He had been entirely captured. Eddie thought he could almost hear the sucking sound as the man’s conscious mind drained away. It occurred to him that something as simple as a ringing phone at this critical moment might change the whole course of existence. He got up, and—moving quietly in spite of his stiff and painful leg—went to where it hung on the wall. He twisted the cord in his fingers and applied pressure until it snapped.

“A rose, a stone, an unfound door,” King agreed. “That could be Wolfe, all right. Maxwell Perkins called him ‘a divine wind-chime.’ O lost, and by the wind grieved! All the forgotten faces! O Discordia!”

“How does the story come to you, sai?” Roland asked quietly.

“I don’t like the New Agers…the crystal-wavers…all the it-don’t-matter, turn-the-pagers…but they call it channeling, and that’s…how it feels…like something in a channel…”

“Or on a beam?” Roland asked.

“All things serve the Beam,” the writer said, and sighed. The sound was terrible in its sadness. Eddie felt his back prickle up in helpless waves of gooseflesh.

Stephen King stood in a shaft of dusty afternoon sunlight. It lit his cheek, the curve of his left eye, the dimple at the corner of his mouth. It turned each white hair on the left side of his beard into a line of light. Hestood in light, and that made the faint darkness around him clearer. His respiration had slowed to perhaps three or four breaths a minute.

“Stephen King,” Roland said. “Do you see me?”

“Hile, gunslinger, I see you very well.”

“When did you first see me?”

“Not until today.”

Roland looked surprised at this, and a little frustrated. It was clearly not the answer he had expected. Then King went on.

“I saw Cuthbert, not you.” A pause. “You and Cuthbert broke bread and scattered it beneath the gallows. That’s in the part that’s already written.”

“Aye, so we did. When Hax the cook swung. We were but lads. Did Bert tell you that tale?”

But King did not answer this. “I saw Eddie. I saw him very well.” A pause. “Cuthbert and Eddie are twins.”

“Roland—” Eddie began in a low voice. Roland hushed him with a savage shake of the head and put the bullet he’d used to hypnotize King on the table. King kept looking at the place where it had been, as if he still saw it there. Probably he did. Dust motes danced around his dark and shaggy head of hair.

“Where were you when you saw Cuthbert and Eddie?”

“In the barn.” King’s voice dropped. His lips had begun to tremble. “Auntie sent me out because we tried to run away.”

“Who?”

“Me and my brother Dave. They caught us and brought us back. They said we were bad, bad boys.”

“And you had to go into the barn.”

“Yes, and saw wood.”

“That was your punishment.”

“Yes.” A tear welled in the corner of King’s right eye. It slipped down his cheek to the edge of his beard. “The chickens are dead.”

“The chickens in the barn?”

“Yes, them.” More tears followed the first.

“What killed them?”

“Uncle Oren says it was avian flu. Their eyes are open. They’re…a little scary.”

Or perhaps more than just a little, Eddie thought, judging by the tears and the pallor of the man’s cheeks.

“You couldn’t leave the barn?”

“Not until I saw my share of the wood. David did his. It’s my turn. There are spiders in the chickens. Spiders in their guts, little red ones. Like specks of red pepper. If they get on me I’ll catch the flu and die. Only then I’ll come back.”

“Why?”

“I’ll be a vampire. I’ll be a slave tohim. His scribe, maybe. His pet writer.”

“Whose?”

“The Lord of the Spiders. The Crimson King, Tower-pent.”

“Christ, Roland,” Eddie whispered. He was shuddering. What had they found here? What nest had they exposed? “Sai King,Steve, how old were you—areyou?”

“I’m seven.” A pause. “I wet my pants. I don’t want the spiders to bite me. The red spiders. But thenyou came, Eddie, and I went free.” He smiled radiantly, his cheeks gleaming with tears.

“Are you asleep, Stephen?” Roland asked.

“Aye.”

“Go deeper.”

“All right.”

“I’ll count to three. On three you’ll be as deep as you can go.”

“All right.”

“One…two…three.” Onthree, King’s head lolled forward. His chin rested on his chest. A line of silver drool ran from his mouth and swung like a pendulum.

“So now we know something,” Roland said to Eddie. “Something crucial, maybe. He was touched by the Crimson King when he was just a child, but it seems that we won him over to our side. Oryou did, Eddie. You and my old friend, Bert. In any case, it makes him rather special.”

“I’d feel better about my heroism if I remembered it,” Eddie said. Then: “You realize that when this guy was seven, I wasn’t even born?”

Roland smiled. “Ka is a wheel. You’ve been turning on it under different names for a long time. Cuthbert for one, it seems.”

“What’s this about the Crimson King being ‘Tower-pent’?”

“I have no idea.”

Roland turned back to Stephen King. “How many times do you think the Lord of Discordia has tried to kill you, Stephen? Kill you and halt your pen? Shut up your troublesome mouth? Since that first time in your aunt and uncle’s barn?”

King seemed to try counting, then shook his head. “Delah,” he said.Many.

Eddie and Roland exchanged a glance.

“And does someone always step in?” Roland asked.

“Nay, sai, never think it. I’m not helpless. Sometimes I step aside.”

Roland laughed at that—the dry sound of a stick broken over a knee. “Do you know what you are?”

King shook his head. His lower lip had pooched out like that of a sulky child.

“Do you know what you are?”

“The father first. The husband second. The writer third. Then the brother. After brotherhood I am silent. Okay?”

“No. Not oh-kay. Do you know what you are?”

A long pause. “No. I told you all I can. Stop asking me.”

“I’ll stop when you speak true. Do you know—”

“Yes, all right, I know what you’re getting at. Satisfied?”

“Not yet. Tell me what—”

“I’m Gan, orpossessed by Gan, I don’t know which, maybe there’s no difference.” King began to cry. His tears were silent and horrible. “But it’s not Dis, I turned aside from Dis, Irepudiate Dis, and that should be enough but it’s not, ka is never satisfied, greedy old ka, that’s whatshe said, isn’t it? What Susan Delgado said before you killed her, or I killed her, or Gan killed her. ‘Greedy old ka, how I hate it.’ Regardless of who killed her,I made her say that, I, for I hate it, so I do. I buck against ka’s goad, and will until the day I go into the clearing at the end of the path.”

Roland sat at the table, white at the sound of Susan’s name.

“And still ka comes to me, comesfrom me, I translate it, ammade to translate it, ka flows out of my navel like a ribbon. I am not ka, I am not the ribbon, it’s just what comes through me and I hate it I hate it! The chickens were full ofspiders, do you understand that, full ofspiders! ”

“Stop your snivelment,” Roland said (with a remarkable lack of sympathy, to Eddie’s way of thinking), and King stilled.

The gunslinger sat thinking, then raised his head.

“Why did you stop writing the story when I came to the Western Sea?”

“Are you dumb? BecauseI don’t want to be Gan! I turned aside from Dis, I should be able to turn aside from Gan, as well. I love my wife. I love my kids. I love to write stories, but I don’t want to writeyour story. I’m always afraid. He looks for me. The Eye of the King.”

“But not since you stopped,” Roland said.

“No, since then he looks for me not, he sees me not.”

“Nevertheless, you must go on.”

King’s face twisted, as if in pain, then smoothed out into the previous look of sleep.

Roland raised his mutilated right hand. “When you do, you’ll start with how I lost my fingers. Do you remember?”