1
Roland stopped at the sentry-box, glanced in, then picked up the thing which was lying on the floor. The others caught up with him and clustered around. It had looked like a newspaper, and that was just what it was . . . although an exceedingly odd one. No Topeka Capital-Journal this, and no news of a population-levelling plague.
The Oy Daily Buzz
Vol. MDLXVDI No. 96 "Daily Buzz, Daily Buzz, Handsome Iz as Handsome Duuzz" Weather: Here today, gone tomorrow Lucky Numbers: None Prognosis: Bad
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak blah blah blah good is bad bad is good all the stuffs the same good is bad bad is good all the stuffs the same go slow past the drawers all the stuffs the same blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Blame is a pain all the stuffs the same yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak charyou tree all the stuffs the same blah yak blah blah yak yak blah blah blah yak yak yak baked turkey cooked goose all the stuffs the same blah blah yak yak ride a train die in pain all the stuffs the same blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blame blame blame blame blame blame blah blah blah blah blah blah blah yak yak blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. (Related story p. 6)
Below this was a picture of Roland, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake crossing the mirrored courtyard, as if this had happened the day before instead of only minutes ago. Beneath it was a caption reading: Tragedy in Oz: Travellers Arrive Seeking Fame and Fortune; Find Death Instead.
"I like that," Eddie said, adjusting Roland's revolver in the holster he wore low on his hip. "Comfort and encouragement after days of confusion. Like a hot drink on a cold fucking night."
"Don't be afraid of this," Roland said. "This is a joke."
"I'm not afraid," Eddie said, "but it's a little more than a joke. I lived with Henry Dean for a lot of years, and I know when there's a plot to psych me out afoot. I know it very well." He looked curiously at Roland. "I hope you don't mind me saying this, but you 're the one who looks scared, Roland."
"I'm terrified," Roland said simply.
2
The arched entryway made Susannah think of a song which had been popular ten years or so before she had been yanked out of her world and into Roland's. Saw an eyeball peepin through a smoky cloud behind the Green Door, the lyric went. When I said "Joe sent me, " someone laughed out loud behind the Green Door. There were actually two doors here instead of one, and no peephole through which an eyeball could look in either. Nor did Susannah try that old speakeasy deal about how Joe had sent her. She did, however, bend forward to read the sign hanging from one of the circular glass door-pulls. bell out of order, please knock, it said.
"Don't bother," she said to Roland, who had actually doubled up his fist to do as the sign said. "It's from the story, that's all."
Eddie pulled her chair back slightly, stepped in front of it, and took hold of the circular pulls. The doors opened easily, the hinges rolling in silence. He took a step forward into what looked like a shadowy green grotto, cupped his hands to his mouth, and called: "Hey!"
The sound of his voice rolled away and came back changed... small, echoing, lost. Dying, it seemed.
"Christ," Eddie said. "Do we have to do this?"
"If we want to get back to the Beam, I think so." Roland looked paler than ever, but he led them in. Jake helped Eddie lift Susannah's chair over the sill (a milky block of jade-colored glass) and inside. Oy's little shoes flashed dim red on the green glass floor. They had gone only ten paces when the doors slammed shut behind them with a no-question-about-it boom that rolled past them and went echoing away into the depths of the Green Palace.
3
There was no reception room; only a vaulted, cavernous hallway that seemed to go on forever. The walls were lit with a faint green glow. This is just like the hallway in the movie, Jake thought, the one where the Cowardly Lion got so scared when he stepped on his own tail.
And, adding a little extra touch of verisimilitude Jake could have done without, Eddie spoke up in a trembly (and better than passable) Bert Lahr imitation: "Wait a minute, fellas, I wuz just thinkin - I really don't wanna see the Wizard this much. I better wait for you outside!"
"Stop it," Jake said sharply.
"Oppit!" Oy agreed. He walked directly at Jake's heel, swinging his head watchfully from side to side as he went. Jake could hear no sound except for their own passage ... yet he sensed something: a sound that wasn't. It was, he thought, like looking at a wind-chime that wants only the slightest puff of breeze to set it tinkling.
