Wolves of the Calla (42 page)

“You’ve heard of the gentleman, I see,” Callahan said dryly.

“Let’s say he’s left his mark where we could see it, too,” Susannah said.

Callahan nodded his head in the direction of Thunderclap. “If your quest takes you there,” he said, “you’re going to see a hell of a lot more than a few signs spray-painted on a few walls.”

“What about you?” Eddie asked. “What did you do?”

“First, I sat down and considered the situation. And decided that, no matter how fantastic or paranoid it might sound to an outsider, I really was being stalked, and not necessarily by Type
Three vampires. Although of course I did realize that the people leaving the graffiti around and putting up the lost-pet posters wouldn’t scruple to use the vampires against me.

“At this point, remember, I had no idea who this mysterious group could be. Back in Jerusalem’s Lot, Barlow moved into a house that had seen terrible violence and was reputed to be haunted. The writer, Mears, said that an evil house had drawn an evil man. My best thinking in New York took me back to that idea. I began to think I’d drawn another king vampire, another Type One, the way the Marsten House had drawn Barlow. Right idea or wrong one (it turned out to be wrong), I found it comforting to know my brain, booze-soaked or not, was still capable of some logic.

“The first thing I had to decide was whether to stay in New York or run away. I knew if I
didn’t
run, they’d catch up to me, and probably sooner rather than later. They had a description, with this as an especially good marker.” Callahan raised his burned hand. “They
almost
had my name; would have it for sure in another week or two. They’d stake out all my regular stops, places where my scent had collected. They’d find people I’d talked to, hung out with, played checkers and cribbage with. People I’d worked with on my Manpower and Brawny Man jobs, too.

“This led me to a place I should have gotten to much sooner, even after a month of binge drinking. I realized they’d find Rowan Magruder and Home and all sorts of other people who knew me there. Part-time workers, volunteers, dozens of clients. Hell, after nine months,
hundreds
of clients.

“On top of that, there was the lure of those roads.” Callahan looked at Eddie and Susannah. “Do you know there’s a footbridge over the Hudson River to New Jersey? It’s practically in the shadow of the GWB, a plank footbridge that still has a few wooden drinking troughs for cows and horses along one side.”

Eddie laughed the way a man will when he realizes one of his lower appendages is being shaken briskly. “Sorry, Father, but that’s impossible. I’ve been over the George Washington Bridge maybe five hundred times in my life. Henry and I used to go to Palisades Park all the time. There’s no plank bridge.”

“There is, though,” Callahan said calmly. “It goes back to the early nineteenth century, I should say, although it’s been repaired quite a few times since then. In fact, there’s a sign halfway across that says
BICENTENNIAL REPAIRS COMPLETED 1975 BY LAMERK INDUSTRIES
. I recalled that name the first time I saw Andy the robot. According to the plate on his chest, that’s the company that made him.”

“We’ve seen the name before, too,” Eddie said. “In the city of Lud. Only there it said LaMerk
Foundry
.”

“Different divisions of the same company, probably,” Susannah said.

Roland said nothing, only made that impatient twirling gesture with the remaining two fingers of his right hand: hurry up, hurry up.

“It’s there, but it’s hard to see,” Callahan said. “It’s in hiding. And it’s only the first of the secret ways. From New York they radiate out like a spider’s web.”

“Todash turnpikes,” Eddie murmured. “Dig the concept.”

“I don’t know if that’s right or not,” Callahan said. “I only know I saw extraordinary things in my wanderings over the next few years, and I also met a lot of good people. It seems almost an insult to call them normal people, or ordinary people, but they were both. And certainly they give such words as
normal
and
ordinary
a feel of nobility for me.

“I didn’t want to leave New York without seeing Rowan Magruder again. I wanted him to know that maybe I
had
pissed in Lupe’s dead face—I’d gotten drunk, surely enough—but I hadn’t dropped my pants all the way down and done the other thing. Which is my too-clumsy way of saying I hadn’t given up entirely. And that I’d decided not just to cower like a rabbit in a flashlight beam.”

