“I don’t think he needs to be immortal. I think all he needs to do is write the right story. Because some stories do live forever.”

Understanding lit up Roland’s eyes. At last, Eddie thought. At last he sees it.

But how long had it taken him to see it himself, and then to swallow it? God knew he should have been able to, after all the other wonders he’d seen, and yet still this last step had eluded him. Even discovering that Pere Callahan had seemingly sprung alive and breathing from a fiction called ’Salem’s Lot hadn’t been enough to take him that last crucial step. What had finally done it was finding out that Co-Op City was in the Bronx, not Brooklyn. In this world, at least. Which was the only world that mattered.

“Maybe he’s not at home,” Roland said as around them the whole world waited. “Maybe this man who made us is not at home.”

“You know he is.”

Roland nodded. And the old light had dawned in his eyes, light from a fire that had never gone out, the one that had lit his way along the Beam all the way from Gilead.

“Then drive on!” he cried hoarsely. “Drive on, for your father’s sake! If he’s God—our God—I’d look Him in the eye and ask Him the way to the Tower!”

“Would you not ask him the way to Susannah, first?”

As soon as the question was out of his mouth, Eddie regretted it and prayed the gunslinger would not answer it.

Roland didn’t. He only twirled the remaining fingers on his right hand: Go, go.

Eddie put the gearshift of Cullum’s Ford into Drive and turned onto the dirt road. He drove them into a great singing force that seemed to go through them like a wind, turning them into something as insubstantial as a thought, or a dream in the head of some sleeping god.

THREE

A quarter of a mile in, the road forked. Eddie took the lefthand branch, although the sign pointing that way said ROWDEN, not KING. The dust raised by their passage hung in the rearview mirror. The singing was a sweet din, pouring through him like liquor. His hair was still standing up at the roots, and his muscles were trembling. Called upon to draw his gun, Eddie thought he would probably drop the damned thing. Even if he managed to hold onto it, aiming would be impossible. He didn’t know how the man they were looking for could live so close to the sound of that singing and eat or sleep, let alone write stories. But of course King wasn’t just close to the sound; if Eddie had it right, King was the source of the sound.

But if he has a family, what about them? And even if he doesn’t, what about the neighbors?

Here was a driveway on the right, and—

“Eddie, stop.” It was Roland, but not sounding the least bit like himself. His Calla tan was thin paint over an immense pallor.