"Sorry," Eddie said. "Really." He pointed. "Look down there."
About forty yards ahead of them, the green corridor did end, in a narrow green doorway of amazing height - perhaps thirty feet from the floor to its pointed tip. And from behind it, Jake could now hear a steady thrumming sound. As they drew closer and the sound grew louder, his dread grew. He had to make a conscious effort to take the last dozen steps to the door. He knew this sound; he knew it from the run he'd made with Gasher under Lud, and from the run he and his friends had made on Blaine the Mono. It was the steady beat-beat-beat of slo-trans engines.
"It's like a nightmare," he said in a small, close-to-tears voice. "We're right back where we started."
"No, Jake," the gunslinger said, touching his hair. "Never think it. What you feel is an illusion. Stand and be true."
The sign on this door wasn't from the movie, and only Susannah knew it was from Dante. abandon hope, all ye who enter here, it said.
Roland reached out with his two-fingered right hand and pulled the thirty-foot door open.
4
What lay beyond it was, to the eyes of Jake, Susannah, and Eddie, a weird combination of The Wizard of Oz and Blaine the Mono. A thick mg (pale blue, like the one in the Barony Coach) lay on the floor. The chamber was like the nave of a cathedral, soaring to impenetrable heights of greenish-black. The pillars which supported the glowing walls were great glass ribs of alternating green and pink light; the pink was the exact shade of Blaine's hull. Jake saw these supporting pillars had been carven with a billion different images, none of them comforting; they jostled the eye and unsettled the heart. There seemed to be a preponderance of screaming faces.
Ahead of them, dwarfing the visitors, turning them into creatures that seemed no bigger than ants, was the chamber's only furnishing: an enormous green glass throne. Jake tried to estimate its size and was unable - he had no reference-points to help him. He thought that the throne's back might be fifty feet high, but it could as easily have been seventy-five or a hundred. It was marked with the open eye symbol, this time traced in red instead of yellow. The rhythmic thrusting of the light made the eye seem alive; to be beating like a heart.
Above the throne, rising like the pipes of a mighty medieval organ, were thirteen great cylinders, each pulsing a different color. Each, that was, save for the pipe which ran directly down in back of the throne's center. That one was black as midnight and as still as death.
"Hey!" Susannah shouted from her chair. "Anyone here?"
At the sound of her voice, the pipes flashed so brilliantly that Jake had to shield his eyes. For a moment the entire throneroom glared like an exploding rainbow. Then the pipes went out, went dark, went dead, just as the wizard's glass in Roland's story had done when the glass (or the force inhabiting the glass) decided to shut up for awhile. Now there was only the column of blackness, and the steady green pulse of the empty throne.
Next, a somehow tired humming sound, as of a very old servomechanism being called into use one final time, began to whine its way into their ears. Panels, each at least six feet long and two feet wide, slid open in the arms of the throne. From the black slots thus revealed, a rose-colored smoke began to drift out and up. As it rose, it darkened to a bright red. And in it, a terribly familiar zigzag line appeared. Jake knew what it was even before the words
{Lud Candleton Rilea The Falls of the Hounds Dasherville Topeka)
appeared, glowing smoke-bright.
It was Blaine's route-map.
Roland could say all he wanted about how things had changed, how Jake's feeling of being trapped in a nightmare
{this is the worst nightmare of my life, and that is the truth)
was just an illusion created by his confused mind and frightened heart, but Jake knew better. This place might look a little bit like the throneroom ofoz the great and Terrible, but it was really Blaine the Mono. They were back aboard Blaine, and soon the riddling would begin all over again.
Jake felt like screaming.
5
Eddie recognized the voice that boomed out of the smoky route-map hanging above the green throne, but he believed it was Blaine the Mono no more than he believed it was the Wizard of Oz. Some wizard, perhaps, but this wasn't the Emerald City, and Blaine was just as dead as dogshit. Eddie had sent him home with a fuckin rupture.
"HELLO THERE AGAIN, LITTLE TRAILHANDS!"