Callahan had begun to weep again. He wiped at his eyes with the sleeves of his shirt. “Also, I suppose I wanted to say goodbye to someone, and have someone say goodbye to me. The goodbyes we speak and the goodbyes we hear are the goodbyes that tell us we’re still alive, after all. I wanted to give him a hug, and pass along the kiss Lupe had given me. Plus the same message: You’re too valuable to lose. I—”

He saw Rosalita hurrying down the lawn with her skirt twitched up slightly at the ankle, and broke off. She handed him a flat piece of slate upon which something had been chalked. For a wild moment Eddie imagined a message flanked by stars and moons:
LOST! ONE STRAY DOG WITH MANGLED FRONT PAW! ANSWERS TO THE NAME OF
ROLAND
! BAD-TEMPERED, PRONE TO BITE,
BUT WE LOVE HIM ANYWAY!!!

“It’s from Eisenhart,” Callahan said, looking up. “If Overholser’s the big farmer in these parts, and Eben Took’s the big businessman, then you’d have to call Vaughn Eisenhart the big rancher. He says that he, Slightman Elder and Younger, and your Jake would meet us at Our Lady falls noon, if it do ya fine. It’s hard to make out his shorthand, but I think he’d have you visit farms, smallholds, and ranches on your way back out to the Rocking B, where you’d spend the night. Does it do ya?”

“Not quite,” Roland said. “I’d much like to have my map before I set off.”

Callahan considered this, then looked at Rosalita. Eddie decided the woman was probably a lot more than just a housekeeper. She had withdrawn out of earshot, but not all the way back to the house.
Like a good executive secretary,
he thought. The Old Fella didn’t need to beckon her; she came forward at his glance. They spoke, and then Rosalita set off.

“I think we’ll take our lunch on the church lawn,” Callahan said. “There’s a pleasant old ironwood there that’ll shade us. By the time we’re done, I’m sure the Tavery twins will have something for you.”

Roland nodded, satisfied.

Callahan stood up with a wince, put his hands in the small of his back, and stretched. “And I have something to show you now,” he said.

“You haven’t finished your story,” Susannah said.

“No,” Callahan agreed, “but time has grown short. I can walk and talk at the same time, if you fellows can walk and listen.”

“We can do that,” Roland said, getting up himself. There was pain, but not a great deal of it. Rosalita’s
cat-oil was something to write home about. “Just tell me two things before we go.”

“If I can, gunslinger, and do’ee fine.”

“They of the signs: did you see them in your travels?”

Callahan nodded slowly. “Aye, gunslinger, so I did.” He looked at Eddie and Susannah. “Have you ever seen a color photo of people—one taken with a flash—where everyone’s eyes are red?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said.

“Their eyes are like that. Crimson eyes. And your second question, Roland?”

“Are they the Wolves, Pere? These low men? These soldiers of the Crimson King? Are they the Wolves?”

Callahan hesitated a long time before replying. “I can’t say for sure,” he said at last. “Not a hundred per cent, kennit. But I don’t think so. Yet certainly they’re kidnappers, although it’s not just children they take.” He thought over what he’d said. “Wolves of a kind, perhaps.” He hesitated, thought it over some more, then said it again: “Aye, Wolves of a kind.”

The walk from the back yard of the rectory to the front door of Our Lady of Serenity was a short one, taking no more than five minutes. That was surely not enough time for the Old Fella to tell them about the years he had spent on the bum before seeing a news story in the Sacramento
Bee
which had brought him back to New York in 1981, and yet the three gunslingers heard the entire tale, nevertheless. Roland suspected that Eddie and Susannah knew what this meant as well as he did: when they moved on from Calla Bryn Sturgis—always assuming they didn’t die here—there was every likelihood that Donald Callahan would be moving on with them. This was not just storytelling but khef, the sharing of water. And, leaving the touch, which was a different matter, to one side, khef could only be shared by those whom destiny had welded together for good or for ill. By those who were ka-tet.

Callahan said, “Do you know how folks say, ‘We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto’?”

“The phrase has some vague resonance for us, sugar, yes,” Susannah said dryly.

