Song of Susannah

ONE

By the time they reached the little shopping center in the town of Bridgton-a supermarket, a laundry, and a surprisingly large drugstore-both Roland and Eddie sensed it: not just the singing, but the gathering power. It lifted them up like some crazy, wonderful elevator. Eddie found himself thinking of Tinkerbell’s magic dust and Dumbo’s magic feather. This was like drawing near the rose and yet not like that. There was no sense of holiness or sanctification in this little New England town, but something was going on here, and it was powerful.

Driving here from East Stoneham, following the signs to Bridgton from back road to back road, Eddie had sensed something else, as well: the unbelievable crispness of this world. The summer-green depths of the pine forests had a validity he had never encountered before, never even suspected. The birds which flew across the sky fair stopped his breath for wonder, even the most common sparrow. The very shadows on the ground seemed to have a velvety thickness, as if you could reach down, pick them up, and carry them away under your arm like pieces of carpet, if you so chose.

At some point, Eddie asked Roland if he felt any of this.

“Yes,” Roland said. “I feel it, see it, hear it… Eddie, I touch it.”

Eddie nodded. He did, too. This world was real beyond reality. It was… anti-todash. That was the best he could do. And they were very much in the heart of the Beam. Eddie could feel it carrying them on like a river rushing down a gorge toward a waterfall.

“But I’m afraid,” Roland said. “I feel as though we’re approaching the center of everything-the Tower itself, mayhap. It’s as if, after all these years, the quest itself has become the point for me, and the end is frightening.”

Eddie nodded. He could get behind that. Certainly he was afraid. If it wasn’t the Tower putting out that stupendous force, then it was some potent and terrible thing akin to the rose. But not quite the same. A twin to the rose? That could be right.

Roland looked out at the parking lot and the people who came and went beneath a summer sky filled with fat, slow-floating clouds, seemingly unaware that the whole world was singing with power around them, and that all the clouds flowed along the same ancient pathway in the heavens. They were unaware of their own beauty.

The gunslinger said, “I used to think the most terrible thing would be to reach the Dark Tower and find the top room empty. The God of all universes either dead or nonexistent in the first place. But now… suppose there is someone there, Eddie? Someone in charge who turns out to be…” He couldn’t finish.

Eddie could. “Someone who turns out to be just another bumhug? Is that it? God not dead but feeble-minded and malicious?”

Roland nodded. This was not, in fact, precisely what he was afraid of, but he thought Eddie had at least come close.

“How can that be, Roland? Considering what we feel?”

Roland shrugged, as if to say anything could be.

“In any case, what choice do we have?”

“None,” Roland said bleakly. “All things serve the Beam.”

Whatever the great and singing force was, it seemed to be coming from the road that ran west from the shopping center, back into the woods. Kansas Road, according to the sign, and that made Eddie think of Dorothy and Toto and Blaine the Mono.

He dropped the transmission of their borrowed Ford into Drive and started rolling forward. His heart was beating in his chest with slow, exclamatory force. He wondered if Moses had felt like this when he approached the burning bush which contained God. He wondered if Jacob had felt like this, awakening to find a stranger, both radiant and fair, in his camp-the angel with whom he would wrestle. He thought that they probably had. He felt sure that another part of their journey was about to come to an end-another answer lay up ahead.

God living on Kansas Road, in the town of Bridgton, Maine? It should have sounded crazy, but didn’t.

Just don’t strike me dead, Eddie thought, and turned west. I need to get back to my sweetheart, so please don’t strike me dead, whoever or whatever you are.

“Man, I’m so scared,” he said.

Roland reached out and briefly grasped his hand.

TWO

Three miles from the shopping center, they came to a dirt road which struck off into the pine trees on their left. There had been other byways, which Eddie had passed without slowing from the steady thirty miles an hour he had been maintaining, but at this one he stopped.

Both front windows were down. They could hear the wind in the trees, the grouchy call of a crow, the not-too-distant buzz of a powerboat, and the rumble of the Ford’s engine. Except for a hundred thousand voices singing in rough harmony, those were the only sounds. The sign marking the turnoff said no more than private drive. Nevertheless, Eddie was nodding.

“This is it.”

“Yes, I know. How’s your leg?”

“Hurts. Don’t worry about it. Are we gonna do this?”

“We have to,” Roland said. ’You were right to bring us here. What’s here is the other half of this.” He tapped the paper in his pocket, the one conveying ownership of the vacant lot to the Tet Corporation.

“You think this guy King is the rose’s twin.”

“You say true.” Roland smiled at his own choice of words. Eddie thought he’d rarely seen one so sad. “We’ve picked up the Calla way of talking, haven’t we? Jake first, then all of us. But that will fall away.”

“Further to go,” Eddie said. It wasn’t a question.

“Aye, and it will be dangerous. Still… maybe nothing so dangerous as this. Shall we roll?”

“In a minute. Roland, do you remember Susannah mentioning a man named Moses Carver?”

“A stem… which is to say a man of affairs. He took over her father’s business when sai Holmes died, am I correct?”

“Yeah. He was also Suze’s godfather. She said he could be trusted completely. Remember how mad she got at Jake and me when we suggested he might have stolen the company’s money?”

Roland nodded.

“I trust her judgment,” Eddie said. “What about you?”

“Yes.”

“If Carver is honest, we might be able to put him in charge of the things we need to accomplish in this world.”

None of this seemed terribly important compared to the force Eddie felt rising all around him, but he thought it was. They might only have one chance to protect the rose now and ensure its survival later. They had to do it right, and Eddie knew that meant heeding the will of destiny.

In a word, ka.

“Suze says Holmes Dental was worth eight or ten million when you snatched her out of New York, Roland. If Carver’s as good as I hope he is, the company might be worth twelve or fourteen million by now.”

“That’s a lot?”

“Delah,” Eddie said, tossing his open hand at the horizon, and Roland nodded. “It sounds funny to talk about using the profits from some kind of dental process to save the viniverse, but that’s just what I am talking about. And the money the tooth-fairy left her may only be the beginning. Microsoft, for instance. Remember me mentioning that name to Tower?”

Roland nodded. “Slow down, Eddie. Calm down, I beg.”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie said, and pulled in a deep breath.

“It’s this place. The singing. The faces… do you see the faces in the trees? In the shadows?”

“I see them very well.”

“It makes me feel a little crazy. Bear with me. What I’m talking about is merging Holmes Dental and the Tet Corporation, then using our knowledge of the future to turn it into one of the richest combinations in the history of the world. Resources to equal those of the Sombra Corporation… or maybe North Central Positronics itself.”

Roland shrugged, then lifted a hand as if to ask how Eddie could talk about money while in the presence of the immense force flowing along the barrel of the Beam and through them, lifting the hair from the napes of their necks, making their sinuses tingle, turning every woodsy shadow into a watching face… as if a multitude had gathered here to watch them play out a crucial scene in their drama.

“I know how you feel, but it matters,” Eddie insisted. “Believe me, it does. Suppose, for instance, we were to grow fast enough to buy out North Central Positronics before it can rise as a force in this world? Roland, we might be able to turn it, the way you can turn even the biggest river with no more than a single spade up in its headwaters, where it’s only a trickle.”

At this Roland’s eyes gleamed. “Take it over,” he said. “Turn its purpose from the Crimson King’s to our own. Yes, that might be possible.”

“Whether it is or isn’t, we have to remember that we’re not just playing for 1977, or 1987, where I came from, or 1999, where Suze went.” In that world, Eddie realized, Calvin Tower might be dead and Aaron Deepneau would be for sure, their final action in the Dark Tower’s drama-saving Donald Callahan from the Hitler Brothers-long finished. Swept from the stage, both of them. Into the clearing at the end of the path along with Gasher and Hoots, Benny Slight-man, Susan Delgado

(Calla, Callahan, Susan, Susannah)

and the Tick-Tock Man, even Blaine and Patricia. Roland and his ka-tet would also pass into that clearing, be it early or late. In the end-if they were fantastically lucky and suicidally brave-only the Dark Tower would stand. If they could nip North Central Positronics in the bud, they might be able to save all the Beams that had been broken. Even if they failed at that, two Beams might be enough to hold the Tower in place: the rose in New York and a man named Stephen King in Maine. Eddie’s head had no proof that this was indeed the case… but his heart believed it.