The smoky route-map pulsed, but Eddie no longer associated it with the voice, although he guessed they were supposed to. No, the voice was coming from the pipes.
He glanced down, saw Jake's paper-white face, and knelt beside him. "If scrap, kid," he said.
"N-No ... it's Blaine ... not dead..."
"He's dead, all right. This is nothing but an amplified version of the after-school announcements . . . who's got detention and who's supposed to report to Room Six for Speech Therapy. You dig?"
"What?" Jake looked up at him, lips wet and trembling, eyes dazed. "What do you - "
"Those pipes are speakers. Even a pipsqueak can sound big through a twelve-speaker Dolby sound-system; don't you remember the movie? It has to sound big because it's a bumhug, Jake - just a bumhug."
"WHAT ARE YOU TELLING HIM, EDDIE OF NEW YORK? ONE OF YOUR STUPID, NASTY-MINDED LITTLE JOKES? ONE OF YOUR UNFAIR RIDDLES?"
"Yeah," Eddie said. "The one that goes, 'How many dipolar computers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?' Who are you, buddy? 1 know goddam well you're not Blaine the Mono, so who are you?"
"I ... AM . . .Oz!" the voice thundered. the glass columns flashed; so did the pipes behind the throne. "OZ THE GREAT! OZ THE POWERFUL! WHO ARE YOU?"
Susannah rolled forward until her wheelchair was at the base of the dull green steps leading up to a throne that would have dwarfed even Lord Perth.
"I'm Susannah Dean, the small and crippled," she said, "and I was raised to be polite, but not to suffer bullshit. We're here because we're s'pozed to be here - why else did we get left the shoes?"
"WHAT DO YOU WANT OF ME, SUSANNAH? WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE, LITTLE COWGIRL?"
"You know," she said. "We want what everyone wants, so far as I know - to go back home again, 'cause there's no place like home. We - "
"You can't go home," Jake said. He spoke in a rapid, frightened murmur. "You can't go home again, Thomas Wolfe said that, and that is the truth."
"It's a lie, sug," Susannah said. "A flat-out lie. You can go home again. All you have to do is find the right rainbow and walk under it. We've found it; the rest is just, you know, footwork."
"WOULD YOU GO BACK TO NEW YORK, SUSANNAH DEAN? EDDIE DEAN? JAKE CHAMBERS? IS THAT WHAT YOU ASK OF OZ, THE MIGHTY AND POWERFUL?"
"New York isn't home for us anymore," Susannah said. She looked very small yet very fearless as she sat in her new wheelchair at the foot of the enormous, pulsing throne. "No more than Gilead is home for Roland. Take us back to the Path of the Beam. That's where we want to go, because that's our way home. Only way home we got."
"GO AWAY!" cried the voice from the pipes. "GO AWAY AND COME BACK TOMORROW! WE'LL DISCUSS THE BEAM THEN! FIDDLE-DE-DEE, SAID SCARLETT, WE'LL TALK ABOUT THE BEAM TOMORROW, FOR TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY!"
"No," Eddie said. "We'll talk about it now."
"DO NOT AROUSE THE WRATH OF THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ!" the voice cried, and the pipes flashed furiously with each word. Susannah was sure this was supposed to be scary, but she found it almost amusing, instead. It was like watching a salesman demonstrate a child's toy. Hey, kids! When you talk, the pipes flash bright colors! Try it and see!
"Sugar, you best listen, now," Susannah said. "What you don't want to do is arouse the wrath of folks with guns. Especially when you be livin in a glass house."
"I SAID COME BACK TOMORROW!"
Red smoke once more began to boil out of the slots in the arms of the throne. It was thicker now. The shape which had been Blaine's route-map melted apart and joined it. The smoke formed a face, this time. It was narrow and hard and watchful, framed by long hair.
It's the man Roland shot in the desert, Susannah thought wonderingly. It's that man Jonas. I know it is.
