He pulled the poker from the little clutch of tools, wincing when the poker's tip clanged softly against the ashshovel. He took the poker and walked carefully back to the closed door again, holding the poker as he had held it before crashing into the bathroom. He had to skirt the magazine he'd thrown on the way. He reached the door and stood in front of it. 'Shooter?' There was no answer. 'Shooter, you better come out under your own power! If I have to come in and get you, you'll never walk out of anyplace under your own power again !' There was still no answer. He stood a moment longer, nerving himself (but not really sure he had the nerve), and then twisted the knob. He hit the door with his shoulder and barrelled in, screaming, waving the poker And the room was empty. But Shooter had been here, all right. Yes. The VDT unit of Mort's word cruncher lay on the floor, its screen a shattered staring eye. Shooter had killed it. On the desk where the VDT had stood was an old Royal typewriter. The steel surfaces of this dinosaur were dull and dusty. Propped on the keyboard was a manuscript. Shooter's manuscript, the one he had left under a rock on the porch a million years ago. It was 'Secret Window, Secret Garden.' Mort dropped the poker on the floor. He walked toward the typewriter as if mesmerized and picked up the manuscript. He shuffled slowly through its pages, and came to understand why Mrs Gavin had been so sure it was his ... sure enough to rescue it from the trash. Maybe she hadn't known consciously, but her eye had recognized the irregular typeface. And why not? She had seen manuscripts which looked like 'Secret Window, Secret Garden' for years. The Wang word processor and the System Five laser printer were relative newcomers. For most of his writing career he had used this old Royal. The years had almost worn it out, and it was a sad case now  when you typed on it, it produced letters as crooked as an old man's teeth. But it had been here all the time, of course  tucked away at the back of the study closet behind piles of old galleys and manuscripts ... what editors called 'foul matter.' Shooter must have stolen it, typed his manuscript on it, and then sneaked it back when Mort was out at the post office. Sure. That made sense, didn't it? No, Mort. That doesn't make sense. Would you like to do something that does make sense? Call the police, then. That makes sense. Call the police and tell them to come down here and lock you up. Tell them to do it fast, before you can do any more damage. Tell them to do it before you kill anyone else. Mort dropped the pages with a great wild cry and they seesawed lazily down around him as all of the truth rushed in on him at once like a jagged bolt of silver lightning. 46 There was no John Shooter. There never had been. 'No,' Mort said. He was striding back and forth through the big living room again. His headache came and went in waves of pain. 'No, I do not accept that. I do not accept that at all.' But his acceptance or rejection didn't make much difference. All the pieces of the puzzle were there, and when he saw the old Royal typewriter, they began to fly together. Now, fifteen minutes later, they were still flying together, and he seemed to have no power to will them apart. The picture which kept coming back to him was of the gas jockey in Mechanic Falls, using a squeegee to wash his windshield. A sight he had never expected to witness again in his lifetime. Later, he had assumed that the kid had given him a little extra service because he had recognized Mort and liked Mort's books. Maybe that was so, but the windshield had needed washing. Summer was gone, but plenty of stuff still splatted on your windshield if you drove far enough and fast enough on the back roads. And he must have used the back roads. He must have sped up to Derry and back again in record time, only stopping long enough to burn down his house. He hadn't even stopped long enough to get gas on the way back. After all, he'd had places to go and cats to kill, hadn't he? Busy, busy, busy. He stopped in the middle of the floor and whirled to stare at the window wall. 'If I did all that, why can't I remember?' he asked the silvery crack in the glass. 'Why can't I remember even now?' He didn't know ... but he did know where the name had come from, didn't he? One half from the Southern man whose story he had stolen in college; one half from the man who had stolen his wife. It was like some bizarre literary injoke. She says she loves him, Mort. She says she loves him now. 'Fuck that. A man who sleeps with another man's wife is a thief. And the woman is his accomplice.' He looked defiantly at the crack. The crack said nothing. Three years ago, Mort had published a novel called The Delacourt Family. The return address on Shooter's story had been Dellacourt, Mississippi. It  He suddenly ran for the encyclopedias in the study, slipping and almost falling in the mess of pages strewn on the floor in his hurry. He pulled out the M volume and at last found the entry for Mississippi. He ran a trembling finger down the list of towns  it took up one entire page  hoping against hope. It was no good. There was no Dellacourt or Delacourt, Mississippi. He thought of looking for Perkinsburg, the town where Shooter had told him he'd picked up a paperback copy of Everybody Drops the Dime before getting on the Greyhound bus, and then simply closed the encyclopedia. Why bother? There might be a Perkinsburg in Mississippi, but it would mean nothing if there was. The name of the novelist who'd taught the class in which Mort had met John Kintner had been Richard Perkins, Jr. That was where the name had come from. Yes, but I don't remember any of this, so how ? Oh, Mort, the small voice mourned. You're very sick. You're a very sick man. 'I don't accept that,' he said again, horrified by the wavery weakness of his voice, but what other choice was there? Hadn't he even thought once that it was almost as if he were doing things, taking irrevocable steps, in his sleep? You killed two men, the little voice whispered. You killed Tom because he knew you were alone that day, and you killed Greg so he wouldn't find out for sure. If you had just killed Tom, Greg would have called the police. And you didn't want that, COULDN'T have that. Not until this horrible story you've been telling is all finished. You were so sore when you got up yesterday. So stiff and sore. But it wasn't just from breaking in the bathroom door and trashing the shower stall, was it? You were a lot busier than that. You had Tom and Greg to take care of. And you were right about how the vehicles got moved around ... but You were the one who jogged all the way back to Tom's to get the Buick, and You were the one who called up Sonny Trotts and pretended to be Tom. A man who just got into town from Mississippi wouldn't know Sonny was a little deaf, but You would. You killed them, Mort, you KILLED those men! 'I do not accept that I did!' he shrieked. 'This is all just Part of his plan! This I do not is just part of his little game! His little mindgame! And I do not accept...' Stop, the little voice whispered inside his head, and Mort stopped. For a moment there was utter silence in both worlds the one inside his head, and the one outside of it. And, after an interval the little voice asked quietly Why did You do It, Mort? This whole elaborate and homicidal episode? Shooter kept saying he wanted a story, but there is no Shooter. What do You want, Mort? What did you create John Shooter FOR? Then, from outside, came the sound of a car rolling down the driveway. Mort looked at his watch and saw that the hands were standing straight up at noon. A blaze of triumph and relief roared through him like flames shooting up the neck of a chimney. That he had the magazine but still no proof did not matter. That Shooter might kill him did not matter. He could die happily, just knowing that there was a John Shooter and that he himself was not responsible for the horrors he had been considering. 'He's here!' he screamed joyfully, and ran out of the study. He waved his hands wildly above his head, and actually cut a little caper as he rounded the corner and came into the hall. He stopped, looking out at the driveway past the sloping roof of the garbage cabinet where Bump's body had been nailed up. His hands dropped slowly to his sides. Dark horror stole over his brain. No, not over it; it came down, as if some merciless hand were pulling a shade. The last piece fell into place. It had occurred to him moments before in the study that he might have created a fantasy assassin because he lacked the courage to commit suicide. Now he realized that Shooter had told the truth when he said he would never kill Mort. It wasn't John Shooter's imaginary station wagon but Amy's nononsense little Subaru which was just now coming to a stop. Amy was behind the wheel. She had stolen his love, and a woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had to give was not much of a woman. He loved her, all the same. It was Shooter who hated her. It was Shooter who meant to kill her and then bury her down by the lake near Bump. where she would before long be a mystery to both of them. 'Go away, Amy,' he whispered in the palsied voice of a very old man. 'Go away before it's too late.' But Amy was getting out of the car, and as she closed the door behind her, the hand pulled the shade in Mort's head all the way down and he was in darkness. 47 Amy tried the door and found it unlocked. She stepped in, started to call for Mort, and then didn't. She looked around, wideeyed and startled. The place was a mess. The trash can was full and had overflowed onto the floor. A few sluggish autumn flies were crawling in and out of an aluminum potpie dish that had been kicked into the corner. She could smell stale cooking and musty air. She thought she could even smell spoiled food. 'Mort?' There was no answer. She walked further into the house, taking small steps, not entirely sure she wanted to look at the rest of the place. Mrs Gavin had been in only three days ago  how had things gotten so out of hand since then? What had happened? She had been worried about Mort during the entire last year of their marriage, but she had been even more worried since the divorce. Worried, and, of course, guilty. She held part of the blame for herself. and supposed she always would. But Mort had never been strong ... and his greatest weakness was his stubborn (and sometimes almost hysterical) refusal to recognize the fact. This morning he had sounded like a man on the point of suicide. And the only reason she had heeded his admonition not to bring Ted was because she thought the sight of him might set Mort off if he really was poised on the edge of such an act. The thought of murder had never crossed her mind, nor did it do so now. Even when he had brandished the gun at them that horrible afternoon at the motel, she had not been afraid. Not of that. Mort was no killer. 'Mort? M ' She came around the kitchen counter and the word died. She stared at the big living room with wide, stunned eyes. Paper was littered everywhere. It looked as if Mort must at some point have exhumed every copy of every manuscript he had in his desk drawers and in his files and strewn the pages about in here like confetti at some black New Year's Eve celebration. The table was heaped with dirty dishes. The Silex was lying shattered on the floor by the windowwall, which was cracked. And everywhere, everywhere, everywhere was one word. The word was SHOOTER. SHOOTER had been written on the walls in colored chalks he must have taken from her drawer of art supplies. SHOOTER was sprayed on the window twice in what looked like dried whipped cream  and yes, there was the RediWhip pressurecan, lying discarded under the stove. SHOOTER was written over and over on the kitchen counters in ink, and on the wooden support posts of the deck on the far side of the house in pencil  a neat column like adding that went down in a straight line and said SHOOTER SHOOTER SHOOTER SHOOTER. Worst of all, it had been carved into the polished cherrywood surface of the table in great jagged letters three feet high, like a grotesque declaration of love SHOOTER. The screwdriver he had used to do this last was lying on a chair nearby. There was red stuff on its steel shaft  stain from the cherrywood, she assumed. 