“But I’ve got some ideas,” Eddie went on, “and if I’m right, we’ve got a problem. A big one.” He swallowed. Hard. Jake touched his hand, and the gunslinger was concerned to see how quickly and firmly Eddie took hold of the boy’s fingers.

Roland reached out and drew Susannah’s hand into his own. He had a brief vision of that hand seizing a frog and squeezing the guts out of it. He put it out of his mind. The woman who had done that was not here now.

“Tell us,” he said to Eddie and Jake. “Tell us everything. We would hear it all.”

“Every word,” Susannah agreed. “For your fathers’ sakes.”

Two

They recounted what had happened to them in the New York of 1977. Roland and Susannah listened, fascinated, as they told of following Jake to the bookstore, and of seeing Balazar and his gentlemen pull up in front.

“Huh!” Susannah said. “The very same bad boys! It’s almost like a Dickens novel.”

“Who is Dickens, and what is a novel?” Roland asked.

“A novel’s a long story set down in a book,” she said. “Dickens wrote about a dozen. He was maybe the best who ever lived. In his stories, folks in this big city called London kept meeting people they knew from other places or long ago. I had a teacher in college who hated the way that always happened. He said Dickens’s stories were full of easy coincidences.”

“A teacher who either didn’t know about ka or didn’t believe in it,” Roland said.

Eddie was nodding. “Yeah, this is ka, all right. No doubt.”

“I’m more interested in the woman who wrote Charlie the Choo-Choo than this storyteller Dickens,” Roland said. “Jake, I wonder if you’d—”

“I’m way ahead of you,” Jake said, unbuckling the straps of his pack. Almost reverently, he slid out the battered book telling the adventures of Charlie the locomotive and his friend, Engineer Bob. They all looked at the cover. The name below the picture was still Beryl Evans.

“Man,” Eddie said. “That is so weird. I mean, I don’t want to get sidetracked, or anything…” He paused, realizing he had just made a railroading pun, then went on. Roland wasn’t very interested in puns and jokes, anyway. “…but that is weird . The one Jake bought—Jake Seventy-seven—was by Claudia something Bachman.”

“Inez,” Jake said. “Also, there was a y . A lowercase y . Any of you know what that means?”

None of them did, but Roland said there had been names like it in Mejis. “I believe it was some sort of added honorific. And I’m not sure it is to the side. Jake, you said the sign in the window was different from before. How?”

“I can’t remember. But you know what? I think if you hypnotized me again—you know, with the bullet—I could.”