"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."
Ten
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 f**king 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..."
"And you felt something pushing back." Roland spoke in the same utterly flat tone.
"Yeah." King's voice had dropped so low Eddie could barely hear him. "N O TRESPASSING. D O NOT ENTER. H IGH VOLTAGE. " He paused. "Maybe even DANGER OF DEATH. "
You wouldn't like that faint shadow I see swirling around you,Eddie thought.That black nimbus. No, sai, I don't think you'd like that at all, and what am I seeing? The cigarettes? The beer? Something else addictive you maybe have a taste for? A car accident one drunk night? And how far ahead? How many years?
He looked at the clock over the Kings' kitchen table and was dismayed to see that it was quarter to four in the afternoon. "Roland, it's getting late. This man's got to get his kid."And we've got to find my wife before Mia has the baby they seem to be sharing and the Crimson King has no more use for the Susannah part of her.
Roland said, "Just a little more." And lowered his head without saying anything. Thinking. Trying to decide which questions were the right questions. Maybe just one right question. And it was important, Eddie knew it was, because they'd never be able to return to the ninth day of July in the year 1977. They might be able to revisit that day in some other world, but not in this one. And would Stephen King exist in any of those other worlds? Eddie thought maybe not.Probably not.
While Roland considered, Eddie asked King if the name Blaine meant anything special to him.
"No. Not particularly."
"What about Lud?"
"As in Luddites? They were some sort of machine-hating religious sect, weren't they? Nineteenth century, I think, or they might have started even earlier. If I've got it right, the ones in the nineteenth century would break into factories and bash the machinery to pieces." He grinned, displaying those crooked teeth. "I guess they were the Green-peace of their day."
"Beryl Evans? That name ring a bell?"
"No."
"Henchick? Henchick of the Manni?"
"No. What are the Manni?"
"Too complicated to go into. What about Claudia y Inez Bachman? That one mean anyth - "
King burst out laughing, startling Eddie. Startling King himself, judging from the look on his face. "Dicky's wife!" he exclaimed. "How in the hell do you know about that?"
"I don't. Who's Dicky?"
"Richard Bachman. I've started publishing some of my earliest novels as paperback originals, under a pseudonym. Bachman is it. One night when I was pretty drunk, I made up a whole author bio for him, right down to how he beat adult-onset leukemia, hooray Dickie. Anyway, Claudia's his wife. Claudia Inez Bachman. They part, though...that I don't know about."
Eddie felt as if a huge invisible stone had suddenly rolled off his chest and out of his life.Claudia Inez Bachman only had eighteen letters. So something had added they, and why? To make nineteen, of course. Claudia Bachman was just a name. Claudia y Inez Bachman, though...shewas ka-tet.
Eddie thought they'd just gotten one of the things they'd come here for. Yes, Stephen King had created them. At least he'd created Roland, Jake, and Father Callahan. The rest he hadn't gotten to yet. And he had moved Roland like a piece on a chessboard: go to Tull, Roland, sleep with Allie, Roland, chase Walter across the desert, Roland. But even as he moved his main character along the board, so hadKing himself been moved. That one letter added to the name of his pseudonym's wife insisted upon it. Something had wanted to make Claudia Bachmannineteen. So -