“What we’re playing for, Roland, is the ages.”

Roland made a fist and thumped it lightly on the dusty dashboard of John Cullum’s old Ford and nodded.

“Anything can go on that lot, you realize that? Anything. A building, a park, a monument, The National Gramophone Institute. As long as the rose stays. This guy Carver can make the Tet Corporation legal, maybe working with Aaron Deepneau-”

“Yes,” Roland said. “I liked Deepneau. He had a true face.”

Eddie thought so, too. “Anyway, they can draw up legal papers that take care of the rose-the rose always stays, no matter what. And I’ve got a feeling that it will. 2007, 2057, 2525, 3700… hell, the year 19,000… I think it’ll always be there. Because it may be fragile, but I think it’s also immortal. We have to do it right while we have the chance, though. Because this is the key world. In this one you never get a chance to whittle a little more if the key doesn’t turn. In this world I don’t think there are any do-overs.”

Roland considered this, then pointed to the dirt road leading into the trees. Into a forest of watching faces and singing voices. A harmonium of all that filled life with worth and meaning, that held to the truth, that acknowledged the White. “And what about the man who lives at the end of this road, Eddie? If he is a man.”

“I think he is, and not just because of what John Cullum said. It’s what I feel here.” Eddie patted his chest above the heart.

“So do I.”

“Do you say so, Roland?”

“Aye, I do. Is he immortal, do you think? Because I’ve seen much in my years, and heard rumors of much more, but never of a man or woman who lived forever.”

“I don’t think he needs to be immortal. I think all he needs to do is write the right story. Because some stories do live forever.”

Understanding lit up Roland’s eyes. At last, Eddie thought. At last he sees it.

But how long had it taken him to see it himself, and then to swallow it? God knew he should have been able to, after all the other wonders he’d seen, and yet still this last step had eluded him. Even discovering that Pere Callahan had seemingly sprung alive and breathing from a fiction called ’salem’s Lot hadn’t been enough to take him that last crucial step. What had finally done it was finding out that Co-Op City was in the Bronx, not Brooklyn. In this world, at least. Which was the only world that mattered.

“Maybe he’s not at home,” Roland said as around them the whole world waited. “Maybe this man who made us is not at home.”

“You know he is.”

Roland nodded. And the old light had dawned in his eyes, light from a fire that had never gone out, the one that had lit his way along the Beam all the way from Gilead.

“Then drive on!” he cried hoarsely. “Drive on, for your father’s sake! If he’s God-our God-I’d look Him in the eye and ask Him the way to the Tower!”

“Would you not ask him the way to Susannah, first?”

As soon as the question was out of his mouth, Eddie regretted it and prayed the gunslinger would not answer it.

Roland didn’t. He only twirled the remaining fingers on his right hand: Go, go.

Eddie put the gearshift of Cullum’s Ford into Drive and turned onto the dirt road. He drove them into a great singing force that seemed to go through them like a wind, turning them into something as insubstantial as a thought, or a dream in the head of some sleeping god.

THREE

A quarter of a mile in, the road forked. Eddie took the left-hand branch, although the sign pointing that way said row-den, not king. The dust raised by their passage hung in the rearview mirror. The singing was a sweet din, pouring through him like liquor. His hair was still standing up at the roots, and his muscles were trembling. Called upon to draw his gun, Eddie thought he would probably drop the damned thing. Even if he managed to hold onto it, aiming would be impossible. He didn’t know how the man they were looking for could live so close to the sound of that singing and eat or sleep, let alone write stories. But of course King wasn’t just close to the sound; if Eddie had it right, King was the source of the sound.

But if he has a family, what about them? And even if he doesn’t, what about the neighbors?

Here was a driveway on the right, and-

“Eddie, stop.” It was Roland, but not sounding the least bit like himself. His Calla tan was thin paint over an immense pallor.

Eddie stopped. Roland fumbled at the doorhandle on his side, couldn’t make it work, levered himself out the window all the way to his waist instead (Eddie heard the chink his belt buckle made on the chrome strip which faced the window-well), and then vomited onto the oggan. When he fell back into the seat, he looked both exhausted and exalted. The eyes which rolled to meet Eddie’s were blue, ancient, glittering. “Drive on.”

“Roland, are you sure-”

Roland only twirled his fingers, looking straight out through the Ford’s dusty windshield. Go, go. For your father’s sake!

Eddie drove on.

FOUR

It was the sort of house real-estate agents call a ranch. Eddie wasn’t surprised. What did surprise him a little was how modest the place was. Then he reminded himself that not every writer was a rich writer, and that probably went double for young writers. Some sort of typo had apparently made his second novel quite the catch among bibliomaniacs, but Eddie doubted if King ever saw a commission on that sort of thing. Or royalties, if that was what they called it.

Still, the car parked in the turnaround driveway was a new-looking Jeep Cherokee with a nifty Indian stripe running up the side, and that suggested Stephen King wasn’t exactly starving for his art, either. There was a wooden jungle gym in the front yard with a lot of plastic toys scattered around it. Eddie’s heart sank at the sight of them. One lesson which the Calla had taught exquisitely was that kids complicated things. The ones living here were little kids, from the look of the toys. And to them comes a pair of men wearing hard calibers. Men who were not, at this point in time, strictly in their right minds.

Eddie cut the Ford’s engine. A crow cawed. A powerboat-bigger than the one they’d heard earlier, from the sound-buzzed. Beyond the house, bright sun glinted on blue water. And the voices sang Come, come, come-come-commala.

There was a clunk as Roland opened his door and got out, slewing a little as he did so: bad hip, dry twist. Eddie got out on legs that felt as numb as sticks.

“Tabby? That you?”

This from around the right side of the house. And now, running ahead of the voice and the man who owned the voice, came a shadow. Never had Eddie seen one that so filled him with terror and fascination. He thought, and with absolute certainty: Yonder comes my maker. Yonder is he, aye, say true. And the voices sang, Commala-come-three, he who made me.

“Did you forget something, darling?” Only the last word came out in a downeast drawl, daaa-lin, the way John Cullum would have said it. And then came the man of the house, then came he. He saw them and stopped. He saw Roland and stopped. The singing voices stopped with him, and the powerboat’s drone seemed to stop as well. For a moment the whole world hung on a hinge. Then the man turned and ran. Not, however, before Eddie saw the terrible thunderstruck look of recognition on his face.

Roland was after him in a flash, like a cat after a bird.

FIVE

But sai King was a man, not a bird. He couldn’t fly, and there was really nowhere to run. The side lawn sloped down a mild hill broken only by a concrete pad that might have been the well or some kind of sewage-pumping device. Beyond the lawn was a postage stamp-sized bit of beach, littered with more toys. After that came the lake. The man reached the edge of it, splashed into it, then turned so awkwardly he almost fell down.

Roland skidded to a stop on the sand. He and Stephen King regarded each other. Eddie stood perhaps ten yards behind Roland, watching both of them. The singing had begun again, and so had the buzzing drone of the powerboat. Perhaps they had never stopped, but Eddie believed he knew better.

The man in the water put his hands over his eyes like a child. ’You’re not there,” he said.

“I am, sai.” Roland’s voice was both gentle and filled with awe. “Take your hands from your eyes, Stephen of Bridgton. Take them down and see me very well.”

“Maybe I’m having a breakdown,” said the man in the water, but he slowly dropped his hands. He was wearing thick glasses with severe black frames. One bow had been mended with a bit of tape. His hair was either black or a very dark brown. The beard was definitely black, the first threads of white in it startling in their brilliance. He was wearing bluejeans below a tee-shirt that said the ramones and rocket to Russia and gabba-gabba-hey. He looked like starting to run to middle-aged fat, but he wasn’t fat yet. He was tall, and as ashy-pale as Roland. Eddie saw with no real surprise that Stephen King looked like Roland. Given the age difference they could never be mistaken for twins, but father and son? Yes. Easily.