Now Oz spoke in a slightly trembling voice: "DO YOU PRESUME TO THREATEN THE GREAT OZ?" The lips of the huge, smoky face hovering over the throne's seat parted in a snarl of mingled menace and contempt. "YOU UNGRATEFUL CREATURES! OH, YOU UNGRATEFUL CREATURES!"
Eddie, who knew smoke and mirrors when he saw them, had glanced in another direction. His eyes widened and he gripped Susannah's arm above the elbow. "Look," he whispered. "Christ, Suze, look at Oy!"
The billy-bumbler had no interest in smoke-ghosts, whether they were monorail route-maps, dead Coffin Hunters, or just Hollywood special effects of the pre-World War II variety. He had seen (or smelled) something that was more interesting.
Susannah grabbed Jake, turned him, and pointed at the bumbler. She saw the boy's eyes widen with understanding a moment before Oy reached the small alcove in the left wall. It was screened from the main chamber by a green curtain which matched the glass walls. Oy stretched his long neck forward, caught the curtain's fabric in his teeth, and yanked it back.
6
Behind the curtain red and green lights flashed; cylinders spun inside glass boxes; needles moved back and forth inside long rows of lighted dials. Yet Jake barely noticed these things. It was the man who took all his attention, the one sitting at the console, his back to them. His filthy hair, streaked with dirt and blood, hung to his shoulders in matted clumps. He was wearing some sort of headset, and was speaking into a tiny mike which hung in front of his mouth. His back was to them, and at first he had no idea that Oy had smelled him out and uncovered his hiding place.
"GO!" thundered the voice from the pipes . .. except now Jake saw where it was really coming from. "COME BACK TOMORROW IF YOU LIKE, BUT GO NOW! I WARN YOU!"
"It is Jonas, Roland must not have killed him after all," Eddie whispered, but Jake knew better. He had recognized the voice. Even distorted by the amplification of the colored pipes, he had recognized the voice. How could he have ever believed it to be the voice of Blaine?
"I WARN YOU, IF YOU REFUSE - "
Oy barked, a sharp and somehow forbidding sound. The man in the equipment alcove began to turn.
Tell me, cully, Jake remembered this voice saying before its owner had discovered the dubious attractions of amplification. Tell me all you know about dipolar computers and transitive circuits. Tell me and I'll give you a drink.
It wasn't Jonas, and it wasn't the Wizard of anything. It was David Quick's grandson. It was the Tick-Tock Man.
7
Jake stared at him, horrified. The coiled, dangerous creature who had lived beneath Lud with his mates - Gasher and Hoots and Brandon and Tilly - was gone. This might have been that monster's ruined father ... or grandfather. His left eye - the one Oy had punctured with his claws - bulged white and misshapen, partly in its socket and partly on his unshaven cheek. The right side of his head looked half-scalped, the skull showing through in a long, triangular strip. Jake had a distant, panic-darkened memory of a flap of skin falling over the side of Tick-Tock's face, but he had been on the edge of hysteria by that point... and was again now.
Oy had also recognized the man who had tried to kill him and was barking hysterically, head down, teeth bared, back bowed. Tick-Tock stared at him with wide, stunned eyes.
"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain," said a voice from behind them, and then tittered. "My friend Andrew is having another in a long series of bad days. Poor boy. I suppose I was wrong to bring him out of Lud, but he just looked so lost ..." The owner of the voice tittered again.
Jake swung around and saw that there was now a man sitting in the middle of the great throne, with his legs casually crossed in front of him. He was wearing jeans, a dark jacket that belted at the waist, and old, rundown cowboy boots. On his jacket was a button that showed a pig's head with a bullethole between the eyes. In his lap this newcomer held a drawstring bag. He rose, standing in the seat of the throne like a child in daddy's chair, and the smile dropped away from his face like loose skin. Now his eyes blazed, and his lips parted over vast, hungry teeth.
"Get them, Andrew! Get them! Kill them! Every sister-fucking one of them!"
"My life for you!" the man in the alcove screamed, and for the first time Jake saw the machine-gun propped in the comer. Tick-Tock sprang for it and snatched it up. "My life for you!"
