Wolves of the Calla (37 page)

Callahan sat, considering, looking through them and back to those old days. At last he resumed.

“Barlow was gone, but he’d left the woman. And a letter. It was addressed to all of us, but was directed principally to me. The moment I saw her lying there in the cellar of the Marsten House I understood it was all true. The doctor with us listened to her chest and took her blood pressure, though, just to be sure. No heartbeat. Blood pressure zero. But when Ben pounded the stake into her, she came alive. The blood flowed. She screamed, over and over. Her hands . . . I remember the shadows of her hands on the wall . . . ”

Eddie’s hand gripped Susannah’s. They listened in a horrified suspension that was neither belief nor disbelief. This wasn’t a talking train powered by malfunctioning computer circuits, nor men and women who had reverted to savagery. This was something akin to the unseen demon that had come to the place where they had drawn Jake. Or the doorkeeper in Dutch Hill.

“What did he say to you in his note, this Barlow?” Roland asked.

“That my faith was weak and I would undo myself. He was right, of course. By then the only thing I really believed in was Bushmills. I just didn’t know it.
He
did, though. Booze is also a vampire, and maybe it takes one to know one.

“The boy who was with us became convinced that this prince of vampires meant to kill his parents next, or turn them. For revenge. The boy had been
taken prisoner, you see, but he escaped and killed the vampire’s half-human accomplice, a man named Straker.”

Roland nodded, thinking this boy sounded more and more like Jake. “What was his name?”

“Mark Petrie. I went with him to his house, and with all the considerable power my church affords: the cross, the stole, the holy water, and of course the Bible. But I had come to think of these things as symbols, and that was my Achilles’ heel. Barlow was there. He had Petrie’s parents. And then he had the boy. I held up my cross. It glowed. It hurt him. He screamed.” Callahan smiled, recalling that scream of agony. The look of it chilled Eddie’s heart. “I told him that if he hurt Mark, I’d destroy him, and at that moment I could have done it. He knew it, too. His response was that before I did, he’d rip the child’s throat out. And
he
could have done it.”

“Mexican standoff,” Eddie murmured, remembering a day by the Western Sea when he had faced Roland in a strikingly similar situation. “Mexican standoff, baby.”

“What happened?” Susannah asked.

Callahan’s smile faded. He was rubbing his scarred right hand the way the gunslinger had rubbed his hip, without seeming to realize it. “The vampire made a proposal. He would let the boy go if I’d put down the crucifix I held. We’d face each other unarmed. His faith against mine. I agreed. God help me, I agreed. The boy”

The boy is gone, like an eddy of dark water.

Barlow seems to grow taller. His hair, swept back from his brow in the European manner, seems to float around his skull. He’s wearing a dark suit and a bright red tie, impeccably knotted, and to Callahan he seems part of the darkness that surrounds him. Mark Petrie’s parents lie dead at his feet, their skulls crushed.

“Fulfill your part of the bargain, shaman.”

But why should he? Why not drive him off, settle for a draw this night? Or kill him outright? Something is wrong with the idea, terribly wrong, but he cannot pick out just what it is. Nor will any of the buzzwords that have helped him in previous moments of crisis be of any help to him here. This isn’t anomie, lack of empathy, or the existential grief of the twentieth century; this is a
vampire.
And
—

And his cross, which had been glowing fiercely, is growing dark.

Fear leaps into his belly like a confusion of hot wires. Barlow is walking toward him across the Petrie kitchen, and Callahan can see the thing’s fangs very clearly because Barlow is smiling. It is a winner’s smile.

Callahan takes a step backward. Then two. Then his buttocks strike the edge of the table, and the table pushes back against the wall, and then there is nowhere left to go.

“Sad to see a man’s faith fail,” says Barlow, and reaches out.

Why should he not reach out? The cross Callahan is holding up is now dark. Now it’s nothing but a piece of plaster, a cheap piece of rickrack his mother bought in a Dublin souvenir shop, probably at a scalper’s price. The
power it had sent ramming up his arm, enough spiritual voltage to smash down walls and shatter stone, is gone.