Roland tapped the base of his throat three times, then shook his head. It wasn’t enough. It wouldn’t do. Eddie watched with fascination and horror as the gunslinger sank to his knees amid the litter of bright plastic toys and put his curled hand against his brow.

“Hile, tale-spinner,” he said. “Comes to you Roland Deschain of Gilead that was, and Eddie Dean of New York. Will you open to us, if we open to you?”

King laughed. Given the power of Roland’s words, Eddie found the sound shocking. “I… man, this can’t be happening.” And then, to himself: “Can it?”

Roland, still on his knees, went on as if the man standing in the water had neither laughed nor spoken. “Do you see us for what we are, and what we do?”

“You’d be gunslingers, if you were real.” King peered at Roland through his thick spectacles. “Gunslingers seeking the Dark Tower.”

That’s it, Eddie thought as the voices rose and the sun shimmered on the blue water. That nails it.

“You say true, sai. We seek aid and succor, Stephen of Bridgton. Will’ee give it?”

“Mister, I don’t know who your friend is, but as for you… man, I made you. You can’t be standing there because the only place you really exist is here.” He thumped a fist to the center of his forehead, as if in parody of Roland. Then he pointed to his house. His ranch-style house. “And in there. You’re in there, too, I guess. In a desk drawer, or maybe a box in the garage. You’re unfinished business. I haven’t thought of you in… in…”

His voice had grown thin. Now he began to sway like someone who hears faint but delicious music, and his knees buckled. He fell.

“Roland!” Eddie shouted, at last plunging forward. “Man’s had a fucking heart attack!” Already knowing (or perhaps only hoping) better. Because the singing was as strong as ever. The faces in the trees and shadows as clear.

The gunslinger was bending down and grasping King-who had already begun to thrash weakly-under the arms. “He’s but fainted. And who could blame him? Help me get him into the house.”

SIX

The master bedroom had a gorgeous view of the lake and a hideous purple rug on the floor. Eddie sat on the bed and watched through the bathroom door as King took off his wet sneakers and outer clothes, stepping between the door and the tiled bathroom wall for a moment to swap his wet under-shorts for a dry pair. He hadn’t objected to Eddie following him into the bedroom. Since coming to-and he’d been out for no more than thirty seconds-he had displayed an almost eerie calm.

Now he came out of the bathroom and crossed to the bureau. “Is this a practical joke?” he asked, rummaging for dry jeans and a fresh tee-shirt. To Eddie, King’s house said money-some, at least. God knew what the clothes said. “Is it something Mac McCutcheon and Floyd Calderwood dreamed up?”

“I don’t know those men, and it’s no joke.”

“Maybe not, but that man can’t be real.” King stepped into the jeans. He spoke to Eddie in a reasonable tone of voice. “I mean, I wrote about him!”

Eddie nodded. “I kind of figured that. But he’s readjust the same. I’ve been running with him for-” How long? Eddie didn’t know. “-for awhile,” he finished. ’You wrote about him but not me?”

“Do you feel left out?”

Eddie laughed, but in truth he did feel left out. A little, anyway. Maybe King hadn’t gotten to him yet. If that was the case, he wasn’t exactly safe, was he?

“This doesn’t feel like a breakdown,” King said, “but I suppose they never do.”

“You’re not having a breakdown, but I have some sympathy for how you feel, sai. That man-”

“Roland. Roland of… Gilead?”

“You say true.”

“I don’t know if I had the Gilead part or not,” King said. “I’d have to check the pages, if 1 could find them. But it’s good. As in ’There is no balm in Gilead.’”

“I’m not following you.”

“That’s okay, neither am I.” King found cigarettes, Pall Malls, on the bureau and lit one. “Finish what you were going to say.”

“He dragged me through a door between this world and his world. I also felt like I was having a breakdown.” It hadn’t been this world from which Eddie had been dragged, close but no cigar, and he’d been jonesing for heroin at the time-jonesing bigtime-but the situation was complicated enough without adding that stuff. Still, there was one question he had to ask before they rejoined Roland and the real palaver began.

“Tell me something, sai King-do you know where Co-Op City is?”

King had been transferring his coins and keys from his wet jeans to the dry ones, right eye squinted shut against the smoke of the cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth. Now he stopped and looked at Eddie with his eyebrows raised. “Is this a trick question?”

“No.”

“And you won’t shoot me with that gun you’re wearing if I get it wrong?”

Eddie smiled a little. King wasn’t an unlikable cuss, for a god. Then he reminded himself that God had killed his little sister, using a drunk driver as a tool, and his brother Henry as well. God had made Enrico Balazar and burned Susan Delgado at the stake. His smile faded. But he said, “No one’s getting shot here, sai.”

“In that case, I believe Co-Op City’s in Brooklyn. Where you come from, judging by your accent. So do I win the Fair-Day Goose?”

Eddie jerked like someone who’s been poked with a pin. “What?”

“Just a thing my mother used to say. When my brother Dave and I did all our chores and got em right the first time, she’d say ’You boys win the Fair-Day Goose.’ It was a joke. So do I win the prize?”

“Yes,” Eddie said. “Sure.”

King nodded, then butted out his cigarette. “You’re an okay guy. It’s your pal I don’t much care for. And never did. I think that’s part of the reason I quit on the story.”

That startled Eddie again, and he got up from the bed to cover it. “Quit on it?”

“Yeah. The Dark Tower, it was called. It was gonna be my Lord of the Rings, my Gormenghast, my you-name-it. One thing about being twenty-two is that you’re never short of ambition. It didn’t take me long to see that it was just too big for my little brain. Too… I don’t know… outre? That’s as good a word as any, I guess. Also,” he added dryly, “I lost the outline.”

“You did what?”

“Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But writing can be a crazy deal. Did you know that Ernest Hemingway once lost a whole book of short stories on a train?”

“Really?”

“Really. He had no back-up copies, no carbons. Just poof, gone. That’s sort of what happened to me. One fine drunk night-or maybe I was done up on mescaline, I can no longer remember-I did a complete outline for this five-or ten-thousand-page fantasy epic. It was a good outline, I think. Gave the thing some form. Some style. And then I lost it. Probably flew off the back of my motorcycle when I was coming back from some fucking bar. Nothing like that ever happened to me before. I’m usually careful about my work, if nothing else.”

“Uh-huh,” Eddie said, and thought of asking Did you happen to see any guys in loud clothes, the sort of guys who drive flashy cars, around the time you lost it? Low men, not to put too fine a point on it? Anyone with a red mark on his or her forehead? The sort of thing that looks a little like a circle of blood? Any indications,in short, that someone stole your outline’? Someone who might have an interest in making sure The Dark Tower never gets finished?

“Let’s go out to the kitchen. We need to palaver.” Eddie just wished he knew what they were supposed to palaver about. Whatever it was, they had better get it right, because this was the real world, the one in which there were no do-overs.

SEVEN

Roland had no idea of how to stock and then start the fancy coffee-maker on the counter, but he found a battered coffee pot on one of the shelves that was not much different from the one Alain Johns had carried in his gunna long ago, when three boys had come to Mejis to count stock. Sai King’s stove ran on electricity, but a child could have figured out how to make the burners work. When Eddie and King came into the kitchen, the pot was beginning to get hot.

“I don’t use coffee, myself,” King said, and went to the cold-box (giving Roland a wide berth). “And I don’t ordinarily drink beer before five, but I believe that today I’ll make an exception. Mr. Dean?”

“Coffee’ll do me fine.”

“Mr. Gilead?”

“It’s Deschain, sai King. I’ll also have the coffee, and say thank ya.”

