Yes, like that. Only behind this canvas you wouldn’t find the workshop and storage areas of backstage but only a great bulging darkness. Some vast dead universe where Roland’s Tower had already fallen.

Please let me be wrong,Eddie thought. Please let this just be a case of culture shock or the plain old heebie-jeebies.

He didn’t think it was.

“How’d we get here?” he asked Jake. “There was no door…” He trailed off, and then asked with some hope: “Maybe it is a dream?”

“No,” Jake said. “It’s more like when we traveled in the Wizard’s Glass. Except this time there was no ball.” A thought struck him. “Did you hear music, though? Chimes? Just before you wound up here?”

Eddie nodded. “It was sort of overwhelming. Made my eyes water.”

“Right,” Jake said. “Exactly.”

Oy sniffed a fire hydrant. Eddie and Jake paused to let the little guy lift his leg and add his own notice to what was undoubtedly an already crowded bulletin board. Ahead of them, that other Jake—Kid Seventy-seven—was still walking slowly and gawking everywhere. To Eddie he looked like a tourist from Michigan. He even craned up to see the tops of the buildings, and Eddie had an idea that if the New York Board of Cynicism caught you doing that, they took away your Bloomingdale’s charge card. Not that he was complaining; it made the kid easy to follow.

And just as Eddie was thinking that, Kid Seventy-seven disappeared.

“Where’d you go? Christ, where’d you go?”

“Relax,” Jake said. (At his ankle, Oy added his two cents’ worth: “Ax!”) The kid was grinning. “I just went into the bookstore. The…um…Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, it’s called.”

“Where you got Charlie the Choo-Choo and the riddle book?”

“Right.”

Eddie loved the mystified, dazzled grin Jake was wearing. It lit up his whole face. “Remember how excited Roland got when I told him the owner’s name?”

Eddie did. The owner of The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind was a fellow named Calvin Tower.

“Hurry up,” Jake said. “I want to watch.”

Eddie didn’t have to be asked twice. He wanted to watch, too.

Four

Jake stopped in the doorway to the bookstore. His smile didn’t fade, exactly, but it faltered.

“What is it?” Eddie asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Dunno. Something’s different, I think. It’s just…so much has happened since I was here…”

He was looking at the chalkboard in the window, which Eddie thought was actually a very clever way of selling books. It looked like the sort of thing you saw in diners, or maybe the fish markets.

TODAY’S SPECIALS

From Mississippi! Pan-Fried William Faulkner

Hardcovers Market Price

Vintage Library Paperbacks 75c each

From Maine! Chilled Stephen King

Hardcovers Market Price

Book Club Bargains

Paperbacks 75c each

From California! Hard-Boiled Raymond Chandler

Hardcovers Market Price

Paperbacks 7 for $5.00