Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [19]
But after their confrontation in the glass palace with Jake’s old friend the Tick-Tock Man and Roland’s old friend (Flagg…or Marten…or—just perhaps—Maerlyn), time had changed.
Not right away, though. We traveled in that damned pink ball…saw Roland kill his mother by mistake…and when we came back…
Yes, that was when it had happened. They had awakened in a clearing perhaps thirty miles from the Green Palace. They had still been able to see it, but all of them had understood that it was in another world. Someone—or some force—had carried them over or through the thinny and back to the Path of the Beam. Whoever or whatever it had been, it had actually been considerate enough to pack them each a lunch, complete with Nozz-A-La sodas and rather more familiar packages of Keebler cookies.
Near them, stuck on the branch of a tree, had been a note from the being Roland had just missed killing in the Palace: “Renounce the Tower. This is your last warning.” Ridiculous, really. Roland would no more renounce the Tower than he’d kill Jake’s pet billy-bumbler and then roast him on a spit for dinner. None of them would renounce Roland’s Dark Tower. God help them, they were in it all the way to the end.
We got some daylight left, Eddie had said on the day they’d found Flagg’s warning note. You want to use it, or what?
Yes, Roland of Gilead had replied. Let’s use it.
And so they had, following the Path of the Beam through endless open fields that were divided from each other by belts of straggly, annoying underbrush. There had been no sign of people. Skies had remained low and cloudy day after day and night after night. Because they followed the Path of the Beam, the clouds directly above them sometimes roiled and broke open, revealing patches of blue, but never for long. One night they opened long enough to disclose a full moon with a face clearly visible on it: the nasty, complicitous squint-and-grin of the Peddler. That made it late summer by Roland’s reckoning, but to Eddie it looked like half-past no time at all, the grass mostly listless or outright dead, the trees (what few there were) bare, the bushes scrubby and brown. There was little game, and for the first time in weeks—since leaving the forest ruled by Shardik, the cyborg bear—they sometimes went to bed with their bellies not quite full.
Yet none of that, Eddie thought, was quite as annoying as the sense of having lost hold of time itself: no hours, no days, no weeks, no seasons, for God’s sake. The moon might have told Roland it was the end of summer, but the world around them looked like the first week of November, dozing sleepily toward winter.
Time, Eddie had decided during this period, was in large part created by external events. When a lot of interesting shit was happening, time seemed to go by fast. If you got stuck with nothing but the usual boring shit, it slowed down. And when everything stopped happening, time apparently quit altogether. Just packed up and went to Coney Island. Weird but true.
Had everything stopped happening? Eddie considered (and with nothing to do but push Susannah’s wheelchair through one boring field after another, there was plenty of time for consideration). The only peculiarity he could think of since returning from the Wizard’s Glass was what Jake called the Mystery Number, and that probably meant nothing. They’d needed to solve a mathematical riddle in the Cradle of Lud in order to gain access to Blaine, and Susannah had suggested the Mystery Number was a holdover from that. Eddie was far from sure she was right, but hey, it was a theory.
And really, what could be so special about the number nineteen? Mystery Number, indeed.