“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 called The 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 like all 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.”