Song of Susannah (41 page)

“Maybe so, but we won’t be able to check on him for twenty-two years unless we decide to abandon Susannah . . . and I’ll never do that. Once we jump ahead to 1999, there’s no coming back. Not in this world.”

For a moment Roland made no reply, just looked at the man leaning his behind against his kitchen counter, asleep on his feet with his eyes open and his hair tumbled on his brow. Seven or eight minutes from now King would awaken with no memory of Roland and Eddie . . . always assuming they were gone, that was. Eddie didn’t seriously believe the gunslinger would leave Suze hung out on the line . . . but he’d let Jake drop, hadn’t he? Let Jake drop into the abyss, once upon a time.

“Then he’ll have to go it alone,” Roland said, and Eddie breathed a sigh of relief. “Sai King.”

“Yes, Roland.”

“Remember—when you hear the song of the Turtle, you must put aside all other things and tell this story.”

“I will. At least I’ll try.”

“Good.”

Then the writer said: “The ball must be taken off the board and broken.”

Roland frowned. “Which ball? Black Thirteen?”

“If it wakes, it will become the most dangerous thing in the universe. And it’s waking now. In some other place. Some other where and when.”

“Thank you for your prophecy, sai King.”

“Dad-a-shim, dad-a-shower. Take the ball to the double Tower.”

To this Roland shook his head in silent bewilderment.

Eddie put a fist to his forehead and bent slightly. “Hile, wordslinger.”

King smiled faintly, as if this were ridiculous, but said nothing.

“Long days and pleasant nights,” Roland told him. “You don’t need to think about the chickens anymore.”

An expression of almost heartbreaking hope spread across Stephen King’s bearded face. “Do you really say so?”

“I really do. And may we meet again on the path before we all meet in the clearing.” The gunslinger turned on his bootheel and left the writer’s house.

Eddie took a final look at the tall, rather stooped man standing with his narrow ass propped against the counter. He thought:
The next time I see you, Stevie—if I do—your beard will be mostly white and there’ll be lines around your face . . . and I’ll still be young. How’s your blood-pressure, sai? Good to go for the next twenty-two years? Hope so. What about your ticker? Does cancer run in your family, and if it does, how deep?

There was time for none of these questions, of course. Or any others. Very soon the writer would be
waking up and going on with his life. Eddie followed his dinh out into the latening afternoon and closed the door behind him. He was beginning to think that, when ka had sent them here instead of to New York City, it had known what it was doing, after all.

Eddie stopped on the driver’s side of John Cullum’s car and looked across the roof at the gunslinger. “Did you see that thing around him? That black haze?”

“The todana, yes. Thank your father that it’s still faint.”

“What’s a todana? Sounds like todash.”

Roland nodded. “It’s a variation of the word. It means deathbag. He’s been marked.”

“Jesus,” Eddie said.

“It’s faint, I tell you.”

“But there.”

Roland opened his door. “We can do nothing about it. Ka marks the time of each man and woman. Let’s move, Eddie.”

But now that they were actually ready to get rolling again, Eddie was queerly reluctant to go. He had a sense of things unfinished with sai King. And he hated the thought of that black aura.

“What about Turtleback Lane, and the walk-ins? I meant to ask him—”

“We can find it.”

“Are you sure? Because I think we need to go there.”

“I think so, too. Come on. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”

The taillights of the old Ford had hardly cleared the end of the driveway before Stephen King opened his eyes. The first thing he did was look at the clock. Almost four. He should have been rolling after Joe ten minutes ago, but the nap he’d taken had done him good. He felt wonderful. Refreshed. Cleaned out in some weird way. He thought,
If every nap could do that, taking them would be a national law.

Maybe so, but Betty Jones was going to be seriously worried if she didn’t see the Cherokee turning into her yard by four-thirty. King reached for the phone to call her, but his eyes fell to the pad on the desk below it, instead. The sheets were headed
CALLING ALL BLOWHARDS
. A little something from one of his sisters-in-law.

Face going blank again, King reached for the pad and the pen beside it. He bent and wrote:

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

He paused, looking fixedly at this, then wrote:

Dad-a-chud, dad-a-ched, see it, Jake! The key is red!

He paused again, then wrote:

Dad-a-chum, dad-a-chee, give this boy a plastic key.

He looked at what he had written with deep affection. Almost love. God almighty, but he felt fine! These lines meant nothing at all, and yet writing
them afforded a satisfaction so deep it was almost ecstasy.

King tore off the sheet.

Balled it up.

Ate it.

It stuck for a moment in his throat and then—ulp!—down it went. Good deal! He snatched the

(
ad-a-chee
)

key to the Jeep off the wooden key-board (which was itself shaped like a key) and hurried outside. He’d get Joe, they’d come back here and pack, they’d grab supper at Mickey Kee’s in South Paris. Correction, Mickey-
Dee’s.
He felt he could eat a couple of Quarter Pounders all by himself. Fries, too.
Damn
, but he felt good!

