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When the gunslinger entered Eddie, Eddie had experienced awatched (this Roland hadn&039;t felt; Eddie had told hiue sense of the gunslinger&039;s presence With Detta, Roland had been forced to come forward immediately, like it or not She hadn&039;t just sensed hi for him - him or another, more frequent, visitor Either way, she had been totally aware of his presence from the first moment he had been in her

Jack Mort didn&039;t feel a thing

He was too intent on the boy

He had been watching the boy for the last teeks

Today he was going to push him

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Even with the back to the eyes fronized the boy It was the boy he had met at the way station in the desert, the boy he had rescued from the Oracle in the Mountains, the boy whose life he had sacrificed when the choice between saving hi up with the man in black finally came; the boy who had said Go then - there are other worlds than these before plunging into the abyss And sure enough, the boy had been right

The boy was Jake

He was holding a plain brown paper bag in one hand and a blue canvas bag by its drawstring top in the other Frounslinger thought it must contain books

Traffic flooded the street the boy aiting to cross - a street in the same city from which he had taken the Prisoner and the Lady, he realized, but for the oing to happen or not happen in the next few seconds

Jake had not been brought into the gunslinger&039;s world through any h a cruder, more understandable portal: he had been born into Roland&039;s world by dying in his own

He had been murdered

More specifically, he had been pushed

Pushed into the street; run over by a car while on his way to school, his lunch-sack in one hand and his books in the other

Pushed by theto do it! He&039;s going to do it right now! That&039;s to behim in my world - to see him murdered in this one before I can stop it!

But the rejection of brutish destiny had been the gunslinger&039;s work all his life - it had been his ka, if you pleased - and so he ca with reflexes so deep they had nearly becoht both horrible and ironic flashed into his mind: What if the body he had entered was itself that of the man in black? What if, as he rushed forward to save the boy, he saw his own hands reach out and push? What if this sense of control was only an illusion, and Walter&039;s final gleeful joke that Roland himself should learrow of his concentration On the edge of leaping forward and shoving the kid into the traffic, he felt so which his mind mistranslated just as the body may refer pain frounslinger ca had landed on the back of his neck Not a wasp or a bee, nothing that actually stung, but so that bit and itched Mosquito, maybe It was on this that he blamed his lapse in concentration at the crucial moment He slapped at it and returned to the boy

He thought all this happened in a bare wink; actually, seven seconds passed He sensed neither the gunslinger&039;s swift advance nor his equally swift retreat, and none of the people around hi-to-work people, most from the subway station on the next block, their faces still puffy with sleep, their half-drea eyes turned inward) noticed Jack&039;s eyes turn froold-rilasses he wore No one noticed those eyes darken to their normal cobalt color either, but when it happened and he refocused on the boy, he saith frustrated fury as sharp as a thorn that his chance was gone The light had changed

He watched the boy crossing with the rest of the sheep, and then Jack hi hiainst the tidal flow of pedestrians

"Hey, irl he barely saw Jack shoved her aside, hard, not looking back at her caw of anger as her own ar on down Fifth Avenue and away from Forty-Third, where he had meant for the boy to die today His head was bent, his lips pressed together so tightly he see-healed wound above his chin Once clear of the bottleneck at the corner, he did not slon but strode evenForty-Second, Forty-First, Fortieth So where the boy lived He gave it barely a glance, although he had followed the boy fro for the last three weeks, followed hi to the corner three and a half blocks further up Fifth, the corner he thought of siirl he bu after him, but Jack Mort didn&039;t notice An amateur lepidopterist would have taken no more notice of a common butterfly

Jack was, in his way, much like an amateur lepidopterist

By profession, he was a successful CPA

Pushing was only his hobby

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The gunslinger returned to the back of the man&039;s mind and fainted there If there was relief, it was simply that this man was not the man in black, was not Walter

All the rest was utter horrorand utter realization

Divorced of his body, his mind - his ka - was as healthy and acute as ever, but the sudden knowing struck hi didn&039;t come when he went forward but when he was sure the boy was safe and slipped back again He saw the connection between this man and Odetta, too fantastic and yet too hideously apt to be coincidental, and understood what the real drawing of the three ht be

The third was not this man, this Pusher; the third named by Walter had been Death

Death but not for you That hat Walter, clever as Satan even at the end, had said A lawyer&039;s answerso close to the truth that the truth was able to hide in its shadow Death was not for him; death was become him

