Wolves of the Calla (28 page)

The rose was tightly furled against the night. Then, as they knelt there, the petals began to open, as if in greeting. The hum rose all around them, like a song of angels.

At first Susannah was all right. She held on despite the fact that she had lost over a foot and a half of herself—the self that had arrived here, anyway—and was now forced into her old familiar (and hatefully subservient) posture, half-kneeling and half-sitting on the filthy sidewalk. Her back was propped against the fence surrounding the vacant lot. A sardonic thought crossed her mind—
All I need’s a cardboard sign and a tin cup.

She held on even after seeing the dead woman cross Forty-sixth Street. The singing helped—what she understood to be the voice of the rose. Oy helped, too, crowding his warmth close to her. She stroked his silky fur, using the reality of him as a steadying-point. She told herself again and again that she was
not
insane. All right, she’d lost seven minutes.
Maybe
. Or maybe the guts inside that newfangled clock down there had just hiccupped. All right, she’d seen a dead woman crossing the street.
Maybe
. Or maybe she’d just seen some strung-out junkie, God knew there was no shortage of them in New York—

A junkie with a little green worm crawling out of her mouth?

“I could have imagined that part,” she said to the bumbler. “Right?”

Oy was dividing his nervous attention between Susannah and the rushing headlights, which might have looked to him like large, predatory animals with shining eyes. He whined nervously.

“Besides, the boys’ll be back soon.”

“Oys,” the bumbler agreed, sounding hopeful.

Why didn’t I just go in with em? Eddie would have carried me on his back, God knows he’s done it before, both with the harness and without it.

“I couldn’t,” she whispered. “I just couldn’t.”

Because some part of her was frightened of the rose. Of getting too close to it. Had that part been in control during the missing seven minutes? Susannah was afraid it had been. If so, it was gone now. Had taken back its legs and just walked off on them into New York, circa 1977. Not good. But it had taken her fear of the rose with it, and that
was
good. She didn’t want to be afraid of something that felt so strong and so wonderful.

Another personality? Are you thinking the lady who brought the legs was another personality?

Another version of Detta Walker, in other words?

The idea made her feel like screaming. She thought she now understood how a woman would feel if, five years or so after an apparently successful cancer operation, the doctor told her a routine X-ray had picked up a shadow on her lung.

“Not again,” she murmured in a low, frantic voice as a fresh group of pedestrians schooled past. They all moved away from the board fence a little, although it reduced the space between them considerably. “No, not again. It can’t be. I’m whole. I’m . . . I’m
fixed
.”

How long had her friends been gone?

She looked downstreet at the flashing clock. It said 8:42, but she wasn’t sure she could trust it. It felt longer than that. Much longer. Maybe she should call to them. Just give a halloo. How y’all doin in there?

No. No such thing. You’re a gunslinger, girl. At least that’s what
he
says. What he thinks. And you’re not going to change what he thinks by hollering like a school-girl just seen a garter snake under a bush. You’re just going to sit here and wait. You can do it. You’ve got Oy for company and you
—

Then she saw the man standing on the other side of the street. Just standing there beside a newsstand. He was naked. A ragged Y-cut, sewn up with large black industrial stitches, began at his groin, rose, and branched at his sternum. His empty eyes gazed at her. Through her. Through the world.

Any possibility that this might only have been a hallucination ended when Oy began to bark. He was staring directly across at the naked dead man.

Susannah gave up her silence and began to scream for Eddie.

When the rose opened, disclosing the scarlet furnace within its petals and the yellow sun burning at the center, Eddie saw everything that mattered.

“Oh my Lord,” Jake sighed from beside him, but he might have been a thousand miles away.