He turned, and Oy was on him once again, leaping forward and upward, sinking his teeth deep into Tick-Tock's left thigh, just below the crotch.
Eddie and Susannah drew in unison, each raising one of Roland's big guns. They fired in concert, not even the smallest overlap in the sound of their shots. One of them tore off the top of Tick-Tock's miserable head, buried itself in the equipment, and created a loud but mercifully brief snarl of feedback. The other took him in the throat.
He staggered forward one step, then two. Oy dropped to the floor and backed away from him, snarling. A third step took Tick-Tock out into the throneroom proper. He raised his arms toward Jake, and the boy could read Ticky's hatred in his remaining green eye; the boy thought he could hear the man's last, hateful thought: Oh, you fucking little squint -
Then Tick-Tock collapsed forward, as he had collapsed in the Cradle of the Grays . . . only this time he would rise no more.
"Thus fell Lord Perth, and the earth did shake with that thunder," said the man on the throne.
Except he's not a man, Jake thought. Not a man at all. We've found the Wizard at last, I think. And I'm pretty sure I know what's in the bag he has.
"Marten," Roland said. He held out his left hand, the one which was still whole. "Marten Broadcloak. After all these years. After all these centuries."
"Want this, Roland?"
Eddie put the gun he had used to kill the Tick-Tock Man in Roland's hand. A tendril of blue smoke was still rising from the barrel. Roland looked at the old revolver as if he had never seen it before, then slowly lifted it and pointed it at the grinning, rosy-cheeked figure sitting cross-legged on the Green Palace's throne.
"Finally," Roland breathed, thumbing back the trigger. "Finally in my sights."
8
"That six-shooter will do you no good, as I think you know," the man on the throne said. "Not against me. Only misfires against me, Roland, old fellow. How's the family, by the way? I seem to have lost touch with them over the years. I was always such a lousy correspondent. Someone ought to take a hosswhip to me, aye, so they should!"
He threw back his head and laughed. Roland pulled the trigger of the gun in his hand. When the hammer fell there was only a dull click.
"Toadjer," the man on the throne said. "I think you must have gotten some of those wet slugs in there by accident, don't you? The ones with the flat powder? Good for blocking the sound of the thinny, but not so good for shooting old wizards, are they? Too bad. And your hand, Roland, look at your hand! Short a couple of fingers, by the look. My, this has been hard on you, hasn't it? Things could get easier, though. You and your friends could have a fine, fruitful life - and, as Jake would say, that is the truth. No more lobstrosities, no more mad trains, no more disquieting - not to mention dangerous - trips to other worlds. All you have to do is give over this stupid and hopeless quest for the Tower."
"No," Eddie said.
"No," Susannah said.
"No," Jake said.
"No!" Oy said, and added a bark.
The dark man on the green throne continued to smile, unperturbed. "Roland?" he asked. "What about you?" Slowly, he raised the drawstring bag. It looked dusty and old. It hung from the wizard's fist like a teardrop, and now the thing in its pouch began to pulse with pink light. "Cry off, and they need never see what's inside this - they need never see the last scene of that sad long-ago play. Cry off. Turn from the Tower and go your way."
"No," Roland said. He began to smile, and as his smile broadened, that of the man sitting on the throne began to falter. "You can enchant my guns, those of this world, I reckon," he said.
"Roland, I don't know what you're thinking of, laddie, but I warn you not to - "
"Not to cross Oz the Great? Oz the Powerful? But I think I will, Marten ... or Maerlyn ... or whoever you call yourself now..."
"Flagg, actually," the man on the throne said. "And we've met before." He smiled. Instead of broadening his face, as smiles usually did, it contracted Flagg's features into a narrow and spiteful grimace. "In the wreck of Gilead. You and your surviving pals - that laughing donkey Cuthbert Allgood made one of your party, I remember, and DeCurry, the fellow with the birthmark, made another - were on your way west, to seek the Tower. Or, in the parlance of Jake's world, you were off to see the Wizard. I know you saw me, but I doubt you knew until now that I saw you, as well."
