The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass by Stephen King

riddles from his young days was a sense of doom. It wasn’t coming just from the gunslinger; Susannah was sending out the same grim blue-black vibe. Only Eddie wasn’t sending it, and that was because he’d gone off somewhere, was chasing his own thoughts. That might be good, but there were no guarantees, and—
    —and Jake began to be scared again. Worse, he felt desperate, like a creature that is pressed deeper and deeper into its final corner by a relentless foe. His fingers worked restlessly in Oy’s fur, and when he looked down at them, he realized an amazing thing: the hand which Oy had bitten into to keep from falling off the bridge no longer hurt. He could see the holes the bumbler’s teeth had made, and blood was still crusted in his palm and on his wrist, but the hand itself no longer hurt. He flexed it cautiously. There was some pain, but it was low and distant, hardly there at all.
    “Blaine, what may go up a chimney down but cannot go down a chimney up?”
    “A LADY’S PARASOL,” Blaine replied in that tone of jolly complacency which Jake, too, was coming to loathe.
    “Thankee-sai, Blaine, once again you have answered true. Next—”
    “Roland?”
    The gunslinger looked around at Jake, and his look of concentration lightened a bit. It wasn’t a smile, but it went a little way in that direction, at least, and Jake was glad.
    “What is it, Jake?”
    “My hand. It was hurting like crazy, and now it’s stopped!”
    “SHUCKS,” Blaine said in the drawling voice of John Wayne. “I COULDN’T WATCH A HOUND SUFFER WITH A MASHED-UP FOREPAW LIKE THAT, LET ALONE AFINE LITTLE TRAILHAND LIKE YOURSELF. SO I FIXED IT UP.”
    “How?” Jake asked.
    “LOOK ON THE ARM OF YOUR SEAT.”
    Jake did, and saw a faint gridwork of lines. It looked a little like the speaker of the transistor radio he’d had when he was seven or eight.
    “ANOTHER BENEFIT OF TRAVELLING BARONY CLASS,” Blaine went on in his smug voice. It crossed Jake’s mind that Blaine would fit in perfectly at the Piper School. The world’s first slo-trans, dipolar nerd. “THE HAND-SCAN SPECTRUM MAGNIFIER IS A DIAGNOSTIC TOOL ALSO CAPABLE OF ADMINISTERING MINOR FIRST AID, SUCH AS I HAVE PERFORMED ON YOU. IT IS ALSO A NUTRIENT DELIVERY SYSTEM, A BRAIN-PATTERN RECORDING DEVICE, A STRESS-ANALYZER, AND AN EMOTION-ENHANCER WHICH CAN NATURALLY STIMULATE THE PRODUCTION OF ENDORPHINS. HAND-SCAN IS ALSO CAPABLE OF CREATING VERY BELIEVABLE ILLUSIONS AND HALLUCINATIONS. WOULD YOU CARE TO HAVE YOUR FIRST SEXUAL EXPERIENCE WITH A NOTED SEX-GODDESS FROM YOUR LEVEL OF THE TOWER, JAKE OF NEW YORK? PERHAPS MARILYN MONROE, RAQUEL WELCH, OR EDITH BUNKER?”
    Jake laughed. He guessed that laughing at Blaine might be risky, but this time he just couldn’t help it. “There is no Edith Bunker,” he said. “She’s just a character on a TV show. The actress’s name is, um, Jean Stapleton. Also, she looks like Mrs. Shaw. She’s our housekeeper. Nice, but not—you know—a babe.”
    A long silence from Blaine. When the voice of the computer returned, a certain coldness had replaced the jocose ain’t-we-having-fun tone of voice.
    “I CRY YOUR PARDON, JAKE OF NEW YORK. I ALSO WITHDRAW MY OFFER OF A SEXUAL EXPERIENCE.”
    That’ll teach me, Jake thought, raising one hand to cover a smile. Aloud (and in what he hoped was a suitably humble tone of voice) he said: “That’s okay, Blaine. I think I’m still a little young for that, anyway.”
    Susannah and Roland were looking at each other. Susannah didn’t know who Edith Bunker was— All in the Family hadn’tbeen on the tube in her when. But she grasped the essence of the situation just the same; Jake saw her full lips form one soundless word and send it to the gunslinger like a message in a soapbubble:
    Mistake .
    Yes. Blaine had made a mistake. More, Jake Chambers, a boy of eleven, had picked up on it. And if Blaine had made one, he could make another. Maybe there was hope after all. Jake decided he would