Song of Susannah

Aaron had, and as far as the bad guys were concerned, one was as good as the other. Callahan had left him a note telling him to stop advertising his presence in East Stoneham. How stupid can you be??? had been the Pere’s final communication to sai Tower, and the answer seemed to be more stupid than a bag of hammers.

“Ayuh,” Cullum said. “Only he did a lot more’n browse.” His eyes, as blue as Roland’s, were twinkling. “Bought a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of readin material. Paid with traveler’s checks. Then he gut her to give him a list of other used bookstores in the area. There’s quite a few, if you add in Notions in Norway and that Your Trash, My Treasure place over in Fryeburg. Plus he got her to write down the names of some local folks who have book collections and sometimes sell out of their houses. Jane was awful excited. Talked about it all over town, she did.”

Eddie put a hand to his forehead and groaned. That was the man he’d met, all right, that was Calvin Tower to the life. What had he been thinking? That once he “gut” north of Boston he was safe?

“Can you tell us how to find him?” Roland asked.

“Oh, I c’n do better’n that. I can take you right to where they’re stayin.”

Roland had been tossing the ball from hand to hand. Now he stopped and shook his head. “No. You’ll be going somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“Anyplace you’ll be safe,” Roland said. “Beyond that, sai, I don’t want to know. Neither of us do.”

“Well call me Sam, I say goddam. Dunno’s I like that much.”

“Doesn’t matter. Time is short.” Roland considered, then said: “Do you have a cartomobile?”

Cullum looked momentarily puzzled, then grinned.

“Yep, a cartomobile and a truckomobile both. I’m loaded.” The last word came out ludded.

“Then you’ll lead us to Tower’s Dimity Road place in one while Eddie…” Roland paused for a moment. “Eddie, do you still remember how to drive?”

“Roland, you’re hurtin my feelings.”

Roland, never a very humorous fellow even at the best of times, didn’t smile. He returned his attention to the dan-tete-little savior-ka had put in their way, instead. “Once we’ve found Tower, you’ll go your course, John. That’s any course that isn’t ours. Take a little vacation, if it does ya. Two days should be enough, then you can return to your business.” Roland hoped their own business here in East Stone-ham would be done by sundown, but didn’t want to hex them by saying so.

“I don’t think you understand that this is my busy season,” Cullum said. He held out his hands and Roland tossed him the ball. “I got a boathouse to paint… a barn that needs shinglin-”

“If you stay with us,” Roland said, “you’ll likely never shingle another barn.”

Cullum looked at him with an eyebrow cocked, clearly trying to gauge Roland’s seriousness and not much liking what he saw.

While this was going on, Eddie found himself returning to the question of whether or not Roland had ever actually seen Tower with his own eyes. And now he realized that his first answer to that question had been wrong-Roland had seen Tower.

Sure he did. It was Roland who pulled that bookcase full of Tower’s first editions into the Doorway Cave. Roland was looking right at him. What he saw was probably distorted, but…

That train of thought drifted away, and by the seemingly inevitable process of association, Eddie’s mind returned to Tower’s precious books, such rarities as The Dogan, by Benjamin Slightman, Jr… and ’salem’s Lot, by Stephen King.

“I’ll just get m’keys and we’re off,” Cullum said, but before he could turn away, Eddie said: “Wait.”

Cullum looked at him quizzically.

“We’ve got a little more to talk about, I think.” And he held up his hands for the baseball.

“Eddie, our time is short,” Roland said.

“I know that,” Eddie said. Probably better than you, since it’s my woman the clock’s running out on. “If I could, I’d leave that asshole Tower to Jack and concentrate on getting back to Susannah. But ka won’t let me do that. Your damned old ka.”

“We need-”

“Shut up.” He had never said such a thing to Roland in his life, but now the words came out on their own, and he felt no urge to call them back. In his mind, Eddie heard a ghostly Calla-chant: Commala-come-come, the palaver’s not done.

“What’s on your mind?” Cullum asked him.

“A man named Stephen King. Do you know that name?”

And saw by Cullum’s eyes that he did.

THREE

“Eddie,” Roland said. He spoke in an oddly tentative way the younger man had never heard before. He’s as at sea as I am. Not a comforting thought. “Andolini may still be looking for us. More important, he may be looking for Tower, now that we’ve slipped through his fingers… and as sai Cullum has made perfectly clear, Tower has made himself easy to find.”

“Listen to me,” Eddie replied. “I’m playing a hunch here, but a hunch is not all this is. We’ve met one man, Ben Slightman, who wrote a book in another world. Tower’s world. This world. And we’ve met another one, Donald Callahan, who was a character in a book from another world. Again, this world.” Cullum had tossed him the ball and now Eddie flipped it underhand, and hard, to Roland. The gunslinger caught it easily.

