King.” She smiled. “I don’t suppose it’s the famous writer? Do you know him?”
“No, ma’am,” Jake said, and snuck a sidewards glance at Callahan. Neither of them had heard of Stephen King until recently, but Jake understood why the name might give his current
traveling companion the chills. Callahan didn’t look particularly chilly at the moment, but his mouth had thinned to a single line.’
“Well,” she said, “I suppose it’s a common enough name, isn’t it? Probably there are normal Stephen Kings all over the United States who wish he’d just . . . I don’t know . . . give it a rest. ”
She voiced a nervous little laugh, and Callahan wondered what had set her on edge. Oy, who got
less doggy the longer you looked at him? Maybe, but Callahan thought it was more likely
something in Jake, something that whispered danger. Perhaps even gunslinger. Certainly there was something in him that set him apart from other boys. Far. Callahan thought of him pulling the Ruger from the docker’s clutch and sticking it under the unfortunate taxi
driver’s nose. Tell me that you were driving too fast and almost ran down my friend! he’d screamed, his finger already white on the trigger. Tell me that you don’t want to die here in the street with a hole in your head!
Was that the way an ordinary twelve-year-old reacted to a near-miss accident? Callahan
thought not. He thought the desk clerk was right to be nervous. As for himself, Callahan realized he felt a little better about their chances at the Dixie Pig. Not a lot, but a little.
SEVEN
Jake, perhaps sensing something a little off-kilter, flashed the clerk his best getting-along-with-grownups smile, but to Callahan it looked like Oy’s: too many teeth.
“Just a moment,” she said, turning away from him.
Jake gave Callahan a puzzled what’s up-with- her look. Callahan shrugged and spread his hands.
The clerk went to a cabinet behind her, opened it, looked through the contents of a box stored
inside, and returned to the desk with an envelope bearing the Plaza-Park’s logo. Jake’s name —
and something else — had been written on the front in what looked like half-script and half-
printing:
Jake Chambers
This is the Truth
She slid it across to the desk to him, careful that their fingers should not touch.
Jake took it and ran his fingers down the length of it. There was a piece of paper inside.
Something else, as well. A hard narrow strip. He tore open the envelope and pulled out the paper.
Folded inside it was the slim, white plastic rectangle of a hotel MagCard. The note had been
written on a cheeky piece of stationery headed CALLING ALL BLOWHARDS. The message
itself was only three lines long:
Dad-a-chum, dad-a-chee, not to worry, you’ve got the key.
Dad-a-chud, dad-a-ched,see it, Jake! The key is red!
Jake looked at the MagCard and watched color abruptly swirl into it, turning it the color of
blood almost instantly.
Couldn’t be red until the message was read, Jake thought, smiling a little at the idea’s riddle-ish quality. He looked up to see if the clerk had seen the MagCard’s transformation, but she had found something which required her attention at the far end of the desk. And Callahan was
checking out a couple of women who’d just come strolling in from the street. He might be a Pere, Jake reflected, but his eye for the ladies still seemed to be in proper working order.
Jake looked back at the paper and was just in time to read the last line:
Dad-a-chum, dad-a-chee, give this boy a plastic key.
A couple of years before, his mother and father had given him a Tyco Chemistry Set for
Christmas. Using the instruction booklet, he’d whipped up a batch of invisible ink. The words
written in the stuff had faded almost as quickly as these words were fading now, only if you
looked very closely, you could still read the message written in chemistry set ink. This one,
however, was authentically gone, and Jake knew why. Its purpose had been served. There was no more need for it. Ditto the line about the key being red, and sure enough, that was fading, as
well. Only the first line remained, as if he needed reminding:
Dad-a-chum, dad-a-chee, not to worry, you’ve got the key.
Had Stephen King sent this message? Jake doubted it. More likely one of the other players in the game — perhaps even Roland or Eddie — had used the name to get his attention. Still, he’d
run upon two things since arriving here that encouraged him enormously. The first was the
continued singing of the rose. It was stronger than ever, really, even though a skyscraper had
been built on the vacant lot. The second was that Stephen King was apparently still alive twenty-four years after creating Jake’s traveling companion. And no longer just a writer but a famous writer.
Great. For now things were still rattling precariously along the right set of tracks.
Jake grabbed Father Callahan’s arm and led him toward the gift shop and tinkling cocktail
piano. Oy followed, padding at Jake’s knee. Along the wall they found a line of house phones.
“When the operator answers,” Jake said, “tell her you want to talk to your friend Susannah Dean, or to her friend, Mia.”
“She’ll ask me what room,” Callahan said.
“Tell her you forgot, but it’s on the nineteenth floor.”
“How do you — ”
“It’ll be the nineteenth, just trust me.”
“I do,” Callahan said.
The phone rang twice and then the operator asked how she could help. Callahan told her. He
was connected, and in some room on the nineteenth floor, a telephone began to ring.
Jake watched the Pere begin to speak, then subside into listening again with a small, bemused
smile on his face. After a few moments, he hung up. “Answering machine!” he said. “They have a machine that takes guests’ calls and then tapes messages! What a wonderful invention!”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “Anyway, we know for sure that she’s out and for pretty sure she didn’t leave anyone behind to watch her gunna. But, just in case . . .” He patted the front of his shirt, which now concealed the Ruger.
As they crossed the lobby to the elevator bank, Callahan said: “What do we want in her
room?”
“I don’t know.”
Callahan touched him on the shoulder. “I think you do.”
The doors of the middle elevator popped open and Jake got on with Oy still at heel. Callahan
followed, but Jake thought he was all at once dragging his feet a little.
“Maybe,” Jake said as they started up. “And maybe you do, too.”
Callahan’s stomach suddenly felt heavier, as if he’d just finished a large meal. He supposed the added weight was fear. “I thought I was rid of it,” he said. “When Roland took it out of the church, I really thought I was rid of it.”
“Some bad pennies just keep turning up,” Jake said.
EIGHT
He was prepared to try his unique red key in every door on the nineteenth floor if he had to, but Jake knew 1919 was right even before they reached it. Callahan did, too, and a sheen of sweat
broke on his forehead. It felt thin and hot. Feverish.
Even Oy knew. The bumbler whined uneasily.
“Jake,” Callahan said. “We need to think this over. That thing is dangerous. Worse, it’s malevolent. ”
“That’s why we gotta take it,” Jake said patiently. He stood in front of 1919, drumming the MagCard between his fingers. From behind the door — and under it, and through it — came a
hideous drone like the singing voice of some apocalyptic idiot. Mixed in was the sound of
jangling, out-of-tune chimes. Jake knew the ball had the power to send you todash, and in those dark and mostly doorless spaces, it was all too possible to become lost forever. Even if you
found your way to another version of Earth, it would have a queer darkness to it, as if the sun were always on the verge of total eclipse.
“Have you seen it?” Callahan asked.
Jake shook his head.
“I have,” Callahan said dully, and armed sweat from his forehead. His cheeks had gone leaden.
“There’s an Eye in it. I think it’s the Crimson King’s eye. I think it’s a part of him that’s trapped in there forever, and insane. Jake, taking that ball to a place where there are vampires and low men
— servants of the King — would be like giving Adolf Hitler an A-bomb for his birthday.”
Jake knew perfectly well that Black Thirteen was capable of doing great, perhaps illimitable,
damage. But he knew something else, as well.
“Pere, if Mia left Black Thirteen in this room and she’s now going to where they are, they’ll know about it soon enough. And they’ll be after it in one of their big flashy cars before you can say Jack Robinson.”