The writer opened a can by using the built-in ring in the top (a device that struck Roland as superficially clever and almost moronically wasteful). There was a hiss, followed by the pleasant smell^:

(commala-come-come)

of yeast and hops. King drank down at least half the can at a go, wiped foam out of his mustache, then put the can on the counter. He was still pale, but seemingly composed and in possession of his faculties. The gunslinger thought he was doing quite well, at least so far. Was it possible that, in some of the deeper ranges of his mind and heart, King had expected their visit? Had been waiting for them?

“You have a wife and children,” Roland said. “Where are they?”

“Tabby’s folks live up north, near Bangor. My daughter’s been spending the last week with her nanna and poppa. Tabby took our youngest-Owen, he’s just a baby-and headed that way about an hour ago. I’m supposed to pick up my other son-Joe-in…” He checked his watch. “In just about an hour. I wanted to finish my writing, so this time we’re taking both cars.”

Roland considered. It might be true. It was almost certainly King’s way of telling them that if anything happened to him, he would be missed in short order.

“I can’t believe this is happening. Have I said that enough to be annoying yet? In any case, it’s too much like one of my own stories to be happening.”

“Like ’salem’s Lot, for instance,” Eddie suggested.

King raised his eyebrows. “So you know about that. Do they have the Literary Guild wherever you came from?” He downed the rest of his beer. He drank, Roland thought, like a man with a gift for it. “A couple of hours ago there were sirens way over on the other side of the lake, plus a big plume of smoke. I could see it from my office. At the time I thought it was probably just a grassfire, maybe in Harrison or Stoneham, but now I wonder. Did that have anything to do with you guys? It did, didn’t it?”

Eddie said, “He’s writing it, Roland. Or was. He says he stopped. But it’s called The Dark Tower. So he knows.”

King smiled, but Roland thought he looked really, deeply frightened for the first time. Setting aside that initial moment when he’d come around the corner of the house and seen them, that was. When he’d seen his creation.

Is that what I am? His creation?

It felt wrong and right in equal measure. Thinking about it made Roland’s head ache and his stomach feel slippery all over again.

“’He knows,’” King said. “I don’t like the sound of that, boys. In a story, when someone says ’He knows,’ the next line is usually ’We’ll have to kill him.’”

“Believe me when I tell you this,” Roland said. He spoke with great emphasis. “Killing you is the last thing we’d ever want to do, sai King. Your enemies are our enemies, and those who would help you along your way are our friends.”

“Amen,” Eddie said.

King opened his cold-box and got another beer. Roland saw a great many of them in there, standing to frosty attention. More cans of beer than anything else. “In that case,” he said, “you better call me Steve.”

EIGHT

“Tell us the story with me in it,” Roland invited.

King leaned against the kitchen counter and the top of his head caught a shaft of sun. He took a sip of his beer and considered Roland’s question. Eddie saw it then for the first time, very dim-a contrast to the sun, perhaps. A dusty black shadow, something swaddled around the man. Dim. Barely there. But there. Like the darkness you saw hiding behind things when you traveled todash. Was that it? Eddie didn’t think so.

Barely there.

But there.

“You know,” King said, “I’m not much good at telling stories. That sounds like a paradox, but it’s not; it’s the reason I write them down.”

Is it Roland he talks like, or me? Eddie wondered. He couldn’t tell. Much later on he’d realize that King talked like all of them, even Rosa Munoz, Pere Callahan’s woman of work in the Calla.

Then the writer brightened. “Tell you what, why don’t I see if I can find the manuscript? I’ve got four or five boxes of busted stories downstairs. Dark Towers got to be in one of them.” Busted. Busted stories. Eddie didn’t care for the sound of that at all. ’You can read some of it while I go get my little boy.” He grinned, displaying big, crooked teeth. “Maybe when I get back, you’ll be gone and I can get to work on thinking you were never here at all.”

Eddie glanced at Roland, who shook his head slightly. On the stove, the first bubble of coffee blinked in the pot’s glass eye.

“Sai King-” Eddie began.

“Steve.”

“Steve, then. We ought to transact our business now. Matters of trust aside, we’re in a ripping hurry.”

“Sure, sure, right, racing against time,” King said, and laughed. The sound was charmingly goofy. Eddie suspected that the beer was starting to do its work, and he wondered if the man was maybe a juice-head. Impossible to tell for sure on such short acquaintance, but Eddie thought some of the signs were there. He didn’t remember a whole hell of a lot from high school English, but he did recall some teacher or other telling him that writers really liked to drink. Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, “The Raven” guy. Writers liked to drink.

“I’m not laughing at you guys,” King said. “It’s actually against my religion to laugh at men who are toting guns. It’s just that in the sort of books I write, people are almost always racing against time. Would you like to hear the first line of The Dark Tower?”

“Sure, if you remember it,” Eddie said.

Roland said nothing, but his eyes gleamed bright under brows that were now threaded with white.

“Oh, I remember it. It may be the best opening line I ever wrote.” King set his beer aside, then raised his hands with the first two fingers of each held out and bent, as if making quotation marks. “’The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.’ The rest might have been puff and blow, but man, that was clean.” He dropped his hands and picked up his beer. “For the forty-third time, is this really happening?"’

“Was the man in black’s name Walter?” Roland asked.

King’s beer tilted shy of his mouth and he spilled some down his front, wetting his fresh shirt. Roland nodded, as if that was all the answer he needed.

“Don’t faint on us again,” Eddie said, a trifle sharply. “Once was enough to impress me.”

King nodded, took another sip of his beer, seemed to take hold of himself at the same time. He glanced at the clock. “Are you gentlemen really going to let me pick up my son?”

“Yes,” Roland said.

“You…” King paused to consider, then smiled. “Do you set your watch and your warrant on it?”

With no smile in return, Roland said, “So I do.”

“Okay, then, The Dark Tower, Reader’s Digest Condensed Book version. Keeping in mind that oral storytelling isn’t my thing, I’ll do the best I can.”

NINE

Roland listened as if worlds depended on it, as he was quite sure they did. King had begun his version of Roland’s life with the campfires, which had pleased the gunslinger because they confirmed Walter’s essential humanity. From there, King said, the story went back to Roland’s meeting with a kind of shirttail farmer on the edge of the desert. Brown, his name had been.

Life for your crop, Roland heard across an echo of years, and Life for your own. He’d forgotten Brown, and Brown’s pet raven, Zoltan, but this stranger had not.

“What I liked,” King said, “was how the story seemed to be going backward. From a purely technical standpoint, it was very interesting. I start with you in the desert, then slip back a notch to you meeting Brown and Zoltan. Zoltan was named after a folk-singer and guitarist I knew at the University of Maine, by the way. Anyway, from the dweller’s hut the story slips back another notch to you coming into the town of Tull… named after a rock group-”

“Jethro Tull,” Eddie said. “Goddam of course! I knew that name was familiar! What about Z.Z. Top, Steve? Do you know them?” Eddie looked at King, saw the incomprehension, and smiled. “I guess it’s not their when quite yet. Or if it is, you haven’t found out about them.”

Roland twirled his fingers: Go on, go on. And gave Eddie a look that suggested he stop interrupting.

“Anyway, from Roland coming into Tull, the story slips back another notch to tell how Nort, the weed-eater, died and was resurrected by Walter. You see what buzzed me about it, don’t you? The early part of it was all told in reverse gear. It was bass-ackwards.”

Roland had no interest in the technical aspects that seemed to fascinate King; this was his life they were talking about, after all, his life, and to him it had all been moving forward. At least until he’d reached the Western Sea, and the doors through which he had drawn his traveling companions.

But Stephen King knew nothing of the doors, it seemed. He had written of the way station, and Roland’s meeting with Jake Chambers; he had written of their trek first into the mountains and then through them; he had written of Jake’s betrayal by the man he had come to trust and to love.

King observed the way Roland hung his head during this part of the tale, and spoke with odd gentleness. “No need to look so ashamed, Mr. Deschain. After all, I was the one who made you do it.”

But again, Roland wondered about that.

