by Stephen King
“Maybe I’m having a breakdown,” said the man in the water, but he slowly dropped his hands. He was wearing thick glasses with severe black frames. One bow had been mended with a bit of tape. His hair was either black or a very dark brown. The beard was definitely black, the first threads of white in it startling in their brilliance. He was wearing bluejeans below a tee-shirt that said THE RAMONES and ROCKET TO RUSSIA and GABBA-GABBA-HEY. He looked like starting to run to middle-aged fat, but he wasn’t fat yet. He was tall, and as ashy-pale as Roland. Eddie saw with no real surprise that Stephen Kinglooked like Roland. Given the age difference they could never be mistaken for twins, but father and son? Yes. Easily.
Roland tapped the base of his throat three times, then shook his head. It wasn’t enough. It 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, Imade you. You can’t be standingthere because the only place you really exist ishere. ” 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, Iwrote about him!”
Eddie nodded. “I kind of figured that. But he’s real, just 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 hedid 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’tfeel 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 I 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. “Quiton it?”
“Yeah.The Dark Tower, it was called. It was gonna be myLord of the Rings, myGormenghast, 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 didwhat? ”
“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 askingDid 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 stoleyour outline? Someone who might have an interest in making sure The Dark Towernever gets finished?
“Let’s go out to the kitchen. We need to palaver.” Eddie just wished he knew what they were supposed to palaverabout. 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.
“I don’t use coffee, myself,” King said, and went to the cold-box (giving Roland a wide berth). “And I don’t ordinarily drink beer before five, but I believe that today I’ll make an exception. Mr. Dean?”
“Coffee’ll do me fine.”
“Mr. Gilead?”
“It’s Deschain, sai King. I’ll also have the coffee, and say thank ya.”
The writer opened a can by using the built-in ring in the top (a device that struck Roland as superficially clever and almost moronically wasteful). There was a hiss, followed by the pleasant smell
(commala-come-come)
of yeast and hops. King drank down at least half the can at a go, wiped foam out of his mustache, then put the can on the counter. He was still pale, but seemingly composed and in possession of his faculties. The gunslinger thought he was doing quite well, at least so far. Was it possible that, in some of the deeper ranges of his mind and heart, King had expected their visit? Had been waiting for them?
“You have a wife and children,” Roland said. “Where are they?”
“Tabby’s folks live up north, near Bangor. My daughter’s been spending the last week with her nanna and poppa. Tabby took our youngest—Owen, he’s just a baby—and headed that way about an hour ago. I’m supposed to pick up my other son—Joe—in…” He checked his watch. “In just about an hour. I wanted to finish my writing, so this time we’re taking both cars.”
Roland considered. It might be true. It was almost certainly King’s way of telling them that if anything happened to him, he would be missed in short order.
“I can’t believe this is happening. Have I said that enough to be annoying yet? In any case, it’s too much like one of my own stories to be happening.”
“Like’Salem’s Lot, for instance,” Eddie suggested.
King raised his eyebrows. “So you know about that. Do they have the Literary Guild wherever you came from?” He downed the rest of his beer. He drank, Roland thought, like a man with a gift for it. “A couple of hours ago there were sirens way over on the other side of the lake, plus a big plume of smoke. I could see it from my office. At the time I thought it was probably just a grassfire, maybe in Harrison or Stoneham, but now I wonder. Did that have anything to do with you guys? It did, didn’t it?”
Eddie said, “He’s writing it, Roland. Or was. He says he stopped. But it’s calledThe Dark Tower. So he knows.”
King smiled, but Roland thought he looked really, deeply frightened for the first time. Setting aside that initial moment when he’d come around the corner of the house and seen them, that was. When he’d seen his creation.
Is that what I am? His creation?
It felt wrong and right in equal measure. Thinking about it made Roland’s head ache and his stomach feel slippery all over again.
“ ‘He knows,’ ” King said. “I don’t like the sound of that, boys. In a story, when someone says ‘He knows,’ the next line is usually ‘We’ll have to kill him.’ ”
“Believe me when I tell you this,” Roland said. He spoke with great emphasis. “Killing you is the last thing we’d ever want to do, sai King. Your enemies are our enemies, and those who would help you along your way are our friends.”
“Amen,” Eddie said.
King opened his cold-box and got another beer. Roland saw a great many of them in there, standing to frosty attention. More cans of beer than anything else. “In that case,” he said, “you better call me Steve.”
Eight
“Tell us the story with me in it,” Roland invited.
King leaned against the kitchen counter and the top of his head caught a shaft of sun. He took a sip of his beer and considered Roland’s question. Eddie saw it then for the first time, very dim—a contrast to the sun, perhaps. A dusty black shadow, something swaddled around the man. Dim. Barely there. But there. Like the darkness you saw hiding behind things when you traveled todash. Was that it? Eddie didn’t think so.
Barely there.