Barlow plucks it from his fingers. Callahan cries out miserably, the cry of a child who suddenly realizes the bogeyman has been real all along, waiting patiently in the closet for its chance. And now comes a sound that will haunt him for the rest of his life, from New York and the secret highways of America to the AA meetings in Topeka where he finally sobered up to the final stop in Detroit to his life here, in Calla Bryn Sturgis. He will remember that sound when his forehead is scarred and he fully expects to be killed. He will remember it when he
is
killed. The sound is two dry snaps as Barlow breaks the arms of the cross, and the meaningless thump as he throws what remains on the floor. And he’ll also remember the cosmically ludicrous thought which came, even as Barlow reached for him:
God, I need a drink.

The Pere looked at Roland, Eddie, and Susannah with the eyes of one who is remembering the absolute worst moment of his life. “You hear all sorts of sayings and slogans in Alcoholics Anonymous. There’s one that recurs to me whenever I think of that night. Of Barlow taking hold of my shoulders.”

“What?” Eddie asked.

“Be careful what you pray for,” Callahan said. “Because you just might get it.”

“You got your drink,” Roland said.

“Oh yes,” Callahan said. “I got my drink.”

Barlow’s hands are strong, implacable. As Callahan is drawn forward, he suddenly understands what is going to happen. Not death. Death would be a mercy compared to this.

No, please no,
he tries to say, but nothing comes out of his mouth but one small, whipped moan.

“Now, priest,” the vampire whispers.

Callahan’s mouth is pressed against the reeking flesh of the vampire’s cold throat. There is no anomie, no social dysfunction, no ethical or racial ramifications. Only the stink of death and one vein, open and pulsing with Barlow’s dead, infected blood. No sense of existential loss, no postmodern grief for the death of the American value system, not even the religio-psychological guilt of Western man. Only the effort to hold his breath forever, or twist his head away, or both. He cannot. He holds on for what seems like aeons, smearing the blood across his cheeks and forehead and chin like war paint. To no avail. In the end he does what all alcoholics must do once the booze has taken them by the ears: he drinks.

Strike three. You’re out.

“The boy got away. There was that much. And Barlow let me go. Killing me wouldn’t have been any fun, would it? No, the fun was in letting me live.

“I wandered for an hour or more, through a town that was less and less there. There aren’t many Type One vampires, and that’s a blessing because a Type One can cause one hell of a lot of mayhem in an extremely short period of time. The town was
already half-infected, but I was too blind—too
shocked
—to realize it. And none of the new vampires approached me. Barlow had set his mark on me as surely as God set his mark on Cain before sending him off to dwell in the land of Nod. His watch and his warrant, as you’d say, Roland.

“There was a drinking fountain in the alley beside Spencer’s Drugs, the sort of thing no Public Health Office would have sanctioned a few years later, but back then there was one or two in every small town. I washed Barlow’s blood off my face and neck there. Tried to wash it out of my hair, too. And then I went to St. Andrews, my church. I’d made up my mind to pray for a second chance. Not to the God of the theologians who believe that everything holy and unholy ultimately comes from inside us, but to the old God. The one who proclaimed to Moses that he should not suffer a witch to live and gave unto his own son the power to raise from the dead. A second chance is all I wanted. My life for that.

“By the time I got to St. Andrews, I was almost running. There were three doors going inside. I reached for the middle one. Somewhere a car backfired, and someone laughed. I remember those sounds very clearly. It’s as if they mark the border of my life as a priest of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.”

“What happened to you, sugar?” Susannah asked.

“The door rejected me,” Callahan said. “It had an iron handle, and when I touched it, fire came out of it like a reverse stroke of lightning. It knocked me all the way down the steps and onto the cement path. It did this.” He raised his scarred right hand.

“And that?” Eddie asked, and pointed to his forehead.

“No,” Callahan said. “That came later. I picked myself up. Walked some more. Wound up at Spencer’s again. Only this time I went in. Bought a bandage for my hand. And then, while I was paying, I saw the sign. Ride The Big Grey Dog.”

“He means Greyhound, sugar,” Susannah told Roland. “It’s a nationwide bus company.”

Roland nodded and twirled a finger in his go-on gesture.

“Miss Coogan told me the next bus went to New York, so I bought a ticket on that one. If she’d told me it went to Jacksonville or Nome or Hot Burgoo, South Dakota, I would have gone to one of those places. All I wanted to do was get out of that town. I didn’t care that people were dying and worse than dying, some of them my friends, some of them my parishioners. I just wanted to get
out
. Can you understand that?”

“Yes,” Roland said with no hesitation. “Very well.”

