the bunched fingers of his right hand. He looked at Roland and Eddie gravely. “We know
each other pretty damn well for folks who haven’t known each other very damn long,” he
said. “Wouldn’t you say that’s so?”
They nodded. Eddie kept expecting the wind to begin outside, but the world went on
holding its breath. He was willing to bet it was going to be one hellacious storm when it
came.
“Folks gut t’know each other that way in the Army,” John said. “In the war.”Aaa-my.
Andwar too Yankee for representation. “Way it always is when the chips’re down, I sh’d
judge.”
“Aye,” Roland agreed. “ ‘Gunfire makes close relations,’ we say.”
“Do ya? Now I know you gut things to tell me, but before you start, there’s one thing I gut
to tell you. And I sh’d smile n kiss a pig if it don’t please you good n hard.”
“What?” Eddie asked.
“County Sheriff Eldon Royster took four fellas into custody over in Auburn couple of
hours ago. Seems as though they was tryin to sneak past a police roadblock on a woods
road and gut stuck for their trouble.” John put his pipe in his mouth, took a wooden match
from his breast pocket, and set his thumb against the tip. For the moment, however, he
didn’t flick it; only held it there. “Reason they ’us tryin to sneak around is they seemed to have quite a fair amount of fire-power.”Fiah-powah. “Machine-guns, grenades, and some
of that stuff they call C-4. One of em was a fella I b’lieve you mentioned—Jack Andolini?”
And with that he popped the Diamond Bluetip alight.
Eddie collapsed back in one of sai Beckhardt’s prim Shaker chairs, turned his head up to
the ceiling, and bellowed laughter at the rafters. When he was tickled, Roland reflected, no
one could laugh like Eddie Dean. At least not since Cuthbert Allgood had passed into the
clearing. “Handsome Jack Andolini, sitting in a county hoosegow in the State of Maine!”
he said. “Roll me in sugar and call me a fuckin jelly-doughnut! If only my brother Henry
was alive to see it.”
Then Eddie realized that Henry probablywas alive right now—some version of him,
anyway. Assuming the Dean brothers existed in this world.
“Ayuh, thought that’d please ya,” John said, drawing the flame of the rapidly blackening
match down into the bowl of his pipe. It clearly pleased him, too. He was grinning almost
too hard to kindle his tobacco.
“Oh deary-dear,” Eddie said, wiping his eyes. “That makes my day. Almost makes
myyear .”
“I gut somethin else for ya,” John said, “but we’ll let her be for now.” The pipe was at last going to his satisfaction and he settled back, eyes shifting between the two strange,
wandering men he had met earlier that day. Men whose ka was now entwined with his own,
for better or worse, and richer or poorer. “Right now I’d like t’hear your story. And just
what it is you’d have me do.”
“How old are you, John?” Roland asked him.
“Not s’ old I don’t still have a little get up n go,” John replied, a trifle coldly. “What about y’self, chummy? How many times you ducked under the pole?”
Roland gave him a smile—the kind that saidpoint taken, now let’s change the subject .
“Eddie will speak for both of us,” he said. They had decided on this during their ride from
Bridgton. “My own tale’s too long.”
“Do you say so,” John remarked.
“I do,” Roland said. “Let Eddie tell you his story, as much as he has time for, and we’ll
both tell what we’d have you do, and then, if you agree, he’ll give you one thing to take to
a man named Moses Carver…and I’ll give you another.”
John Cullum considered this, then nodded. He turned to Eddie.
Eddie took a deep breath. “The first thing you ought to know is that I met this guy here in
a middle of an airplane flight from Nassau, the Bahamas, to Kennedy Airport in New York.
I was hooked on heroin at the time, and so was my brother. I was muling a load of cocaine.”
“And when might this have been, son?” John Cullum asked.
“The summer of 1987.”