King had written of Roland’s palaver with Walter in the dusty golgotha of bones, the telling of the Tarot and the terrible vision Roland had had of growing right through the roof of the universe. He had written of how Roland had awakened following that long night of fortune-telling to find himself years older, and Walter nothing but bones. Finally, King said, he’d written of Roland going to the edge of the water and sitting there. “You said, ’I loved you, Jake’”

Roland nodded matter-of-factly. “I love him still.”

“You speak as though he actually exists.”

Roland looked at him levelly. “Do I exist? Do you?”

King was silent.

“What happened then?” Eddie asked.

“Then, senor, I ran out of story-or got intimidated, if you like that better-and stopped.”

Eddie also wanted to stop. He could see the shadows beginning to lengthen in the kitchen and wanted to get after Susannah before it was too late. He thought both he and Roland had a pretty good idea of how to get out of this world, suspected Stephen King himself could direct them to Turtle-back Lane in Lovell, where reality was thin and-according to John Cullum, at least-the walk-ins had been plentiful of late. And King would be happy to direct them. Happy to get rid of them. But they couldn’t go just yet, and in spite of his impatience Eddie knew it.

“You stopped because you lost your lineout,” Roland said.

“Outline. And no, not really.” King had gone after his third beer, and Eddie thought it was no wonder the man was getting pudgy in the middle; he’d already consumed the caloric equivalent of a loaf of bread, and was starting on Loaf #2. “I hardly ever work from an outline. In fact… don’t hold me to this, but that might have been the only time. And it got too big for me. Too strange. Also you became a problem, sir or sai or whatever you call yourself.” King grimaced. “Whatever form of address that is, I didn’t make it up.”

“Not yet, anyway,” Roland remarked.

“You started as a version of Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name.”

“In the Spaghetti Westerns,” Eddie said. “Jesus, of course! I watched a hundred of em at the Majestic with my brother Henry, when Henry was still at home. I went by myself or with this friend of mine, Chuggy Coter, when Henry was in the Nam. Those were guy flicks.”

King was grinning. ’Yeah,” he said, “but my wife went ape for em, so go figure.”

“Cool on her!” Eddie exclaimed.

“Yeah, Tab’s a cool kitty.” King looked back at Roland. “As The Man With No Name-a fantasy version of Clint Eastwood-you were okay. A lot of fun to partner up with.”

“Is that how you think of it?”

“Yes. But then you changed. Right under my hand. It got so I couldn’t tell if you were the hero, the antihero, or no hero at all. When you let the kid drop, that was the capper.”

“You said you made me do that.”

Looking Roland straight in the eyes-blue meeting blue amid the endless choir of voices-King said: “I lied, brother.”

TEN

There was a little pause while they all thought that over. Then King said, “You started to scare me, so I stopped writing about you. Boxed you up and put you in a drawer and went on to a series of short stories I sold to various men’s magazines.” He considered, then nodded. “Things changed for me after I put you away, my friend, and for the better. I started to sell my stuff. Asked Tabby to marry me. Not long after that I started a book called Carrie. It wasn’t my first novel, but it was the first one I sold, and it put me over the top. All that after saying goodbye Roland, so long, happy trails to you. Then what happens? I come around the corner of my house one day six or seven years later and see you standing in my fucking driveway, big as Billy-be-damned, as my mother used to say. And all I can say now is that thinking you’re a hallucination brought on by overwork is the most optimistic conclusion I can draw. And I don’t believe it. How can I?” King’s voice was rising, becoming reedy. Eddie didn’t mistake it for fear; this was outrage. “How can I believe it when I see the shadows you cast, the blood on your leg-” He pointed to Eddie. “And the dust on your face?” This time to Roland. ’You’ve taken away my goddam options, and I can feel my mind… I don’t know… tipping? Is that the word? I think it is. Tipping.”

“You didn’t just stop,” Roland said, ignoring this last completely for the self-indulgent nonsense it probably was.

“No?”

“I think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe. And one day while you were doing that, you felt something pushing back.”

King considered this for what seemed to Eddie like a very long time. Then he nodded. ’You could be right. It was more than the usual going-dry feeling, for sure. I’m used to that, although it doesn’t happen as often as it used to. It’s… I don’t know, one day you just start having less fun while you’re sitting there, tapping the keys. Seeing less clearly. Getting less of a buzz from telling yourself the story. And then, to make things worse, you get a new idea, one that’s all bright and shiny, fresh off the showroom floor, not a scratch on her. Completely unfucked-up by you, at least as of yet. And… well…”

“And you felt something pushing back.” Roland spoke in the same utterly flat tone.

“Yeah.” King’s voice had dropped so low Eddie could barely hear him. “No trespassing. Do not enter. High voltage.” He paused. “Maybe even danger of death.”

You wouldn’t like that faint shadow I see swirling around you, Eddie thought. That black nimbus. No, sai, I don’t think you’d like that at all, and what am I seeing? The cigarettes? The beer? Something else addictive you maybe have a taste for? A car accident one drunk night? And how far ahead? How many years?

He looked at the clock over the Kings’ kitchen table and was dismayed to see that it was quarter to four in the afternoon. “Roland, it’s getting late. This man’s got to get his kid.” And we’ve got to find my wife before Mia has the baby they seem to be sharing and the Crimson King has no more use for the Susannah part of her.

Roland said, “Just a little more.” And lowered his head without saying anything. Thinking. Trying to decide which questions were the right questions. Maybe just one right question. And it was important, Eddie knew it was, because they’d never be able to return to the ninth day of July in the year 1977. They might be able to revisit that day in some other world, but not in this one. And would Stephen King exist in any of those other worlds? Eddie thought maybe not. Probably not.

While Roland considered, Eddie asked King if the name Blaine meant anything special to him.

“No. Not particularly.”

“What about Lud?”

“As in Luddites? They were some sort of machine-hating religious sect, weren’t they? Nineteenth century, I think, or they might have started even earlier. If I’ve got it right, the ones in the nineteenth century would break into factories and bash the machinery to pieces.” He grinned, displaying those crooked teeth. “I guess they were the Greenpeace of their day.”

“Beryl Evans? That name ring a bell?”

“No.”

“Henchick? Henchick of the Manni?”

“No. What are the Manni?”

“Too complicated to go into. What about Claudia y Inez Bachman? That one mean anyth-”

King burst out laughing, startling Eddie. Startling King himself, judging from the look on his face. “Dicky’s wife!” he exclaimed. “How in the hell do you know about that?”

“I don’t. Who’s Dicky?”

“Richard Bachman. I’ve started publishing some of my earliest novels as paperback originals, under a pseudonym. Bachman is it. One night when I was pretty drunk, I made up a whole author bio for him, right down to how he beat adult-onset leukemia, hooray Dickie. Anyway, Claudia’s his wife. Claudia Inez Bachman. The y part, though… that I don’t know about.”

Eddie felt as if a huge invisible stone had suddenly rolled off his chest and out of his life. Claudia Inez Bachman only had eighteen letters. So something had added the y, and why? To make nineteen, of course. Claudia Bachman was just a name. Claudia y Inez Bachman, though… she was ka-tet.

Eddie thought they’d just gotten one of the things they’d come here for. Yes, Stephen King had created them. At least he’d created Roland, Jake, and Father Callahan. The rest he hadn’t gotten to yet. And he had moved Roland like a piece on a chessboard: go to Tull, Roland, sleep with Allie, Roland, chase Walter across the desert, Roland. But even as he moved his main character along the board, so had King himself been moved. That one letter added to the name of his pseudonym’s wife insisted upon it. Something had wanted to make Claudia Bachman nineteen. So-

“Steve.”

“Yes, Eddie of New York.” King smiled self-consciously.

Eddie could feel his heart beating hard in his chest. “What does the number nineteen mean to you?”

King considered. Outside the wind soughed in the trees, the powerboats whined, and the crow-or another-cawed. Soon along this lake would come the hour of barbecues, and then maybe a trip to town and a band concert on the square, all in this best of all possible worlds. Or just the one most real.

