1
They reached the shoes at mid-morning. Beyond them, clearer now, stood the glass palace. It glimmered a delicate green shade, like the reflection of a lily pad in still water. There were shining gates in front of it; red pennons snapped from its towers in a light breeze.
The shoes were also red.
Susannah's impression that there were six pairs was understandable but wrong - there were actually four pairs and one quartet. This latter - four dark red booties made of supple leather - was undoubtedly meant for the four-footed member of their ka-tet. Roland picked one of them up and felt inside it. He didn't know how many bumblers had worn shoes in the history of the world, but he was willing to guess that none had ever been gifted with a set of silk-lined leather booties.
"Bally, Gucci, eat your heart out," Eddie said. "This is great stuff."
Susannah's were easiest to pick out, and not just because of the feminine, sparkly swoops on the sides. They weren't really shoes at all - they had been made to fit over the stumps of her legs, which ended just above the knees.
"Now look at this," she marvelled, holding one up so the sun could flash on the rhinestones with which the shoes were decorated ... if they were rhinestones. She had a crazy notion that maybe they were diamond chips. "Cappies. After four years of gettin along in what my friend Cynthia calls 'circumstances of reduced leg-room,' I finally got myself a pair of cappies. Think of that."
"Cappies," Eddie mused. "Is that what they call em?"
"That's what they call em, sugar."
Jake's were bright red Oxfords - except for the color, they would have looked perfectly at home in the well-bred classrooms of The Piper School. He flexed one, then turned it over. The sole was bright and unmarked. There was no manufacturer's stamp, nor had he really expected one. His father had maybe a dozen pairs of fine handmade shoes. Jake knew them when he saw them.
Eddie's were low boots with Cuban heels {Maybe in this world you call them Mejis heels, he thought) and pointed toes ... what, back in his other life, had been known as "street-boppers." Kids from the mid-sixties - an era Odetta/Detta/Susannah had just missed - might have called them "Beatle-boots."
Roland's, of course, were cowboy boots. Fancy ones - you'd go dancing rather than droving in such as these. Looped stitching, side decorations, narrow, haughty arches. He examined them without picking them up, then looked at his fellow travellers and frowned. They were looking at each other. You would have said three people couldn't do that, only a pair ... but you only would have said it if you'd never been part of a ka-tet.
Roland still shared khef with them; he felt the powerful current of their mingled thought, but could not understand it. Because it's of their world. They come from different whens of that world, but they see something here that's common to all three of them.
"What is it?" he asked. "What do they mean, these shoes?"
"I don't think any of us know that, exactly," Susannah said.
"No," Jake said. "It's another riddle." He looked at the weird, blood red Oxford shoe in his hands with distaste. "Another goddamned riddle."
"Tell what you know." He looked toward the glass palace again. It was perhaps fifteen New York miles away, now, shining in the clear day, delicate as a mirage, but as real as ... well, as real as shoes. "Please, tell me what you know about these shoes."
"I got shoes, you got shoes, all God's chillun got shoes," Odetta said. "That's the prevailin opinion, anyway."
"Well," Eddie said, "we got em, anyway. And you're thinking what I'm thinking, aren't you?"
"I guess I am."
"You, Jake?"
Instead of answering with words, Jake picked up the other Oxford (Roland had no doubt that all the shoes, including Oy's, would fit perfectly) and clapped them briskly together three times. It meant nothing to Roland, but both Eddie and Susannah reacted violently, looking around, looking especially at the sky, as if expecting a storm born out of this bright autumn sunshine. I hey ended up looking at the glass palace again . . . and then at each other, in that knowing, round-eyed way that made Roland feel like shaking them both until their teeth rattled. Yet he waited. Sometimes that was all a man could do.
"After you killed Jonas, you looked into the ball," Eddie said, turning to him.
"Yes."
"Travelled in the ball."
"Yes, but I don't want to talk about that again now; it has nothing to do with these - "
"I think it does," Eddie said. "You flew inside a pink storm. Inside a pink gale, you could say. Gale is a word you might use for a storm, isn't it? Especially if you were making up a riddle."
