Song of Susannah (23 page)

“Tell you one thing,” Eddie said cheerfully. The pills John had given him were kicking in and he
felt
cheerful. A little bit, anyway. “You don’t want to die before 1986. That one’s gonna be a corker.”

“Ayuh?”

“Say absolutely true.” Then Eddie turned to the gunslinger. “What are we going to do about our gunna, Roland?”

Roland hadn’t even thought about it until this moment. All their few worldly possessions, from Eddie’s fine new whittling knife, purchased in Took’s Store, to Roland’s ancient grow-bag, given to him by his father far on the other side of time’s horizon, had been left behind when they came through the door. When they had been
blown through
the door. The gunslinger assumed their gunna had been left lying in the dirt in front of the East Stoneham store, although he couldn’t remember for sure; he’d been too fiercely focused on getting Eddie and himself to safety before the fellow with the long-sighted rifle blew their heads off. It hurt to think of all those companions of the long trek burned up in the fire that had undoubtedly claimed the store by now. It hurt even worse to think of them in the hands of Jack Andolini. Roland had a brief but vivid picture of his grow-bag hanging on Andolini’s belt like a ’backy-pouch (or an enemy’s scalp) and winced.

“Roland? What about our—”

“We have our guns, and that’s all the gunna we need,” Roland said, more roughly than he had intended. “Jake has the
Choo-Choo
book, and I can make another compass should we need one. Otherwise—”

“But—”

“If you’re talkin about your goods, sonny, I c’n ask some questions about em when the time comes,” Cullum said. “But for the time being, I think your friend’s right.”

Eddie
knew
his friend was right. His friend was almost
always
right, which was one of the few
things Eddie still hated about him. He wanted his gunna, goddammit, and not just for the one clean pair of jeans and the two clean shirts. Nor for extra ammo or the whittling knife, fine as it was. There had been a lock of Susannah’s hair in his leather swag-bag, and it had still carried a faint whiff of her smell.
That
was what he missed. But done was done.

“John,” he said, “what day is this?”

The man’s bristly gray eyebrows went up. “You serious?” And when Eddie nodded: “Ninth of July. Year of our Lord nineteen-seventy-seven.”

Eddie made a soundless whistling noise through his pursed lips.

Roland, the last stub of the Dromedary cigarette smoldering between his fingers, had gone to the window for a looksee. Nothing behind the house but trees and a few seductive blue winks from what Cullum called “the Keywadin.” But that pillar of black smoke still rose in the sky, as if to remind him that any sense of peace he might feel in these surroundings was only an illusion. They had to get out of here. And no matter how terribly afraid he was for Susannah Dean, now that they were here they had to find Calvin Tower and finish their business with him. And they’d have to do it quickly. Because—

As if reading his mind and finishing his thought, Eddie said: “Roland? It’s speeding up. Time on this side is speeding up.”

“I know.”

“It means that whatever we do, we have to get it right the first time, because in this world you
can never come back earlier. There are no do-overs.”

Roland knew that, too.

“The man we’re looking for is from New York City,” Eddie told John Cullum.

“Ayuh, plenty of those around in the summertime.”

“His name’s Calvin Tower. He’s with a friend of his named Aaron Deepneau.”

Cullum opened the glass case with the baseballs inside, took out one with
Carl Yastrzemski
written across the sweet spot in that weirdly perfect script of which only professional athletes seem capable (in Eddie’s experience it was the spelling that gave most of them problems), and began to toss it from hand to hand. “Folks from away really pile in once June comes—you know that, don’t ya?”

“I do,” Eddie said, feeling hopeless already. He thought it was possible old Double-Ugly had already gotten to Cal Tower. Maybe the ambush at the store had been Jack’s idea of dessert. “I guess you can’t—”

“If I can’t, I guess I better goddam retire,” Cullum said with some spirit, and tossed the Yaz ball to Eddie, who held it in his right hand and ran the tips of his left-hand fingers over the red stitches. The feel of them raised a wholly unexpected lump in his throat. If a baseball didn’t tell you that you were home, what did? Only this world wasn’t home anymore. John was right, he was a walk-in.

