Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower #6)(52)

"This might not seem like such a big deal to me, except we've beenhaunted by books, haven't we?The Dogan. The Wizard of Oz. Charlie the Choo-Choo. Even Jake's Final Essay. And now'Salem's Lot. I think that if this Stephen King is real - "

"Oh, he's real, all right," Cullum said. He glanced out his window toward Keywadin Pond and the sound of the sirens on the other side. At the pillar of smoke, now diffusing the blue sky with its ugly smudge. Then he held his hands up for the baseball. Roland threw it in a soft arc whose apogee almost skimmed the ceiling. "And I read that book you're all het up about. Got it up to the City, at Bookland. Thought it was a corker, too."

"A story about vampires."

"Ayuh, I heard him talkin about it on the radio. Said he got the idea fromDracula. "

"You heard the writer on the radio," Eddie said. He was having that through-the-looking-glass, down-the-rabbit-hole, off-on-a-comet feeling again, and tried to ascribe it to the Percodan. It wouldn't work. All at once he felt strangely unreal to himself, a shade you could almost see through, as thin as...well, as thin as a page in a book. It was no help to realize that this world, lying in the summer of 1977 on time's beam, seemed real in a way all the other wheres and whens - including his own - did not. And that feeling was totally subjective, wasn't it? When you came right down to it, how did anyone know they weren't a character in some writer's story, or a transient thought in some bus-riding schmoe's head, or a momentary mote in God's eye? Thinking about such stuff was crazy, and enough such thinking coulddrive you crazy.

And yet...

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

Keys, my specialty,Eddie thought. And then:King's a key, isn't he? Calla, Callahan. Crimson King, Stephen King. Is Stephen King the Crimson King of this world?

Roland had settled. Eddie was sure it hadn't been easy for him, but the difficult had ever been Roland's specialty. "If you have questions to ask, have at it." And made the twirling gesture with his right hand.

"Roland, I hardly know where to start. The ideas I've got are so big...so...I don't know, so fundamentally f**kingscary... "

"Best to keep it simple, then." Roland took the ball when Eddie tossed it to him but now looked more than a little impatient with the game of toss. "We reallydo have to move on."

How Eddie knew it. He would have asked his questions while they were rolling, if they all could have ridden in the same vehicle. But they couldn't, and Roland had never driven a motor vehicle, which made it impossible for Eddie and Cullum to ride in the same one.

"All right," he said. "Who is he? Let's start with that. Who is Stephen King?"

"A writer," Cullum said, and gave Eddie a look that said,Are you a fool, son? "He lives over in Bridgton with his family. Nice enough fella, from what I've heard."

"How far away is Bridgton?"

"Oh...twenty, twenty-five miles."

"How old is he?" Eddie was groping, maddeningly aware that the right questions might be out there, but he had no clear idea of what they were.

John Cullum squinted an eye and seemed to calculate. "Not that old, I sh'd think. If he's thirty, he just got there."

"This book...'Salem's Lot...was it a bestseller?"

"Dunno," Cullum said. "Lots of people around here read it, tell you that much. Because it's set in Maine. And because of the ads they had on TV, you know. Also there was a movie made out of his first book, but I never went to see it. Looked too bloody."

"What was it called?"

Cullum thought, then shook his head. "Can't quite remember. 'Twas just one word, and I'm pretty sure it was a girl's name, but that's the best I can do. Maybe it'll come to me."

"He's not a walk-in, you don't think?"

Cullum laughed. "Born and raised right here in the State of Maine. Guess that makes him alive -in."

Roland was looking at Eddie with increasing impatience, and Eddie decided to give up. This was worse than playing Twenty Questions. But goddammit, Pere Callahan wasreal and he was also in a book of fiction written by this man King, and King lived in an area that was a magnet for what Cullum called walk-ins. One of those walk-ins had sounded very much to Eddie like a servant of the Crimson King. A woman with a bald head who seemed to have a bleeding eye in the center of her forehead, John had said.

Time to drop this for now and get to Tower. Irritating he might be, but Calvin Tower owned a certain vacant lot where the most precious rose in the universe was growing wild. Also, he knew all sorts of stuff about rare books and the folks who had written them. Very likely he knew more about the author of'Salem's Lot than sai Cullum. Time to let it go. But -

"Okay," he said, tossing the ball back to the caretaker. "Lock that thing up and we'll head off to the Dimity Road, if it does ya. Just a couple more questions."

Cullum shrugged and put the Yaz ball back into the case. "It's your nickel."

"I know," Eddie said...and suddenly, for the second time since he'd come through the door, Susannah seemed weirdly close. He saw her sitting in a room filled with antiquey-looking science and surveillance equipment. Jake's Dogan, for sure...only as Susannah must have imagined it. He saw her speaking into a mike, and although he couldn't hear her, he could see her swollen belly and her frightened face. Nowvery pregnant, wherever she was. Pregnant and ready to pop. He knew well enough what she was saying:Come, Eddie, save me, Eddie, save both of us, do it before it's too late.