Wolves of the Calla (26 page)

Almost here,
he thought.
Were the force that brought us any more powerful, we
would
be here
.

And, he realized, the force might indeed grow stronger, assuming that Callahan was right about what was hidden under the floor of his church. As they drew closer to the town and to the source of the thing doing this . . .

Susannah twitched his arm. Roland stopped immediately. “Is it your feet?” he asked.

“No,” she said, and Roland saw she was frightened. “Why is it so
dark
?”

“Susannah, it’s night.”

She gave his arm an impatient shake. “I know that, I’m not blind. Can’t you . . . ” She hesitated. “Can’t you
feel
it?”

Roland realized he could. For one thing, the darkness on Second Avenue really wasn’t dark at all. The gunslinger still couldn’t comprehend the prodigal way in which these people of New York squandered the things those of Gilead had held most rare and precious. Paper; water; refined oil; artificial light. This last was everywhere. There was the glow from the store windows (although most were closed, the displays were still lit), the even harsher glow from a popkin-selling place called Blimpie’s, and over all this, peculiar orange electric lamps that seemed to drench the very air with light. Yet Susannah was right. There was a black feel to the air in spite of the orange lamps. It seemed to surround the people who walked this street. It made him think about what Eddie had said earlier:
This whole deal has gone nineteen
.

But this darkness, more felt than seen, had nothing to do with nineteen. You had to subtract six in order to understand what was going on here. And for the first time, Roland really believed Callahan was right.

“Black Thirteen,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s brought us here, sent us todash, and we feel it all around us. It’s not the same as when I flew inside the grapefruit, but it’s
like
that.”

“It feels bad,” she said, speaking low.

“It
is
bad,” he said. “Black Thirteen’s very likely the most terrible object from the days of Eld still remaining on the face of the earth. Not that the Wizard’s Rainbow was from then; I’m sure it existed even before—”

“Roland! Hey, Roland! Suze!”

They looked up and in spite of his earlier misgivings, Roland was immensely relieved to see not only Eddie, but Jake and Oy, as well. They were about a block and a half farther along. Eddie was waving. Susannah waved back exuberantly. Roland grabbed her arm before she started to run, which was clearly her intention.

“Mind your feet,” he said. “You don’t need to pick up some sort of infection and carry it back to the other side.”

They compromised at a rapid walk. Eddie and Jake, both shod, ran to meet them. Pedestrians moved out of their way without looking, or even breaking their conversations, Roland saw, and then observed that wasn’t quite true. There was a little boy, surely no older than three, walking sturdily along next to his mother. The woman seemed to notice nothing, but as Eddie and Jake swung around them, the toddler watched with wide, wondering eyes . . . and then actually stretched out a hand, as if to stroke the briskly trotting Oy.

Eddie pulled ahead of Jake and arrived first. He held Susannah out at arm’s length, looking at her. His expression, Roland saw, was really quite similar to that of the tot.

“Well? What do you think, sugar?” Susannah spoke nervously, like a woman who has come
home to her husband with some radical new hairdo.

“A definite improvement,” Eddie said. “I don’t need em to love you, but they’re way beyond good and into the land of excellent. Christ, now you’re an inch taller than I am!”

Susannah saw this was true and laughed. Oy sniffed at the ankle that hadn’t been there the last time he’d seen this woman, and then he laughed, too. It was an odd barky-bark of a sound, but quite clearly a laugh for all that.

“Like your legs, Suze,” Jake said, and the perfunctory quality of this compliment made Susannah laugh again. The boy didn’t notice; he had already turned to Roland. “Do you want to see the bookstore?”

“Is there anything to see?”

Jake’s face clouded. “Actually, not much. It’s closed.”

“I would see the vacant lot, if there’s time before we’re sent back,” Roland said. “And the rose.”

“Do they hurt?” Eddie asked Susannah. He was looking at her closely indeed.

“They feel fine,” she said, laughing.
“Fine
.”

“You look different.”

“I bet!” she said, and executed a little barefoot jig. It had been moons and moons since she had last danced, but the exultancy she so clearly felt made up for any lack of grace. A woman wearing a business suit and swinging a briefcase bore down on the ragged little party of wanderers, then abruptly veered off, actually taking a few steps into the street to get around them. “You bet I do, I got
legs
!”

