Then Roland left the powdery remains of Mia's corpse and came to Susannah, who was sitting on one of the nearby beds with her hands clasped between her thighs. "Tell me everything that befell since you left us on the East Road, after the battle,"
he said. "We need to-"
"Roland, I never meant to leave you. It was Mia. She took over. If I hadn't had a place to go-a Dogan-she might've taken over completely."
Roland nodded to show he understood that. "Nevertheless, tell me how you came to this devar-tete. And Jake, I'd hear the same from you."
"Devar-tete," Eddie said. The phrase held some faint familiarity.
Did it have something to do with Chevin of Chayven, the slow mutie Roland had put out of its misery in Lovell? He thought so. "What's that?"
Roland swept a hand at the room with all its beds, each with its helmet-like machine and segmented steel hose; beds where the gods only knew how many children from the Callas had lain, and been ruined. "It means little prison, or torture-chamber."
"Doesn't look so little to me," Jake said. He couldn't tell how many beds there were, but he guessed the number at three hundred. Three hundred at least.
"Mayhap we'll come upon a larger one before we're finished.
Tell your tale, Susannah, and you too, Jake."
"Where do we go from here?" Eddie asked.
"Perhaps the tale will tell," Roland answered.
TWO
Roland and Eddie listened in silent fascination as Susannah and Jake recounted their adventures, turn and turn about. Roland first halted Susannah while she was telling them of Mathiessen van Wyck, who had given her his money and rented her a hotel room. The gunslinger asked Eddie about the turtle in the lining of the bag.
"I didn't know it was a turtle. I thought it might be a stone."
"If you'd tell this part again, I'd hear," Roland said.
So, thinking carefully, trying to remember completely (for it all seemed a very long time ago), Eddie related how he and Pere Callahan had gone up to the Doorway Cave and opened the ghostwood box with Black Thirteen inside. They'd expected Black Thirteen to open the door, and so it had, but first-
"We put the box in the bag," Eddie said. "The one that said NOTHING BUT STRIKES AT MIDTOWN LANES in New York and NOTHING BUT STRIKES AT MID-WORLD LANES on the Calla Bryn Sturgis side. Remember?"
They all did.
"And I felt something in the lining of the bag. I told Callahan, and he said … " Eddie mulled it over. "He said, 'This isn't the time to investigate it.' Or something like that. I agreed.
I remember thinking we had enough mysteries on our hands already, we'd save this one for another day. Roland, who in God's name put that thing in the bag, do you think?"
"For that matter, who left the bag in the vacant lot?" Susannah asked.
"Or the key?" Jake chimed in. "I found the key to the house in Dutch Hill in that same lot. Was it the rose? Did the rose somehow … I dunno … make them?"
Roland thought about it. "Were I to guess," he said, "I'd say that sai King left those signs and siguls."
"The writer," Eddie said. He weighed the idea, then nodded slowly. He vaguely remembered a concept from high school-the god from the machine, it was called. There was a fancy Latin term for it as well, but that one he couldn't remember.
Had probably been writing Mary Lou Kenopensky's name on his desk while the other kids had been obediently taking notes.
The basic concept was that if a playwright got himself into a corner he could send down the god, who arrived in a flowerdecked bucka wagon from overhead and rescued the characters who were in trouble. This no doubt pleased the more religious playgoers, who believed that God-not the specialeffects version who came down from some overhead platform the audience couldn't see but the One who wert in heaven-really did save people who deserved it. Such ideas had undoubtedly gone out of fashion in the modern age, but Eddie thought that popular novelists-of the sort sai King seemed on his way to becoming-probably still used the technique, only disguising it better. Litde escape hatches. Cards that read GET OUT OF JAIL FREE or ESCAPE THE PIRATES Or FREAK STORM CUTS ELECTRICAL POWER, EXECUTION POSTPONED. The god from die machine (who was actually the writer), patiently working to keep the characters safe so his tale wouldn't end with an unsatisfying line like
"And so the ka-tet was wiped out on Jericho Hill and the bad guys won, rule Discordia, so sorry, better luck next time (what next time, ha-ha), THE END."
Little safety nets, like a key. Not to mention a scrimshaw turde.
"If he wrote those things into his story," Eddie said, "it was long after we saw him in 1977."