"Sure," Jake said. He sounded dreamy, almost like a boy who talks in his sleep. "When does Dorothy fly over the Wizard's Rainbow? When she's a Gale."
"We ain't in Kansas anymore, sugar," Susannah said, and then voiced a strange, humorless bark which Roland supposed was a species of laughter. "May look a little like it, but Kansas was never . . . you know, this thin:'
"I don't understand you," Roland said. But he felt cold, and his heart was beating too fast. There were thinnies everywhere now, hadn't he told them that? Worlds melting into one another as the forces of the Tower weakened? As the day when the rose would be plowed under drew nearer?
"You saw things as you flew," Eddie said. "Before you got to the dark land, the one you called Thunderclap, you saw things. The piano-player, Sheb. Who turned up again later in your life, didn't he?"
"Yes, in Tull."
"And the dweller with the red hair?"
"Him, too. He had a bird named Zoltan. But when we met, he and I, we said the normal. 'Life for you, life for your crop,' that sort of thing. I thought I heard the same when he flew by me in the pink storm, but he really said something else." He glanced at Susannah. "I saw your wheel-chair, too. The old one."
"And you saw the witch."
"Yes. I - "
In a creaky chortle that reminded Roland unnervingly of Rhea, Jake Chambers cried: "I'll get you, my pretty! And your little dog, too!"
Roland stared at him, trying not to gape.
"Only in the movie, the witch wasn't riding a broom," Jake said. "She was on her bike, the one with the basket on the back."
"Yeah, no reap-charms, either," Eddie said. "Would have been a nice touch, though. I tell you, Jake, when I was a kid, I used to have nightmares about the way she laughed."
"It was the monkeys that gave me the creeps," Susannah said. "The flying monkeys. I'd get thinkin about em, and then have to crawl into bed with my mom and dad. They'd still be arguin 'bout whose bright idea it was to take me to that show in the foist place when I fell asleep between em."
"I wasn't worried about clapping the heels together," Jake said. "Not a bit." It was Susannah and Eddie he was speaking to; for the time being, it was as if Roland wasn't even there. "I wasn't wearing them, after all."
"True," Susannah said, sounding severe, "but you know what my daddy always used to say?"
"No, but I have a feeling we're going to find out," Eddie said.
She gave Eddie a brief, severe look, then turned her attention back to Jake. " 'Never whistle for the wind unless you want it to blow,' " she said. "And it's good advice, no matter what Young Mister Foolish here may think."
"Spanked again," Eddie said, grinning.
'Tanked!" Oy said, eyeing Eddie severely.
"Explain this to me," Roland said in his softest voice. "I would hear. I would share your khef. And I would share it now."
2
They told him a story almost every American child of the twentieth century knew, about a Kansas farmgirl named Dorothy Gale who had been carried away by a cyclone and deposited, along with her dog, in the Land of Oz. There was no 1-70 in Oz, but there was a yellow brick road which served much the same purpose, and there were witches, both good and bad. There was a ka-tet comprised of Dorothy, Toto, and three friends she met along the way: the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Woodman, and the Scarecrow. They each had
(bird and bear and hare and fish)
a fondest wish, and it was with Dorothy's that Roland's new friends (and Roland himself, for that matter) identified the most strongly: she wanted to find her way home again.
"The Munchkins told her that she had to follow the yellow brick road to Oz," Jake said, "and so she went. She met the others along the way, sort of like you met us, Roland - "
"Although you don't look much like Judy Garland," Eddie put in.
" - and eventually they got there. To Oz, the Emerald Palace, and the guy who lived in the Emerald Palace." He looked toward the glass palace ahead of them, greener and greener in the strengthening light, and then back to Roland.
"Yes, I understand. And was this fellow, Oz, a powerful dinh? A Baron? Perhaps a King?"
