The sun had gone behind the trees on their left, throwing the two-lane blacktop entirely into shadow. Eddie had an almost palpable sense of time slipping through his fingers like some fabulously expensive cloth that was too smooth to grip. He stepped on the gas and Cullum’s old Ford, although wheezy in the valves, walked out a little. Eddie got it up to fifty-five and pegged it there. More speed might have been possible, but Kansas Road was both twisty and badly maintained.

Roland had taken a sheet of notepaper from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and was now studying it (although Eddie doubted if the gunslinger could actually read much of the document; this world’s written words would always be mostly mystery to him). At the top of the paper, above Aaron Deepneau’s rather shaky but perfectly legible handwriting (and Calvin Tower’s all-important signature), was a smiling cartoon beaver and the words DAM IMPORTANT THINGS TO DO. A silly pun if ever there was one.

I don’t like silly questions, I won’t play silly games, Eddie thought, and suddenly grinned. It was a point of view to which Roland still held, Eddie felt quite sure, notwithstanding the fact that, while riding Blaine the Mono, their lives had been saved by a few well-timed silly questions. Eddie opened his mouth to point out that what might well turn out to be the most important document in the history of the world-more important than the Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence or Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity-was headed by a dumb pun, and how did Roland like them apples? Before he could get out a single word, however, the wave struck.

TWO

His foot slipped off the gas pedal, and that was good. If it had stayed on, both he and Roland would surely have been injured, maybe killed. When the wave came, staying in control of John Cullum’s Ford Galaxie dropped all the way off Eddie Dean’s list of priorities. It was like that moment when the roller coaster has reached the top of its first mountain, hesitates a moment… tilts… plunges… and you fall with a sudden blast of hot summer air in your face and a pressure against your chest and your stomach floating somewhere behind you.