At last, King shook his head and Eddie let out a frustrated breath.

“Sorry. It’s a prime number, but that’s all I can come up with. Primes sort of fascinate me, have ever since Mr. Soychak’s Algebra I class at Lisbon High. And I think it’s how old I was when I met my wife, but she might dispute that. She has a disputatious nature.”

“What about ninety-nine?”

King thought it over, then ticked items off on his fingers. “A hell of an age to be. ’Ninety-nine years on the old rock-pile.’ A song called-I think-’The Wreck of Old Ninety-nine.’ Only it might be ’The Wreck of the Hesperus’ I’m thinking about. ’Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, we took one down and passed it all around, and there were ninety-eight bottles of beer.’ Beyond that, nada.”

This time it was King’s turn to look at the clock.

“If I don’t leave soon, Betty Jones is going to call to see if I forgot I have a son. And after I get Joe I’m supposed to drive a hundred and thirty miles north, there’s that. Which might be easier if I quit with the beer. And that, in turn, might be easier if I didn’t have a couple of armed spooks sitting in my kitchen.”

Roland was nodding. He reached down to his gunbelt, brought up a shell, and began to roll it absently between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. “Just one more question, if it does ya. Then we’ll go our course and let you go yours.”

King nodded. “Ask it, then.” He looked at his third can of beer, then tipped it down the sink with an expression of regret.

“Was it you wrote The Dark Tower?”

To Eddie this question made no sense, but King’s eyes lit up and he smiled brilliantly. “No!” he said. “And if I ever do a book on writing-and I probably could, it’s what I taught before I retired to do this-I’ll say so. Not that, not any of them, not really. I know that there are writers who do write, but I’m not one of them. In fact, whenever I run out of inspiration and resort to plot, the story I’m working on usually turns to shit.”

“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” Eddie said.

“It’s like… hey, that’s neat!”

The shell rolling back and forth between the gunslinger’s thumb and forefinger had jumped effortlessly to the backs of his fingers, where it seemed to walk along Roland’s rippling knuckles.

“Yes,” Roland agreed, “it is, isn’t it?”

“It’s how you hypnotized Jake at the way station. How you made him remember being killed.”

And Susan, Eddie thought. He hypnotized Susan the same way, only you don’t know about that yet, sai King. Or maybe you do. Maybe somewhere inside you know all of it.

“I’ve tried hypnosis,” King said. “In fact, a guy got me up onstage at the Topsham Fair when I was a kid and tried to make me cluck like a hen. It didn’t work. That was around the time Buddy Holly died. And the Big Bopper. And Ritchie Valens. Todana! Ah, Discordia!”

He suddenly shook his head as if to clear it, and looked up from the dancing shell to Roland’s face. “Did I say something just then?”

“No, sai.” Roland looked down at the dancing shell-back and forth it went, and back and forth-which quite naturally drew King’s eyes back as well.

“What happens when you make a story?” Roland inquired. “My story, for instance?”

“It just comes,” King said. His voice had grown faint. Bemused. “It blows into me-that’s the good part-and then it comes out when I move my fingers. Never from the head. Comes out the navel, or somewhere. There was an editor… I think it was Maxwell Perkins… who called Thomas Wolfe-”

Eddie knew what Roland was doing and knew it was probably a bad idea to interrupt, but he couldn’t help it. “A rose,” he said. “A rose, a stone, an unfound door.”

King’s face lighted with pleasure, but his eyes never lifted from the shell dancing along the heddles of the gunslinger’s knuckles. “Actually it’s a stone, a leaf, a door,” he said. “But I like rose even better.”

He had been entirely captured. Eddie thought he could almost hear the sucking sound as the man’s conscious mind drained away. It occurred to him that something as simple as a ringing phone at this critical moment might change the whole course of existence. He got up, and-moving quietly in spite of his stiff and painful leg-went to where it hung on the wall. He twisted the cord in his fingers and applied pressure until it snapped.

“A rose, a stone, an unfound door,” King agreed. “That could be Wolfe, all right. Maxwell Perkins called him ’a divine wind-chime.’ O lost, and by the wind grieved! All the forgotten faces! O Discordia!”

“How does the story come to you, sai?” Roland asked quietly.

“I don’t like the New Agers… the crystal-wavers… all the it-don’t-matter, turn-the-pagers… but they call it channeling, and that’s… how it feels… like something in a channel…”

“Or on a beam?” Roland asked.

“All things serve the Beam,” the writer said, and sighed. The sound was terrible in its sadness. Eddie felt his back prickle up in helpless waves of gooseflesh.

ELEVEN

Stephen King stood in a shaft of dusty afternoon sunlight. It lit his cheek, the curve of his left eye, the dimple at the corner of his mouth. It turned each white hair on the left side of his beard into a line of light. He stood in light, and that made the faint darkness around him clearer. His respiration had slowed to perhaps three or four breaths a minute.

“Stephen King,” Roland said. “Do you see me?”

“Hile, gunslinger, I see you very well.”

“When did you first see me?”

“Not until today.”

Roland looked surprised at this, and a little frustrated. It was clearly not the answer he had expected. Then King went on.

“I saw Cuthbert, not you.” A pause. “You and Cuthbert broke bread and scattered it beneath the gallows. That’s in the part that’s already written.”

“Aye, so we did. When Hax the cook swung. We were but lads. Did Bert tell you that tale?”

But King did not answer this. “I saw Eddie. I saw him very well.” A pause. “Cuthbert and Eddie are twins.”

“Roland-” Eddie began in a low voice. Roland hushed him with a savage shake of the head and put the bullet he’d used to hypnotize King on the table. King kept looking at the place where it had been, as if he still saw it there. Probably he did. Dust motes danced around his dark and shaggy head of hair.

“Where were you when you saw Cuthbert and Eddie?”

“In the barn.” King’s voice dropped. His lips had begun to tremble. “Auntie sent me out because we tried to run away.”

“Who?”

“Me and my brother Dave. They caught us and brought us back. They said we were bad, bad boys.”

“And you had to go into the barn.”

“Yes, and saw wood.”

“That was your punishment.”

“Yes.” A tear welled in the corner of King’s right eye. It slipped down his cheek to the edge of his beard. “The chickens are dead.”

“The chickens in the barn?”

“Yes, them.” More tears followed the first.

“What killed them?”

“Uncle Oren says it was avian flu. Their eyes are open. They’re… a little scary.”

Or perhaps more than just a little, Eddie thought, judging by the tears and the pallor of the man’s cheeks.

“You couldn’t leave the barn?”

“Not until I saw my share of the wood. David did his. It’s my turn. There are spiders in the chickens. Spiders in their guts, little red ones. Like specks of red pepper. If they get on me I’ll catch the flu and die. Only then I’ll come back.”

“Why?”

“I’ll be a vampire. I’ll be a slave to him. His scribe, maybe. His pet writer.”

“Whose?”

“The Lord of the Spiders. The Crimson King, Tower-pent.”

“Christ, Roland,” Eddie whispered. He was shuddering. What had they found here? What nest had they exposed? “Sai King, Steve, how old were you-are you?”

“I’m seven.” A pause. “I wet my pants. I don’t want the spiders to bite me. The red spiders. But then you came, Eddie, and I went free.” He smiled radiantly, his cheeks gleaming with tears.

“Are you asleep, Stephen?” Roland asked.

“Aye.”

“Go deeper."

"All right.”

“I’ll count to three. On three you’ll be as deep as you can go.”

“All right.”

“One… two… three.” On three, King’s head lolled forward. His chin rested on his chest. A line of silver drool ran from his mouth and swung like a pendulum.

“So now we know something,” Roland said to Eddie. “Something crucial, maybe. He was touched by the Crimson King when he was just a child, but it seems that we won him over to our side. Or you did, Eddie. You and my old friend, Bert. In any case, it makes him rather special.”

“I’d feel better about my heroism if I remembered it,” Eddie said. Then: “You realize that when this guy was seven, I wasn’t even born?”