"Aye," Roland agreed.
"And I don't think he thought them up," Eddie said. "Not really. He's just … I dunno, just a … "
"A bumhug?" Susannah asked, smiling.
"No!" Jake said, sounding a litde shocked. "Not diat. He's a sender. A telecaster." He was thinking about his father and his father's job at the Network.
"Bingo," Eddie said, and leveled a finger at die boy. This idea led him to another: that if Stephen King did not remain alive long enough to write those things into his tale, the key and the turde would not be there when they were needed. Jake would have been eaten by the Doorkeeper in the house on Dutch Hill … always assuming he got that far, which he probably wouldn't have done. And if he escaped the Dutch Hill monster, he would've been eaten by the Grandfathers-Callahan's Type One vampires-in the Dixie Pig.
Susannah thought to tell them about the vision she'd had as Mia was beginning her final journey from the Plaza-Park Hotel to the Dixie Pig. In this vision she'd been jugged in ajail cell in Oxford, Mississippi, and there had been voices coming from a TV somewhere. Chet Huntley, Walter Cronkite, Frank McGee: newscasters chanting the names of the dead. Some of those names, like President Kennedy and the Diem brothers, she'd known. Others, like Christa McAuliffe, she had not. But one of the names had been Stephen King's, she was quite sure of it.
Chet Huntley's partner
(good night Chet good night David)
saying that Stephen King had been struck and killed by a Dodge minivan while walking near his house. King had been fifty-two, according to Brinkley.
Had Susannah told them that, a great many things might have happened differently, or not at all. She was opening her mouth to add it into the conversation-a falling chip on a hillside strikes a stone which strikes a larger stone which then strikes two others and starts a landslide-when there was the clunk of an opening door and the clack of approaching footsteps.
They all turned, Jake reaching for a 'Riza, the others for their guns.
"Relax, fellas," Susannah murmured. "It's all right. I know this guy." And then to DNK 45932, DOMESTIC, she said: "I didn't expect to see you again so soon. In fact, I didn't expect to see you at all. What's up, Nigel old buddy?"
So this time something which might have been spoken was not, and the deus ex machina which might have descended to rescue a writer who had a date with a Dodge minivan on a latespring day in the year of '99 remained where it was, high above the mortals who acted their parts below.
THREE
The nice thing about robots, in Susannah's opinion, was that most of them didn't hold grudges. Nigel told her that no one had been available to fix his visual equipment (although he might be able to do it himself, he said, given access to the right components, discs, and repair tutorials), so he had come back here, relying on the infrared, to pick up the remains of the shattered (and completely unneeded) incubator. He thanked her for her interest and introduced himself to her friends.
"Nice to meet you, Nige," Eddie said, "but you'll want to get started on those repairs, I kennit, so we won't keep you."
Eddie's voice was pleasant and he'd reholstered his gun, but he kept his hand on the butt. In truth he was a little bit freaked by the resemblance Nigel bore to a certain messenger robot in the town of Calla Bryn Sturgis. That one hadheld a grudge.
"No, stay," Roland said. "We may have chores for you, but for the time being I'd as soon you were quiet. Turned off, if it please you." And if it doesn't, his tone implied.
"Certainly, sai," Nigel replied in his plummy British accent.
"You may reactivate me with the words Nigel, I need you."
"Very good," Roland said.
Nigel folded his scrawny (but undoubtedly powerful)
stainless-steel arms across his chest and went still.
"Came back to pick up the broken glass," Eddie marveled.
"Maybe the Tet Corporation could sell em. Every housewife in America would want two-one for the house and one for the yard."
"The less we're involved with science, the better," Susannah said darkly. In spite of her brief nap while leaning against the door between Fedic and New York, she looked haggard, done almost to death. "Look where it's gotten this world."
Roland nodded to Jake, who told of his and Pere Callahan's adventures in the New York of 1999, beginning with the taxi that had almost hit Oy and ending with their two-man attack on the low men and the vampires in the dining room of the Dixie pig. He did not neglect to tell how they had disposed of Black Thirteen by putting it in a storage locker at the World Trade Center, where it would be safe until early June of 2002, and how they had found the turtle, which Susannah had dropped, like a message in a bottle, in the gutter outside the Dixie Pig.