Again, the three of them exchanged a glance from which Roland was excluded. "That's complicated," Jake said. "He was sort of a humbug - "
"A bumhug? What's that?"
"Humbug, " Jake said, laughing. "A faker. All talk, no action. But maybe the important thing is that the Wizard actually came from - "
"Wizard?" Roland asked sharply. He grasped Jake's shoulder with his diminished right hand. "Why do you call him so?"
"Because that was his title, sug," Susannah said. "The Wizard of Oz." She lifted Roland's hand gently but firmly from Jake's shoulder. "Let him tell it, now. He don't need you to squeeze it out of him."
"Did I hurt you? Jake, I cry your pardon."
"Nah, I'm fine," Jake said. "Don't worry about it. Anyway, Dorothy and her friends had a lot of adventures before finding out the Wizard was a, you know, a bumhug." Jake giggled at this with his hands clapped to his forehead and pushing back his hair, like a child of five. "He couldn't give the Lion courage, the Scarecrow a brain, or the Tin Woodman a heart. Worst of all, he couldn't send Dorothy back to Kansas. The Wizard had a balloon, but he went without her. I don't think he meant to, but he did."
"It seems to me, from your telling of the tale," Roland said, speaking very slowly, "that Dorothy's friends had the things they wanted all along."
"That's the moral of the story," Eddie said. "Maybe what makes it a great story. But Dorothy was stuck in Oz, you see. Then Glinda showed up. Glinda the Good. And, as a present for smooshing one of the bad witches under her house and melting another one, Glinda told Dorothy how to use the ruby slippers. The ones Glinda gave her."
Eddie raised the red Cuban-heeled street-boppers which had been left for him on the dotted white line of 1-70.
"Glinda told Dorothy to click the heels of the ruby slippers together three times. That would take her back to Kansas, she said. And it did." "And that's the end of the tale?"
"Well," Jake said, "it was so popular that the guy who wrote it went ahead and wrote about a thousand more Oz stories - "
"Yeah," Eddie said. "Everything but Glinda's Guide to Firm Thighs."
" - and there was this crazy remake called The Wiz, starring black people - "
"Really?" Susannah asked. She looked bemused. "What a peculiar concept."
" - but the only one that really matters is the first one, I think," Jake finished.
Roland hunkered and put his hands into the boots which had been left for him. He lifted them, looked at them, put them down again. "Are we supposed to put them on, do you think? Here and now?"
His three friends from New York looked at each other doubtfully. At last Susannah spoke for them - fed him the khef which he could feel but not quite share on his own.
"Best not to right now, maybe. Too many bad-ass spirits here." "Takuro spirits," Eddie murmured, mostly to himself. Then: "Look, let's just take em along. If we're supposed to put em on, I think we'll know when the time comes. In the meantime, I think we ought to beware of bumhugs bearing gifts."
It cracked Jake up, as Eddie had known it would; sometimes a word or an image got into your funny bone like a virus and just lived there awhile. Tomorrow the word "bumhug" might mean nothing to the kid; for the rest of today, however, he was going to laugh every time he heard it. Eddie intended to use it a lot, especially when ole Jake wasn't expecting it.
They picked up the red shoes which had been left for them in the east-bound lanes (Jake took Oy's) and moved on again toward the shimmering glass castle.
Oz, Roland thought. He searched his memory, but he didn't think it was a name he had ever heard before, or a word of the High Speech that had come in disguise, as char had come disguised as Charlie. Yet it had a sound that belonged in this business; a sound more of his world than of Jake's, Susannah's, and Eddie's, from whence the tale had come.
3
Jake kept expecting the Green Palace to begin looking normal as they drew closer to it, the way the attractions in Disney World began to look normal as you drew close to them - not ordinary, necessarily, but normal, things which were as much a part of the world as the comer bus stop or mailbox or park bench, stuff you could touch, stuff you could write fuck piper on, if you took a notion.
