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Whatever it is, spill it quick. The baby’s coming now—may have come already. Soon they’ll have no more use for her!”
    “I know,” Eddie said. “But we can’t go to Lovell.” He grimaced as if what he was saying was causing him physical pain. Roland guessed it probably was. “Not yet.”
TWO
    They sat quiet for a moment, listening to the sweetly tuned hum of the Beam, a hum that sometimes became joyous voices. They sat looking into the thickening shadows in the trees, where a million faces and a million stories lurked, O can you say unfound door, can you say lost.
    Eddie half-expected Roland to shout at him—it wouldn’t be the first time—or maybe clout him upside the head, as the gunslinger’s old teacher, Cort, had been wont to do when his pupils were slow or contrary. Eddie almost hoped he would. A good shot to the jaw might clear his head, by Shardik.
    Only muddy thinking’s not the trouble and you know it, he thought. Your head is clearer than his. If it wasn’t, you could let go of this world and go on hunting for your lost wife.
    At last Roland spoke. “What is it, then? This?” He bent and picked up the folded piece of paper with Aaron Deepneau’s pinched handwriting on it. Roland looked at it for a moment, then flicked it into Eddie’s lap with a little grimace of distaste.
    “You know how much I love her,” Eddie said in a low, strained voice. “You know that.”
    Roland nodded, but without looking at him. He appeared to be staring down at his own broken and dusty boots, and the dirty floor of the passenger-side footwell. Those downcast eyes, that gaze which would not turn to him who’d come almost to idolize Roland of Gilead, sort of broke Eddie Dean’s heart. Yet he pressed on. If there had ever been room for mistakes, it was gone now. This was the endgame.
    “I’d go to her this minute if I thought it was the right thing to do. Roland, this second! But we have to finish our business in this world. Because this world is one-way. Once we leave today, July 9th, 1977, we can never come here again. We—”
    “Eddie, we’ve been through all of this.” Still not looking at him.
    “Yes, but do you understand it? Only one bullet to shoot, one ’Riza to throw. That’s why we came to Bridgton in the first place! God knows I wanted to go to Turtleback Lane as soon as John Cullum told us about it, but I thought we had to see the writer, and talk to him. And I was right, wasn’t I?” Almost pleading now. “Wasn’t I?”
    Roland looked at him at last, and Eddie was glad. This was hard enough, wretched enough, withouthaving to bear the turned-away, downcast gaze of his dinh.
    “And it may not matter if we stay a little longer. If we concentrate on those two women lying together on those two beds, Roland—if we concentrate on Suze and Mia as we last saw them —then it’s possible we can cut into their history at that point. Isn’t it?”
    After a long, considering moment during which Eddie wasn’t conscious of drawing a single breath, the gunslinger nodded. Such could not happen if on Turtleback Lane they found what the gunslinger had come to think of as an “old-ones door,” because such doors were dedicated, and always came out at the same place. But were they to find a magic door somewhere along Turtleback Lane in Lovell, one that had been left behind when the Prim receded, then yes, they might be able to cut in where they wanted. But such doors could be tricky, too; this they had found out for themselves in the Cave of Voices, when the door there had sent Jake and Callahan to New York instead of Roland and Eddie, thereby scattering all their plans into the Land of Nineteen.
    “What else must we do?” Roland said. There was no anger in his voice, but to Eddie he sounded both tired and unsure.
    “Whatever it is, it’s gonna be hard. That much I guarantee you.”
    Eddie took the bill of sale and gazed at it as grimly as any Hamlet in the history of drama had ever stared upon