'Mort?' she whispered, looking around. Now she was frightened that she would find him dead by his own hand. And where? Why, in his study, of course. Where else? He had lived all the most important parts of his life in there; surely he had chosen to die there. Although she had no wish to go in, no wish to be the one to find him, her feet carried her in that direction all the same. As she went, she kicked the issue of EQMM Herb Creekmore had had sent out of her way. She did not look down. She reached the study door and pushed it slowly open. 48 Mort stood in front of his old Royal typewriter; the screenandkeyboard unit of his word processor lay overturned in a bouquet of glass on the floor. He looked strangely like a country preacher. It was partly the posture he had adopted, she supposed; he was standing almost primly with his hands behind his back. But most of it was the hat. The black hat, pulled down so it almost touched the tops of his ears. She thought he looked a little bit like the old man in that picture, 'American Gothic,' even though the man in the picture wasn't wearing a hat. 'Mort?' she asked. Her voice was weak and uncertain. He made no reply, only stared at her. His eyes were grim and glittering. She had never seen Mort's eyes look this way, not even on the horrible afternoon at the motel. It was almost as if this was not Mort at all, but some stranger who looked like Mort. She recognized the hat, though. 'Where did you find that old thing? The attic?' Her heartbeat was in her voice, making it stagger. He must have found it in the attic. The smell of mothballs on it was strong, even from where she was standing. Mort had gotten the hat years ago, at a gift shop in Pennsylvania. They had been travelling through Amish country. She had kept a little garden at the Derry house, in the angle where the house and the study addition met. It was her garden, but Mort often went out to weed it when he was stuck for an idea. He usually wore the hat when he did this. He called it his thinking cap. She remembered him looking at himself in a mirror once when he was wearing it and joking that he ought to have a bookjacket photo taken in it. 'When I put this on,' he'd said, 'I look like a man who belongs out in the north forty, walking plowfurrows behind a mule's ass.' Then the hat had disappeared. It must have migrated down here and been stored. But... 'It's my hat,' he said at last in a rusty, bemused voice. 'Wasn't ever anybody else's.' 'Mort? What's wrong? What's 'You got you a wrong number, woman. Ain't no Mort here. Mort's dead.' The gimlet eyes never wavered. 'He did a lot of squirming around, but in the end he couldn't lie to himself anymore, let alone to me. I never put a hand on him, Mrs Rainey. I swear. He took the coward's way out.' 'Why are you talking that way?' Amy asked. 'This is just the way I talk,' he said with mild surprise. 'Everybody down in Miss'ippi talks this way.' 'Mort, stop!' 'Don't you understand what I said?' he asked. 'You ain't deaf, are you? He's dead. He killed himself.' 'Stop it, Mort,' she said, beginning to cry. 'You're scaring me, and I don't like it.' 'Don't matter,' he said. He took his hands out from behind his back. In one of them he held the scissors from the top drawer of the desk. He raised them. The sun had come out, and it sent a starfish glitter along the blades as he snicked them open and then closed. 'You won't be scared long.' He began walking toward her. 49 For a moment she stood where she was. Mort would not kill her; if there had been killing in Mort, then surely he would have done some that day at the motel. Then she saw the look in his eyes and understood that Mort knew that, too. But this wasn't him. She screamed and wheeled around and lunged for the door. Shooter came after her, bringing the scissors down in a silver arc. He would have buried them up to the handles between her shoulderblades if his feet had not slid on the papers scattered about the hardwood floor. He fell fulllength with a cry of mingled perplexity and anger. The blades stabbed down through page nine of 'Secret Window, Secret Garden' and the tips broke off. His mouth struck the floor and sprayed blood. The package of Pall Malls  the brand John Kintner had silently smoked during the breaks halfway through the writing class he and Mort Rainey had shared  shot out of his pocket and slid along the slick wood like the weight in a barroom shuffleboard game. He got up on his knees, his mouth snarling and smiling through the blood which ran over his lips and teeth. 'Won't do you no help, Mrs Rainey!' he cried, getting to his feet. He looked at the scissors, snicked them open to study the blunted tips a little better, and then tossed them impatiently aside. 'I got a place in the garden for you! I got it all picked out. You mind me, now!' He ran out the door after her. 50 Halfway across the living room, Amy took her own spill. One of her feet came down on the discarded issue of EQMM and she fell sprawling on her side, hurting her hip and right breast. She cried out. Behind her, Shooter ran across to the table and snatched up the screwdriver he had used on the cat. 'Stay right there, and be still,' he said as she turned over on her back and stared at him with wide eyes which looked almost drugged. 'If you move around, I'm only goin to hurt you before it's over. I don't want to hurt you, missus, but I will if I have to. I've got to have something, you see. I have come all this way, and I've got to have something for my trouble.' As he approached, Amy propped herself up on her elbows and shoved herself backward with her feet. Her hair hung in her face. Her skin was coated with sweat; she could smell it pouring out of her, hot and stinking. The face above her was the solemn, judgmental face of insanity. 'No, Mort! Please! Please, Mort He flung himself at her, raising the screwdriver over his head and then bringing it down. Amy shrieked and rolled to the left. Pain burned a line across her hip as the screwdriver blade tore her dress and grooved her flesh. Then she was scrambling to her knees, hearing and feeling the dress shred out a long unwinding strip as she did it. 'No, ma'am,' Shooter panted. His hand closed upon her ankle. 'No, ma'am.' She looked over her shoulder and through the tangles of her hair and saw he was using his other hand to work the screwdriver out of the floor. The roundcrowned black hat sat askew on his head. He yanked the screwdriver free and drove it into her right calf. The pain was horrid. The pain was the whole world. She screamed and kicked backward, connecting with his nose, breaking it. Shooter grunted and fell on his side, clutching at his face, and Amy got to her feet. She could hear a woman howling. It sounded like a dog howling at the moon. She supposed it wasn't a dog. She supposed it was her. Shooter was getting to his feet. His lower face was a mask of blood. The mask split open, showing Mort Rainey's crooked front teeth. She could remember licking across those teeth with her tongue. 'Feisty one, ain't you?' he said, grinning. 'That's all right, ma'am. You go right on.' He lunged for her. Amy staggered backward. The screwdriver fell out of her calf and rolled across the floor. Shooter glanced at it, then lunged at her again, almost playfully. Amy grabbed one of the livingroom chairs and dumped it in front of him. For a moment they only stared at each other over it . and then he snatched for the front of her dress. Amy recoiled. 'I'm about done fussin with you,' he panted. Amy turned and bolted for the door. He was after her at once, flailing at her back, his fingertips skating skidding down the nape of her neck, trying to close on the top of the dress, catching it, then just missing the hold which would have coiled her back to him for good. Amy bolted past the kitchen counter and toward the back door. Her right loafer squelched and smooched on her foot. It was full of blood. Shooter was after her, puffing and blowing bubbles of blood from his nostrils, clutching at her. She struck the screen door with her hands, then tripped and fell fulllength on the porch, the breath whooshing out of her. She fell exactly where Shooter had left his manuscript. She rolled over and saw him coming. He only had his bare hands now, but they looked like they would be more than enough. His eyes were stern and unflinching and horribly kind beneath the brim of the black hat. 'I am so sorry, missus,' he said. 'Rainey!' a voice cried. 'Stop!' She tried to look around and could not. She had strained something in her neck. Shooter never even tried. He simply came on toward her. 'Rainey! Stop!' 'There is no Rainey h ' Shooter began, and then a gunshot rapped briskly across the fall air. Shooter stopped where he was, and looked curiously, almost casually, down at his chest. There was a small hole there. No blood issued from it  at least, not at first  but the hole was there. He put his hand to it, then brought it away. His index finger was marked by a small dot of blood. It looked like a bit of punctuation  the kind which ends a sentence. He looked at this thoughtfully. Then he dropped his hands and looked at Amy. 'Babe?' he asked, and then fell fulllength beside her on the porch boards. She rolled over, managed to get up on her elbows, and crawled to where he lay, beginning to sob. 'Mort?' she cried. 'Mort? Please, Mort, try to say something!' But he was not going to say anything, and after a moment she let this realization fill her up. She would reject the simple fact of his death again and again over the next few weeks and months, and would then weaken, and the realization would fill her up again. He was dead. He was dead. He had gone crazy down here and he was dead. He, and whoever had been inside him at the end. She put her head down on his chest and wept, and when someone came up behind her and put a comforting hand on her shoulder, Amy did not look around. EPILOGUE Ted and Amy Milner came to see the man who had shot and killed Amy's first husband, the wellknown writer Morton Rainey, about three months after the events at Tashmore Lake. They had seen the man at one other time during the threemonth period, at the inquest, but that had been a formal situation, and Amy had not wanted to speak to him personally. Not there. She was grateful that he had saved her life ... but Mort had been her husband, and she had loved him for many years, and in her deepest heart she felt that Fred Evans's finger hadn't been the only one which pulled the trigger. She would have come in time anyway, she suspected, in order to clarify it as much as possible in her mind. Her time might have been a year, or two, possibly even three. But things had happened in the meanwhile which made her move more quickly. She had hoped Ted would let her come to New York alone, but he was emphatic. Not after the last time he had let her go someplace alone. That time she had almost gotten killed. Amy pointed out with some asperity that it would have been hard for Ted to 'let her go,' since she had never told him she was going in the first place, but Ted only shrugged. So they went to New York together, rode up to the fiftythird floor of a large skyscraper together, and were together shown to the small cubicle in the offices of the Consolidated Assurance Company which Fred Evans called home during the working day . unless he was in the field, of course. She sat as far into the corner as she could get, and although the offices were quite warm, she kept her shawl wrapped around her. Evans's manner was slow and kind  he seemed to her almost like the country doctor who had nursed her through her childhood illnesses  and she liked him. But that's something he'll never know, she thought. I might be able to summon up the strength to tell him, and he would nod, but his nod wouldn't indicate belief. He only knows that to me he will always be the man who shot Mort, and he had to watch me cry on Mort's chest until the ambulance came, and one of the paramedics had to give me a shot before I would let him go. And what he won't know is that I like him just the same. He buzzed a woman from one of the outer offices and had her bring in three big, steaming mugs of tea. It was January outside now, the wind high, the temperature low. She thought with some brief longing of how it would be in Tashmore, with the lake finally frozen and that killer wind blowing long, ghostly snakes of powdered snow across the ice. Then her mind made some obscure but nasty association, and she saw Mort hitting the floor, saw the package of Pall Malls skidding across the wood like a shuffleboard weight. She shivered, her brief sense of longing totally dispelled. 'Are you okay, Mrs Milner?' Evans asked. She nodded. Frowning ponderously and playing with his pipe, Ted said, 'My wife wants to hear everything you know about what happened, Mr Evans. I tried to discourage her at first, but I've come to think that it might be a good thing. She's had bad dreams ever since 'Of course,' Evans said, not exactly ignoring Ted, but speaking directly to Amy. 