The saying might have been true when Roland had been a boy not much older than Jake Chambers, but Eddie thought it was even truer now, as the world wound down like the main-spring in an ancient watch. Roland had told them that even such basic things as the points of the compass could no longer be trusted in Mid-World; what was dead west today might be south west tomorrow, crazy as that might seem. And time had likewise begun to soften. There were days Eddie could have sworn were forty hours long, some of them followed by nights (like the one on which Roland had taken them to Mejis) that seemed even longer. Then there would come an afternoon when it seemed you could almost see darkness bloom as night rushed over the horizon to meet you. Eddie wondered if time had gotten lost.

They had ridden (and riddled) out of a city called Lud on Blaine the Mono. Blaine is a pain, Jake had said on several occasions, but he—or it—turned out to be quite a bit more than just a pain; Blaine the Mono had been utterly mad. Eddie killed it with illogic (“Somethin you’re just naturally good at, sugar,” Susannah told him), and they had detrained in a Topeka which wasn’t quite part of the world from which Eddie, Susannah, and Jake had come. Which was good, really, because this world—one in which the Kansas City pro baseball team was called The Monarchs, Coca-Cola was called Nozz-A-La, and the big Japanese car-maker was Takuro rather than Honda—had been overwhelmed by some sort of plague which had killed damn near everyone. So stick that in your Takuro Spirit and drive it, Eddie thought.

The passage of time had seemed clear enough to him through all of this. During much of it he’d been scared shitless—he guessed all of them had been, except maybe for Roland—but yes, it had seemed real and clear. He’d not had that feeling of time slipping out of his grasp even when they’d been walking up I-70 with bullets in their ears, looking at the frozen traffic and listening to the warble of what Roland called a thinny.

But after their confrontation in the glass palace with Jake’s old friend the Tick-Tock Man and Roland’s old friend (Flagg…or Marten…or—just perhaps—Maerlyn), time had changed.

Not right away, though. We traveled in that damned pink ball…saw Roland kill his mother by mistake…and when we came back…