“This might not seem like such a big deal to me, except we’ve been haunted by books, haven’t we? The Dogan. The Wizard of Oz. Charlie the Choo- Choo. Even Jake’s Final Essay. And now ’salem’s Lot. I think that if this Stephen King is real-”

“Oh, he’s real, all right,” Cullum said. He glanced out his window toward Keywadin Pond and the sound of the sirens on the other side. At the pillar of smoke, now diffusing the blue sky with its ugly smudge. Then he held his hands up for the baseball. Roland threw it in a soft arc whose apogee almost skimmed the ceiling. “And I read that book you’re all het up about. Got it up to the City, at Bookland. Thought it was a corker, too.”

“A story about vampires.”

“Ayuh, I heard him talkin about it on the radio. Said he got the idea from Dracula.”

“You heard the writer on the radio,” Eddie said. He was having that through-the-looking-glass, down-the-rabbit-hole, off-on-a-comet feeling again, and tried to ascribe it to the Percodan. It wouldn’t work. All at once he felt strangely unreal to himself, a shade you could almost see through, as thin as… well, as thin as a page in a book. It was no help to realize that this world, lying in the summer of 1977 on time’s beam, seemed real in a way all the other wheres and whens-including his own-did not. And that feeling was totally subjective, wasn’t it? When you came right down to it, how did anyone know they weren’t a character in some writer’s story, or a transient thought in some bus-riding schmoe’s head, or a momentary mote in God’s eye? Thinking about such stuff was crazy, and enough such thinking could drive you crazy.

And yet…

Dad-a-chum, dad-a-chee, not to worry, you’ve got the key.

Keys, my specialty, Eddie thought. And then: King’s a key, isn’t he? Calla, Callahan. Crimson King, Stephen King. Is Stephen King the Crimson King of this world?

Roland had settled. Eddie was sure it hadn’t been easy for him, but the difficult had ever been Roland’s specialty. “If you have questions to ask, have at it.” And made the twirling gesture with his right hand.

“Roland, I hardly know where to start. The ideas I’ve got are so big… so… I don’t know, so fundamentally fucking scary…”

“Best to keep it simple, then.” Roland took the ball when Eddie tossed it to him but now looked more than a little impatient with the game of toss. “We really do have to move on.”

How Eddie knew it. He would have asked his questions while they were rolling, if they all could have ridden in the same vehicle. But they couldn’t, and Roland had never driven a motor vehicle, which made it impossible for Eddie and Cullum to ride in the same one.

“All right,” he said. “Who is he? Let’s start with that. Who is Stephen King?”

“A writer,” Cullum said, and gave Eddie a look that said, Are you a fool, son? “He lives over in Bridgton with his family. Nice enough fella, from what I’ve heard.”

“How far away is Bridgton?”

“Oh… twenty, twenty-five miles.”

“How old is he?” Eddie was groping, maddeningly aware that the right questions might be out there, but he had no clear idea of what they were.

John Cullum squinted an eye and seemed to calculate. “Not that old, I sh’d think. If he’s thirty, he just got there.”

“This book… ’salem’s Lot… was it a bestseller?”

“Dunno,” Cullum said. “Lots of people around here read it, tell you that much. Because it’s set in Maine. And because of the ads they had on TV, you know. Also there was a movie made out of his first book, but I never went to see it. Looked too bloody.”

“What was it called?”

Cullum thought, then shook his head. “Can’t quite remember. ’Twas just one word, and I’m pretty sure it was a girl’s name, but that’s the best I can do. Maybe it’ll come to me.”

“He’s not a walk-in, you don’t think?”

Cullum laughed. “Born and raised right here in the State of Maine. Guess that makes him a live-in.”

Roland was looking at Eddie with increasing impatience, and Eddie decided to give up. This was worse than playing Twenty Questions. But goddammit, Pere Callahan was real and he was also in a book of fiction written by this man King, and King lived in an area that was a magnet for what Cullum called walk-ins. One of those walk-ins had sounded very much to Eddie like a servant of the Crimson King. A woman with a bald head who seemed to have a bleeding eye in the center of her forehead, John had said.

Time to drop this for now and get to Tower. Irritating he might be, but Calvin Tower owned a certain vacant lot where the most precious rose in the universe was growing wild. Also, he knew all sorts of stuff about rare books and the folks who had written them. Very likely he knew more about the author of ’salem’s Lot than sai Cullum. Time to let it go. But-

“Okay,” he said, tossing the ball back to the caretaker. “Lock that thing up and we’ll head off to the Dimity Road, if it does ya. Just a couple more questions.”

Cullum shrugged and put the Yaz ball back into the case. “It’s your nickel.”

“I know,” Eddie said… and suddenly, for the second time since he’d come through the door, Susannah seemed weirdly close. He saw her sitting in a room filled with antiquey-looking science and surveillance equipment. Jake’s Dogan, for sure… only as Susannah must have imagined it. He saw her speaking into a mike, and although he couldn’t hear her, he could see her swollen belly and her frightened face. Now very pregnant, wherever she was. Pregnant and ready to pop. He knew well enough what she was saying: Come, Eddie, save me, Eddie,