When he reached Kansas Road and turned toward town, he flipped on the radio and got the McCoys, singing “Hang On, Sloopy”—always excellent. His mind drifted, as it so often did while listening to the radio, and he found himself thinking of the characters from that old story,
The Dark Tower.
Not that there were many left; as he recalled, he’d killed most of them off, even the kid. Didn’t know what else to do with him, probably. That was usually why you got rid of characters, because you didn’t know what else to do with them. What had his name been, Jack? No, that was the haunted Dad in
The Shining.
The
Dark Tower
kid had been
Jake.
Excellent choice of name for a story with a Western motif, something right out of Wayne D. Overholser or Ray Hogan. Was it possible Jake could come back into that story, maybe as a ghost? Of course he could. The nice
thing about tales of the supernatural, King reflected, was that nobody had to
really
die. They could always come back, like that guy Barnabas on
Dark Shadows.
Barnabas Collins had been a vampire.

“Maybe the
kid
comes back as a vampire,” King said, and laughed. “Watch out, Roland, dinner is served and dinner be you!” But that didn’t feel right. What, then? Nothing came, but that was all right. In time, something might. Probably when he least expected it; while feeding the cat or changing the baby or just walking dully along, as Auden said in that poem about suffering.

No suffering today. Today he felt
great.

Yar, just call me Tony the Tiger.

On the radio, the McCoys gave way to Troy Shondell, singing “This Time.”

That
Dark Tower
thing had been sort of interesting, actually. King thought,
Maybe when we get back from up north I ought to dig it out. Take a look at it.

Not a bad idea.

STAVE:
Commala-come-call

We hail the One who made us all
,

Who made the men and made the maids
,

Who made the great and small.

RESPONSE:
Commala-come-call!

He made the great and small!

And yet how great the hand of fate

That rules us one and all.

Don Callahan had had many dreams of returning to America. Usually they began with him waking up under a high, fair desert sky full of the puffy clouds baseball players call “angels” or in his own rectory bed in the town of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine. No matter which locale it happened to be, he’d be nearly overwhelmed with relief, his first instinct for prayer.
Oh, thank God. Thank God it was only a dream and finally I am awake.

He was awake now, no question of that.

He turned a complete circle in the air and saw Jake do exactly the same in front of him. He lost one of his sandals. He could hear Oy yapping and Eddie roaring in protest. He could hear taxi horns, that sublime New York street music, and something else, as well: a preacher. Really cruising along, by the sound of him. Third gear, at least. Maybe overdrive.

One of Callahan’s ankles clipped the side of the Unfound Door as he went through and there was a burst of terrific pain from that spot. Then the ankle (and the area around it) went numb. There was a
speedy riffle of todash chimes, like a thirty-three-and-a-third record played at forty-five rpm. A buffet of conflicting air currents hit him, and suddenly he was smelling gasoline and exhaust instead of the Doorway Cave’s dank air. First street music; now street perfume.

For a moment there were
two
preachers. Henchick behind, roaring
“Behold, the door opens!”
and another one ahead, bellowing
“Say GAWD, brotha, that’s right, say GAWD on Second Avenue!”

More twins
, Callahan thought—there was time for that—and then the door behind him blammed shut and the only God-shouter was the one on Second Avenue. Callahan also had time to think
Welcome home, you sonofabitch, welcome back to America
, and then he landed.

It was quite an all-out crash, but he came down hard on his hands and knees. His jeans protected the latter parts to some degree (although they tore), but the sidewalk scraped what felt like an acre of skin from his palms. He heard the rose, singing powerfully and undisturbed.

Callahan rolled over onto his back and looked up at the sky, snarling with pain, holding his bleeding, buzzing hands in front of his face. A drop of blood from the left one splashed onto his cheek like a tear.

“Where the fuck did
you
come from, my friend?” asked an astounded black man in gray fatigues. He
seemed to have been the only one to mark Don Callahan’s dramatic re-entry into America. He was staring down at the man on the sidewalk with wide eyes.

“Oz,” Callahan said, and sat up.

His hands stung fiercely and now his ankle was back, complaining in loud
yowp-yowp-yowp
bursts of pain that were in perfect synch with his elevated heartbeat. “Go on, fella. Get out of here. I’m okay, so twenty-three skidoo.”

“Whatever you say, bro. Later.”

The man in the gray fatigues—a janitor just off-shift was Callahan’s guess—started walking. He favored Callahan with one final glance—still amazed but already beginning to doubt what he’d seen—and then skirted the little crowd listening to the street preacher. A moment later he was gone.

Callahan got to his feet and stood on one of the steps leading up to Hammarskjöld Plaza, looking for Jake. He didn’t see him. He looked the other way, for the Unfound Door, but that was gone, too.

“Now listen, my friends! Listen, I say God, I say God’s
love,
I say gimme hallelujah!”

“Hallelujah,” said a member of the street preacher’s crowd, not really sounding all that into it.

“I say amen, thank you, brotha! Now listen because this is America’s time of TESTING and America is FAILING her TEST! This country needs a BOMB, not a new-kew-lar one but a GAWD-BOMB, can you say hallelujah?”

“Jake!” Callahan shouted. “Jake, where are you? Jake!”

“Oy!”
That was Jake, his voice raised in a scream.
“Oy, LOOK OUT!”

There was a yapping, excited bark Callahan would have recognized anywhere. Then the scream of locked tires.