“No,” Roland said.

“Then I wish you’d stop looking at those books and help me think of a way to open this d—”

“I know how to open it,” Roland said. “The first question is where will it take us now that the ball is gone? The second question is where do we want to go? After Mia, or to the place where Tower and his friend are hiding from Balazar and his friends?”

“We go after Susannah!” Eddie shouted. “Have you been listening to any of the shit those voices are saying? They’re saying it’s a cannibal! My wife could be giving birth to some kind of a cannibal monster right now, and if you think anything’s more important than that—”

“The Tower’s more important,” Roland said. “And somewhere on the other side of this door there’s a man whose name is Tower. A man who owns a certain vacant lot and a certain rose growing there.”

Eddie looked at him uncertainly. So did Jake and Callahan. Roland turned again to the little bookcase. It looked strange indeed, here in this rocky darkness.

“And he owns these books,” Roland mused. “He risked all things to save them.”

“Yeah, because he’s one obsessed motherfucker.”

“Yet all things serve ka and follow the Beam,” Roland said, and selected a volume from the upper shelf of the bookcase. Eddie saw it had been placed in there upside down, which struck him as a very un-Calvin Tower thing to do.

Roland held the book in his seamed, weather-chapped hands, seeming to debate which one to give it to. He looked at Eddie…looked at Callahan…and then gave the book to Jake.

“Read me what it says on the front,” he said. “The words of your world make my head hurt. They swim to my eye easily enough, but when I reach my mind toward them, most swim away again.”

Jake was paying little attention; his eyes were riveted on the book jacket with its picture of a little country church at sunset. Callahan, meanwhile, had stepped past him in order to get a closer look at the door standing here in the gloomy cave.

At last the boy looked up. “But…Roland, isn’t this the town Pere Callahan told us about? The one where the vampire broke his cross and made him drink his blood?”

Callahan whirled away from the door. “What?”

Jake held the book out wordlessly. Callahan took it. Almost snatched it.

“ ’Salem’s Lot,” he read. “A novel by Stephen King.” He looked up at Eddie, then at Jake. “Heard of him? Either of you? He’s not from my time, I don’t think.”

Jake shook his head. Eddie began to shake his, as well, and then he saw something. “That church,” he said. “It looks like the Calla Gathering Hall. Close enough to be its twin, almost.”