But that didn't happen, wasn't going to happen, and as they neared the Green Palace, Jake realized something else: it was the most beautiful, radiant thing he had ever seen in his life. Not trusting it - and he did not - didn't change the fact. It was like a drawing in a fairy-tale book, one so good it had become real, somehow. And, like the thinny, it hummed ... except that this sound was far fainter, and not unpleasant.
Pale green walls rose to battlements that jutted and towers that soared, seeming almost to touch the clouds floating over the Kansas plains. These towers were topped with needles of a darker, emerald green; it was from these that the red pennants nickered. Upon each pennant the symbol of the open eye
had been traced in yellow.
It's the mark of the Crimson King, Jake thought. It's really his sigul, not John Farson 's. He didn't know how he knew this (how could he, when Alabama's Crimson Tide was the only Crimson anything he knew?), but he did.
"So beautiful," Susannah murmured, and when Jake glanced at her, he thought she was almost crying. "But not nice, somehow. Not right. Maybe not downright bad, the way the thinny is, but.. ."
"But not nice," Eddie said. "Yeah. That works. Not a red light, maybe, but a bright yellow one just the same." He rubbed the side of his face (a gesture he had picked up from Roland without even realizing it) and looked puzzled. "It feels almost not serious - a practical joke."
"I doubt it's a joke," Roland said. "Do you think it's a copy of the place where Dorothy and her ka-tet met the false wizard?"
Again, the three erstwhile New Yorkers seemed to exchange a single glance of consultation. When it was over, Eddie spoke for all of them. "Yeah. Yeah, probably. It's not the same as the one in the movie, but if this thing came out of our minds, it wouldn't be. Because we see the one from L. Frank Baum's book, too. Both from the illustrations in the book. . ."
"And the ones from our imaginations," Jake said.
"But that's it," Susannah said. "I'd say we're definitely off to see the Wizard."
"You bet," Eddie said. "Because-because-because-because-because - "
"Because of the wonderful things he does!" Jake and Susannah finished in unison, then laughed, delighted with each other, while Roland frowned at them, feeling puzzled and looking left out.
"But I have to tell you guys," Eddie said, "that it's only gonna take about one more wonderful thing to send me around to the dark side of the Psycho Moon. Most likely for good."
4
As they drew closer, they could see Interstate 70 stretching away into the pale green depths of the castle's slightly rounded outer wall; it floated there like an optical illusion. Closer yet, and they could hear the pennants snapping in the breeze and see their own ripply reflections, like drowned folk who somehow walk at the bottoms of watery tropical graves.
There was an inner redoubt of dark blue glass - it was a color Jake associated with the bottles fountain-pen ink came in - and a rust-hued wall-walk between the redoubt and the outer wall. That color made Susannah think of the bottles Hires root-beer had come in when she was a little girl.
The way in was blocked by a barred gate that was both huge and ethereal: it looked like wrought iron which had been turned to glass. Each cunningly made stake was a different color, and these colors seemed to come from the inside, as if the bars were filled with some bright gas or liquid.
The travellers stopped before it. There was no sign of the turnpike beyond it; instead of roadway, there was a courtyard of silver glass - a huge flat mirror, in fact. Clouds floated serenely through its depths; so did the image of the occasional swooping bird. Sun reflected off this glass courtyard and ran across the green castle walls in ripples. Un the far side, the wall of the palace's inner ward rose in a glimmery green cliff, broken by narrow loophole windows of jet-black glass. There was also an arched entry in this wall that made Jake think of St. Patrick's Cathedral.
To the left of the main doorway was a sentry-box made of cream-colored glass shot through with hazy orange threads. Its door, painted with red stripes, stood open. The phone-booth-sized room inside was empty, although there was something on the floor which looked to Jake like a newspaper.
Above the entry, flanking its darkness, were two crouching, leering gargoyles of darkest violet glass. Their pointed tongues poked out like bruises.
The pennants atop the towers flapped like schoolyard flags.
Crows cawed over empty cornfields now a week past the Reap.
Distant, the thinny whined and warbled.