“Just like the song says,” Eddie told her.

“Huh?”

“Never mind,” he said, and slipped an arm around her waist. But again Roland saw him give her that searching, questioning look.
But with luck he’ll leave it alone,
Roland thought.

And that was what Eddie did. He kissed the corner of her mouth, then turned to Roland. “So you want to see the famous vacant lot and the even more famous rose, huh? Well, so do I. Lead on, Jake.”

Jake led them down Second Avenue, pausing only long enough so they could all take a quick peek into The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind. No one was wasting light in this shop, however, and there really wasn’t much to see. Roland was hoping for a look at the menu sign, but it was gone.

Reading his mind in the matter-of-fact way of people who share khef, Jake said, “He probably changes it every day.”

“Maybe,” Roland said. He looked in through the window a moment longer, saw nothing but darkened shelves, a few tables, and the counter Jake had mentioned—the one where the old fellows sat drinking coffee and playing this world’s version of Castles. Nothing to see, but something to feel, even through the glass: despair and loss. If it had been a smell, Roland thought, it would have been sour and a bit stale. The smell of failure. Maybe of good dreams that never grew. Which made it the perfect lever for someone like Enrico
“Il Roche”
Balazar.

“Seen enough?” Eddie asked.

“Yes. Let’s go.”

For Roland, the eight-block journey from Second and Fifty-fourth to Second and Forty-sixth was like visiting a country in which he had until that moment only half-believed.
How much stranger must it be for Jake?
he wondered. The bum who’d asked the boy for a quarter was gone, but the restaurant he’d been sitting near was there: Chew Chew Mama’s. This was on the corner of Second and Fifty-second. A block farther down was the record store, Tower of Power. It was still open—according to an overhead clock that told the time in large electric dots, it was only fourteen minutes after eight in the evening. Loud sounds were pouring out of the open door. Guitars and drums. This world’s music. It reminded him of the sacrificial music played by the Grays, back in the city of Lud, and why not? This
was
Lud, in some twisted, otherwhere-and-when way. He was sure of it.

“It’s the Rolling Stones,” Jake said, “but not the one that was playing on the day I saw the rose. That one was ‘Paint It Black.’ ”

“Don’t you recognize this one?” Eddie asked.

“Yeah, but I can’t remember the title.”

“Oh, but you should,” Eddie said. “It’s ‘Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown.’”

Susannah stopped, looked around. “Jake?”

Jake nodded. “He’s right.”

Eddie, meanwhile, had fished a piece of newspaper from the security-gated doorway next to Tower of Power Records. A section of
The New York Times,
in fact.

“Hon, didn’t your Ma ever teach you that gutter-trolling
is generally not practiced by the better class of people?” Susannah asked.

Eddie ignored her. “Look at this,” he said. “All of you.”

Roland bent close, half-expecting to see news of another great plague, but there was nothing so shattering. At least not as far as he could tell.

“Read me what it says,” he asked Jake. “The letters swim in and out of my mind. I think it’s because we’re todash—caught in between—”

“RHODESIAN FORCES TIGHTEN HOLD ON MOZAMBIQUE VILLAGES,”
Jake read.
“TWO CARTER AIDES PREDICT A SAVING OF BILLIONS IN WELFARE PLAN.
And down here,
CHINESE DISCLOSE THAT 1976 QUAKE WAS DEADLIEST IN FOUR CENTURIES.
Also—”

“Who’s Carter?” Susannah asked. “Is he the President before . . .
Ronald Reagan
?” She garnished the last two words with a large wink. Eddie had so far been unable to convince her that he was serious about Reagan’s being President. Nor would she believe Jake when the boy told her he knew it sounded crazy, but the idea was at least faintly plausible because Reagan had been governor of California. Susannah had simply laughed at this and nodded, as if giving him high marks for creativity. She knew Eddie had talked Jake into backing up his fish story, but she would not be hooked. She supposed she could see Paul Newman as President, maybe even Henry Fonda, who had looked presidential enough in
Fail-Safe,
but the host of
Death Valley Days
? Not on your bottom.

“Never mind Carter,” Eddie said. “Look at the
date
.”