But there.
“You know,” King said, “I’m not much good at telling stories. That sounds like a paradox, but it’s not; it’s the reason I write them down.”
Is it Roland he talks like, or me?Eddie wondered. He couldn’t tell. Much later on he’d realize that King talked likeall of them, even Rosa Munoz, Pere Callahan’s woman of work in the Calla.
Then the writer brightened. “Tell you what, why don’t I see if I can find the manuscript? I’ve got four or five boxes of busted stories downstairs.Dark Tower ’s got to be in one of them.”Busted. Busted stories. Eddie didn’t care for the sound of that at all. “You can read some of it while I go get my little boy.” He grinned, displaying big, crooked teeth. “Maybe when I get back, you’ll be gone and I can get to work on thinking you were never here at all.”
Eddie glanced at Roland, who shook his head slightly. On the stove, the first bubble of coffee blinked in the pot’s glass eye.
“Sai King—” Eddie began.
“Steve.”
“Steve, then. We ought to transact our business now. Matters of trust aside, we’re in a ripping hurry.”
“Sure, sure, right, racing against time,” King said, and laughed. The sound was charmingly goofy. Eddie suspected that the beer was starting to do its work, and he wondered if the man was maybe a juice-head. Impossible to tell for sure on such short acquaintance, but Eddie thought some of the signs were there. He didn’t remember a whole hell of a lot from high school English, but he did recall some teacher or other telling him that writersreally liked to drink. Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, “The Raven” guy. Writers liked to drink.
“I’m not laughing at you guys,” King said. “It’s actually against my religion to laugh at men who are toting guns. It’s just that in the sort of books I write, people are almost always racing against time. Would you like to hear the first line ofThe Dark Tower ?”
“Sure, if you remember it,” Eddie said.
Roland said nothing, but his eyes gleamed bright under brows that were now threaded with white.
“Oh, I remember it. It may be the best opening line I ever wrote.” King set his beer aside, then raised his hands with the first two fingers of each held out and bent, as if making quotation marks. “ ‘The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.’ The rest might have been puff and blow, but man, that was clean.” He dropped his hands and picked up his beer. “For the forty-third time, is this really happening?”
“Was the man in black’s name Walter?” Roland asked.
King’s beer tilted shy of his mouth and he spilled some down his front, wetting his fresh shirt. Roland nodded, as if that was all the answer he needed.
“Don’t faint on us again,” Eddie said, a trifle sharply. “Once was enough to impress me.”
King nodded, took another sip of his beer, seemed to take hold of himself at the same time. He glanced at the clock. “Are you gentlemen really going to let me pick up my son?”
“Yes,” Roland said.
“You…” King paused to consider, then smiled. “Do you set your watch and your warrant on it?”
With no smile in return, Roland s
aid, “So I do.”
“Okay, then,The Dark Tower, Reader’s Digest Condensed Book version. Keeping in mind that oral storytelling isn’t my thing, I’ll do the best I can.”
Nine
Roland listened as if worlds depended on it, as he was quite sure they did. King had begun his version of Roland’s life with the campfires, which had pleased the gunslinger because they confirmed Walter’s essential humanity. From there, King said, the story went back to Roland’s meeting with a kind of shirttail farmer on the edge of the desert. Brown, his name had been.
Life for your crop,Roland heard across an echo of years, andLife for your own. He’d forgotten Brown, and Brown’s pet raven, Zoltan, but this stranger had not.
“What I liked,” King said, “was how the story seemed to be going backward. From a purely technical standpoint, it was very interesting. I start with you in the desert, then slip back a notch to you meeting Brown and Zoltan. Zoltan was named after a folk-singer and guitarist I knew at the University of Maine, by the way. Anyway, from the dweller’s hut the story slips back another notch to you coming into the town of Tull…named after a rock group—”
“Jethro Tull,” Eddie said. “Goddam of course! Iknew that name was familiar! What about Z.Z. Top, Steve? Do you know them?” Eddie looked at King, saw the incomprehension, and smiled. “I guess it’s not their when quite yet. Or if it is, you haven’t found out about them.”
Roland twirled his fingers:Go on, go on. And gave Eddie a look that suggested he stop interrupting.
“Anyway, from Roland coming into Tull, the story slips back another notch to tell how Nort, the weed-eater, died and was resurrected by Walter. You see what buzzed me about it, don’t you? The early part of it was all told in reverse gear. It was bass-ackwards.”
Roland had no interest in the technical aspects that seemed to fascinate King; this was his life they were talking about, after all, hislife, and to him it had all been moving forward. At least until he’d reached the Western Sea, and the doors through which he had drawn his traveling companions.
But Stephen King knew nothing of the doors, it seemed. He had written of the way station, and Roland’s meeting with Jake Chambers; he had written of their trek first into the mountains and then through them; he had written of Jake’s betrayal by the man he had come to trust and to love.