"Look at the bars of this gate," Susannah said. She sounded breathless and awestruck. "Look very closely."
Jake bent toward the yellow bar until his nose nearly touched it and a faint yellow stripe ran down the middle of his face. At first he saw nothing, and then he gasped. What he had taken for motes of some kind were creatures - living creatures - imprisoned inside the bar, swimming in tiny schools. They looked like fish in an aquarium, but they also (their heads, Jake told himself, Ithink it's mostly their heads) looked oddly, disquietingly human. As if, Jake thought, he were looking into a vertical golden sea, all the ocean in a glass rod - and living myths no bigger than grains of dust swimming within it. A tiny woman with a fish's tail and long blonde hair streaming out behind her swam to her side of the glass, seemed to peer out at the giant boy (her eyes were round, startled, and beautiful), and then flipped away again.
Jake felt suddenly dizzy and weak. He closed his eyes until the feeling of vertigo went away, then opened them again and looked around at the others. "Cripes! Are they all the same?"
"All different, I think," said Eddie, who had already peered into two or three. He bent close to the purple rod, and his cheeks lit up as if in the glow of an old-fashioned fluoroscope. "These guys here look like birds - little tiny birds."
Jake looked and saw that Eddie was right: inside the gate's purple upright were flocks of birds no bigger than summer minges. They swooped giddily about in their eternal twilight, weaving over and under one another, their wings leaving tiny silver trails of bubbles.
"Are they really there?" Jake asked breathlessly. "Are they, Roland, or are we only imagining them?"
"I don't know. But I know what this gate has been made to look like."
"So do I," Eddie said. He surveyed the shining posts, each with its own column of imprisoned light and life. Each of the gate's wings consisted of six colored bars. The one in the center - broad and flat instead of round, and made to split in two when the gate was opened - was the thirteenth. This one was dead black, and in this one nothing moved.
Oh, maybe not that you can see, but there are things moving around in there, all right, Jake thought. There's life in there, terrible life. And maybe there are roses, too. Drowned ones.
"It's a Wizard's Gate," Eddie said. "Each bar has been made to look like one of the balls in Maerlyn's Rainbow. Look, here's the pink one."
Jake leaned toward it, hands propped on his thighs. He knew what would be inside even before he saw them: horses, of courses. Tiny herds of them, galloping through that strange pink stuff that was neither light nor liquid. Horses running in search of a Drop they would never find, mayhap.
Eddie stretched his hands out to grasp the sides of the central post, the black one.
"Don't!" Susannah called sharply.
Eddie ignored her, but Jake saw his chest stop for a moment and his lips tighten as he wrapped his hands around the black bar and waited for something - some force perhaps sent Special Delivery all the way from the Dark Tower itself - to change him, or even to strike him dead. When nothing happened, he breathed deep again, and risked a smile. "No electricity, but . . ." He pulled; the gate held fast. "No give, either. I see where it splits down the middle, but I get nothing. Want to take a shot, Roland?"
Roland reached for the gate, but Jake put a hand on his arm and stopped him before the gunslinger could do more than give it a preliminary shake. "Don't bother. That's not the way."
"Then what is?"
Instead of answering, Jake sat down in front of the gate, near the place where this strange version of 1-70 ended, and began putting on the shoes which had been left for him. Eddie watched a moment, then sat down beside him. "I guess we ought to try it," he said to Jake, "even though it'll probably turn out to be just another bumhug."
Jake laughed, shook his head, and began to tighten the laces of the blood-red Oxfords. He and Eddie both knew it was no bumhug. Not this time.
5
"Okay," Jake said when they had all put on their red shoes (he thought they looked extraordinarily stupid, especially Eddie's pair). "I'll count to three, and we'll click our heels together. Like this." He clicked the Oxfords together once, sharply . . . and the gate shivered like a loosely fastened shutter blown by a strong wind. Susannah cried out. There followed a low, sweet chiming sound from the Green Palace, as if the walls themselves had vibrated.
