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If asked, Jake could not explain why he had walked into the palm reader's shop. He didn't really believe in that sort of thing, but something just compelled him to enter. The mid 30-ish woman greeted him with a fake generic gypsy accent and asked him "Vhat do you vant to know, your future, your lucky number, vhat can I do for you, young Mr. Chambers?"
At first Jake was shaken by this, but quickly remembered that his mother had put his name on his backpack, and she could clearly see his name. "Um, I guess I want to see what's in that crystal ball" he stammered.
"Five dollars... up front young man." Jake nervously pulled out his wallet, unconsciously licking the sweat off his upper lip as handed over the money.
Deftly securing the cash in her ample cleavage, Madame Svetlana ushered Jake into the chair opposite her.The first few minutes of the reading were what Jake's father would have called "the usual bullshit" and Jake hid a smile as he considered what his Father would say if he knew Jake was here, getting a reading. After Madame Svetlana had told Jake he would be a fabulously successful Player for the New York Yankees, would marry a model, and be the happiets man ever, when Jake heard a buzzing whine in his head. And it itched... inside his head, it itched, although Jake could not fathom how that could be.Then it started getting weird.
Jake saw flashes of color in the crystal ball. Red then black, moving quickly through the rainbow from there. As the color intensified, Jake started to reach for the ball.
Madame Svetlana tried to stop jake, but must have seen something in his face, for she quickly started to look at the crystal ball, to really look at it. And what she saw, scared her.
"what the fuck did you do?" she shrieked, dropping all pretense at the accent. If Jake had been listening to her, he would have recognized it as the same one as people from this very neighborhood.
But Jake was listening to something else, and didn't notice that she left to go in the back room.
As Jake cradled the ball in his hands, the buzzing stopped.AT least that's what he first thought. But the buzzing had actually become a song, or a tuneless symphony of voices, singing notes of pure joy. And Jake saw clearly a rose, the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and altough he would never now this, he had begun to cry. The rose faded and Jake was unaware of the whimper he uttered as it faded from view. What he saw next was a face. A face he had never seen, yet he knew.
The face belonged to Roland, and as he caressed the crystal, he said as in a dream, "there are other worlds than this." The face looked straight at Jake and said something to him, or rather tried to, as Jake could not hear him, try as he might. He was attempting to read his lips (how do I know his name is Roland, and why do I call him "Father" in my heart), and thought he was saying "nineteen." Jake had no idea what it meant, but knew it was time to go. The spell was fading from him, and he became aware of sounds from the back room, and the New Yorker in him knew he was almost certainly in for trouble. Jake quickly put down the crystal, grabbed his backpack with one hand and wiped the tears from his face with the other, and quickly fled the shop.
That night the dreams began.
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The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
Stephen King
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