Song of Susannah - Stephen King [71]
“A story about vampires.”
“Ayuh, I heard him talkin about it on the radio. Said he got the idea from Dracula. ”
“You heard the writer on the radio,” Eddie said. He was having that through-the-looking-glass, down-the-rabbit-hole, off-on-a-comet feeling again, and tried to ascribe it to the Percodan. It wouldn’t work. All at once he felt strangely unreal to himself, a shade you could almost see through, as thin as…well, as thin as a page in a book. It was no help to realize that this world, lying in the summer of 1977 on time’s beam, seemed real in a way all the other wheres and whens—including his own—did not. And that feeling was totally subjective, wasn’t it? When you came right down to it, how did anyone know they weren’t a character in some writer’s story, or a transient thought in some bus-riding schmoe’s head, or a momentary mote in God’s eye? Thinking about such stuff was crazy, and enough such thinking could drive you crazy.
And yet…
Dad-a-chum, dad-a-chee, not to worry, you’ve got the key.
Keys, my specialty, Eddie thought. And then: King’s a key, isn’t he? Calla, Callahan. Crimson King, Stephen King. Is Stephen King the Crimson King of this world?
Roland had settled. Eddie was sure it hadn’t been easy for him, but the difficult had ever been Roland’s specialty. “If you have questions to ask, have at it.” And made the twirling gesture with his right hand.
“Roland, I hardly know where to start. The ideas I’ve got are so big…so…I don’t know, so fundamentally fucking scary… ”
“Best to keep it simple, then.” Roland took the ball when Eddie tossed it to him but now looked more than a little impatient with the game of toss. “We really do have to move on.”
How Eddie knew it. He would have asked his questions while they were rolling, if they all could have ridden in the same vehicle. But they couldn’t, and Roland had never driven a motor vehicle, which made it impossible for Eddie and Cullum to ride in the same one.
“All right,” he said. “Who is he? Let’s start with that. Who is Stephen King?”
“A writer,” Cullum said, and gave Eddie a look that said, Are you a fool, son? “He lives over in Bridgton with his family. Nice enough fella, from what I’ve heard.”
“How far away is Bridgton?”
“Oh…twenty, twenty-five miles.”
“How old is he?” Eddie was groping, maddeningly aware that the right questions might be out there, but he had no clear idea of what they were.
John Cullum squinted an eye and seemed to calculate. “Not that old, I sh’d think. If he’s thirty, he just got there.”
“This book…’Salem’s Lot…was it a bestseller?”
“Dunno,” Cullum said. “Lots of people around here read it, tell you that much. Because it’s set in Maine. And because of the ads they had on TV, you know. Also there was a movie made out of his first book, but I never went to see it. Looked too bloody.”
“What was it called?”
Cullum thought, then shook his head. “Can’t quite remember. ’Twas just one word, and I’m pretty sure it was a girl’s name, but that’s the best I can do. Maybe it’ll come to me.”
“He’s not a walk-in, you don’t think?”
Cullum laughed. “Born and raised right here in the State of Maine. Guess that makes him a live -in.”
Roland was looking at Eddie with increasing impatience, and Eddie decided to give up. This was worse than playing Twenty Questions. But goddammit, Pere Callahan was real and he was also in a book of fiction written by this man King, and King lived in an area that was a magnet for what Cullum called walk-ins. One of those walk-ins had sounded very much to Eddie like a servant of the Crimson King. A woman with a bald head who seemed to have a bleeding eye in the center of her forehead,