'I suppose you will for a long time. I've had a few of my own, actually. I never shot a man before.' He paused, then added, 'I missed Vietnam by a year or so.' Amy offered him a smile. It was wan, but it was a smile. 'She heard it all at the inquest,' Ted went on, 'but she wanted to hear it again, from you, and with the legalese omitted.' 'I understand,' Evans said. He pointed at the pipe. 'You can light that, if you want to.' Ted looked at it, then dropped it into the pocket of his coat quickly, as if he were slightly ashamed of it. 'I'm trying to give it up, actually.' Evans looked at Amy. 'What purpose do you think this will serve?' he asked her in the same kind, rather sweet voice. 'Or maybe a better question would be what purpose do you need it to serve?' 'I don't know.' Her voice was low and composed. 'But we were in Tashmore three weeks ago, Ted and I, to clean the place out  we've put it up for sale  and something happened. Two things, actually.' She looked at her husband and offered the wan smile again. 'Ted knows something happened, because that's when I got in touch with you and made this appointment. But he doesn't know what, and I'm afraid he's put out with me. Perhaps he's right to be.' Ted Milner did not deny that he was put out with Amy. His hand stole into his coat pocket, started to remove the pipe, and then let it drop back again. 'But these two things  they bear on what happened to your lake home in October?' 'I don't know. Mr Evans ... what did happen? How much do you know?' 'Well,' he said, leaning back in his chair and sipping from his mug, 'if you came expecting all the answers, you're going to be sorely disappointed. I can tell you about the fire, but as for why your husband did what he did ... you can probably fill in more of those blanks than I can. What puzzled us most about the fire was where it started  not in the main house but in Mr Rainey's office, which is an addition. That made the act seem directed against him, but he wasn't even there. 'Then we found a large chunk of bottle in the wreckage of the office. It had contained wine  champagne, to be exact  but there wasn't any doubt that the last thing it had contained was gasoline. Part of the label was intact, and we sent a Fax copy to New York. It was identified as Moet et Chandon, nineteeneightysomething. That wasn't proof indisputable that the bottle used for the Molotov cocktail came from your own wine room, Mrs Milner, but it was very persuasive, since you listed better than a dozen bottles of Moet et Chandon, some from 1983 and some from 1984. 'This led us toward a supposition which seemed clear but not very sensible that you or your exhusband might have burned down your own house. Mrs Milner here said she went off and left the house unlocked  ' 'I lost a lot of sleep over that,' Amy said. 'I often forgot to lock up when I was only going out for a little while. I grew up in a little town north of Bangor and country habits die hard. Mort used to . . .' Her lips trembled and she stopped speaking for a moment, pressing them together so tightly they turned white. When she had herself under control again, she finished her thought in a low voice. 'He used to scold me about it.' Ted took her hand. 'It didn't matter, of course,' Evans said. 'If you had locked the house, Mr Rainey still could have gained access, because he still had his keys. Correct?' 'Yes,' Ted said. 'It might have sped up the detection end a little if you'd locked the door, but it's impossible to say for sure. Mondaymorning quarterbacking is a vice we try to steer clear of in my business, anyway. There's a theory that it causes ulcers, and that's one I subscribe to. The point is this given Mrs Rainey's  excuse me, Mrs Milner's  testimony that the house was left unlocked, we at first believed the arsonist could have been literally anyone. But once we started playing around with the assumption that the bottle used had come from the cellar wine room, it narrowed things down.' 'Because that room was locked,' Ted said. Evans nodded. 'Do you remember me asking who held keys to that room, Mrs Milner?' 'Call me Amy, won't you?' He nodded. 'Do you remember, Amy?' 'Yes. We started locking the little wine closet three or four years ago, after some bottles of red table wine disappeared. Mort thought it was the housekeeper. I didn't like to believe it, because I liked her, but I knew he could be right, and probably was. We started locking it then so nobody else would be tempted.' Evans looked at Ted Milner. 'Amy had a key to the wine room, and she believed Mr Rainey still had his. So that limited the possibilities. Of course, if it had been Amy, you would have had to have been in collusion with her, Mr Milner, since you were each other's alibis for that evening. Mr Rainey didn't have an alibi, but he was at a considerable distance. And the main thing was this we could see no motive for the crime. His work had left both Amy and himself financially comfortable. Nevertheless, we dusted for fingerprints and came up with two good ones. This was the day after we had our meeting in Derry. Both prints belonged to Mr Rainey. It still wasn't proof  ' 'It wasn't?' Ted asked, looking startled. Evans shook his head. 'Lab tests were able to confirm that the prints were made before what remained of the bottle was charred in the fire, but not how long before. The heat had cooked the oils in them, you see. And if our assumption that the bottle came from the wine room was correct, why, someone had to physically pick it up out of the bag or carton it came in and store it in its cradle. That someone would have been either Mr or Mrs Rainey, and he could have argued that that was where the prints came from.' 'He was in no shape to argue anything,' Amy said softly. 'Not at the end.' 'I guess that's true, but we didn't know that. All we knew is that when people carry bottles, they generally pick them up by the neck or the upper barrel. These two prints were near the bottom, and the angle was very odd.' 'As if he had been carrying it sideways or even upside down,' Ted broke in. 'Isn't that what you said at the hearing?' 'Yes  and people who know anything about wine don't do it. With most wines, it disturbs the sediment. And with champagne 'It shakes it up,' Ted said. Evans nodded. 'If you shake a bottle of champagne really hard, it will burst from the pressure.


' 'But there was no champagne in it, anyway,' Amy said quietly. 'No. Still, it was not proof. I canvassed the area gas stations to see if anyone who looked like Mr Rainey had bought a small amount of gas that night, but had no luck. I wasn't too surprised; he could have bought the gasoline in Tashmore or at half a hundred service stations between the two places. 'Then I went to see Patricia Champion, our one witness. I took a picture of a 1986 Buick  the make and model we assumed Mr Rainey would have been driving. She said it might have been the car, but she still couldn't be sure. So I was up against it. I went back out to the house to look around, and you came, Amy. It was early morning. I wanted to ask you some questions, but you were clearly upset. I did ask you why you were there, and you said a peculiar thing. You said you were going down to Tashmore Lake to see your husband, but you came by first to look in the garden.' 'On the phone he kept talking about what he called my secret window ... the one that looked down on the garden. He said he'd left something there. But there wasn't anything. Not that I could see, anyway.' 'I had a feeling about the man when we met,' Evans said slowly. 'A feeling that he wasn't ... quite on track. It wasn't that he was lying about some things, although I was pretty sure he was. It was something else. A kind of distance.' 'Yes  I felt it in him more and more. That distance.' 'You looked almost sick with worry. I decided I could do worse than follow you down to the other house, Amy, especially when you told me not to tell Mr Milner here where you'd gone if he came looking for you. I didn't believe that idea was original with you. I thought I might just find something out. And I also thought . . .' He trailed off, looking bemused. 'You thought something might happen to me,' she said. 'Thank you, Mr Evans. He would have killed me, you know. If you hadn't followed me, he would have killed me.' 'I parked at the head of the driveway and walked down. I heard a terrific rumpus from inside the house and I started to run. That was when you more or less fell out through the screen door, and he came out after you.' Evans looked at them both earnestly. 'I asked him to stop,' he said. 'I asked him twice.' Amy reached out, squeezed his hand gently for a moment, then let it go. 'And that's it,' Evans said. 'I know a little more, mostly from the newspapers and two chats I had with Mr Milner 'Call me Ted.' 'Ted, then.' Evans did not seem to take to Ted's first name as easily as he had to Amy's. 'I know that Mr Rainey had what was probably a schizophrenic episode in which he was two people, and that neither one of them had any idea they were actually existing in the same body. I know that one of them was named John Shooter. I know from Herbert Creekmore's deposition that Mr Rainey imagined this Shooter was hounding him over a story called "Sowing Season," and that Mr Creekmore had a copy of the magazine in which that story appeared sent up so Mr Rainey could prove that he had published first. The magazine arrived shortly before you did, Amy  it was found in the house. The Federal Express envelope it came in was on the seat of your exhusband's Buick.' 'But he cut the story out, didn't he?' Ted asked. 'Not just the story  the contents page as well. He was careful to remove every trace of himself. He carried a Swissarmy knife, and that was probably what he used. The missing pages were in the Buick's glove compartment.' 'In the end, the existence of that story became a mystery even to him,' Amy said softly. Evans looked at her, eyebrows raised. 'Beg pardon?' She shook her head. 'Nothing.' 'I think I've told you everything I can,' Evans said. 'Anything else would be pure speculation. I'm an insurance investigator, after all, not a psychiatrist.' 'He was two men,' Amy said. 'He was himself ... and he became a character he created. Ted believes that the last name, Shooter, was something Mort picked up and stored in his head when he found out Ted came from a little town called Shooter's Knob, Tennessee. I'm sure he's right. Mort was always picking out character names just that way ... like anagrams, almost. 'I don't know the rest of it  I can only guess. I do know that when a film studio dropped its option on his novel The Delacourt Family, Mort almost had a nervous breakdown. They made it clear  and so did Herb Creekmore  that they were concerned about an accidental similarity, and they understood he never could have seen the screenplay, which was called The Home Team. There was no question of plagiarism ... except in Mort's head. His reaction was exaggerated, abnormal. It was like stirring a stick around in what looks like a dead campfire and uncovering a live coal.' 'You don't think he created John Shooter just to punish you, do you?' Evans asked. 'No. Shooter was there to punish Mort. I think . She paused and adjusted her shawl, pulling it a little more tightly about her shoulders. Then she picked up her teacup with a hand which wasn't quite steady. 'I think that Mort stole somebody's work sometime in the past,' she said. 'Probably quite far in the past, because everything he wrote from The OrganGrinder's Boy on was widely read. It would have come out, I think. I doubt that he even actually published what he stole. But I think that's what happened, and I think that's where John Shooter really came from. Not from the film company dropping his novel, or from my ... my time with Ted, and not from the divorce. Maybe all those things contributed, but I think the root goes back to a time before I knew him. Then, when he was alone at the lake house . . .' 'Shooter came,' Evans said quietly. 'He came and accused him of plagiarism. Whoever Mr Rainey stole from never did, so in the end he had to punish himself. But I doubt if that was all, Amy. He did try to kill you.' 'No,' she said. 'That was Shooter.' He raised his eyebrows. Ted looked at her carefully, and then drew the pipe out of his pocket again. 'The real Shooter.' 'I don't understand you.' She smiled her wan smile. 'I don't understand myself. That's why I'm here. I don't think telling this serves any practical purpose  Mort's dead, and it's over but it may help me. It may help me to sleep better.' 'Then tell us, by all means,' Evans said. 