“Not a word from now until I tell you it’s all right,” Roland said. “Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Roland pressed his thumb into the groove between two of the floorboards and the hidey-hole in the preacher’s cove sprang open. He lifted the top aside. Eddie had once seen a movie on TV about guys disposing of live explosives during the London Blitz— UXB,it had been called—and Roland’s movements now recalled that film strongly to his mind. And why not? If they were right about what was in this hiding place—and Eddie knew they were—then it was an unexploded bomb.

Roland folded back the white linen surplice, exposing the box. The hum rose. Eddie’s breath stopped in his throat. He felt the skin all over his body grow cold. Somewhere close, a monster of nearly unimaginable malevolence had half-opened one sleeping eye.

The hum dropped back to its former sleepy pitch and Eddie breathed again.

Roland handed him the bowling bag, motioning for Eddie to hold it open. With misgivings (part of him wanted to whisper in Roland’s ear that they should forget the whole thing), Eddie did as he was bidden. Roland lifted the box out, and once again the hum rose. In the rich, if limited, glow of the ’sener, Eddie could see sweat on the gunslinger’s brow. He could feel it on his own. If Black Thirteen awoke and pitched them out into some black limbo…

I won’t go. I’ll fight to stay with Susannah.

Of course he would. But he was still relieved when Roland slipped the elaborately carved ghostwood box into the queer metallic bag they’d found in the vacant lot. The hum didn’t disappear entirely, but subsided to a barely audible drone. And when Roland gently pulled the drawstring running around the top of the bag, closing its mouth, the drone became a distant whisper. It was like listening to a seashell.

Eddie sketched the sign of the cross in front of himself. Smiling faintly, Roland did the same.

Outside the church, the northeast horizon had brightened appreciably—there would be real daylight after all, it seemed.

“Roland.”

The gunslinger turned toward him, eyebrows raised. His left fist was closed around the bag’s throat; he was apparently not willing to trust the weight of the box to the bag’s drawstring, stout as it looked.

“If we were todash when we found that bag, how could we have picked it up?”

Roland considered this. Then he said, “Perhaps the bag is todash, too.”

“Still?”

Roland nodded. “Yes, I think so. Still.”

“Oh.” Eddie thought about it. “That’s spooky.”

“Changing your mind about revisiting New York, Eddie?”

Eddie shook his head. He was scared, though. Probably more scared than he’d been at any time since standing up in the aisle of the Barony Coach to riddle Blaine.

Two