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mouth was violently kissed by nettles and his testicles were skewered. He screamed, clawing at the air with his free hand, until Roland grabbed it and forced it down.
    “Stop, Eddie. Stop. They’re gone.” A pause. The connection broke and the pain faded. Roland wasright, of course. Unlike the Pere, they had escaped. Eddie saw that Roland’s eyes were shiny with tears. “He’s gone, too. The Pere.”
    “The vampires? You know, the cannibals? Did . . . Did they . . . ?” Eddie couldn’t finish the thought. The idea of Pere Callahan as one of them was too awful to speak aloud.
    “No, Eddie. Not at all. He—” Roland pulled the gun he still wore. The scrolled steel sides gleamed in the late light. He tucked the barrel deep beneath his chin for a moment, looking at Eddie as he did it.
    “He escaped them,” Eddie said.
    “Aye, and how angry they must be.”
    Eddie nodded, suddenly exhausted. And his wounds were aching again. No, sobbing . “Good,” he said. “Now put that thing back where it belongs before you shoot yourself with it.” And as Roland did: “What just happened to us? Did we go todash or was it another Beamquake?”
    “I think it was a bit of both,” Roland said. “There’s a thing called aven kal, which is like a tidal-wave that runs along the Path of the Beam. We were lifted on it.”
    “And allowed to see what we wanted to see.”
    Roland thought about this for a moment, then shook his head with great firmness. “We saw what the Beam wanted us to see. Where it wants us to go.”
    “Roland, did you study this stuff when you were a kid? Did your old pal Vannay teach classes in . . . I don’t know, The Anatomy of Beams and Bends o’ the Rainbow?”
    Roland was smiling. “Yes, I suppose that we were taught such things in both History and Summa Logicales.”
    “Logicka- what ?”
    Roland didn’t answer. He was looking out the window of Cullum’s car, still trying to get his breath back—both the physical and the figurative. It really wasn’t that hard to do, not here; being in this part of Bridgton was like being in the neighborhood of a certain vacant lot in Manhattan. Because there was a generator near here. Not sai King, as Roland had first believed, but the potential of sai King . . . of what sai King might be able to create, given world enough and time. Wasn’t King also being carried on aven kal, perhaps generating the very wave that lifted him?
    A man can’t pull himself up by his own bootstraps no matter how hard he tries, Cort had lectured when Roland, Cuthbert, Alain, and Jamie had been little more than toddlers. Cort speaking in the tone of cheery self-assurance that had gradually hardened to harshness as his last group of lads grew toward their trials of manhood. But maybe about bootstraps Cort had been wrong. Maybe, under certain circumstances, a man could pull himself up by them. Or give birth to the universe from his navel, as Gan was said to have done. As a writer of stories, was King not a creator? And at bottom, wasn’t creation about making something from nothing—seeing the world in a grain of sand or pulling one’s self up by one’s own bootstraps?
    And what was he doing, sitting here and thinking long philosophical thoughts while two members of his tet were lost?
    “Get this carriage going,” Roland said, trying to ignore the sweet humming he could hear—whether the Voice of the Beam or the Voice of Gan the Creator, he didn’t know. “We’ve got to get toTurtleback Lane in this town of Lovell and see if we can’t find our way through to where Susannah is.”
    And not just for Susannah, either. If Jake succeeded in eluding the monsters in the Dixie Pig, he would also head to where she lay. Of this Roland had no doubt.
    Eddie reached for the transmission lever—despite all its gyrations, Cullum’s old Galaxie had never quit running—and then his hand fell away from it. He turned and looked at Roland with a bleak eye.
    “What ails thee, Eddie?