Roland smiled. “Ka is a wheel. You’ve been turning on it under different names for a long time. Cuthbert for one, it seems.”

“What’s this about the Crimson King being ’Tower-pent’?”

“I have no idea.”

Roland turned back to Stephen King. “How many times do you think the Lord of Discordia has tried to kill you, Stephen? Kill you and halt your pen? Shut up your troublesome mouth? Since that first time in your aunt and uncle’s barn?”

King seemed to try counting, then shook his head. “Delah,” he said. Many.

Eddie and Roland exchanged a glance.

“And does someone always step in?” Roland asked.

“Nay, sai, never think it. I’m not helpless. Sometimes I step aside.”

Roland laughed at that-the dry sound of a stick broken over a knee. “Do you know what you are?”

King shook his head. His lower lip had pooched out like that of a sulky child.

“Do you know what you are?”

“The father first. The husband second. The writer third. Then the brother. After brotherhood I am silent. Okay?”

“No. Not oh-kay. Do you know what you are?”

A long pause. “No. I told you all I can. Stop asking me.”

“I’ll stop when you speak true. Do you know-”

“Yes, all right, I know what you’re getting at. Satisfied?”

“Not yet. Tell me what-”

“I’m Gan, or possessed by Gan, I don’t know which, maybe there’s no difference.” King began to cry. His tears were silent and horrible. “But it’s not Dis, I turned aside from Dis, I repudiate Dis, and that should be enough but it’s not, ka is never satisfied, greedy old ka, that’s what she said, isn’t it? What Susan Delgado said before you killed her, or I killed her, or Gan killed her. ’Greedy old ka, how I hate it.’ Regardless of who killed her, I made her say that, I, for I hate it, so I do. I buck against ka’s goad, and will until the day I go into the clearing at the end of the path.”

Roland sat at the table, white at the sound of Susan’s name.

“And still ka comes to me, comes from me, I translate it, am made to translate it, ka flows out of my navel like a ribbon. I am not ka, I am not the ribbon, it’s just what comes through me and I hate it I hate it! The chickens were full of spiders, do you understand that, full of spiders!”

“Stop your snivelment,” Roland said (with a remarkable lack of sympathy, to Eddie’s way of thinking), and King stilled.

The gunslinger sat thinking, then raised his head.

“Why did you stop writing the story when I came to the Western Sea?”

“Are you dumb? Because I don’t want to be Gan! I turned aside from Dis, I should be able to turn aside from Gan, as well. I love my wife. I love my kids. I love to write stories, but I don’t want to write your story. I’m always afraid. He looks for me. The Eye of the King.”

“But not since you stopped,” Roland said.

“No, since then he looks for me not, he sees me not.”

“Nevertheless, you must go on.”

King’s face twisted, as if in pain, then smoothed out into the previous look of sleep.

Roland raised his mutilated right hand. “When you do, you’ll start with how I lost my fingers. Do you remember?”

“Lobstrosities,” King said. “Bit them off.”

“And how do you know that?”

King smiled a little and made a gentle wissshhhing sound. “The wind blows,” said he.

“Gan bore the world and moved on,” Roland replied. “Is that what you mean to say?”

“Aye, and the world would have fallen into the abyss if not for the great turtle. Instead of falling, it landed on his back.”

“So we’re told, and we all say thank ya. Start with the lobstrosities biting off my fingers.”

“Dad-a-jum, dad-ajingers, goddam lobsters bit off your fingers,” King said, and actually laughed.

“Yes."

"Would have saved me a lot of trouble if you’d died, Roland son of Steven.”

“I know. Eddie and my other friends, as well.” A ghost of a smile touched the corners of the gunslinger’s mouth. “Then, after the lobstrosities-”

“Eddie comes, Eddie comes,” King interrupted, and made a dreamy little flapping gesture with his right hand, as if to say he knew all that and Roland shouldn’t waste his time. “The Prisoner the Pusher the Lady of Shadows. The butcher the baker the candle-mistaker.” He smiled. “That’s how my son Joe says it. When?”

Roland blinked, caught by surprise.

“When, when, when?” King raised his hand and Eddie watched with surprise as the toaster, the waffle maker, and the drainer full of clean dishes rose and floated in the sunshine.

“Are you asking me when you should start again?”

“Yes, yes, yes!” A knife rose out of the floating dish drainer and flew the length of the room. There it stuck, quivering, in the wall. Then everything settled back into place again.

Roland said, “Listen for the song of the Turtle, the cry of the Bear.”

“Song of Turtle, cry of Bear. Maturin from the Patrick O’Brian novels. Shardik from the Richard Adams novel.”

“Yes. If you say so.”

“Guardians of the Beam.”

“Yes.”

“Of my Beam.”

Roland looked at him fixedly. “Do you say so?”

“Yes.”

“Then let it be so. When you hear the song of the Turtle or the cry of the Bear, then you must start again.”

“When I open my eye to your world, he sees me.” A pause. “It.”

“I know. We’ll try to protect you at those times, just as we intend to protect the rose.”

King smiled. “I love the rose."

"Have you seen it?” Eddie asked.

“Indeed I have, in New York. Up the street from the U.N. Plaza Hotel. It used to be in the deli. Tom and Jerry’s. In the back. Now it’s in the vacant lot where the deli was.”

“You’ll tell our story until you’re tired,” Roland said. “When you can’t tell any more, when the Turtle’s song and the Bear’s cry grow faint in your ears, then will you rest. And when you can begin again, you will begin again. You-”

“Roland?”

“Sai King?”

“I’ll do as you say. I’ll listen for the song of the Turtle and each time I hear it, I’ll go on with the tale. If 1 live. But you must listen, too. For her song.”

“Whose?”

“Susannah’s. The baby will kill her if you aren’t quick. And your ears must be sharp.”

Eddie looked at Roland, frightened. Roland nodded. It was time to go.

“Listen to me, sai King. We’re well-met in Bridgton, but now we must leave you.”

“Good,” King said, and he spoke with such unfeigned relief that Eddie almost laughed.

“You will stay here, right where you are, for ten minutes. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ll wake up. You’ll feel very well. You won’t remember that we were here, except in the very deepest depths of your mind.”

“In the mudholes.”

“The mudholes, do ya. On top, you’ll think you had a nap. A wonderful, refreshing nap. You’ll get your son and go to where you’re supposed to go. You’ll feel fine. You’ll go on with your life. You’ll write many stories, but every one will be to some greater or lesser degree about this story. Do you understand?”

“Yar,” King said, and he sounded so much like Roland when Roland was gruff and tired that Eddie’s back pricked up in gooseflesh again. “Because what’s seen can’t be unseen. What’s known can’t be unknown.” He paused. “Save perhaps in death.”

“Aye, perhaps. Every time you hear the song of the Turtle-if that’s what it sounds like to you-you’ll start on our story again. The only real story you have to tell. And we’ll try to protect you.”

“I’m afraid.”

“I know, but we’ll try-”

“It’s not that. I’m afraid of not being able to finish.” His voice lowered. “I’m afraid the Tower will fall and I’ll be held to blame.”

“That is up to ka, not you,” Roland said. “Or me. I’ve satisfied myself on that point. And now-” He nodded to Eddie, and stood up.

“Wait,” King said.

Roland looked at him, eyebrows raised.

“I am allowed mail privileges, but only once.”

Sounds like a guy in a POW camp, Eddie mused. And aloud: “Who allows you mail privileges, Steve-O?”

King’s brow wrinkled. “Gan?” he asked. “Is it Gan?” Then, like the sun breaking through on a foggy morning, his brow smoothed out and he smiled. “I think it’s me!” he said. “I can send a letter to myself… perhaps even a small package… but only once.” His smile broadened into an engaging grin. “All of this… sort of like a fairy-tale, isn’t it?”

“Yes indeed,” Eddie said, thinking of the glass palace they’d come to straddling the Interstate in Kansas.

“What would you do?” Roland asked. “To whom would you send mail?”

“To Jake,” King said promptly.

