Eddie knew what Roland was doing and knew it was probably a bad idea to interrupt, but he couldn’t help it. “A rose,” he said. “A rose, a stone, an unfound door.”

King’s face lighted with pleasure, but his eyes never lifted from the shell dancing along the heddles of the gunslinger’s knuckles. “Actually it’s a stone, a leaf, a door,” he said. “But I like rose even better.”

He had been entirely captured. Eddie thought he could almost hear the sucking sound as the man’s conscious mind drained away. It occurred to him that something as simple as a ringing phone at this critical moment might change the whole course of existence. He got up, and—moving quietly in spite of his stiff and painful leg—went to where it hung on the wall. He twisted the cord in his fingers and applied pressure until it snapped.

“A rose, a stone, an unfound door,” King agreed. “That could be Wolfe, all right. Maxwell Perkins called him ‘a divine wind-chime.’ O lost, and by the wind grieved! All the forgotten faces! O Discordia!”

“How does the story come to you, sai?” Roland asked quietly.

“I don’t like the New Agers … the crystal-wavers … all the it-don’t-matter, turn-the-pagers … but they call it channeling, and that’s … how it feels … like something in a channel …”

“Or on a beam?” Roland asked.

“All things serve the Beam,” the writer said, and sighed. The sound was terrible in its sadness. Eddie felt his back prickle up in helpless waves of gooseflesh.

ELEVEN

Stephen King stood in a shaft of dusty afternoon sunlight. It lit his cheek, the curve of his left eye, the dimple at the corner of his mouth. It turned each white hair on the left side of his beard into a line of light. He stood in light, and that made the faint darkness around him clearer. His respiration had slowed to perhaps three or four breaths a minute.

“Stephen King,” Roland said. “Do you see me?”

“Hile, gunslinger, I see you very well.”

“When did you first see me?”

“Not until today.”

Roland looked surprised at this, and a little frustrated. It was clearly not the answer he had expected. Then King went on.

“I saw Cuthbert, not you.” A pause. “You and Cuthbert broke bread and scattered it beneath the gallows. That’s in the part that’s already written.”

“Aye, so we did. When Hax the cook swung. We were but lads. Did Bert tell you that tale?”

But King did not answer this. “I saw Eddie. I saw him very well.” A pause. “Cuthbert and Eddie are twins.”

“Roland—” Eddie began in a low voice. Roland hushed him with a savage shake of the head and put the bullet he’d used to hypnotize King on the table. King kept looking at the place where it had been, as if he still saw it there. Probably he did. Dust motes danced around his dark and shaggy head of hair.