Roland tried, but it kept swimming in and out. It
would almost settle into Great Letters that he could read, and then fall back into gibberish. “What is it, for your father’s sake?”

“June second,” Jake said. He looked at Eddie. “But if time’s the same here and over on the other side, shouldn’t it be June
first
?”

“But it’s
not
the same,” Eddie said grimly. “It’s
not
. Time goes by faster on this side. Game on. And the game-clock’s running fast.”

Roland considered. “If we come here again, it’s going to be later each time, isn’t it?”

Eddie nodded.

Roland went on, talking to himself as much as to the others. “Every minute we spend on the other side—the Calla side—a minute and
a half
goes by over here. Or maybe two.”

“No, not two,” Eddie said. “I’m sure it’s not going double-time.” But his uneasy glance back down at the date on the newspaper suggested he wasn’t sure at all.

“Even if you’re right,” Roland said, “all we can do now is go forward.”

“Toward the fifteenth of July,” Susannah said. “When Balazar and his gentlemen stop playing nice.”

“Maybe we ought to just let these Calla-folk do their own thing,” Eddie said. “I hate to say that, Roland, but maybe we should.”

“We can’t do that, Eddie.”

“Why not?”

“Because Callahan’s got Black Thirteen,” Susannah said. “Our help is his price for turning it over. And we need it.”

Roland shook his head. “He’ll turn it over in any
case—I thought I was clear about that. He’s terrified of it.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “I got that feeling, too.”

“We have to help them because it’s the Way of Eld,” Roland told Susannah. “And because the way of ka is always the way of duty.”

He thought he saw a glitter far down in her eyes, as though he’d said something funny. He supposed he had, but Susannah wasn’t the one he had amused. It had been either Detta or Mia who found those ideas funny. The question was which one. Or had it been both?

“I hate how it feels here,” Susannah said. “That
dark
feeling.”

“It’ll be better at the vacant lot,” Jake said. He started walking, and the others followed. “The rose makes everything better. You’ll see.”

When Jake crossed Fiftieth, he began to hurry. On the downtown side of Forty-ninth, he began to jog. At the corner of Second and Forty-eighth, he began to run. He couldn’t help it. He got a little
WALK
help at Forty-eighth, but the sign on the post began to flash red as soon as he reached the far curb.

“Jake, wait up!” Eddie called from behind him, but Jake didn’t. Perhaps couldn’t. Certainly Eddie felt the pull of the thing; so did Roland and Susannah. There was a hum rising in the air, faint and sweet. It was everything the ugly black feeling around them was not.

To Roland the hum brought back memories of
Mejis and Susan Delgado. Of kisses shared in a mattress of sweet grass.

Susannah remembered being with her father when she was little, crawling up into his lap and laying the smooth skin of her cheek against the rough weave of his sweater. She remembered how she would close her eyes and breathe deeply of the smell that was his smell and his alone: pipe tobacco and wintergreen and the Musterole he rubbed into his wrists, where the arthritis first began to bite him at the outrageous age of twenty-five. What these smells meant to her was that everything was all right.

Eddie found himself remembering a trip to Atlantic City when he’d been very young, no more than five or six. Their mother had taken them, and at one point in the day she and Henry had gone off to get ice cream cones. Mrs. Dean had pointed at the boardwalk and had said,
You put your fanny right there, Mister Man, and keep it there until we get back
. And he did. He could have sat there all day, looking down the slope of the beach at the gray pull and flow of the ocean. The gulls rode just above the foam, calling to each other. Each time the waves drew back, they left a slick expanse of wet brown sand so bright he could hardly look at it without squinting. The sound of the waves was both large and lulling.
I could stay here forever,
he remembered thinking.
I could stay here forever because it’s beautiful and peaceful and
. . .
and all right. Everything here is all right.

That was what all five of them felt most strongly (for Oy felt it, too): the sense of something that was wonderfully and beautifully all right.

Roland and Eddie grasped Susannah by the elbows without so much as an exchanged glance. They lifted her bare feet off the sidewalk and carried her. At Second and Forty-seventh the traffic was against them, but Roland threw up a hand at the oncoming headlights and cried,
“Hile! Stop in the name of Gilead!”