“Oh, he’s real, all right,” Cullum said. He glanced out his window toward Keywadin Pond and the sound of the sirens on the other side. At the pillar of smoke, now diffusing the blue sky with its ugly smudge. Then he held his hands up for the baseball. Roland threw it in a soft arc whose apogee almost skimmed the ceiling. “And I read that book you’re all het up about. Got it up to the City, at Bookland. Thought it was a corker, too.”

“A story about vampires.”

“Ayuh, I heard him talkin about it on the radio. Said he got the idea from Dracula.”

“You heard the writer on the radio,” Eddie said. He was having that through-the-looking-glass, down-the-rabbit-hole, off-on-a-comet feeling again, and tried to ascribe it to the Percodan. It wouldn’t work. All at once he felt strangely unreal to himself, a shade you could almost see through, as thin as … well, as thin as a page in a book. It was no help to realize that this world, lying in the summer of 1977 on time’s beam, seemed real in a way all the other wheres and whens—including his own—did not. And that feeling was totally subjective, wasn’t it? When you came right down to it, how did anyone know they weren’t a character in some writer’s story, or a transient thought in some bus-riding schmoe’s head, or a momentary mote in God’s eye? Thinking about such stuff was crazy, and enough such thinking could drive you crazy.

And yet …

Dad-a-chum, dad-a-chee, not to worry, you’ve got the key.

Keys, my specialty, Eddie thought. And then: King’s a key, isn’t he? Calla, Callahan. Crimson King, Stephen King. Is Stephen King the Crimson King of this world?

Roland had settled. Eddie was sure it hadn’t been easy for him, but the difficult had ever been Roland’s specialty. “If you have questions to ask, have at it.” And made the twirling gesture with his right hand.

“Roland, I hardly know where to start. The ideas I’ve got are so big … so … I don’t know, so fundamentally fucking scary …”

“Best to keep it simple, then.” Roland took the ball when Eddie tossed it to him but now looked more than a little impatient with the game of toss. “We really do have to move on.”

How Eddie knew it. He would have asked his questions while they were rolling, if they all could have ridden in the same vehicle. But they couldn’t, and Roland had never driven a motor vehicle, which made it impossible for Eddie and Cullum to ride in the same one.

“All right,” he said. “Who is he? Let’s start with that. Who is Stephen King?”

“A writer,” Cullum said, and gave Eddie a look that said, Are you a fool, son? “He lives over in Bridgton with his family. Nice enough fella, from what I’ve heard.”

“How far away is Bridgton?”

“Oh … twenty, twenty-five miles.”

“How old is he?” Eddie was groping, maddeningly aware that the right questions might be out there, but he had no clear idea of what they were.