Song of Susannah dt-6 Read online

  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,señor, 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 Turtleback 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. Alsoyou 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 wereguy 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 calledCarrie. 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 tellingyourself the story. And then, to make things worse, you get anew 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. “N O TRESPASSING. D O NOT ENTER. H IGH 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 Green-peace 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 d
own to how he beat adult-onset leukemia, hooray Dickie. Anyway, Claudia’s his wife. Claudia Inez Bachman. They 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 they, and why? To make nineteen, of course. Claudia Bachman was just a name. Claudia y Inez Bachman, though…shewas 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 hadKing himself been moved. That one letter added to the name of his pseudonym’s wife insisted upon it. Something had wanted to make Claudia Bachmannineteen. 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 theHesperus ’ 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 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.”

  “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 li
ps 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 tohim. 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—areyou?”

  “I’m seven.” A pause. “I wet my pants. I don’t want the spiders to bite me. The red spiders. But thenyou 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.”