Eddie saw great things and near misses. Albert Einstein as a child, not quite struck by a runaway milk-wagon as he crossed a street. A teenage boy named Albert Schweitzer getting out of a bathtub and not quite stepping on the cake of soap lying beside the pulled plug. A Nazi
Oberleutnant
burning a piece of paper with the date and place of the D-Day invasion written on it. He saw a man who intended to poison the entire water supply of Denver die of a heart attack in a roadside rest stop on I-80 in Iowa with a bag of McDonald’s french fries on his lap. He saw a terrorist wired up with explosives suddenly turn away from a crowded restaurant in a city that might have been Jerusalem. The terrorist had been transfixed by nothing more than the sky, and the thought that it arced above the just and unjust alike. He saw four men rescue a little boy from a monster whose entire head seemed to consist of a single eye.

But more important than any of these was the vast, accretive weight of small things, from planes
which hadn’t crashed to men and women who had come to the correct place at the perfect time and thus founded generations. He saw kisses exchanged in doorways and wallets returned and men who had come to a splitting of the way and chosen the right fork. He saw a thousand random meetings that weren’t random, ten thousand right decisions, a hundred thousand right answers, a million acts of unacknowledged kindness. He saw the old people of River Crossing and Roland kneeling in the dust for Aunt Talitha’s blessing; again heard her giving it freely and gladly. Heard her telling him to lay the cross she had given him at the foot of the Dark Tower and speak the name of Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth. He saw the Tower itself in the burning folds of the rose and for a moment understood its purpose: how it distributed its lines of force to all the worlds that were and held them steady in time’s great helix. For every brick that landed on the ground instead of some little kid’s head, for every tornado that missed the trailer park, for every missile that didn’t fly, for every hand stayed from violence, there was the Tower.

And the quiet, singing voice of the rose. The song that promised all might be well, all might be well, that all manner of things might be well.

But something’s wrong with it,
he thought.

There was a jagged dissonance buried in the hum, like bits of broken glass. There was a nasty flickering purple glare in its hot heart, some cold light that did not belong there.

“There are two hubs of existence,” he heard Roland say.
“Two!”
Like Jake, he could have been a
thousand miles away. “The Tower . . . and the rose. Yet they are the same.”

“The same,” Jake agreed. His face was painted with brilliant light, dark red and bright yellow. Yet Eddie thought he could see that other light, as well—a flickering purple reflection like a bruise. Now it danced on Jake’s forehead, now on his cheek, now it swam in the well of his eye; now gone, now reappearing at his temple like the physical manifestation of a bad idea.

“What’s wrong with it?” Eddie heard himself ask, but there was no answer. Not from Roland or Jake, not from the rose.

Jake raised one finger and began to count. Counting petals, Eddie saw. But there was really no need to count. They all knew how many petals there were.

“We
must
have this patch,” Roland said. “Own it and then protect it. Until the Beams are reestablished and the Tower is made safe again. Because while the Tower weakens, this is what holds everything together. And this is weakening, too. It’s sick. Do you feel it?”

Eddie opened his mouth to say of course he felt it, and that was when Susannah began to scream. A moment later Oy joined his voice to hers, barking wildly.

Eddie, Jake, and Roland looked at each other
like sleepers awakened from the deepest of dreams. Eddie made it to his feet first. He turned and stumbled back toward the fence and Second Avenue, shouting her name. Jake followed, pausing only long enough to snatch something out of the snarl of burdocks where the key had been before.

Roland spared one final, agonized look at the wild rose growing so bravely here in this tumbled wasteland of bricks and boards and weeds and litter. It had already begun to furl its petals again, hiding the light that blazed within.

I’ll come back,
he told it.
I swear by the gods of all the worlds, by my mother and father and my friends that were, that I’ll come back.

Yet he was afraid.

Roland turned and ran for the board fence, picking his way through the tumbled litter with unconscious agility in spite of the pain in his hip. As he ran, one thought returned to him and beat at his mind like a heart:
Two. Two hubs of existence. The rose and the Tower. The Tower and the rose.

All the rest was held between them, spinning in fragile complexity.

Eddie threw himself over the fence, landed badly and asprawl, leaped to his feet, and stepped in front of Susannah without even thinking. Oy continued to bark.

“Suze! What? What is it?” He reached for Roland’s gun and found nothing. It seemed that guns did not go todash.