"And will again, I reckon," Roland said. "Unless, that is, I kill you now and put an end to your interference."
Still holding his own gun out in his left hand, he went for the one tucked in the waistband of his jeans - Jake's Ruger, a gun from another world and perhaps immune to this creature's enchantments - with his right. And he was fast as he had always been fast, his speed blinding.
The man on the throne shrieked and cringed back. The bag fell from his lap, and the glass ball - once held by Rhea, once held by Jonas, once held by Roland himself - slipped out of its mouth. Smoke, green this time instead of red, billowed from the slots in the arms of the throne. It rose in obscuring fumes. Yet Roland still might have shot the figure disappearing into the smoke if he had made a clean draw. He didn't, however; the Ruger slid in the grip of his reduced hand, then twisted. The front sight caught on his belt-buckle. It took only an extra quarter-second for him to free the snag, but that was the quarter-second he had needed. He pumped three shots into the billowing smoke, then ran forward, oblivious of the shouts of the others.
He waved the smoke aside with his hands. His shots had shattered the back of the throne into thick green slabs of glass, but the man-shaped creature which had called itself Flagg was gone. Roland found himself already beginning to wonder if he - or it had been there in the first place.
The ball was still there, however, unharmed and glowing the same enticing pink he remembered from so long ago - from Mejis, when he had been young and in love. This survivor of Maerlyn's Rainbow had rolled almost to the edge of the throne's seat; two more inches and it would have plunged over and shattered on the floor. Yet it had not; still it remained, this bewitched thing Susan Delgado had first glimpsed through the window of Rhea's hut, under the light of the Kissing Moon.
Roland picked it up - how well it fit his hand, how natural it felt against his palm, even after all these years - and looked into its cloudy, troubled depths. "You always did have a charmed life," he whispered to it. He thought of Rhea as he had seen her in this ball - her ancient, laughing eyes. He thought of the flames from the Reap-Night bonfire rising around Susan, making her beauty shimmer in the heat. Making it shiver like a mirage.
Wretched glam! he thought. If I dashed you to the floor, surely we would drown in the sea of tears that would pour out of your split belly . . . the tears of all those you've put to ruin.
And why not do it? Left whole, the nasty thing might be able to help them back to the Path of the Beam, but Roland didn't believe they actually needed it. He thought that Tick-Tock and the creature which had called itself Flagg had been their last challenge in that regard. The Green Palace was their door back to Mid-World ... and it was theirs, now. They had conquered it by force of arms.
But you can't go yet, gunslinger. Not until you've finished your story, told the last scene.
Whose voice was that? Vannay's? No. Cort's? No. Nor was it the voice of his father, who had once turned him naked out of a whore's bed. That was the hardest voice, the one he often heard in his troubled dreams, the one he wanted so to please and so seldom could. No, not that voice, not this time.
This time what he heard was the voice of ka - ka like a wind. He had told so much of that awful fourteenth year ... but he hadn't finished the tale. As with Detta Walker and the Blue Lady's forspecial plate, there was one more thing. A hidden thing. The question wasn't, he saw, whether or not the five of them could find their way out of the Green Palace and recover the Path of the Beam; the question was whether or not they could go on as ka-tet. If they were to do that, there could be nothing hidden; he would have to tell them of the final time he had looked into the wizard's glass in that long-ago year. Three nights past the welcoming banquet, it had been. He would have to tell them -
No, Roland, the voice whispered. Not just tell. Not this time. You know better.
Yes. He knew better.
"Come," he said, turning to them.
They drew slowly around him, their eyes wide and filling with the ball's flashing pink light. Already they were half-hypnotized by it, even Oy.
"We are ka-tet," Roland said, holding the ball toward them. "We are one from many. I lost my one true love at the beginning of my quest for the Dark Tower. Now look into this wretched thing, if you would, and see what I lost not long after. See it once and for all; see it very well."
They looked. The ball, cupped in Roland's upraised hands, began to pulse faster. It gathered them in and swept them away. Caught and whirled in the grip of that pink storm, they flew over the Wizard's Rainbow to the Gilead that had been.