'You see, when we went down to clean out the house, we stopped at the little store in town  Bowie's. Ted filled the gas tank  it's always been selfservice at Bowie's  and I went in to get some things. There was a man in there, Sonny Trotts, who used to work with Tom Greenleaf. Tom was the older of the two caretakers who were killed. Sonny wanted to tell me how sorry he was about Mort, and he wanted to tell me something else, too, because he saw Mort the day before Mort died, and meant to tell him. So he said. It was about Tom Greenleaf  something Tom told Sonny while they were painting the Methodist Parish Hall together. Sonny saw Mort after that, but didn't think to tell him right away, he said. Then he remembered that it had something to do with Greg Carstairs 'The other dead man?' 'Yes. So he turned around and called, but Mort didn't hear him. And the next day, Mort was dead.' 'What did Mr Greenleaf tell this guy?' 'That he thought he might have seen a ghost,' Amy said calmly. They looked at her, not speaking. 'Sonny said Tom had been getting forgetful lately, and that Tom was worried about it. Sonny thought it was no more than the ordinary sort of forgetfulness that settles in when a person gets a little older, but Tom had nursed his wife through Alzheimer's disease five or six years before, and he was terrified of getting it himself and going the same way. According to Sonny, if Tom forgot a paintbrush, he spent half the day obsessing about it. Tom said that was why, when Greg Carstairs asked him if he recognized the man he'd seen Mort Rainey talking to the day before, or if he would recognize him if he saw him again, Tom said he hadn't seen anyone with Mort  that Mort had been alone.' There was the snap of a match. Ted Milner had decided to light his pipe after all. Evans ignored him. He was leaning forward in his chair, his gaze fixed intently on Amy Milner. 'Let's get this straight. According to this Sonny Troots 'Trotts.' 'Okay, Trotts. According to him, Tom Greenleaf did see Mort with someone?' 'Not exactly,' Amy said. 'Sonny thought if Tom believed that, believed it for sure, he wouldn't have lied to Greg. What Tom said was that he didn't know what he'd seen. That he was confused. That it seemed safer to say nothing about it at all. He didn't want anybody  particularly Greg Carstairs, who was also in the caretaking business  to know how confused he was, and most of all he didn't want anybody to think that he might be getting sick the way his late wife had gotten sick.' 'I'm not sure I understand this  I'm sorry.' 'According to Sonny,' she said, 'Tom came down Lake Drive in his Scout and saw Mort, standing by himself where the lakeside path comes out.' 'Near where the bodies were found?' 'Yes. Very near. Mort waved. Tom waved back. He drove by. Then, according to what Sonny says, Tom looked in his rearview mirror and saw another man with Mort, and an old station wagon, although neither the man nor the car had been there ten seconds before. The man was wearing a black hat. he said ... but you could see right through him, and the car, too.' 'Oh, Amy,' Ted said softly. 'The man was bullshiting you. Big time.' She shook her head. 'I don't think Sonny is smart enough to make up such a story. He told me Tom thought he ought to get in touch with Greg and tell him he might have seen such a man after all; that it would be all right if he left out the seethrough part. But Sonny said the old man was terrified. He was convinced that it was one of two things either he was coming down with Alzheimer's disease, or he'd seen a ghost.' 'Well, it's certainly creepy,' Evans said, and it was  the skin on his arms and back had crinkled into gooseflesh for a moment or two. 'But it's hearsay ... hearsay from a dead man, in fact.' 'Yes ... but there's the other thing.' She set her teacup on the desk, picked up her purse, and began to rummage in it. 'When I was cleaning out Mort's office, I found that hat  that awful black hat  behind his desk. It gave me a shock, because I wasn't expecting it. I thought the police must have taken it away as evidence, or something. I hooked it out from behind there with a stick. It came out upside down, with the stick inside it. I used the stick to carry it outside and dump it in the trash cabinet. Do you understand?' Ted clearly didn't; Evans clearly did. 'You didn't want to touch it.' 'That's right. I didn't want to touch it. It landed right side up on one of the green trash bags  I'd swear to that. Then, about an hour later, I went out with a bag of old medicines and shampoos and things from the bathroom. When I opened the lid of the garbage cabinet to put it in, the hat was turned over again. And this was tucked into the sweatband.' She pulled a folded sheet of paper from her purse and offered it to Evans with a hand that still trembled minutely. 'It wasn't there when the hat came out from behind the desk. I know that.' Evans took the folded sheet and just held it for a moment. He didn't like it. It felt too heavy, and the texture was somehow wrong. 'I think there was a John Shooter,' she said. 'I think he was Mort's greatest creation  a character so vivid that he actually did become real. 'And I think that this is a message from a ghost.' He took the slip of paper and opened it. Written halfway down was this message Missus  I am sorry for all the trouble. Things got out of hand. I am going back to my home now, I got my story, which is all I came for in the first place. It is called 'Crowfoot Mile,' and it is a crackerjack. Yours truly, John Shooter The signature was a bald scrawl below the neat lines of script. 'Is this your late husband's signature, Amy?' Evans asked. 'No,' she said. 'Nothing like it.' The three of them sat in the office, looking at one another. Fred Evans tried to think of something to say and could not. After awhile, the silence (and the smell of Ted Milner's pipe) became more than any of them could stand. So Mr and Mrs Milner offered their thanks, said their goodbyes, and left his office to get on with their lives as best they could, and Fred Evans got on with his own as best he could, and sometimes, late at night, both he and the woman who had been married to Morton Rainey woke from dreams in which a man in a roundcrowned black hat looked at them from sunfaded eyes caught in nets of wrinkles. He looked at them with no love ... but, they both felt, with an odd kind of stern pity. It was not a kind expression, and it left no feeling of comfort, but they also both felt, in their different places, that they could find room to live with that look. And to tend their gardens. Two PAST MIDNIGHT A note on 'Secret Window, Secret Garden' I'm one of those people who believe that life is a series of cycles  wheels within wheels, some meshing with others, some spinning alone, but all of them performing some finite, repeating function. I like that abstract image of life as something like an efficient factory machine, probably because actual life, up close and personal, seems so messy and strange. It's nice to be able to pull away every once in awhile and say, 'There's a pattern there after all! I'm not sure what it means, but by God, I see it!' All of these wheels seem to finish their cycles at roughly the same time, and when they do  about every twenty years would be my guess  we go through a time when we end things. Psychologists have even lifted a parliamentary term to describe this phenomenon  they call it cloture. I'm fortytwo now, and as I look back over the last four years of my life I can see all sorts of cloture. It's as apparent in my work as anywhere else. In It, I took an outrageous amount of space to finish talking about children and the wide perceptions which light their interior lives. Next year I intend to publish the last Castle Rock novel, Needful Things (the last story in this volume, 'The Sun Dog,' forms a prologue to that novel). And this story is, I think, the last story about writers and writing and the strange no man's land which exists between what's real and what's makebelieve. I believe a good many of my longtime readers, who have borne my fascination with this subject patiently, will be glad to hear that. A few years ago I published a novel called Misery which tried, at least in part, to illustrate the powerful hold fiction can achieve over the reader. Last year I published a book called The Dark Half where I tried to explore the converse the powerful hold fiction can achieve over the writer. While that book was between drafts, I started to think that there might be a way to tell both stories at the same time by approaching some of the plot elements of The Dark Half from a totally different angle. Writing, it seems to me, is a secret act  as secret as dreaming  and that was one aspect of this strange and dangerous craft I had never thought about much. I knew that writers have from time to time revised old works  John Fowles did it with The Magus, and I have done it myself with The Stand  but revision was not what I had in mind. What I wanted to do was to take familiar elements and put them together in an entirely new way. This I had tried to do at least once before, restructuring and updating the basic elements of Bram Stoker's Dracula to create 'Salem's Lot, and I was fairly comfortable with the idea. One day in the late fall of 1987, while these things were tumbling around in my head, I stopped in the laundry room of our house to drop a dirty shirt into the washing machine. Our laundry room is a small, narrow alcove on the second floor. I disposed of the shirt and then stepped over to one of the room's two windows. It was casual curiosity, no more. We've been living in the same house for eleven or twelve years now, but I had never taken a good hard look out this particular window before. The reason is perfectly simple; set at floor level, mostly hidden behind the drier, half blocked by baskets of mending, it's a hard window to look out of. I squeezed in, nevertheless, and looked out. That window looks down on a little brickpaved alcove between the house and the attached sunporch. It's an area I see just about every day ... but the angle was new. My wife had set half a dozen pots out there, so the plants could take a little of the earlyNovember sun, I suppose, and the result was a charming little garden which only I could see. The phrase which occurred to me was, of course, the title of this story. It seemed to me as good a metaphor as any for what writers  especially writers of fantasy  do with their days and nights. Sitting down at the typewriter or picking up a pencil is a physical act; the spiritual analogue is looking out of an almost forgotten window... a window which offers a common view from an entirely different angle ... an angle which renders the common extraordinary. The writer's job is to gaze through that window and report on what he sees. But sometimes windows break. I think that, more than anything else, is the concern of this story what happens to the wideeyed observer when the window between reality and unreality breaks and the glass begins to fly? ONE PAST MIDNIGHT A note on 'The Langoliers' Stories come at different times and places for me  in the car, in the shower, while walking, even while standing around at parties. On a couple of occasions, stories have come to me in dreams. But it's very rare for me to write one as soon as the idea comes, and I don't keep an 'idea notebook.' Not writing ideas down is an exercise in selfpreservation. I get a lot of them, but only a small percentage are any good, so I tuck them all into a kind of mental file. The bad ones eventually selfdestruct in there, like the tape from Control at the beginning of every Mission Impossible episode. The good ones don't do that. Every now and then, when I open the file drawer to peek at what's left inside, this small handful of ideas looks up at me, each with its own bright central image. With 'The Langoliers,' that image was of a woman pressing her hand over a crack in the wall of a commercial jetliner. It did no good to tell myself I knew very little about commercial aircraft; I did exactly that, but the image was there every time I opened the file cabinet to dump in another idea, nevertheless. It got so I could even smell that woman's perfume (it was L'Envoi), see her green eyes, and hear her rapid, frightened breathing. One night, while I was lying in bed, on the edge of sleep, I realized this woman was a ghost. I remember sitting up, swinging my feet out onto the floor, and turning on the light. I sat that way for a little while, not thinking about much of anything ... at least on top. Underneath, however, the guy who really runs this job for me was busy clearing his workspace and