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One night the ball reached out to me when I slept and took me todash to Los Zapatos, Mexico. It was a funeral. The writer’s funeral.” “Ben Mears,” Eddie said. “The Air Dance guy.” “Yes.” “Did folks see you?” Jake asked. “Because they didn’t see us.” Callahan shook his head. “No. But they sensed me. When I walked toward them, they moved away. It was as if I’d turned into a cold draft. In any case, the boy was there—Mark Petrie. Only he wasn’t a boy any longer. He was in his young manhood. From that, and from the way he spoke of Ben—‘There was a time when I would have called fifty-nine old’ is how he began his eulogy—I’d guess that this might have been the mid-1990s. In any case, I didn’t stay long . . . but long enough to decide that my young friend from all that long time ago had turned out fine. Maybe I did something right in ’Salem’s Lot, after all.” He paused a moment and then said, “In his eulogy, Mark referred to Ben as his father. That touched me very, very deeply.
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