The Prisoner, the Lady

Death was the third

He was suddenly filled with the certainty that he himself was the third

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Roland ca but a projectile, a brainless rammed to launch the body he was in at the hts of whatJake did not come until later - the possible paradox, the fistula in ti that had happened after he had arrived at the way stationfor surely if he saved Jake in this world, there would have been no Jake for hi which had happened thereafter would change

What changes? Iht have been the end of his quest never entered the gunslinger&039;s mind And surely such after-the-fact speculations were moot; if he had seen the man in black, no consequence, paradox, or ordained course of destiny could have stopped hi the head of this body he inhabited and pounding it straight through Walter&039;s chest Roland would have been as helpless to do otherwise as a gun is helpless to refuse the finger that squeezes the trigger and flings the bullet on its flight

If it sent all to hell, the hell with it

He scanned the people clustered on the corner quickly, seeing each face (he scanned the wo sure there wasn&039;t one only pretending to be a woman)

Walter wasn&039;t there

Gradually he relaxed, as a finger curled around a trigger may relax at the last instant No; Walter was nowhere around the boy, and the gunslinger soht when Not quite That as close - teeks away, a week, le day - but it was not quite yet

So he went back

On the way he saw

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and fell senseless with shock: this man into whosejust inside theof a deserted tene full of abandoned rooms - abandoned, that was, except for the winos and crazies who often spent their nights here You knew about the winos because you could sry piss You knew about the crazies because you could shts The only furniture in this roo both: one to sit in, one as a prop to keep the door opening on the hallway closed He expected no sudden interruptions, but it was best not to take chances He was close enough to theto look out, but far enough behind the slanted shadow-line to be safe from any casual viewer

He had a crumbly red brick in his hand

He had pried it froood many were loose It was old, eroded at the corners, but heavy Chunks of ancientto it like barnacles

The man meant to drop the brick on someone

He didn&039;t care hen it came to murder, Jack Mort was an equal-opportunity employer

After a bit, a fa the sidewalk below:on the inside, presumably to keep her safely away from the traffic There was quite a lot of it this close to the railway station but Jack Mort didn&039;t care about the auto traffic What he cared about was the lack of buildings directly opposite hi a julass

He would only lean out for a few seconds, and he earing sunglasses over his eyes and an out-of-season knit cap over his blonde hair It was like the chair under the doorknob Even when you were safe fro those unexpected ones which re a sweatshirt h This bag of a garment would help confuse the actual size and shape of his body (he was quite thin) should he be observed It served another purpose as well: whenever he "depth-charged" soht of it: as "depth-charging"), he cay sweatshirt also covered the wet spot which invariably formed on his jeans

Now they were closer

Don&039;t juun, wait, just wait

He shivered at the edge of the , brought the brick forward, drew it back to his stoain (but this time only halfway), and then leaned out, totally cool now He alas at the penultimate moment

He dropped the brick and watched it fall

It went doapping one end for the other Jack saw the clinging barnacles of mortar clearly in the sun At thesestood out with exact and geo which he had pushed into reality, as a sculptor swings a hae stone and create some new substance from the brute caldera; here was the world&039;s ic which was also ecstasy

Sometimes he missed or struck aslant, as the sculptor may carve badly or in vain, but this was a perfect shot The brick struck the girl in the bright ginghahter than the brick but would eventually dry to the same maroon color - splash up He heard the start of the

Jack crossed the room and threw the chair which had been under the knob into a far corner (he&039;d kicked the other - the one he&039;d sat in while waiting - aside as he crossed the room) He yanked up the sweatshirt and pulled a bandanna from his back pocket He used it to turn the knob

No fingerprints allowed

Only Don&039;t Bees left fingerprints

He stuffed the bandanna into his back pocket again even as the door inging open As he walked down the hall, he assuait He didn&039;t look around

Looking around was also only for Don&039;t Bees

Do Bees knew that trying to see if so you was a sure way to acco a witness ht decide it was a suspicious accident, and there would be an investigation All because of one nervous glance around Jack didn&039;t believe anyone could connect him with the crime even if someone decided the "accident" was suspicious and there was an investigation, but

Take only acceptable risks Minimize those which remain

In other words, always prop a chair under the doorknob

So he walked down the powdery corridor where patches of lathing showed through the plastered walls, he walked with his head down, s you saw on the street He could still hear the wo, but that sound was co; it was faint and unis which happened after - the cries, the confusion, the wails of the wounded (if the wounded were still capable of wailing), were not things whichwhich pushed change into the ordinary course of things and sculpted new lines in the flow of livesand, perhaps, the destinies not only of those struck, but of a widening circle around them, like ripples from a stone tossed into a still pond