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 of Oz 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?”