getting ready to start up all his machines again. The next day, I  or he  began writing this story. It took about a month, and it came the most easily of all the stories in this book, layering itself sweetly and naturally as it went along. Once in awhile both stories and babies arrive in the world almost without labor pains, and this story was like that. Because it had an apocalyptic feel similar to an earlier novella of mine called 'The Mist,' I headed each chapter in the same oldfashioned, rococo way. I came out of this one feeling almost as good about it as I did going in ... a rare occurrence. I'm a lazy researcher, but I tried very hard to do my homework this time. Three pilots  Michael Russo, Frank Soares, and Douglas Damon  helped me to get my facts straight and keep them straight. They were real sports, once I promised not to break anything. Have I gotten everything right? I doubt it. Not even the great Daniel Defoe did that; in Robinson Crusoe, our hero strips naked, swims out to the ship he has recently escaped ... and then fills up his pockets with items he will need to stay alive on his desert island. And then there is the novel (title and author will be mercifully omitted here) about the New York subway system where the writer apparently mistook the motormen's cubicles for public toilets. My standard caveat goes like this for what I got right, thank Messrs Russo, Soares, and Damon. For what I got wrong, blame me. Nor is the statement one of hollow politeness. Factual mistakes usually result from a failure to ask the right question and not from erroneous information. I have taken a liberty or two with the airplane you will shortly be entering; these liberties are small, and seemed necessary to the course of the tale. Well, that's enough out of me; step aboard. Let's fly the unfriendly skies. THREE PAST MIDNIGHT A note on 'The Library Policeman' On the morning when this story started to happen, I was sitting at the breakfast table with my son Owen. My wife had already gone upstairs to shower and dress. Those two vital seven o'clock divisions had been made the scrambled eggs and the newspaper. Willard Scott, who visits our house five days out of every seven, was telling us about a lady in Nebraska who had just turned a hundred and four, and I think Owen and I had one whole pair of eyes open between us. A typical weekday morning chez King, in other words. Owen tore himself away from the sports section just long enough to ask me if I'd be going by the mall that day  there was a book he wanted me to pick up for a school report. I can't remember what it was  it might have been Johnny Tremain or April Morning, Howard Fast's novel of the American Revolution  but it was one of those tomes you can never quite lay your hands on in a bookshop; it's always just out of print or just about to come back into print or some damned thing. I suggested that Owen try the local library, which is a very good one. I was sure they'd have it. He muttered some reply. I only caught two words of it, but, given my interests, those two words were more than enough to pique my interest. They were 'library police.' I put my half of the newspaper aside, used the MUTE button on the remote control to strangle Willard in the middle of his ecstatic report on the Georgia Peach Festival, and asked Owen to kindly repeat himself. He was reluctant to do so, but I pressed him. Finally he told me that he didn't like to use the library because he worried about the Library Police. He knew there were no Library Police, he hastened to add, but it was one of those stories that burrowed down into your subconscious and just sort of lurked there. He had heard it from his Aunt Stephanie when he was seven or eight and much more gullible, and it had been lurking ever since. I, of course, was delighted, because I had been afraid of the Library Police myself as a kid  the faceless enforcers who would actually come to your house if you didn't bring your overdue books back. That would be bad enough ... but what if you couldn't find the books in question when those strange lawmen turned up? What then? What would they do to you? What might they take to make up for the missing volumes? It had been years since I'd thought of the Library Police (although not since childhood; I can clearly remember discussing them with Peter Straub and his son, Ben, six or eight years ago), but now all those old questions, both dreadful and somehow enticing, recurred. I found myself musing on the Library Police over the next three or four days, and as I mused, I began to glimpse the outlines of the story which follows. This is the way stories usually happen for me, but the musing period usually lasts a lot longer than it did in this case. When I began, the story was titled 'The Library Police,' and I had no clear idea of where I was going with it. I thought it would probably be a funny story, sort of like the suburban nightmares the late Max Shulman used to bolt together. After all, the idea was funny, wasn't it? I mean, the Library Police! How absurd! What I realized, however, was something I knew already the fears of childhood have a hideous persistence. Writing is an act of selfhypnosis, and in that state a kind of total emotional recall often takes place and terrors which should have been long dead start to walk and talk again. As I worked on this story, that began to happen to me. I knew, going in, that I had loved the library as a kid  why not? It was the only place a relatively poor kid like me could get all the books he wanted  but as I continued to write, I became reacquainted with a deeper truth I had also feared it. I feared becoming lost in the dark stacks, I feared being forgotten in a dark corner of the reading room and ending up locked in for the night, I feared the old librarian with the blue hair and the cat'seye glasses and the almost lipless mouth who would pinch the backs of your hands with her long, pale fingers and hiss 'Shhhh!' if you forgot where you were and started to talk too loud. And yes, I feared the Library Police. What happened with a much longer work, a novel called Christine, began to happen here. About thirty pages in, the humor began to go out of the situation. And about fifty pages in, the whole story took a screaming left turn into the dark places I have travelled so often and which I still know so little about. Eventually I found the guy I was looking for, and managed to raise my head enough to look into his merciless silver eyes. I have tried to bring back a sketch of him for you, Constant Reader, but it may not be very good. My hands were trembling quite badly when I made it, you see. A Note on 'The Sun Dog' Every now and then someone will ask me, 'When are you going to get tired of this horror stuff, Steve, and write something serious?' I used to believe the implied insult in this question was accidental, but as the years go by I have become more and more convinced that it is not. I watch the faces of the people who drop that particular dime, you see, and most of them look like bombardiers waiting to see if their last stick of bombs is going to fall wide or hit the targeted factory or munitions dump dead on. The fact is, almost all of the stuff I have written  and that includes a lot of the funny stuff  was written in a serious frame of mind. I can remember very few occasions when I sat at the typewriter laughing uncontrollably over some wild and crazy bit of fluff I had just finished churning out. I'm never going to be Reynolds Price or Larry Woiwode  it isn't in me  but that doesn't mean I don't care as deeply about what I do. I have to do what I can do, however  as Nils Lofgren once put it, 'I gotta be my dirty self ... I won't play no jive.' If real meaning !!SOMETHING THAT COULD ACTUALLY HAPPEN!!  is your definition of serious, you are in the wrong place and you should by all means leave the building. But please remember as you go that I'm not the only one doing business at this particular site; Franz Kafka had an office here, and George Orwell, and Shirley Jackson, and Jorge Luis Borges, and Jonathan Swift, and Lewis Carroll. A glance at the directory in the lobby shows the present tenants include Thomas Berger, Ray Bradbury, Jonathan Carroll, Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Disch, Kurt Vonnegut, jr, Peter Straub, Joyce Carol Oates, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Katherine Dunn, and Mark Halpern. I am doing what I do for the most serious reasons love, money, and obsession. The tale of the irrational is the sanest way I know of expressing the world in which I live. These tales have served me as instruments of both metaphor and morality; they continue to offer the best window I know on the question of how we perceive things and the corollary question of how we do or do not behave on the basis of our perceptions. I have explored these questions as well as I can within the limits of my talent and intelligence. I am no one's National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize winner, but I'm serious, all right. If you don't believe anything else, believe this when I take you by your hand and begin to talk, my friend, I believe every word I say. A lot of the things I have to say  those Really Serious Things  have to do with the smalltown world in which I was raised and where I still live. Stories and novels are scale models of what we laughingly call 'real life,' and I believe that lives as they are lived in small towns are scale models of what we laughingly call 'society.' This idea is certainly open to argument, and argument is perfectly fine (without it, a lot of literature teachers and critics would be looking for work); I'm just saying that a writer needs some sort of launching pad, and aside from the firm belief that a story may exist with honor for its own self, the idea of the small town as social and psychological microcosm is mine. I began experimenting with this sort of thing in Came, and continued on a more ambitious level with 'Salem's Lot. I never really hit my stride, however, until The Dead Zone. That was, I think, the first of my Castle Rock stories (and Castle Rock is really just the town of Jerusalem's Lot without the vampires). In the years since it was written, Castle Rock has increasingly become 'my town,' in the sense that the mythical city of Isola is Ed McBain's town and the West Virginia village of Glory was Davis Grubb's town. I have been called back there time and time again to examine the lives of its residents and the geographies which seem to rule their lives  Castle Hill and Castle View, Castle Lake and the Town Roads which lie around it in a tangle at the western end of the town. As the years passed, I became more and more interested in  almost entranced by  the secret life of this town, by the hidden relationships which seemed to come clearer and clearer to me. Much of this history remains either unwritten or unpublished how the late Sheriff George Bannerman lost his virginity in the back seat of his dead father's car, how Ophelia Todd's husband was killed by a walking windmill, how Deputy Andy Clutterbuck lost the index finger on his left hand (it was cut off in a fan and the family dog ate it). Following The Dead Zone, which is partly the story of the psychotic Frank Dodd, I wrote a novella called 'The Body'; Cujo, the novel in which good old Sheriff Bannerman bit the dust; and a number of short stories and novelettes about the town (the best of them, at least in my mind, are 'Mrs Todd's Shortcut' and 'Uncle Otto's Truck'). All of which is very well, but a state of entrancement with a fictional setting may not be the best thing in the world for a writer. It was for Faulkner and J. R. R. Tolkien, but sometimes a couple of exceptions just prove the rule, and besides, I don't play in that league. So at some point I decided  first in my subconscious mind, I think, where all that Really Serious Work takes place  that the time had come to close the book on Castle Rock, Maine, where so many of my own favorite characters have lived and died. Enough, after all, is enough. Time to move on (maybe all the way next door to Harlow, haha). But I didn't just want to walk away; I wanted to finish things, and do it with a bang. Little by little I began to grasp how that could be done, and over the last four years or so I have been engaged in writing a Castle Rock Trilogy, if you please the last Castle Rock stories. They were not written in order (I sometimes think 'out of order' is the story of my life), but now they are written, and they are serious enough ... but I hope that doesn't mean that they are sobersided or boring. The first of these stories, The Dark Half, was published in 1989.


