside—fear as well—and folded back the cloth. Beneath the surplice, wrapped in it, was a wooden box.

Despite his fear, Roland reached out to touch that dark, heavy wood. It will be like touching some lightly oiled metal, he thought, and it was. He felt an erotic shiver shake itself deep inside him; it kissed his fear like an old lover and then was gone.

“This is black ironwood,” Roland whispered. “I have heard of it but never seen it.”

“In my Tales of Arthur, it’s called ghostwood,” Callahan whispered back.

“Aye? Is it so?”