expected. Then King went on.
“I saw Cuthbert, not you.” A pause. “You and Cuthbert broke bread and scattered it beneath the gallows. That’s in the part that’s already written.”
“Aye, so we did. When Hax the cook swung. We were but lads. Did Bert tell you that tale?”
But King did not answer this. “I saw Eddie. I saw him very well.” A pause. “Cuthbert and Eddie are twins.”
“Roland — ” Eddie began in a low voice. Roland hushed him with a savage shake of the head and put the bullet he’d used to hypnotize King on the table. King kept looking at the place where it had been, as if he still saw it there. Probably he did. Dust motes danced around his dark and shaggy head of hair.
“Where were you when you saw Cuthbert and Eddie?”
“In the barn.” King’s voice dropped. His lips had begun to tremble. “Auntie sent me out because we tried to run away.”
“Who?”
“Me and my brother Dave. They caught us and brought us back. They said we were bad, bad
boys.”
“And you had to go into the barn.”
“Yes, and saw wood.”
“That was your punishment.”
“Yes.” A tear welled in the corner of King’s right eye. It slipped down his cheek to the edge of his beard. “The chickens are dead.”
“The chickens in the barn?”
“Yes, them.” More tears followed the first.
“What killed them?”
“Uncle Oren says it was avian flu. Their eyes are open. They’re . . . a little scary.”
Or perhaps more than just a little, Eddie thought, judging by the tears and the pallor of the
man’s cheeks.
“You couldn’t leave the barn?”
“Not until I saw my share of the wood. David did his. It’s my turn. There are spiders in the chickens. Spiders in their guts, little red ones. Like specks of red pepper. If they get on me I’ll catch the flu and die. Only then I’ll come back.”
“Why?”
“I’ll be a vampire. I’ll be a slave to him. His scribe, maybe. His pet writer.”
“Whose?”
“The Lord of the Spiders. The Crimson King, Tower-pent.”
“Christ, Roland,” Eddie whispered. He was shuddering. What had they found here? What nest had they exposed? “Sai King, Steve, how old were you — are you?”
“I’m seven.” A pause. “I wet my pants. I don’t want the spiders to bite me. The red spiders. But then you came, Eddie, and I went free.” He smiled radiantly, his cheeks gleaming with tears.
“Are you asleep, Stephen?” Roland asked.
“Aye.”
“Go deeper.”
“All right.”
“I’ll count to three. On three you’ll be as deep as you can go.”
“All right.”
“One . . . two . . . three.” On three, King’s head lolled forward. His chin rested on his chest. A line of silver drool ran from his mouth and swung like a pendulum.
“So now we know something,” Roland said to Eddie. “Something crucial, maybe. He was touched by the Crimson King when he was just a child, but it seems that we won him over to our
side. Or you did, Eddie. You and my old friend, Bert. In any case, it makes him rather special.”
“I’d feel better about my heroism if I remembered it,” Eddie said. Then: “You realize that when this guy was seven, I wasn’t even born?”
Roland smiled. “Ka is a wheel. You’ve been turning on it under different names for a long
time. Cuthbert for one, it seems.”
“What’s this about the Crimson King being ‘Tower-pent’?”
“I have no idea.”
Roland turned back to Stephen King. “How many times do you think the Lord of Discordia has tried to kill you, Stephen? Kill you and halt your pen? Shut up your troublesome mouth?
Since that first time in your aunt and uncle’s barn?”
King seemed to try counting, then shook his head. “Delah,” he said. Many.
Eddie and Roland exchanged a glance.
“And does someone always step in?” Roland asked.
“Nay, sai, never think it. I’m not helpless. Sometimes I step aside.”
Roland laughed at that — the dry sound of a stick broken over a knee. “Do you know what
you are?”
King shook his head. His lower lip had pooched out like that of a sulky child.
“Do you know what you are?”
“The father first. The husband second. The writer third. Then the brother. After brotherhood I am silent. Okay?”
“No. Not oh-kay. Do you know what you are?”