While it is primarily the story of Thad Beaumont and is in large part set in a town called Ludlow (the town where the Creeds lived in Pet Sematary), the town of Castle Rock figures in the tale, and the book serves to introduce Sheriff Bannerman's replacement, a fellow named Alan Pangborn. Sheriff Pangborn is at the center of the last story in this sequence, a long novel called Needful Things, which is scheduled to be published next year and will conclude my doings with what local people call The Rock. The connective tissue between these longer works is the story which follows. You will meet few if any of Castle Rock's larger figures in 'The Sun Dog,' but it will serve to introduce you to Pop Merrill, whose nephew is town bad boy (and Gordie LaChance's bete noire in 'The Body') Ace Merrill. 'The Sun Dog' also sets the stage for the final fireworks display ... and, I hope, exists as a satisfying story on its own, one that can be read with pleasure even if you don't give a hang about The Dark Half or Needful Things. One other thing needs to be said every story has its own secret life, quite separate from its setting, and 'The Sun Dog' is a story about cameras and photographs. About five years ago, my wife, Tabitha, became interested in photography, discovered she was good at it, and began to pursue it in a serious way, through study, experiment, and practicepracticepractice. I myself take bad photos (I'm one of those guys who always manage to cut off my subjects' heads, get pictures of them with their mouths hanging open, or both), but I have a great deal of respect for those who take good ones ... and the whole process fascinates me. In the course of her experiments, my wife got a Polaroid camera, a simple one accessible even to a doofus like me. I became fascinated with this camera. I had seen and used Polaroids before, of course, but I had never really thought about them much, nor had I ever looked closely at the images these cameras produce. The more I thought about them, the stranger they seemed. They are, after all, not just images but moments of time ... and there is something so peculiar about them. This story came almost all at once one night in the summer of 1987, but the thinking which made it possible went on for almost a year. And that's enough out of me, I think. It's been great to be with all of you again, but that doesn't mean I'm letting you go home just yet. I think we have a birthday party to attend in the little town of Castle Rock.


THE DARK TOWER VI SONG OF SUSANNAH STEPHEN KING ALSO BY STEPHEN KING NOVELS Carrie Salems Lot The Shining The Stand The Dead Zone Firestarter Cujo THE DARK TOWER I The Gunslinger Christine Pet Sematary Cycle of the Werewolf The Talisman (with Peter Straub) It The Eyes of the Dragon Misery The Tommyknockers THE DARK TOWER II The Drawing of the Three THE DARK TOWER III The Waste Lands The Dark Half Needful Things Geralds Game Dolores Claiborne Insomnia Rose Madder Desperation The Green Mile THE DARK TOWER IV Wizard and Glass Bag of Bones The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Dreamcatcher Black House (with Peter Straub) From a Buick 8 THE DARK TOWER V Wolves of the Calla AS RICHARD BACHMAN Rage The Long Walk Roadwork The Running Man Thinner The Regulators COLLECTIONS Night Shift Different Seasons Skeleton Crew Four Past Midnight Nightmares and Dreamscapes Hearts in Atlantis Everythings Eventual SCREENPLAYS Creepshow Cats Eye Silver Bullet Maximum Overdrive Pet Sematary Golden Years Sleepwalkers The Stand The Shining Rose Red Storm of the Century NONFICTION Danse Macabre On Writing Dark Towerrelated in bold  THE DARK TOWER VI SONG OF SUSANNAH Copyright  2004 by Stephen King httpwww.stephenking.com Illustrations  2004 by Darrel Anderson httpwww.braid.com Book design by Darrel Anderson and Robert K. Wiener All rights reserved under International and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Excerpt from Peace Like a River by Leif Enger used by permission. Library of Congress Control Number 2004103870 ISBN 0743266374 eISBN 9780743266376 FIRST TRADE EDITION Distributed by Simon  Schuster, Inc. SCRIBNER 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com DONALD M. GRANT, PUBLISHER, INC. Post Office Box 187, Hampton Falls, NH 03844 httpwww.grantbooks.com Visit us on the World Wide Web httpwww.SimonSays.com Dedication For Tabby, who knew when it was done Go, then. There are other worlds than these. John Jake Chambers I am a maid of constant sorrow Ive seen trouble all my days All through the world Im bound to ramble I have no friends to show my way  Traditional Fair is whatever God wants to do. Leif Enger Peace Like a River CONTENTS 1st Stanza Beamquake 2nd Stanza The Persistence of Magic 3rd Stanza Trudy and Mia 4th Stanza Susannahs Dogan 5th Stanza The Turtle 6th Stanza The Castle Allure 7th Stanza The Ambush 8th Stanza A Game of Toss 9th Stanza Eddie Bites His Tongue 10th Stanza SusannahMio, Divided Girl of Mine 11th Stanza The Writer 12th Stanza Jake and Callahan 13th Stanza Hile, Mia, Hile, Mother Coda Pages from a Writers Journal Wordslingers Note ILLUSTRATIONS  BURSTS OF GREEN LIGHTNING HE SAW THE DOORS, AT LEAST A THOUSAND OF THEM. HUGE ROCK FORMATIONS SAWED AT THE SKY. DOWN! ROLAND BELLOWED.  SIGNED HIS NAME IN A QUICK SCRAWL SUSANNAH CLOSES HER EYES. INTO A FOREST OF WATCHING FACES  KA COMES TO ME. TWO HAMMARSKJLD PLAZA EMERGING FROM THE SHIRTS COLLAR WAS THE HEAD OF A BIRD. REPRODUCTION 19 THE DARK TOWER VI SONG OF SUSANNAH 1ST STANZA BEAMQUAKE ONE How long will the magic stay? At first no one answered Rolands question, and so he asked it again, this time looking across the living room of the rectory to where Henchick of the Manni sat with Cantab, who had married one of Henchicks numerous granddaughters. The two men were holding hands, as was the Manni way. The older man had lost a granddaughter that day, but if he grieved, the emotion did not show on his stony, composed face. Next to Roland, holding no ones hand, silent and dreadfully white, sat Eddie Dean. Beside him, crosslegged on the floor, was Jake Chambers. He had pulled Oy into his lap, a thing Roland had never seen before and would not have believed the billybumbler would allow. Both Eddie and Jake were splattered with blood. That on Jakes shirt belonged to his friend Benny Slightman. That on Eddies belonged to Margaret Eisenhart, once Margaret of Redpath, the lost granddaughter of the old patriarch. Both Eddie and Jake looked as tired as Roland felt, but he was quite sure there would be no rest for them this night. Distant, from town, came the sounds of fireworks and singing and celebration. There was no celebration here. Benny and Margaret were dead, and Susannah was gone. Henchick, tell me, I beg how long will the magic stay? The old man stroked his beard in a distracted fashion. GunslingerRolandI cant say. The magic of the door in that cave is beyond me. As thee must know. Tell me what you think. Based on what you do know. Eddie raised his hands. They were dirty, there was blood under the nails, and they trembled. Tell, Henchick, he said, speaking in a voice, humble and lost, that Roland had never heard before. Tell, I beg. Rosalita, Pere Callahans woman of all work, came in with a tray. There were cups on it, and a carafe of steaming coffee. She, at least, had found time to change out of her bloody, dusty jeans and shirt and into a housedress, but her eyes were still shocked. They peered from her face like small animals from their burrows. She poured the coffee and passed the cups without speaking. Nor had she gotten all the blood, Roland saw as he took one of the cups. There was a streak of it on the back of her right hand. Margarets or Bennys? He didnt know. Or much care. The Wolves had been defeated. They might or might not come again to Calla Bryn Sturgis. That was kas business. Theirs was Susannah Dean, who had disappeared in the aftermath, taking Black Thirteen with her. Henchick said Ye ask of kaven? Aye, father, Roland agreed. The persistence of magic. Father Callahan took a cup of coffee with a nod and a distracted smile, but no word of thanks. He had spoken little since theyd come back from the cave. In his lap was a book called Salems Lot, by a man of whom he had never heard. It purported to be a work of fiction, but he, Donald Callahan, was in it. He had lived in the town of which it told, had taken part in the events it recounted. He had looked on the back and on the rear flap for the authors photograph, queerly certain that he would see a version of his own face looking back at him (the way hed looked in 1975, when these events had taken place, most likely), but there had been no picture, just a note about the books writer that told very little. He lived in the state of Maine. He was married. Hed written one previous book, quite well reviewed, if you believed the quotations on the back. The greater the magic, the longer it persists, Cantab said, and then looked at Henchick questioningly. Aye, Henchick said. Magic and glammer, both are one, and they do unroll from the back. He paused. From the past, doee ken. This door opened on many places and many times in the world my friends came from, Roland said. I would open it again, but just on the last two. The most recent two. Can that be done? They waited as Henchick and Cantab considered. The Manni were great travelers. If anyone knew, if anyone could do what Roland wantedwhat they all wantedit would be these folk. Cantab leaned deferentially toward the old man, the dinh of Calla Redpath. He whispered. Henchick listened, his face expressionless, then turned Cantabs head with one gnarled old hand and whispered back. Eddie shifted, and Roland felt him getting ready to break loose, perhaps to begin shouting. He put a restraining hand on Eddies shoulder, and Eddie subsided. For the time being, at least. The whispered consultation went on for perhaps five minutes while the others waited. The sounds of celebration in the distance were difficult for Roland to take; God knew how they must make Eddie feel. At last Henchick patted Cantabs cheek with his hand and turned to Roland. We think this may be done, he said. Thank God, Eddie muttered. Then, louder Thank God! Lets go up there. We can meet you on the East Road Both of the bearded men were shaking their heads, Henchick with a kind of stern sorrow, Cantab with a look that was almost horror. Well not go up to the Cave of the Voices in the dark, Henchick said. We have to! Eddie burst out. You dont understand! Its not just a question of how long the magic will or wont last, its a question of time on the other side! It goes faster over there, and once its gone, its gone! Christ, Susannah could be having that baby right now, and if its some kind of cannibal Listen to me, young fellow, Henchick said, and hear me very well, I beg. The day is nigh gone. This was true. Never in Rolands experience had a day run so quickly through his fingers. There had been the battle with the Wolves early, not long after dawn, then celebration there on the road for the victory and sorrow for their losses (which had been amazingly small, as things had fallen). Then had come the realization that Susannah was gone, the trek to the cave, their discoveries there. By the time theyd gotten back to the East Road battlefield, it had been past noon. Most of the townsfolk