“If I don’t leave soon, Betty Jones is going to call to see if I forgot I have a son. And after I get Joe I’m supposed to drive a hundred and thirty miles north, there’s that. Which might be easier if I quit with the beer. And that, in turn, might be easier if I didn’t have a couple of armed spooks sitting in my kitchen.”

Roland was nodding. He reached down to his gunbelt, brought up a shell, and began to roll it absently between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. “Just one more question, if it does ya. Then we’ll go our course and let you go yours.”

King nodded. “Ask it, then.” He looked at his third can of beer, then tipped it down the sink with an expression of regret.

“Was it you wrote The Dark Tower?”

To Eddie this question made no sense, but King’s eyes lit up and he smiled brilliantly. “No!” he said. “And if I ever do a book on writing—and I probably could, it’s what I taught before I retired to do this—I’ll say so. Not that, not any of them, not really. I know that there are writers who do write, but I’m not one of them. In fact, whenever I run out of inspiration and resort to plot, the story I’m working on usually turns to shit.”

“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” Eddie said.

“It’s like … hey, that’s neat!”

The shell rolling back and forth between the gunslinger’s thumb and forefinger had jumped effortlessly to the backs of his fingers, where it seemed to walk along Roland’s rippling knuckles.

“Yes,” Roland agreed, “it is, isn’t it?”

“It’s how you hypnotized Jake at the way station. How you made him remember being killed.”

And Susan, Eddie thought. He hypnotized Susan the same way, only you don’t know about that yet, sai King. Or maybe you do. Maybe somewhere inside you know all of it.

“I’ve tried hypnosis,” King said. “In fact, a guy got me up onstage at the Topsham Fair when I was a kid and tried to make me cluck like a hen. It didn’t work. That was around the time Buddy Holly died. And the Big Bopper. And Ritchie Valens. Todana! Ah, Discordia!”

He suddenly shook his head as if to clear it, and looked up from the dancing shell to Roland’s face. “Did I say something just then?”

“No, sai.” Roland looked down at the dancing shell—back and forth it went, and back and forth—which quite naturally drew King’s eyes back as well.

“What happens when you make a story?” Roland inquired. “My story, for instance?”

“It just comes,” King said. His voice had grown faint. Bemused. “It blows into me—that’s the good part—and then it comes out when I move my fingers. Never from the head. Comes out the navel, or somewhere. There was an editor … I think it was Maxwell Perkins … who called Thomas Wolfe—”