King nodded, took another sip of his beer, seemed to take hold of himself at the same time. He glanced at the clock. “Are you gentlemen really going to let me pick up my son?”

“Yes,” Roland said.

“You…” King paused to consider, then smiled. “Do you set your watch and your warrant on it?”

With no smile in return, Roland said, “So I do.”

“Okay, then,The Dark Tower, Reader’s Digest Condensed Book version. Keeping in mind that oral storytelling isn’t my thing, I’ll do the best I can.”

Roland listened as if worlds depended on it, as he was quite sure they did. King had begun his version of Roland’s life with the campfires, which had pleased the gunslinger because they confirmed Walter’s essential humanity. From there, King said, the story went back to Roland’s meeting with a kind of shirttail farmer on the edge of the desert. Brown, his name had been.

Life for your crop,Roland heard across an echo of years, andLife for your own. He’d forgotten Brown, and Brown’s pet raven, Zoltan, but this stranger had not.

“What I liked,” King said, “was how the story seemed to be going backward. From a purely technical standpoint, it was very interesting. I start with you in the desert, then slip back a notch to you meeting Brown and Zoltan. Zoltan was named after a folk-singer and guitarist I knew at the University of Maine, by the way. Anyway, from the dweller’s hut the story slips back another notch to you coming into the town of Tull…named after a rock group—”

“Jethro Tull,” Eddie said. “Goddam of course! Iknew that name was familiar! What about Z.Z. Top, Steve? Do you know them?” Eddie looked at King, saw the incomprehension, and smiled. “I guess it’s not their when quite yet. Or if it is, you haven’t found out about them.”

Roland twirled his fingers:Go on, go on. And gave Eddie a look that suggested he stop interrupting.

“Anyway, from Roland coming into Tull, the story slips back another notch to tell how Nort, the weed-eater, died and was resurrected by Walter. You see what buzzed me about it, don’t you? The early part of it was all told in reverse gear. It was bass-ackwards.”

Roland had no interest in the technical aspects that seemed to fascinate King; this was his life they were talking about, after all, hislife, and to him it had all been moving forward. At least until he’d reached the Western Sea, and the doors through which he had drawn his traveling companions.

But Stephen King knew nothing of the doors, it seemed. He had written of the way station, and Roland’s meeting with Jake Chambers; he had written of their trek first into the mountains and then through them; he had written of Jake’s betrayal by the man he had come to trust and to love.

King observed the way Roland hung his head during this part of the tale, and spoke with odd gentleness. “No need to look so ashamed, Mr. Deschain. After all, I was the one who made you do it.”

But again, Roland wondered about that.

King had written of Roland’s palaver with Walter in the dusty golgotha of bones, the telling of the Tarot and the terrible vision Roland had had of growing right through the roof of the universe. He had written of how Roland had awakened following that long night of fortune-telling to find himself years older, and Walter nothing but bones. Finally, King said, he’d written of Roland going to the edge of the water and sitting there. “You said, ‘I loved you, Jake’ ”

Roland nodded matter-of-factly. “I love him still.”

“You speak as though he actually exists.”

Roland looked at him levelly. “Do I exist? Do you?”

King was silent.

“What happened then?” Eddie asked.

“Then,señor, I ran out of story—or got intimidated, if you like that better—and stopped.”

Eddie also wanted to stop. He could see the shadows beginning to lengthen in the kitchen and wanted to get after Susannah before it was too late. He thought both he and Roland had a pretty good idea of how to get out of this world, suspected Stephen King himself could direct them to Turtleback Lane in Lovell, where reality was thin and—according to John Cullum, at least—the walk-ins had been plentiful of late. And King would be happy to direct them. Happy to get rid of them. But they couldn’t go just yet, and in spite of his impatience Eddie knew it.

“You stopped because you lost your lineout,” Roland said.

“Outline. And no, not really.” King had gone after his third beer, and Eddie thought it was no wonder the man was getting pudgy in the middle; he’d already consumed the caloric equivalent of a loaf of bread, and was starting on Loaf #2. “I hardly ever work from an outline. In fact…don’t hold me to this, but that might have been the only time. And it got too big for me. Too strange. Alsoyou became a problem, sir or sai or whatever you call yourself.” King grimaced. “Whatever form of address that is, I didn’t make it up.”

“Not yet, anyway,” Roland remarked.

“You started as a version of Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name.”

“In the Spaghetti Westerns,” Eddie said. “Jesus, of course! I watched a hundred of em at the Majestic with my brother Henry, when Henry was still at home. I went by myself or with this friend of mine, Chuggy Coter, when Henry was in the Nam. Those wereguy flicks.”

King was grinning. “Yeah,” he said, “but my wife went ape for em, so go figure.”

“Cool on her!” Eddie exclaimed.

“Yeah, Tab’s a cool kitty.” King looked back at Roland. “As The Man With No Name—a fantasy version of Clint Eastwood—you were okay. A lot of fun to partner up with.”

“Is that how you think of it?”

“Yes. But then you changed. Right under my hand. It got so I couldn’t tell if you were the hero, the antihero, or no hero at all. When you let the kid drop, that was the capper.”

“You said you made me do that.”

Looking Roland straight in the eyes—blue meeting blue amid the endless choir of voices—King said: “I lied, brother.”

There was a little pause while they all thought that over. Then King said, “You started to scare me, so I stopped writing about you. Boxed you up and put you in a drawer and went on to a series of short stories I sold to various men’s magazines.” He considered, then nodded. “Things changed for me after I put you away, my friend, and for the better. I started to sell my stuff. Asked Tabby to marry me. Not long after that I started a book calledCarrie. It wasn’t my first novel, but it was the first one I sold, and it put me over the top. All that after saying goodbye Roland, so long, happy trails to you. Then what happens? I come around the corner of my house one day six or seven years later and see you standing in my fucking driveway, big as Billy-be-damned, as my mother used to say. And all I can say now is that thinking you’re a hallucination brought on by overwork is the most optimistic conclusion I can draw. And I don’t believe it. How can I?” King’s voice was rising, becoming reedy. Eddie didn’t mistake it for fear; this was outrage. “How can I believe it when I see the shadows you cast, the blood on your leg—” He pointed to Eddie. “And the dust on your face?” This time to Roland. “You’ve taken away my goddam options, and I can feel my mind…I don’t know…tipping? Is that the word? I think it is. Tipping.”

“You didn’t just stop,” Roland said, ignoring this last completely for the self-indulgent nonsense it probably was.

“No?”

“I think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe. And one day while you were doing that, you felt something pushing back.”

King considered this for what seemed to Eddie like a very long time. Then he nodded. “You could be right. It was more than the usual going-dry feeling, for sure. I’m used to that, although it doesn’t happen as often as it used to. It’s…I don’t know, one day you just start having less fun while you’re sitting there, tapping the keys. Seeing less clearly. Getting less of a buzz from tellingyourself the story. And then, to make things worse, you get anew idea, one that’s all bright and shiny, fresh off the showroom floor, not a scratch on her. Completely unfucked-up by you, at least as of yet. And…well…”