had left, bearing their saved children home in triumph. Henchick had agreed willingly enough to this palaver, but by the time theyd gotten back to the rectory, the sun had been on the wrong side of the sky. Were going to get a nights rest, after all, Roland thought, and didnt know whether to be glad or disappointed. He could use sleep; that much he did know. I listen and hear, Eddie said, but Rolands hand was still on his shoulder, and he could feel the younger man trembling. Even were we willing to go, we couldnt persuade enough of the others to come wi us, Henchick said. Youre their dinh Aye, so you call it, and so I suppose I am, although it isnt our word, ye ken. In most things theyd follow me, and they know the debt they owe your katet out of this days work and would say thank ya any way they could. But they wouldnt go up that path and into that haunted place after dark. Henchick was shaking his head slowly and with great certainty. Nothat they will not do. Listen, young man. Cantab and I can be back at Redpath Kraten well before full dark. There well call our menfolk to the Tempa, which is to us as the Meeting Hall is to the forgetful folk. He glanced briefly at Callahan. Say pardon, Pere, if the term offends ye. Callahan nodded absently without looking up from the book, which he was turning over and over in his hands. It had been covered in protective plastic, as valuable first editions often are. The price lightly penciled on the flyleaf was 950. Some young mans second novel. He wondered what made it so valuable. If they ran into the books owner, a man named Calvin Tower, he would surely ask. And that would only be the start of his questioning. Well explain what it is ye want, and ask for volunteers. Of the sixtyeight men of Redpath Kraten, I believe all but four or five will agree to helpto blend their forces together. It will make powerful khef. Is that what ye call it? Khef? The sharing? Yes, Roland said. The sharing of water, we say. You couldnt fit anywhere that number of men in the mouth of that cave, Jake said. Not even if half of them sat on the other halfs shoulders. No need, Henchick said. Well put the most powerful insidewhat we call the senders. The others can line up along the path, linked hand to hand and bob to bob. Theyll be there before the sun goes rooftop tomorrow. I set my watch and warrant on it. Well need tonight to gather our mags and bobs, anyway, Cantab said. He was looking at Eddie apologetically, and with some fear. The young man was in terrible pain, that was clear. And he was a gunslinger. A gunslinger might strike out, and when one did, it was never blindly. It could be too late, Eddie said, low. He looked at Roland with his hazel eyes. They were now bloodshot and dark with exhaustion. Tomorrow could be too late even if the magic hasnt gone away. Roland opened his mouth and Eddie raised a finger. Dont say ka, Roland. If you say ka one more time, I swear my headll explode. Roland closed his mouth. Eddie turned back to the two bearded men in their dark, Quakerish cloaks. And you cant be sure the magic will stay, can you? What could be opened tonight could be closed against us forever tomorrow. Not all the magnets and plumbbobs in Manni creation could open it. Aye, Henchick said. But your woman took the magic ball with her, and whateveree may think, MidWorld and the Borderlands are well shed of it. Id sell my soul to have it back, and in my hands, Eddie said clearly. They all looked shocked at this, even Jake, and Roland felt a deep urge to tell Eddie he must take that back, must unsay it. There were powerful forces working against their quest for the Tower, dark ones, and Black Thirteen was their clearest sigul. What could be used could also be misused, and the bends o the rainbow had their own malevolent glammer, Thirteen most of all. Was the sum of all, perhaps. Even if they had possessed it, Roland would have fought to keep it out of Eddie Deans hands. In his current state of sorrowing distraction, the ball would either destroy him or make him its slave in minutes. A stone might drink if it had a mouth, Rosa said dryly, startling them all. Eddie, questions of magic aside, think of the path that goes up there. Then think of five dozen men, many of them nigh as old as Henchick, one or two blind as bats, trying to climb it after dark. The boulder, Jake said. Remember the boulder you have to kind of slide by, with your feet sticking out over the drop? Eddie nodded reluctantly. Roland could see him trying to accept what he couldnt change. Groping for sanity. Susannah Dean is also a gunslinger, Roland said. Mayhap she can take care of herself a little while. I dont think Susannahs in charge anymore, Eddie replied, and neither do you. Its Mias baby, after all, and itll be Mia at the controls until the babythe chapcomes. Roland had an intuition then, and like so many hed had over the years, it turned out to be true. She may have been in charge when they left, but she may not be able to stay in charge. Callahan spoke at last, looking up from the book which had so stunned him. Why not? Because its not her world, Roland said. Its Susannahs. If they cant find a way to work together, they may die together. TWO Henchick and Cantab went back to Manni Redpath, first to tell the gathered (and entirely male) elders about the days work, and then to tell them what payment was required. Roland went with Rosa to her cottage. It stood up the hill from a formerly neat privy which was now mostly in ruins. Within this privy, standing useless sentinel, was what remained of Andy the Messenger Robot (many other functions). Rosalita undressed Roland slowly and completely. When he was mothernaked, she stretched beside him on her bed and rubbed him with special oils catoil for his aches, a creamier, faintly perfumed blend for his most sensitive parts. They made love. They came together (the sort of physical accident fools take for fate), listening to the crackle of firecrackers from the Callas high street and the boisterous shouts of the folken, most of them now well past tipsy, from the sound. Sleep, she said. Tomorrow I see you no more. Not me, not Eisenhart or Overholser, not anyone in the Calla. Do you have the sight, then? Roland asked. He sounded relaxed, even amused, but even when he had been deep in her heat and thrusting, the gnaw of Susannah had never left his mind one of his katet, and lost. Even if there had been no more than that, it would have been enough to keep him from true rest or ease. No, said she, but I have feelings from time to time, like any other woman, especially about when her man is getting ready to move on. Is that what I am to you? Your man? Her gaze was both shy and steady. For the little time yeve been here, aye, I like to think so. Doee call me wrong, Roland? He shook his head at once. It was good to be some womans man again, if only for a short time. She saw he meant it, and her face softened. She stroked his lean cheek. We were wellmet, Roland, were we not? Wellmet in the Calla. Aye, lady. She touched the remains of his right hand, then his right hip. And how are your aches? To her he wouldnt lie. Vile. She nodded, then took hold of his left hand, which hed managed to keep away from the lobstrosities. And this un? Fine, he said, but he felt a deep ache. Lurking. Waiting its time to come out. What Rosalita called the dry twist. Roland! said she. Aye? Her eyes looked at him calmly. She still had hold of his left hand, touching it, culling out its secrets. Finish your business as soon as you can. Is that your advice? Aye, dearheart. Before your business finishes you. THREE Eddie sat on the back porch of the rectory as midnight came and what these folk would ever after call The Day of the East Road Battle passed into history (after which it would pass into myth  always assuming the world held together long enough for it to happen). In town the sounds of celebration had grown increasingly loud and feverish, until Eddie seriously began to wonder if they might not set the entire high street afire. And would he mind? Not a whit, say thanks and youre welcome, too. While Roland, Susannah, Jake, Eddie, and three womenSisters of Oriza, they called themselvesstood against the Wolves, the rest of the Callafolken had either been cowering back in town or in the rice by the riverbank. Yet ten years from nowmaybe even five!they would be telling each other about how theyd bagged their limit one day in autumn, standing shoulder to shoulder with the gunslingers. It wasnt fair and part of him knew it wasnt fair, but never in his life had he felt so helpless, so lost, and so consequently mean. He would tell himself not to think of Susannah, to wonder where she was or if her demon child had yet been delivered, and find himself thinking of her, anyway. She had gone to New York, of that much he was sure. But when? Were people traveling in hansom cabs by gaslight or jetting around in antigrav taxis driven by robots from North Central Positronics? Is she even alive? He would have shuddered away from this thought if he could have, but the mind could be so cruel. He kept seeing her in the gutter somewhere down in Alphabet City, with a swastika carved on her forehead, and a placard reading GREETINGS FROM YOUR FRIENDS IN OXFORD TOWN hung around her neck. Behind him the door from the rectorys kitchen opened. There was the soft padding sound of bare feet (his ears were sharp now, trained like the rest of his killers equipment), and the click of toenails. Jake and Oy. The kid sat down next to him in Callahans rocking chair. He was dressed and wearing his dockers clutch. In it was the Ruger Jake had stolen from his father on the day he had run away from home. Today it had drawn  well, not blood. Not yet. Oil? Eddie smiled a little. There was no humor in it. Cant sleep, Jake? Ake, Oy agreed, and collapsed at Jakes feet, muzzle resting on the boards between his paws. No, Jake said. I keep thinking about Susannah. He paused, then added And Benny. Eddie knew that was natural, the boy had seen his friend blown apart before his very eyes, of course hed be thinking about him, but Eddie still felt a bitter spurt of jealousy, as if all of Jakes regard should have been saved for Eddie Deans wife. That Tavery kid, Jake said. Its his fault. Panicked. Got running. Broke his ankle. If not for him, Bennyd still be alive. And very softlyit would have chilled the heart of the boy in question had he heard it, Eddie had no doubt of thatJake said Frank  fucking  Tavery. Eddie reached out a hand that did not want to comfort and made it touch the kids head. His hair was long. Needed a wash. Hell, needed a cut. Needed a mother to make sure the boy under it took care of it. No mother now, though, not for Jake. And a little miracle giving comfort made Eddie feel better. Not a lot, but a little. Let it go, he said. Done is done. Ka, Jake said bitterly. Kiyet, ka, Oy said without raising his muzzle. Amen, Jake said, and laughed. It was disturbing in its coldness. Jake took the Ruger from its makeshift holster and looked at it. This one will go through, because it came from the other side. Thats what Roland says. The others may, too, because we wont be going todash. If they dont, Henchick will cache them in the cave and maybe we can come back for them. If we wind up in New York, Eddie said, therell be plenty