She thought about it. "It might have some faint ring," she said, "but I can't do better than that. Why?"
Roland told her what he believed: that as Eddie lay dying, he had been granted some sort of vision about a thing... or a place... or a person. Something named Dandelo. Eddie had passed this on to Jake, Jake had passed it to Oy, and Oy had passed it on to Roland.
Susannah was frowning doubtfully. "It's maybe been handed around too much. There was this game we used to play when we were kids. Whisper, it was called. The first kid would think something up, a word or a phrase, and whisper it to the next kid. You could only hear it once, no repeats allowed. The next kid would pass on what he thought he'd heard, and the next, and the next. By the time it got to the last kid in line, it was something entirely different, and everyone would have a good laugh. But if this is wrong, I don't think we'll be laughing."
"Well," Roland said, "we'll keep a lookout and hope that I got it right. Mayhap it means nothing at all." But he didn't really believe that.
"What are we going to do for clothes, if it gets colder than this?" she asked.
"We'll make what we need. I know how. It's something else we don't need to worry about today. What we do need to worry about is finding something to eat. I suppose if we have to, we can find Nigel's pantry-"
"I don't want to go back under the Dogan until we have to,"
Susannah said. "There's got to be a kitchen near the infirmary; they must have fed those poor kids something."
Roland considered this, then nodded. It was a good idea.
"Let's do it now," she said. "I don't even want to be on the top floor of that place after dark."
FOUR
On Turtleback Lane, in the year of '02, month of August,
Stephen King awakes from a waking dream of Fedic. He types
"I don't even want to be on the top floor of that place after dark. "The words appear on the screen before him. It's the end of what he calls a subchapter, but that doesn't always mean he's done for the day. Being done for the day depends on what he hears. Or, more properly, on what he doesn't. What he listens for is Ves'-Ka Gan, the Song of the Turtle. This time the music, which is faint on some days and so loud on others that it almost deafens him, seems to have ceased. It will return tomorrow. At least, it always has.
He pushes the control-key and the S-key together. The computer gives a little chime, indicating that the material he's written today has been saved. Then he gets up, wincing at the pain in his hip, and walks to the window of his office. It looks out on the driveway slanting up at a steep angle to the road where he now rarely walks. (And on the main road, Route 7,
never.) The hip is very bad this morning, and the big muscles of his thigh are on fire. He rubs the hip absently as he stands looking out.
Roland, you bastard, you gave me back the pain, he thinks. It runs down his right leg like a red-hot rope, can ya not say Gawd, can ya not say Gawd-bomb, and he's the one who got stuck with it in the end. It's been three years since the accident that almost took his life and the pain is still there. It's less now, the human body has an amazing engine of healing inside it (a hot-enj, he thinks, and smiles), but sometimes it's still bad. He doesn't think about it much when he's writing, writing's a sort of benign todash, but it's always stiff after he's spent a couple of hours at his desk.
He thinks of Jake. He's sorry as hell that Jake died, and he guesses that when this last book is published, the readers are going to be just wild. And why not? Some of them have known Take Chambers for twenty years, almost twice as long as the boy actually lived. Oh, they'll be wild, all right, and when he writes back and says he's as sorry as they are, as surprised as they are, will they believe him? Not on your tintype, as his grandfather used to say. He thinks of Misery-Annie Wilkes calling Paul Sheldon a cockadoodie brat for trying to get rid of silly, bubbleheaded Misery Chastain. Annie shouting that Paul was the writer and the writer is God to his characters, he doesn't have to kill any of them if he doesn't want to.
But he's not God. At least not in this case. He knows damned well that Jake Chambers wasn't there on the day of his accident, nor Roland Deschain, either-the idea's laughable, they're make-believe, for Christ's sake-but he also knows that at some point the song he hears when he sits at his fancy Macintosh writing-machine became Jake's death-song, and to ignore that would have been to lose touch with Ves'-Ka Gan entirely, and he must not do that. Not if he is to finish. That song is the only thread he has, the trail of breadcrumbs he must follow if he is ever to emerge from this bewildering forest of plot he has planted, and-
Are you sure you planted it?
Well... no. In fact he is not. So call for the men in the white coats.