“Jack Kennedy was not a bad man,” Susannah said coldly. “Jack Kennedy was a good man. A great man.”

“Maybe so. But do you know what? I think it takes a great man to make a great mistake. And besides, someone who came after him might have been a really bad guy. Some Big Coffin Hunter who never got a chance because of Lee Harvey Oswald, or whoever it was.”

“But the ball doesn’t allow such thoughts,” Callahan said. “I believe it lures people on to acts of terrible evil by whispering to them that they will do good. That they’ll make things not just a little better but all better.”

“Yes,” Roland said. His voice was as dry as the snap of a twig in a fire.

“Do you think such traveling might actually be possible?” Callahan asked him. “Or was it only the thing’s persuasive lie? Its glammer?”

“I believe it’s so,” Roland said. “And I believe that when we leave the Calla, it will be by that door.”

“Would that I could come with you!” Callahan said. He spoke with surprising vehemence.

“Mayhap you will,” Roland said. “In any case, you finally put the box—and the ball within—inside your church. To quiet it.”

“Yes. And mostly it’s worked. Mostly it sleeps.”

“Yet you said it sent you todash twice.”

Callahan nodded. The vehemence had flared like a pine-knot in a fireplace and disappeared just as quickly. Now he only looked tired. And very old, indeed. “The first time was to Mexico. Do you remember way back to the beginning of my story? The writer and the boy who believed?”

They nodded.

“One night the ball reached out to me when I slept and took me todash to Los Zapatos, Mexico. It was a funeral. The writer’s funeral.”

“Ben Mears,” Eddie said. “The Air Dance guy.”

“Yes.”

“Did folks see you?” Jake asked. “Because they didn’t see us.”

Callahan shook his head. “No. But they sensed me. When I walked toward them, they moved away. It was as if I’d turned into a cold draft. In any case, the boy was there—Mark Petrie. Only he wasn’t a boy any longer. He was in his young manhood. From that, and from the way he spoke of Ben—‘There was a time when I would have called fifty-nine old’ is how he began his eulogy—I’d guess that this might have been the mid-1990s. In any case, I didn’t stay long…but long enough to decide that my young friend from all that long time ago had turned out fine. Maybe I did something right in ’Salem’s Lot, after all.” He paused a moment and then said, “In his eulogy, Mark referred to Ben as his father. That touched me very, very deeply.”