A long pause. “No. I told you all I can. Stop asking me.”
“I’ll stop when you speak true. Do you know — ”
“Yes, all right, I know what you’re getting at. Satisfied?”
“Not yet. Tell me what — ”
“I’m Gan, or possessed by Gan, I don’t know which, maybe there’s no difference.” King began to cry. His tears were silent and horrible. “But it’s not Dis, I turned aside from Dis, I repudiate Dis, and that should be enough but it’s not, ka is never satisfied, greedy old ka, that’s what she said, isn’t it? What Susan Delgado said before you killed her, or I killed her, or Gan killed her.
‘Greedy old ka, how I hate it.’ Regardless of who killed her, I made her say that, I, for I hate it, so I do. I buck against ka’s goad, and will until the day I go into the clearing at the end of the path.”
Roland sat at the table, white at the sound of Susan’s name.
“And still ka comes to me, comes from me, I translate it, am made to translate it, ka flows out of my navel like a ribbon. I am not ka, I am not the ribbon, it’s just what comes through me and I hate it I hate it! The chickens were full of spiders, do you understand that, full of spiders! ”
“Stop your snivelment,” Roland said (with a remarkable lack of sympathy, to Eddie’s way of thinking), and King stilled.
The gunslinger sat thinking, then raised his head.
“Why did you stop writing the story when I came to the Western Sea?”
“Are you dumb? Because I don’t want to be Gan! I turned aside from Dis, I should be able to turn aside from Gan, as well. I love my wife. I love my kids. I love to write stories, but I don’t want to write your story. I’m always afraid. He looks for me. The Eye of the King.”
“But not since you stopped,” Roland said.
“No, since then he looks for me not, he sees me not.”
“Nevertheless, you must go on.”
King’s face twisted, as if in pain, then smoothed out into the previous look of sleep.
Roland raised his mutilated right hand. “When you do, you’ll start with how I lost my fingers.
Do you remember?”
“Lobstrosities,” King said. “Bit them off.”
“And how do you know that?”
King smiled a little and made a gentle wissshhh ing sound. “The wind blows,” said he.
“Gan bore the world and moved on,” Roland replied. “Is that what you mean to say?”
“Aye, and the world would have fallen into the abyss if not for the great turtle. Instead of falling, it landed on his back.”
“So we’re told, and we all say thank ya. Start with the lobstrosities biting off my fingers.”
“Dad-a-jum, dad-ajingers, goddam lobsters bit off your fingers,” King said, and actually laughed.
“Yes.”
“Would have saved me a lot of trouble if you’d died, Roland son of Steven.”
“I know. Eddie and my other friends, as well.” A ghost of a smile touched the corners of the gunslinger’s mouth. “Then, after the lobstrosities — ”
“Eddie comes, Eddie comes,” King interrupted, and made a dreamy little flapping gesture with his right hand, as if to say he knew all that and Roland shouldn’t waste his time. “The Prisoner the Pusher the Lady of Shadows. The butcher the baker the candle-mistaker.” He smiled. “That’s how my son Joe says it. When?”
Roland blinked, caught by surprise.
“When, when, when? ” King raised his hand and Eddie watched with surprise as the toaster, the waffle maker, and the drainer full of clean dishes rose and floated in the sunshine.
“Are you asking me when you should start again?”
“Yes, yes, yes! ” A knife rose out of the floating dish drainer and flew the length of the room.
There it stuck, quivering, in the wall. Then everything settled back into place again.
Roland said, “Listen for the song of the Turtle, the cry of the Bear.”
“Song of Turtle, cry of Bear. Maturin from the Patrick O’Brian novels. Shardik from the
Richard Adams novel.”
“Yes. If you say so.”
“Guardians of the Beam.”
“Yes.”
“Of my Beam.”
Roland looked at him fixedly. “Do you say so?”
“Yes.”
“Then let it be so. When you hear the song of the Turtle or the cry of the Bear, then you must start again.”
“When I open my eye to your world, he sees me.” A pause. ” It. “