To pass the time, Roland got up to look at a few of the books which had meant so much to Calvin Tower that he’d made their safety a condition for his cooperation. The first one Roland pulled out had the silhouette of a man’s head on it. The man was smoking a pipe and wearing a sort of gamekeeper’s hat. Cort had had one like it, and as a boy, Roland had thought it much more stylish than his father’s old dayrider with its sweat-stains and frayed tugstring. The words on the book were of the New York world. Roland was sure he could have read them easily if he’d been on that side, but he wasn’t. As it was, he could read some, and the result was almost as maddening as the chimes.

“Sir-lock Hones,” he read aloud. “No, Holmes . Like Odetta’s fathername. Four…short…movels. Movels?” No, this one was an . “Four short novels by Sirlock Holmes.” He opened the book, running a respectful hand over the title page and then smelling it: the spicy, faintly sweet aroma of good old paper. He could make out the name of one of the four short novels— The Sign of the Four. Other than the words Hound and Study, the titles of the others were gibberish to him.

“A sign is a sigul,” he said. When he found himself counting the number of letters in the title, he had to laugh at himself. Besides, there were only sixteen. He put the book back and took up another, this one with a drawing of a soldier on the front. He could make out one word of the title: Dead. He looked at another. A man and woman kissing on the cover. Yes, there were always men and women kissing in stories; folks liked that. He put it back and looked up to check on Callahan’s progress. His eyes widened slightly as he saw the Pere walking into a great room filled with books and what Eddie called Magda-seens…although Roland was still unsure what Magda had seen, or why there should be so much written about it.

He pulled out another book, and smiled at the picture on the cover. There was a church, with the sun going down red behind it. The church looked a bit like Our Lady of Serenity. He opened it and thumbed through it. A delah of words, but he could only make out one in every three, if that. No pictures. He was about to put it back when something caught his eye. Leaped at his eye. Roland stopped breathing for a moment.

He stood back, no longer hearing the todash chimes, no longer caring about the great room of books Callahan had entered. He began reading the book with the church on the front. Or trying to. The words swam maddeningly in front of his eyes, and he couldn’t be sure. Not quite. But, gods! If he was seeing what he thought he was seeing—