Callahan looked into his face, and what he saw there seemed to reassure him a little. When he continued, he seemed calmer.

“Loretta Coogan was one of the town spinsters. I must have frightened her, because she said I’d have to wait for the bus outside. I went out. Eventually the bus came. I got on and gave the driver my ticket. He took his half and gave me my half. I sat down. The bus started to roll. We went under the flashing yellow blinker at the middle of town, and that was the first mile. The first mile on the road that took me here. Later on—maybe four-thirty in the morning, still dark outside—the bus stopped in”

“Hartford,” the bus driver says. “This is Hartford, Mac. We got a twenty-minute rest stop. Do you want to go in and get a sandwich or something?”

Callahan fumbles his wallet out of his pocket with his bandaged hand and almost drops it. The taste of death is in his mouth, a moronic, mealy taste like a spoiled apple. He needs something to take away that taste, and if nothing will take it away something to change it, and if nothing will change it at least something to cover it up, the way you might cover up an ugly gouge in a wood floor with a piece of cheap carpet.

He holds out a twenty to the bus driver and says, “Can you get me a bottle?”

“Mister, the rules
—”

“And keep the change, of course. A pint would be fine.”

“I don’t need nobody cutting up on my bus. We’ll be in New York in two hours. You can get anything you want once we’re there.” The bus driver tries to smile. “It’s Fun City, you know.”

Callahan
—
he’s no longer Father Callahan, the flash of fire from the doorhandle answered
that
question, at least
—
adds a ten to the twenty. Now he’s holding out thirty dollars. Again he tells the driver a pint would be fine, and he doesn’t expect any change. This time the driver, not an idiot, takes the money. “But don’t you go cutting up on me,” he repeats. “I don’t need nobody cutting up on my bus.”

Callahan nods. No cutting up, that’s a big ten-four. The driver goes into the combination grocery store
–
liquor store
–
short-order restaurant that exists here on the rim of Hartford, on the rim of morning, under yellow hi-intensity lights. There are secret highways in America, highways in
hiding. This place stands at one of the entrance ramps leading into that network of darkside roads, and Callahan senses it. It’s in the way the Dixie cups and crumpled cigarette packs blow across the tarmac in the pre-dawn wind. It whispers from the sign on the gas pumps, the one that says
PAY FOR GAS IN ADVANCE AFTER SUNDOWN
. It’s in the teenage boy across the street, sitting on a porch stoop at four-thirty in the morning with his head in his arms, a silent essay in pain. The secret highways are out close, and they whisper to him. “Come on, buddy,” they say. “Here is where you can forget everything, even the name they tied on you when you were nothing but a naked, blatting baby still smeared with your mother’s blood. They tied a name to you like a can to a dog’s tail, didn’t they? But you don’t need to drag it around here. Come. Come on.” But he goes nowhere. He’s waiting for the bus driver, and pretty soon the bus driver comes back, and he’s got a pint of Old Log Cabin in a brown paper sack. This is a brand Callahan knows well, a pint of the stuff probably goes for two dollars and a quarter out here in the boonies, which means the bus driver has just earned himself a twenty-eight-dollar tip, give or take. Not bad. But it’s the American way, isn’t it? Give a lot to get a little. And if the Log Cabin will take that terrible taste out of his mouth
—
much worse than the throbbing in his burned hand
—
it will be worth every penny of the thirty bucks. Hell, it would be worth a C-note.

“No cutting up,” the driver says. “I’ll put you out right in the middle of the Cross Bronx Expressway if you start cutting up. I swear to God I will.”

By the time the Greyhound pulls into the Port Authority, Don Callahan is drunk. But he doesn’t cut up; he simply sits quietly until it’s time to get off and join the flow of six o’clock humanity under the cold fluorescent lights: the junkies, the cabbies, the shoeshine boys, the girls who’ll blow
you for ten dollars, the boys dressed up as girls who’ll blow you for five dollars, the cops twirling their nightsticks, the dope dealers carrying their transistor radios, the blue-collar guys who are just coming in from New Jersey. Callahan joins them, drunk but quiet; the nightstick-twirling cops do not give him so much as a second glance. The Port Authority air smells of cigarette smoke and joysticks and exhaust. The docked buses rumble. Everyone here looks cut loose. Under the cold white fluorescents, they all look dead.