“Does it? Yes, I see just looking at you that it does. Perhaps you’ll tell me your own story someday. I have an idea it would put mine to shame. In any case, I knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore as I approached the far end of the footbridge. And it seemed that I wasn’t entering New Jersey, either. At least not the one I’d always expected to find on the other side of the Hudson. There was a newspaper crumpled against the”

footrail of the bridge
—
which seems completely deserted except for him, although vehicle traffic on the big suspension bridge to his left is heavy and constant
—
and Callahan bends to pick it up. The cool wind blowing along the river ruffles his shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair.

There’s only one folded sheet, but the top of it’s the front page of the Leabrook
Register.
Callahan has never heard of Leabrook. No reason he should have, he’s no New Jersey scholar, hasn’t even been over there since arriving in Manhattan the previous year, but he always thought the town on the other side of the GWB was Fort Lee.

Then his mind is taken over by the headlines. The one across the top seems right enough;
RACIAL TENSIONS IN MIAMI EASE
, it reads. The New York papers have been full of these troubles over the last few days. But what to make of
WAR OF KITES CONTINUES IN TEANECK, HACKENSACK
, complete with a picture of a burning building? There’s a photo of firemen arriving on a pumper, but they are all laughing! What to make of
PRESIDENT AGNEW SUPPORTS NASA TERRAFORM DREAM
? What to make of the item at the bottom, written in Cyrillic?

What has happened to me?
Callahan asks himself.
All through the business of the vampires and the walking dead
—
even through the appearance of lost-pet posters which clearly refer to him
—
he has never questioned his sanity. Now, standing on the New Jersey end of this humble (and most remarkable!) footbridge across the Hudson
—
this footbridge which is being utilized by no one except himself
—
he finally does. The idea of Spiro Agnew as President is enough all by itself, he thinks, to make anyone with a speck of political sense doubt his sanity. The man resigned in disgrace years ago, even before his boss did.

What has happened to me?
he wonders, but if he’s a raving lunatic imagining all of this, he really doesn’t want to know.

“Bombs away,” he says, and tosses the four-page remnant of the Leabrook
Register
over the railing of the bridge. The breeze catches it and carries it away toward the George Washington.
That’s reality,
he thinks,
right over there. Those cars, those trucks, those Peter Pan charter buses.
But then, among them, he sees a red vehicle that appears to be speeding along on a number of circular treads. Above the vehicle’s body
—
it’s about as long as a medium-sized schoolbus
—
a crimson cylinder is turning.
BANDY
, it says on one side.
BROOKS
, it says on the other.
BANDY BROOKS
. Or
BANDYBROOKS
. What the hell’s Bandy Brooks? He has no idea. Nor has he ever seen such a vehicle in his life, and would not have believed such a thing
—
look at the
treads,
for heaven’s sake
—
would have been allowed on a public highway.

So the George Washington Bridge isn’t the safe world, either. Or not anymore.

Callahan grabs the railing of the footbridge and squeezes down tightly as a wave of dizziness courses through him, making him feel unsteady on his feet and
unsure of his balance. The railing feels real enough, wood warmed by the sun and engraved with thousands of interlocking initials and messages. He sees
DK L MB
in a heart. He sees
FREDDY
&
HELENA = TRU LUV
. He sees
KILL ALL SPIX AND NIGERS
, the message flanked by swastikas, and wonders at verbal depletion so complete the sufferer cannot even spell his favorite epithets. Messages of hate, messages of love, and all of them as real as the rapid beating of his heart or the weight of the few coins and bills in the right front pocket of his jeans. He takes a deep breath of the breeze, and that’s real, too, right down to the tang of diesel fuel.

This is happening to me, I know it is,
he thinks.
I am
not
in some psychiatric hospital’s Ward 9. I am me, I am here, and I’m even sober—at least for the time being—and New York is at my back. So is the town of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine, with its uneasy dead. Before me is the weight of America, with all its possibilities.

This thought lifts him, and is followed by one that lifts him even higher: not just one America, perhaps, but a dozen
. . .
or a thousand
. . .
or a million. If that’s Leabrook over there instead of Fort Lee, maybe there’s another version of New Jersey where the town on the other side of the Hudson is Leeman or Leighman or Lee Bluffs or Lee Palisades or Leghorn Village. Maybe instead of forty-two continental United States on the other side of the Hudson, there are forty-two hundred, or forty-two
thousand,
all of them stacked in vertical geographies of chance.