of guns. And well find them. Not like Rolands. I hope like hell they go through. There arent any guns left in any of the worlds like his. Thats what I think. It was what Eddie thought, too, but he didnt bother saying so. From town there came a rattle of firecrackers, then silence. It was winding down there. Winding down at last. Tomorrow there would undoubtedly be an allday party on the common, a continuation of todays celebration but a little less drunk and a little more coherent. Roland and his katet would be expected as guests of honor, but if the gods of creation were good and the door opened, they would be gone. Hunting Susannah. Finding her. Never mind hunting. Finding. As if reading his thoughts (and he could do that, he was strong in the touch), Jake said Shes still alive. How can you know that? We would have felt it if she was gone. Jake, can you touch her? No, but Before he could finish, a deep rumbling came from the earth. The porch suddenly began to rise and fall like a boat on a heavy sea. They could hear the boards groaning. From the kitchen came the sound of rattling china like chattering teeth. Oy raised his head and whined. His foxy little face was comically startled, his ears laid back along his skull. In Callahans parlor, something fell over and shattered. Eddies first thought, illogical but strong, was that Jake had killed Suze simply by declaring her still alive. For a moment the shaking intensified. A window shattered as its frame was twisted out of shape. There was a crump from the darkness. Eddie assumedcorrectlythat it was the ruined privy, now falling down completely. He was on his feet without realizing it. Jake was standing beside him, gripping his wrist. Eddie had drawn Rolands gun and now they both stood as if ready to begin shooting. There was a final grumbling from deep in the earth, and then the porch settled under their feet. At certain key points along the Beam, people were waking up and looking around, dazed. In the streets of one New York when, a few car alarms were going off. The following days papers would report a minor earthquake broken windows, no reported casualties. Just a little shake of the fundamentally sound bedrock. Jake was looking at Eddie, eyes wide. And knowing. The door opened behind them and Callahan came out onto the porch, dressed in flimsy white underpants that fell to his knees. The only other thing on him was the gold crucifix around his neck. It was an earthquake, wasnt it? he said. I felt one in northern California once, but never since coming to the Calla. It was a hell of a lot more than an earthquake, Eddie said, and pointed. The screenedin porch looked east, and over there the horizon was lit by silent artillery bursts of green lightning. Downhill from the rectory, the door of Rosalitas snug creaked open and then banged shut. She and Roland came up the hill together, she in her chemise and the gunslinger in a pair of jeans, both barefoot in the dew. Eddie, Jake, and Callahan went down to them. Roland was looking fixedly at the already diminishing flickers of lightning in the east, where the land of Thunderclap waited for them, and the Court of the Crimson King, and, at the end of EndWorld, the Dark Tower itself. If, Eddie thought. If it still stands. Jake was just saying that if Susannah died, wed know it, Eddie said. That thered be what you call a sigul. Then comes this. He pointed to the Peres lawn, where a new ridge had humped up, peeling the sod apart in one tenfoot line to show the puckered brown lips of the earth. A chorus of dogs was barking in town, but there were no sounds from the folken, at least not yet; Eddie supposed a goodly number had slept through the whole thing. The sleep of the drunken victorious. But it wasnt anything to do with Suze. Was it? Not directly, no. And it wasnt ours, Jake put in, or the damage would have been a lot worse. Dont you think? Roland nodded. Rosa looked at Jake with a mixture of puzzlement and fright. Wasnt our what, boy? What are you talking about? It wasnt an earthquake, sure! No, Roland said, a Beamquake. One of the Beams holding up the Towerwhich holds up everythingjust let go. Just snapped. Even in the faint light from the four seners flickering on the porch, Eddie saw Rosalita Munozs face lose its color. She crossed herself. A Beam? One of the Beams? Say no! Say not true! Eddie found himself thinking of some longago baseball scandal. Of some little boy begging, Say it aint so, Joe. I cant, Roland told her, because it is. How many of these Beams are there? Callahan asked. Roland looked at Jake, and nodded slightly Say your lesson, Jake of New Yorkspeak and be true. Six Beams connecting twelve portals, Jake said. The twelve portals are at the twelve ends of the earth. Roland, Eddie, and Susannah really started their quest from the Portal of the Bear, and picked me up between there and Lud. Shardik, Eddie said. He was watching the last flickers of lightning in the east. That was the bears name. Yes, Shardik, Jake agreed. So were on the Beam of the Bear. All the Beams come together at the Dark Tower. Our Beam, on the other side of the Tower ? He looked at Roland for help. Roland, in turn, looked at Eddie Dean. Even now, it seemed, Roland was not done teaching them the Way of Eld. Eddie either didnt see the look or chose to ignore it, but Roland would not be put off. Eddie? he murmured. Were on the Path of the Bear, Way of the Turtle, Eddie said absently. I dont know why it would ever matter, since the Towers as far as were going, but on the other side its the Path of the Turtle, Way of the Bear. And he recited See the TURTLE of enormous girth! On his shell he holds the earth, His thought is slow but always kind; He holds us all within his mind. At this point, Rosalita took up the verse On his back the truth is carried, And there are love and duty married. He loves the earth and loves the sea, And even loves a child like me. Not quite the way I learned it in my cradle and taught it to my friends, Roland said, but close enough, by watch and by warrant. The Great Turtles name is Maturin, Jake said, and shrugged. If it matters. You have no way of telling which one broke? Callahan said, studying Roland closely. Roland shook his head. All I know is that Jakes rightit wasnt ours. If it had been, nothing within a hundred miles of Calla Bryn Sturgis would be standing. Or maybe within a thousand mileswho could know? The very birds would have fallen flaming from the sky. You speak of Armageddon, Callahan said in a low, troubled voice. Roland shook his head, but not in disagreement. I dont know that word, Pere, but Im speaking of great death and great destruction, sure. And somewherealong the Beam connecting Fish to Rat, perhapsthat has now happened. Are you positive this is true? Rosa asked, low. Roland nodded. He had been through this once before, when Gilead fell and civilization as he then understood it had ended. When he had been cast loose to wander with Cuthbert and Alain and Jamie and the few others of their katet. One of the six Beams had broken then, and almost certainly not the first. How many Beams remain to hold the Tower? Callahan asked. For the first time, Eddie seemed interested in something other than the fate of his lost wife. He was looking at Roland with what was almost attention. And why not? This was, after all, the crucial question. All things serve the Beam, they said, and although the actual truth was that all things served the Tower, it was the Beams which held the Tower up. If they snapped Two, Roland said. There have to be at least two, Id say. The one running through Calla Bryn Sturgis and another. But God knows how long theyll hold. Even without the Breakers working on them, I doubt theyd hold for long. We have to hurry. Eddie had stiffened. If youre suggesting we go on without Suze Roland shook his head impatiently, as if to tell Eddie not to be a fool. We cant win through to the Tower without her. For all I know, we cant win through without Mias chap. Its in the hands of ka, and there used to be a saying in my country Ka has no heart or mind. That one I can agree with, Eddie said. We might have another problem, Jake said. Eddie frowned at him. We dont need another problem. I know, but  what if the earthquake blocked the mouth of that cave? Or  Jake hesitated, then reluctantly brought out what he was really afraid of. Or knocked it down completely? Eddie reached out, took hold of Jakes shirt, and bundled it into his fist. Dont say that. Dont you even think that. Now they could hear voices from town. The folken would be gathering on the common again, Roland guessed. He further guessed that this dayand now this nightwould be remembered in Calla Bryn Sturgis for a thousand years. If the Tower stood, that was. Eddie let go of Jakes shirt and then pawed at the place he had grabbed, as if to erase the wrinkles. He tried a smile that made him look feeble and old. Roland turned to Callahan. Will the Manni still turn up tomorrow? You know this bunch better than I. Callahan shrugged. Henchicks a man of his word. Whether he can hold the others to his word after what just happened  that, Roland, I dont know. He better be able to, Eddie said darkly. He just better be. Roland of Gilead said, Whos for Watch Me? Eddie looked at him, unbelieving. Were going to be up until morning light, the gunslinger said. We might as well pass the time. So they played Watch Me, and Rosalita won hand after hand, adding up their scores on a piece of slate with no smile of triumphwith no expression at all that Jake could read. At least not at first. He was tempted to try the touch, but had decided that to use it for any but the strongest reasons was wrong. Using it to see behind Rosas poker face would be like watching her undress. Or watching her and Roland make love. Yet as the game went on and the northeast finally began to grow lighter, Jake guessed he knew what she was thinking of after all, because it was what he was thinking of. On some level of their minds, all of them would be thinking of those last two Beams, from now until the end. Waiting for one or both of them to snap. Whether it was them trailing Susannah or Rosa cooking her dinner or even Ben Slightman, mourning his dead son out there on Vaughn Eisenharts ranch, all of them would now be thinking of the same thing only two left, and the Breakers working against them night and day, eating into them, killing them. How long before everything ended? And how would it end? Would they hear the vast rumble of those enormous slatecolored stones as they fell? Would the sky tear open like a flimsy piece of cloth, spilling out the monstrosities that lived in the todash darkness? Would there be time to cry out? Would there be an afterlife, or would even Heaven and Hell be obliterated by the fall of the Dark Tower? He looked at Roland and sent a thought, as clearly as he could Roland, help us. And one came back, filling his mind with cold comfort (ah, but comfort served cold was better than no comfort at all) If I can. Watch Me, said Rosalita, and laid down her cards. She had built Wands, the high run, and the card on top was Madame Death. STAVE Commalacomecome Theres a young man with a gun. Young man lost his honey When she took it on the run. RESPONSE Commalacomeone! She took it on the run! Left her baby lonely but Her baby aint done.