Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower #6)(90)

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 Ihave 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 wroteThe 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 whodo 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. "Mystory, 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, aleaf, 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. Hestood 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."