"I guess this'll do the trick, all right," Eddie said. "I warn you, though, I'm not singing 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow.' That's not in my contract."
"The rainbow is here," the gunslinger said softly, stretching his diminished hand out to the gate.
It wiped the smile off Eddie's face. "Yeah, I know. I'm a little scared, Roland."
"So am I," the gunslinger said, and indeed, Jake thought he looked pale and ill.
"Go on, sugar," Susannah said. "Count before we all lose our nerve." "One ... two ... three."
They clicked their heels together solemnly and in unison: tock, tock, tock. The gate shivered more violently this time, the colors in the uprights brightening perceptibly. The chime that followed was higher, sweeter - the sound of fine crystal tapped with the haft of a knife. It echoed in dreamy harmonics that made Jake shiver, half with pleasure and half with pain.
But the gate didn't open.
"What - " Eddie began.
"I know," Jake said. "We forgot Oy."
"Oh Christ," Eddie said. "I left the world I knew to watch a kid try to put booties on a fucked-up weasel. Shoot me, Roland, before I breed."
Roland ignored him, watching Jake closely as the boy sat down on the turnpike and called, "Oy! To me!"
The bumbler came willingly enough, and although he had surely been a wild creature before they had met him on the Path of the Beam, he allowed Jake to slip the red leather booties onto his paws without making trouble: in fact, once he got the idea, he stepped into the last two. When all four of the little red shoes were in place (they looked, in fact, the most like Dorothy's ruby slippers), Oy sniffed at one of them, then looked attentively back at Jake.
Jake clicked his heels together three times, looking at the bumbler as he did so, ignoring the rattle of the gate and the soft chime from the walls of the Green Palace.
"You, Oy!"
"Oy!"
He rolled over on his back like a dog playing dead, then simply looked at his own feet with a kind of disgusted bewilderment. Looking at him, Jake had a sharp memory: trying to pat his stomach and rub his head at the same time, and his father making fun of him when he couldn't do it right away.
"Roland, help me. He knows what he's supposed to do, but he doesn't know how to do it." Jake glanced up at Eddie. "And don't make any smart remarks, okay?"
"No," Eddie said. "No smart remarks, Jake. Do you think just Oy has to do it this time, or is it still a group effort?"
"Just him, I think."
"But it wouldn't hurt us to kind of click along with Mitch," Susannah said.
"Mitch who?" Eddie asked, looking blank.
"Never mind. Go on, Jake, Roland. Give us a count again."
Eddie grasped Oy's forepaws. Roland gently grasped the bumbler's rear paws. Oy looked nervous at this - as if he perhaps expected to be swung briskly into the air and given the old heave-ho - but he didn't struggle.
"One, two, three."
Jake and Roland gently patted Oy's forepaws and rear paws together in unison. At the same time they clicked the heels of their own footwear. Eddie and Susannah did the same.
This time the harmonic was a deep, sweet bong, like a glass church bell. The black glass bar running down the center of the gate did not split open but shattered, spraying crumbs of obsidian glass in all directions.
Some rattled against Oy's hide. He sprang up in a hurry, yanking out of Jake's and Roland's grip and trotting a little distance away. He sat on the broken white line between the travel lane and the passing lane of the highway, his ears laid back, looking at the gate and panting.
"Come on," Roland said. He went to the left wing of the gate and pushed it slowly open. He stood at the edge of the mirror courtyard, a tall, lanky man in cowpoke jeans, an ancient shirt of no particular color, and improbable red cowboy boots. "Let's go in and see what the Wizard of Oz has to say for himself."
"If he's still here," Eddie said.
"Oh, I think he's here," Roland murmured. "Yes, I think he's here."
He ambled toward the main door with the empty sentry-box beside it. The others followed, welded to their own downward reflections by the red shoes like sets of Siamese twins.
Oy came last, skipping nimbly along in his ruby slippers, pausing once to sniff down at his own reflected snout.
"Oy!" he cried to the humbler floating below him, and then hurried after Jake.