Eddie threw an arm around Jake’s shoulders. “Too bad you’re over here instead of back in New York,” he said. “If you were back in the Apple, Jakey-boy, you’d probably have your own child psychiatrist by now. You’d be working on these issues about your parents. Getting to the heart of your unresolved conflicts. Maybe getting some good drugs, too. Ritalin, stuff like that.”

“On the whole, I’d rather be here,” Jake said, and looked down at Oy.

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “I don’t blame you.”

“Such stories are called ‘fairy tales,’ ” Roland mused.

“Yeah,” Eddie replied.

“There were no fairies in this one, though.”

“No,” Eddie agreed. “That’s more like a category name than anything else. In our world you got your mystery and suspense stories…your science fiction stories…your Westerns…your fairy tales. Get it?”

“Yes,” Roland said. “Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?”

“I guess that’s close enough,” Susannah said.

“Does no one eat stew?” Roland asked.

“Sometimes at supper, I guess,” Eddie said, “but when it comes to entertainment, we do tend to stick with one flavor at a time, and don’t let any one thing touch another thing on your plate. Although it sounds kinda boring when you put it that way.”

“How many of these fairy tales would you say there are?”

With no hesitation—and certainly no collusion—Eddie, Susannah, and Jake all said the same word at exactly the same time: “Nineteen!” And a moment later, Oy repeated it in his hoarse voice: “Nie-teen!”

They looked at each other and laughed, because “nineteen” had become a kind of jokey catchword among them, replacing “bumhug,” which Jake and Eddie had pretty much worn out. Yet the laughter had a tinge of uneasiness about it, because this business about nineteen had gotten a trifle weird. Eddie had found himself carving it on the side of his most recent wooden animal, like a brand: Hey there, Pard, welcome to our spread! We call it the Bar-Nineteen . Both Susannah and Jake had confessed to bringing wood for the evening fire in armloads of nineteen pieces. Neither of them could say why; it just felt right to do it that way, somehow.

Then there was the morning Roland had stopped them at the edge of the wood through which they were now traveling. He had pointed at the sky, where one particularly ancient tree had reared its hoary branches. The shape those branches made against the sky was the number nineteen. Clearly nineteen. They had all seen it, but Roland had seen it first.