“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 Greenpeace 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 down to how he beat adult-onset leukemia, hooray Dickie. Anyway, Claudia’s
his wife. Claudia Inez Bachman. The y 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 the y, and why? To make nineteen, of course. Claudia Bachman was just a name. Claudia y Inez Bachman, though . .
. she was 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 had King himself been moved. That one letter added to the name of his pseudonym’s wife insisted upon it. Something had wanted to make Claudia Bachman nineteen.
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 the Hesperus’ 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 I have 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 wrote The 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 who do 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. ” My story, 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, a leaf, 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. He stood 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