“What do you mean?” Roland asked. Eddie tossed him the ball and Roland caught it without ever taking his eyes off John Cullum.

“I don’t bother with names, but I know most everyone who comes into this town just the same,” he said. “Know em by sight. Same with any other caretaker worth his salt, I s’pose. You want to know who’s in your territory.” Roland nodded at this with perfect understanding. “Tell me what this guy looks like.”

Eddie said, “He stands about five-nine and weighs . . . oh, I’m gonna say two-thirty.”

“Heavyset, then.”

“Do ya. Also, most of his hair’s gone on the sides of his forehead.” Eddie raised his hands to his own head and pushed his hair back, exposing the temples (one of them still oozing blood from his near-fatal passage through the Unfound Door). He winced a little at the pain this provoked in his upper left arm, but there the bleeding had already stopped. Eddie was more worried about the round he’d taken in the leg. Right now Cullum’s Percodan was dealing with the pain, but if the bullet was still in there—and Eddie thought it might be—it would eventually have to come out.

“How old is he?” Cullum asked.

Eddie looked at Roland, who only shook his head. Had Roland ever actually seen Tower? At this particular moment, Eddie couldn’t remember. He thought not.

“I think in his fifties.”

“He’s the book collector, ain’t he?” Cullum asked, then laughed at Eddie’s expression of surprise.
“Told you, I keep a weather eye out on the summah folk. You never know when one’s gonna turn out to be a deadbeat. Maybe an outright thief. Or, eight or nine years ago, we had this woman from New Jersey who turned out to be a firebug.” Cullum shook his head. “Looked like a small-town librarian, the sort of lady who wouldn’t say boo to a goose, and she was lightin up barns all over Stoneham, Lovell, and Waterford.”

“How do you know he’s a book dealer?” Roland asked, and tossed the ball back to Cullum, who immediately tossed it to Eddie.

“Didn’t know
that,
” he said. “Only that he collects em, because he told Jane Sargus. Jane’s got a little shop right where Dimity Road branches off from Route 5. That’s about a mile south of here. Dimity Road’s actually where that fella and his friend are stayin, if we’re talking about the right ones. I guess we are.”

“His friend’s name is Deepneau,” Eddie said, and tossed the Yaz ball to Roland. The gunslinger caught it, tossed it to Cullum, then went to the fireplace and dropped the last shred of his cigarette onto the little pile of logs stacked on the grate.

“Don’t bother with names, like I told you, but the friend’s skinny and looks about seventy. Walks like his hips pain him some. Wears steel-rimmed glasses.”

“That’s the guy, all right,” Eddie said.

“Janey has a little place called Country Collectibles. She gut some furniture in the barn, dressers and armoires and such, but what she specializes in is quilts, glassware, and old books. Sign says so right out front.”

“So Cal Tower . . . what? Just went in and started browsing?” Eddie couldn’t believe it, and at the same time he could. Tower had been balky about leaving New York even after Jack and George Biondi had threatened to burn his most valuable books right in front of his eyes. And once he and Deepneau got here, the fool had signed up for general delivery at the post office—or at least his friend Aaron had, and as far as the bad guys were concerned, one was as good as the other. Callahan had left him a note telling him to stop advertising his presence in East Stoneham.
How stupid can you be???
had been the Pere’s final communication to sai Tower, and the answer seemed to be more stupid than a bag of hammers.

“Ayuh,” Cullum said. “Only he did a lot more’n browse.” His eyes, as blue as Roland’s, were twinkling. “Bought a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of readin material. Paid with traveler’s checks. Then he gut her to give him a list of other used bookstores in the area. There’s quite a few, if you add in Notions in Norway and that Your Trash, My Treasure place over in Fryeburg. Plus he got her to write down the names of some local folks who have book collections and sometimes sell out of their houses. Jane was awful excited. Talked about it all over town, she did.”

Eddie put a hand to his forehead and groaned. That was the man he’d met, all right, that was Calvin Tower to the life. What had he been thinking? That once he “gut” north of Boston he was safe?

“Can you tell us how to find him?” Roland asked.

