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 . . . outré? 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.