Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [77]
Eddie sat up. “Actually I do.”
Roland nodded, smiling a little. “Then can you say more? If you can’t, we’ll let it go, but I’ve come to respect your feelings, Eddie—far more than you realize—and if you’d speak, I’d hear.”
What he said was true. The gunslinger’s initial feelings for Eddie had wavered between caution and contempt for what Roland saw as his weakness of character. Respect had come more slowly. It had begun in Balazar’s office, when Eddie had fought naked. Very few men Roland had known could have done that. It had grown with his realization of how much Eddie was like Cuthbert. Then, on the mono, Eddie had acted with a kind of desperate creativity that Roland could admire but never equal. Eddie Dean was possessed of Cuthbert Allgood’s always puzzling and sometimes annoying sense of the ridiculous; he was also possessed of Alain Johns’s deep flashes of intuition. Yet in the end, Eddie was like neither of Roland’s old friends. He was sometimes weak and self-centered, but possessed of deep reservoirs of courage and courage’s good sister, what Eddie himself sometimes called “heart.”
But it was his intuition Roland wanted to tap now.
“All right, then,” Eddie said. “Don’t stop me. Don’t ask questions. Just listen.”
Roland nodded. And hoped Susannah and Jake wouldn’t come back, at least not just yet.
“I look in the sky—up there where the clouds are breaking right this minute—and I see the number nineteen written in blue.”
Roland looked up. And yes, it was there. He saw it, too. But he also saw a cloud like a turtle, and another hole in the thinning dreck that looked like a gunnywagon.
“I look in the trees and see nineteen. Into the fire, see nineteen. Names make nineteen, like Overholser’s and Callahan’s. But that’s just what I can say, what I can see, what I can get hold of.” Eddie was speaking with desperate speed, looking directly into Roland’s eyes. “Here’s another thing. It has to do with todash. I know you guys sometimes think everything reminds me of getting high, and maybe that’s right, but Roland, going todash is like being stoned.”
Eddie always spoke to him of these things as if Roland had never put anything stronger than graf into his brain and body in all his long life, and that was far from the truth. He might remind Eddie of this at another time, but not now.
“Just being here in your world is like going todash. Because…ah, man, this is hard…Roland, everything here is real, but it’s not.”
Roland thought of reminding Eddie this wasn’t his world, not anymore—for him the city of Lud had been the end of Mid-World and the beginning of all the mysteries that lay beyond—but again kept his mouth closed.
Eddie grasped a handful of duff, scooping up fragrant needles and leaving five black marks in the shape of a hand on the forest floor. “Real,” he said. “I can feel it and smell it.” He put the handful of needles to his mouth and ran out his tongue to touch them. “I can taste it. And at the same time, it’s as unreal as a nineteen you might see in the fire, or that cloud in the sky that looks like a turtle. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I understand it very well,” Roland murmured.
“The people are real. You…Susannah…Jake…that guy Gasher who snatched Jake…Overholser and the Slightmans. But the way stuff from my world keeps showing up over here, that’s not real. It’s not sensible or logical, either, but that’s not what I mean. It’s just not real. Why do people over here sing ‘Hey Jude’? I don’t know. That cyborg bear, Shardik—where do I know that name from? Why did it remind me of rabbits? All that shit about the Wizard of Oz, Roland—all that happened to us, I have no doubt of it, but at the same time it doesn’t seem real to me. It seems like todash. Like nineteen. And what happens after the Green Palace? Why, we walk into the woods, just like Hansel and Gretel. There’s a road for us to walk on. Muffin-balls for us to pick. Civilization has ended. Everything is coming unraveled. You told us so. We saw it in Lud. Except guess what?