Life for your crop, Roland heard across an echo of years, and Life 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! I knew 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, his life, 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.

King observed the way Roland hung his head during this part of the tale, and spoke with odd gentleness. “No need to look so ashamed, Mr. Deschain. After all, I was the one who made you do it.”

But again, Roland wondered about that.

King had written of Roland’s palaver with Walter in the dusty golgotha of bones, the telling of the Tarot and the terrible vision Roland had had of growing right through the roof of the universe. He had written of how Roland had awakened following that long night of fortune-telling to find himself years older, and Walter nothing but bones. Finally, King said, he’d written of Roland going to the edge of the water and sitting there. “You said, ‘I loved you, Jake’”

Roland nodded matter-of-factly. “I love him still.”

“You speak as though he actually exists.”

Roland looked at him levelly. “Do I exist? Do you?”

King was silent.

“What happened then?” Eddie asked.

“Then, señor, I ran out of story—or got intimidated, if you like that better—and stopped.”