They saw wonder on Cullum’s face but no shade of disbelief. “So youdo come from the
future! Gorry!” He leaned forward through the fragrant pipe-smoke. “Son,” he said, “tell
your tale. And don’tcha skip a goddam word.”
Four
It took Eddie almost an hour and a half—and in the cause of brevity hedid skip some of the
things that had happened to them. By the time he’d finished, a premature night had settled
on the lake below them. And still the threatening storm neither broke nor moved on. Above
Dick Beckhardt’s cottage thunder sometimes rumbled and sometimes cracked so sharply
they all jumped. A stroke of lightning jabbed directly into the center of the narrow lake
below them, briefly illuminating the entire surface a delicate nacreous purple. Once the
wind arose, making voices move through the trees, and Eddie thoughtIt’ll come now,
surely it will come now, but it did not. Nor did the impending storm leave, and this queer suspension, like a sword hanging by the thinnest of threads, made him think of Susannah’s
long, strange pregnancy, now terminated. At around seven o’clock the power went out and
John looked through the kitchen cabinets for a supply of candles while Eddie talked
on—the old people of River Crossing, the mad people in the city of Lud, the terrified
people of Calla Bryn Sturgis, where they’d met a former priest who seemed to have
stepped directly out of a book. John put the candles on the table, along with crackers and
cheese and a bottle of Red Zinger iced tea. Eddie finished with their visit to Stephen King,
telling how the gunslinger had hypnotized the writer to forget their visit, how they had
briefly seen their friend Susannah, and how they had called John Cullum because, as
Roland said, there was no one else in this part of the world theycould call. When Eddie fell
silent, Roland told of meeting Chevin of Chayven on their way to Turtleback Lane. The
gunslinger laid the silver cross he’d shown Chevin on the table by the plate of cheese, and
John poked the fine links of the chain with one thick thumbnail.
Then, for a long time, there was silence.
When he could bear it no longer, Eddie asked the old caretaker how much of the tale he
believed.
“All of it,” John said without hesitation. “You gut to take care of that rose in New York,
don’t you?”
“Yes,” Roland said.
“Because that’s what’s kep’ one of those Beams safe while most of the others has been
broken down by these what-do-you-call-em telepathics, the Breakers.”
Eddie was amazed at how quickly and easily Cullum had grasped that, but perhaps there
was no reason to be.Fresh eyes see clear, Susannah liked to say. And Cullum was very
much what the grays of Lud would have called “a trig cove.”
“Yes,” Roland said. “You say true.”
“The rose is takin care of one Beam. Stephen King’s in charge of the other ’un. Least,
that’s what you think.”
Eddie said, “He’d bear watching, John—all else aside, he’s got some lousy habits—but
once we leave this world’s 1977, we can never come back and check on him.”
“King doesn’t exist in any of these other worlds?” John asked.
“Almost surely not,” Roland said.
“Even if he does,” Eddie put in, “what he does in them doesn’t matter. This is the key
world. This, and the one Roland came from. This world and that one are twins.”
He looked at Roland for confirmation. Roland nodded and lit the last of the cigarettes John had given him earlier.
“I might be able to keep an eye on Stephen King,” John said. “He don’t need to know I’m
doin it, either. That is, if I get back from doin your cussed business in New York. I gut me
a pretty good idear what it is, but maybe you’d better spell it out.” From his back pocket he took a battered notepad with the words Mead Memo written on the green cover. He paged
most of the way through it, found a blank sheet, produced a pencil from his breast pocket,
licked the tip (Eddie restrained a shudder), and then looked at them as expectantly as any
freshman on the first day of high school.
“Now, dearies,” he said, “why don’t you tell your Uncle John the rest.”
Five
This time Roland did most of the talking, and although he had less to say than Eddie, it still took him half an hour, for he spoke with great caution, every now and then turning to Eddie
for help with a word or phrase. Eddie had already seen the killer and the diplomat who
lived inside Roland of Gilead, but this was his first clear look at the envoy, a messenger