“Oh, I c’n do better’n that. I can take you right to where they’re stayin.”

Roland had been tossing the ball from hand to hand. Now he stopped and shook his head. “No. You’ll be going somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“Anyplace you’ll be safe,” Roland said. “Beyond that, sai, I don’t want to know. Neither of us do.”

“Well call me Sam, I say goddam. Dunno’s I like that much.”

“Doesn’t matter. Time is short.” Roland considered, then said: “Do you have a cartomobile?”

Cullum looked momentarily puzzled, then grinned. “Yep, a cartomobile and a truckomobile both. I’m loaded.” The last word came out
ludded.

“Then you’ll lead us to Tower’s Dimity Road place in one while Eddie . . .” Roland paused for a moment. “Eddie, do you still remember how to drive?”

“Roland, you’re hurtin my feelings.”

Roland, never a very humorous fellow even at the best of times, didn’t smile. He returned his attention to the dan-tete—little savior—ka had put in their way, instead. “Once we’ve found Tower, you’ll go your course, John. That’s any course that isn’t ours. Take a little vacation, if it does ya. Two days should be enough, then you can return to your business.” Roland hoped their own business here in East Stoneham would be done by sundown, but didn’t want to hex them by saying so.

“I don’t think you understand that this is my busy season,” Cullum said. He held out his hands and Roland tossed him the ball. “I got a boathouse to paint . . . a barn that needs shinglin—”

“If you stay with us,” Roland said, “you’ll likely never shingle another barn.”

Cullum looked at him with an eyebrow cocked, clearly trying to gauge Roland’s seriousness and not much liking what he saw.

While this was going on, Eddie found himself returning to the question of whether or not Roland had ever actually seen Tower with his own eyes. And now he realized that his first answer to that question had been wrong—Roland
had
seen Tower.

Sure he did. It was Roland who pulled that bookcase full of Tower’s first editions into the Doorway Cave. Roland was looking right at him. What he saw was probably distorted, but . . .

That train of thought drifted away, and by the seemingly inevitable process of association, Eddie’s mind returned to Tower’s precious books, such rarities as
The Dogan,
by Benjamin Slightman, Jr., and
’Salem’s Lot,
by Stephen King.

“I’ll just get m’keys and we’re off,” Cullum said, but before he could turn away, Eddie said: “Wait.”

Cullum looked at him quizzically.

“We’ve got a little more to talk about, I think.” And he held up his hands for the baseball.

“Eddie, our time is short,” Roland said.

“I know that,” Eddie said.
Probably better than you, since it’s my woman the clock’s running out on.
“If I could, I’d leave that asshole Tower to Jack and concentrate on getting back to Susannah. But ka won’t let me do that. Your damned old ka.”

“We need—”

“Shut up.” He had never said such a thing to
Roland in his life, but now the words came out on their own, and he felt no urge to call them back. In his mind, Eddie heard a ghostly Calla-chant:
Commala-come-come, the palaver’s not done.

“What’s on your mind?” Cullum asked him.

“A man named Stephen King. Do you know that name?”

And saw by Cullum’s eyes that he did.

“Eddie,” Roland said. He spoke in an oddly tentative way the younger man had never heard before.
He’s as at sea as I am.
Not a comforting thought. “Andolini may still be looking for us. More important, he may be looking for Tower, now that we’ve slipped through his fingers . . . and as sai Cullum has made perfectly clear, Tower has made himself easy to find.”

“Listen to me,” Eddie replied. “I’m playing a hunch here, but a hunch is
not
all this is. We’ve met one man, Ben Slightman, who wrote a book in another world.
Tower
’s world.
This
world. And we’ve met another one, Donald Callahan, who was a
character
in a book from another world. Again,
this
world.” Cullum had tossed him the ball and now Eddie flipped it underhand, and hard, to Roland. The gunslinger caught it easily.

“This might not seem like such a big deal to me, except we’ve been
haunted
by books, haven’t we?
The Dogan. The Wizard of Oz. Charlie the Choo-Choo.
Even Jake’s Final Essay. And now
’Salem’s Lot.
I think that if this Stephen King is real—”

“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.”