“And what would you tell him?”

King’s voice became Eddie Dean’s voice. It wasn’t an approximation; it was exact. The sound turned Eddie cold.

“Dad-a-chum, dad-a-chee,” King lilted, “not to worry, you’ve got the key!”

They waited for more, but it seemed there was no more. Eddie looked at Roland, and this time it was the younger man’s turn to twirl his fingers in the let’s-go gesture. Roland nodded and they started for the door.

“That was fucking-A creepy,” Eddie said.

Roland didn’t reply.

Eddie stopped him with a touch on the arm. “One other thing occurs to me, Roland. While he’s hypnotized, maybe you ought to tell him to quit drinking and smoking. Especially the ciggies. He’s a fiend for them. Did you see this place? Fuckin ashtrays everywhere.”

Roland looked amused. “Eddie, if one waits until the lungs are fully formed, tobacco prolongs life, not shortens it. It’s the reason why in Gilead everyone smoked but the very poorest, and even they had their shuckies, like as not. Tobacco keeps away ill-sick vapors, for one thing. Many dangerous insects, for another. Everyone knows this.”

“The Surgeon General of the United States would be delighted to hear what everyone in Gilead knows,” Eddie said dryly. “What about the booze, then? Suppose he rolls his Jeep over some drunk night, or gets on the Interstate going the wrong way and head-ons someone?”

Roland considered it, then shook his head. “I’ve meddled with his mind-and ka itself-as much as I intend to. As much as I dare to. We’ll have to keep checking back over the years in any… why do you shake your head at me? The tale spins from him!”

“Maybe so, but we won’t be able to check on him for twenty-two years unless we decide to abandon Susannah… and I’ll never do that. Once we jump ahead to 1999, there’s no coming back. Not in this world.”

For a moment Roland made no reply, just looked at the man leaning his behind against his kitchen counter, asleep on his feet with his eyes open and his hair tumbled on his brow. Seven or eight minutes from now King would awaken with no memory of Roland and Eddie… always assuming they were gone, that was. Eddie didn’t seriously believe the gunslinger would leave Suze hung out on the line… but he’d let Jake drop, hadn’t he? Let Jake drop into the abyss, once upon a time.

“Then he’ll have to go it alone,” Roland said, and Eddie breathed a sigh of relief. “Sai King.”

“Yes, Roland.”

“Remember-when you hear the song of the Turtle, you must put aside all other things and tell this story.”

“I will. At least I’ll try.”

“Good.”

Then the writer said: “The ball must be taken off the board and broken.”

Roland frowned. “Which ball? Black Thirteen?”

“If it wakes, it will become the most dangerous thing in the universe. And it’s waking now. In some other place. Some other where and when.”

“Thank you for your prophecy, sai King.”

“Dad-a-shim, dad-a-shower. Take the ball to the double Tower.”

To this Roland shook his head in silent bewilderment.

Eddie put a fist to his forehead and bent slightly. “Hile, wordslinger.”

King smiled faintly, as if this were ridiculous, but said nothing.

“Long days and pleasant nights,” Roland told him. “You don’t need to think about the chickens anymore.”

An expression of almost heartbreaking hope spread across Stephen King’s bearded face. “Do you really say so?”

“I really do. And may we meet again on the path before we all meet in the clearing.” The gunslinger turned on his bootheel and left the writer’s house.

Eddie took a final look at the tall, rather stooped man standing with his narrow ass propped against the counter. He thought: The next time I see you, Stevie-if I do-your beard will be mostly white and there’ll be lines around your face… and I’ll still be young. How’s your blood-pressure, sai? Good to go for the next twenty-two years? Hope so. What about your ticker? Does cancer run in your family, and if it does, how deep?

There was time for none of these questions, of course. Or any others. Very soon the writer would be waking up and going on with his life. Eddie followed his dinh out into the latening afternoon and closed the door behind him. He was beginning to think that, when ka had sent them here instead of to New York City, it had known what it was doing, after all.

TWELVE

Eddie stopped on the driver’s side of John Cullum’s car and looked across the roof at the gunslinger. “Did you see that thing around him? That black haze?”

“The todana, yes. Thank your father that it’s still faint.”

“What’s a todana? Sounds like todash.”

Roland nodded. “It’s a variation of the word. It means deathbag. He’s been marked.”

“Jesus,” Eddie said.

“It’s faint, I tell you.”

“But there.”

Roland opened his door. “We can do nothing about it. Ka marks the time of each man and woman. Let’s move, Eddie.”

But now that they were actually ready to get rolling again, Eddie was queerly reluctant to go. He had a sense of things unfinished with sai King. And he hated the thought of that black aura.

“What about Turtleback Lane, and the walk-ins? I meant to ask him-”

“We can find it.”

“Are you sure? Because I think we need to go there.”

“I think so, too. Come on. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”

THIRTEEN

The taillights of the old Ford had hardly cleared the end of the driveway before Stephen King opened his eyes. The first thing he did was look at the clock. Almost four. He should have been rolling after Joe ten minutes ago, but the nap he’d taken had done him good. He felt wonderful. Refreshed. Cleaned out in some weird way. He thought, If every nap could do that, taking them would be a national law.

Maybe so, but Betty Jones was going to be seriously worried if she didn’t see the Cherokee turning into her yard by four-thirty. King reached for the phone to call her, but his eyes fell to the pad on the desk below it, instead. The sheets were headed calling all blowhards. A little something from one of his sisters-in-law.

Face going blank again, King reached for the pad and the pen beside it. He bent and wrote:

Dad-a-chum, dad-a-chee, not to worry, you’ve got the key.

He paused, looking fixedly at this, then wrote:

Dad-a-chud, dad-a-ched, see it, Jake! The key is red!

He paused again, then wrote:

Dad-a-chum, dad-a-chee, give this boy a plastic key.

He looked at what he had written with deep affection. Almost love. God almighty, but he felt fine! These lines meant nothing at all, and yet writing them afforded a satisfaction so deep it was almost ecstasy.

King tore off the sheet.

Balled it up.

Ate it.

It stuck for a moment in his throat and then-ulp!-down it went. Good deal! He snatched the

(ad-a-chee)

key to the Jeep off the wooden key-board (which was itself shaped like a key) and hurried outside. He’d get Joe, they’d come back here and pack, they’d grab supper at Mickey-Dee’s in South Paris. Correction, Mickey-Ztee’s. He felt he could eat a couple of Quarter Pounders all by himself. Fries, too. Damn, but he felt good!

When he reached Kansas Road and turned toward town, he flipped on the radio and got the McCoys, singing “Hang On, Sloopy"-always excellent. His mind drifted, as it so often did while listening to the radio, and he found himself thinking of the characters from that old story, The Dark Tower. Not that there were many left; as he recalled, he’d killed most of them off, even the kid. Didn’t know what else to do with him, probably. That was usually why you got rid of characters, because you didn’t know what else to do with them. What had his name been, Jack? No, that was the haunted Dad in The Shining. The Dark Tower kid had been Jake. Excellent choice of name for a story with a Western motif, something right out of Wayne D. Overholser or Ray Hogan. Was it possible Jake could come back into that story, maybe as a ghost? Of course he could. The nice thing about tales of the supernatural, King reflected, was that nobody had to really die. They could always come back, like that guy Barnabas on Dark Shadows. Barnabas Collins had been a vampire.

“Maybe the kid comes back as a vampire,” King said, and laughed. “Watch out, Roland, dinner is served and dinner be you!” But that didn’t feel right. What, then? Nothing came, but that was all right. In time, something might. Probably when he least expected it; while feeding the cat or changing the baby or just walking dully along, as Auden said in that poem about suffering.

No suffering today. Today he felt great.

Yar, just call me Tony the Tiger.

On the radio, the McCoys gave way to Troy Shondell, singing “This Time.”

That Dark Tower thing had been sort of interesting, actually. King thought, Maybe when we get back from up north I ought to dig it out. Take a look at it.

Not a bad idea.