Stephen King - Song of Susannah

“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 telling yourself the story. And then, to make things worse, you get a new 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. “No trespassing. Do not enter. High 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 Greenpeace 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. The y 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 the y, and why? To make nineteen, of course. Claudia Bachman was just a name. Claudia y Inez Bachman, though… she was 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 had King himself been moved. That one letter added to the name of his pseudonym’s wife insisted upon it. Something had wanted to make Claudia Bachman nineteen. So-

“Steve.”

“Yes, Eddie of New York.” King smiled self-consciously.

Eddie could feel his heart beating hard in his chest. “What does the number nineteen mean to you?”

King considered. Outside the wind soughed in the trees, the powerboats whined, and the crow-or another-cawed. Soon along this lake would come the hour of barbecues, and then maybe a trip to town and a band concert on the square, all in this best of all possible worlds. Or just the one most real.

At last, King shook his head and Eddie let out a frustrated breath.

“Sorry. It’s a prime number, but that’s all I can come up with. Primes sort of fascinate me, have ever since Mr. Soychak’s Algebra I class at Lisbon High. And I think it’s how old I was when I met my wife, but she might dispute that. She has a disputatious nature.”

“What about ninety-nine?”

King thought it over, then ticked items off on his fingers. “A hell of an age to be. ’Ninety-nine years on the old rock-pile.’ A song called-I think-’The Wreck of Old Ninety-nine.’ Only it might be ’The Wreck of the Hesperus’ I’m thinking about. ’Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, we took one down and passed it all around, and there were ninety-eight bottles of beer.’ Beyond that, nada. ”

This time it was King’s turn to look at the clock.

“If I don’t leave soon, Betty Jones is going to call to see if I forgot I have a son. And after I get Joe I’m supposed to drive a hundred and thirty miles north, there’s that. Which might be easier if I quit with the beer. And that, in turn, might be easier if I didn’t have a couple of armed spooks sitting in my kitchen.”

Roland was nodding. He reached down to his gunbelt, brought up a shell, and began to roll it absently between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. “Just one more question, if it does ya. Then we’ll go our course and let you go yours.”

King nodded. “Ask it, then.” He looked at his third can of beer, then tipped it down the sink with an expression of regret.

“Was it you wrote The Dark Tower? ”

To Eddie this question made no sense, but King’s eyes lit up and he smiled brilliantly. “ No! ” he said. “And if I ever do a book on writing-and I probably could, it’s what I taught before I retired to do this-I’ll say so. Not that, not any of them, not really. I know that there are writers who do write, but I’m not one of them. In fact, whenever I run out of inspiration and resort to plot, the story I’m working on usually turns to shit.”

“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” Eddie said.

“It’s like… hey, that’s neat!”

The shell rolling back and forth between the gunslinger’s thumb and forefinger had jumped effortlessly to the backs of his fingers, where it seemed to walk along Roland’s rippling knuckles.

“Yes,” Roland agreed, “it is, isn’t it?”

“It’s how you hypnotized Jake at the way station. How you made him remember being killed.”

And Susan, Eddie thought. He hypnotized Susan the same way, only you don’t know about that yet, sai King. Or maybe you do. Maybe somewhere inside you know all of it.