“There!” she cried, pointing across the street. “There! Do you see him? Please, Eddie,
please tell me you see him
!”

Eddie felt the temperature of his blood plummet. What he saw was a naked man who had been cut open and then sewed up again in what could only be an autopsy tattoo. Another man—a living
one—bought a paper at the nearby newsstand, checked for traffic, then crossed Second Avenue. Although he was shaking open the paper to look at the headline as he did it, Eddie saw the way he swerved around the dead man.
The way people swerved around us,
he thought.

“There was another one, too,” she whispered. “A woman. She was walking. And there was a worm. I saw a worm c-c-crawling—”

“Look to your right,” Jake said tightly. He was down on one knee, stroking Oy back to quietness. In his other hand he held a crumpled pink something. His face was as pale as cottage cheese.

They looked. A child was wandering slowly toward them. It was only possible to tell it was a girl because of the red-and-blue dress she wore. When she got closer, Eddie saw that the blue was supposed to be the ocean. The red blobs resolved themselves into little candy-colored sailboats. Her head had been squashed in some cruel accident, squashed until it was wider than it was long. Her eyes were crushed grapes. Over one pale arm was a white plastic purse. A little girl’s best I’m-going-to-the-car-accident-and-don’t-know-it purse.

Susannah drew in breath to scream. The darkness she had only sensed earlier was now almost visible. Certainly it was palpable; it pressed against her like earth. Yet she would scream. She
must
scream. Scream or go mad.

“Not a sound,” Roland of Gilead whispered in her ear. “Do not disturb her, poor lost thing. For your life, Susannah!” Susannah’s scream expired in a long, horrified sigh.

“They’re dead,” Jake said in a thin, controlled voice. “Both of them.”

“The vagrant dead,” Roland replied. “I heard of them from Alain Johns’s father. It must have been not long after we returned from Mejis, for after that there wasn’t much more time before everything . . . what is it you say, Susannah? Before everything ‘went to hell in a handbasket.’ In any case, it was Burning Chris who warned us that if we ever went todash, we might see vags.” He pointed across the street where the naked dead man still stood. “Such as him yonder have either died so suddenly they don’t yet understand what’s happened to them, or they simply refuse to accept it. Sooner or later they
do
go on. I don’t think there are many of them.”

“Thank God,” Eddie said. “It’s like something out of a George Romero zombie movie.”

“Susannah, what happened to your legs?” Jake asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “One minute I had em, and the next minute I was the same as before.” She seemed to become aware of Roland’s gaze and turned toward him. “You see somethin funny, sugar?”

“We are ka-tet, Susannah. Tell us what really happened.”

“What the hell are you trying to imply?” Eddie asked him. He might have said more, but before he could get started, Susannah grasped his arm.

“Caught me out, didn’t you?” she asked Roland. “All right, I’ll tell you. According to that fancy dot-clock down there, I lost seven minutes while I was waiting for you boys. Seven minutes and my fine new legs. I didn’t want to say anything because . . . ”
She faltered, then went on. “Because I was afraid I might be losing my mind.”

That’s not what you’re afraid of,
Roland thought.
Not exactly.

Eddie gave her a brief hug and a kiss on the cheek. He glanced nervously across the street at the nude corpse (the little girl with the squashed head had, thankfully, wandered off down Forty-sixth Street toward the United Nations), then back at the gunslinger. “If what you said before is true, Roland, this business of time slipping its cogs is very bad news. What if instead of just seven minutes, it slips three months? What if the next time we get back here, Calvin Tower’s sold his lot? We can’t let that happen. Because that rose, man . . . that rose . . . ” Tears had begun to slip out of Eddie’s eyes.

“It’s the best thing in the world,” Jake said, low.

“In all the worlds,” Roland said. Would it ease Eddie and Jake to know that this particular time-slip had probably been in Susannah’s head? That Mia had come out for seven minutes, had a look around, and then dived back into her hole like Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day? Probably not. But he saw one thing in Susannah’s haggard face: she either knew what was going on, or suspected very strongly.
It must be hellish for her,
he thought.