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 calledThe 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 likeall 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 Tower 's 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 writersreally 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 ofThe 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, andLife 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! Iknew 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, hislife, 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,se?or, I ran out of story - or got intimidated, if you like that better - and stopped. "