Wolves of the Calla (67 page)

Then a great many things happen at exactly the same time. The water pump in the alcove goes on, starting its weary thudding cycle. And Callahan’s ass bumps into the heavy, smooth wood of the door. And the man in black thrusts the box forward, opening it as he does so. And his hood falls back, revealing the pallid, snarling face of a human weasel. (It’s not Sayre, but upon Walter’s forehead like a Hindu caste-mark is the same welling red circle, an open wound that never clots or flows.) And Callahan sees what’s inside the box: he sees Black Thirteen crouched on its red velvet like the slick eye of a monster that grew outside God’s shadow. And Callahan begins to shriek at the sight of it, for he senses its endless power: it may fling him anywhere or to the farthest blind alley of nowhere. And the door clicks open. And even in his panic
—
or perhaps below his panic
—
Callahan is able to think
Opening the box has opened the door.
And he is stumbling backward into some other place. He can hear shrieking voices. One of them is Lupe’s, asking Callahan why Callahan let him die. Another belongs to Rowena Magruder and she is telling him this is his other life, this is it, and how does he like it? And his hands come up to cover his ears even as one ancient boot trips over the other and he begins to fall backward, thinking it’s Hell the man in black has pushed him into, actual Hell. And when his hands come up, the weasel-faced man thrusts the open box with its terrible glass ball into them. And the ball
moves.
It rolls like an actual eye in an
invisible socket. And Callahan thinks,
It’s alive, it’s the stolen eye of some awful monster from beyond the world, and oh God, oh dear God, it is seeing me.

But he takes the box. It’s the last thing in life he wants to do, but he is powerless to stop himself.
Close it, you have to close it,
he thinks, but he is falling, he has tripped himself (or the robed man’s ka has tripped him) and he’s falling, twisting around as he goes down. From somewhere below him all the voices of his past are calling to him, reproaching him (his mother wants to know why he allowed that filthy Barlow to break the cross she brought him all the way from Ireland), and incredibly, the man in black cries “Bon voyage, Faddah!” merrily after him.

Callahan strikes a stone floor. It’s littered with the bones of small animals. The lid of the box closes and he feels a moment of sublime relief
. . .
but then it opens again, very slowly, disclosing the eye.

“No,” Callahan whispers. “Please, no.”

But he’s not able to close the box
—
all his strength seems to have deserted him
—
and it will not close itself. Deep down in the black eye, a red speck forms, glows
. . .
grows. Callahan’s horror swells, filling his throat, threatening to stop his heart with its chill.
It’s the King,
he thinks.
It’s the Eye of the Crimson King as he looks down from his place in the Dark Tower. And he is seeing
me.

“NO!”
Callahan shrieks as he lies on the floor of a cave in the northern arroyo country of Calla Bryn Sturgis, a place he will eventually come to love.
“NO! NO! DON’T LOOK AT ME! OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD,
DON’T LOOK AT ME!”

But the Eye
does
look, and Callahan cannot bear its insane regard. That is when he passes out. It will be three days before he opens his own eyes again, and when he does he’ll be with the Manni.

Callahan looked at them wearily. Midnight had come and gone, we all say thankya, and now it was twenty-two days until the Wolves would come for their bounty of children. He drank off the final two inches of cider in his glass, grimaced as if it had been corn whiskey, then set the empty tumbler down. “And all the rest, as they say, you know. It was Henchick and Jemmin who found me. Henchick closed the box, and when he did, the door closed. And now what was the Cave of the Voices is Doorway Cave.”

“And you, Pere?” Susannah asked. “What did they do with you?”

“Took me to Henchick’s cabin—his
kra
. That’s where I was when I opened my eyes. During my unconsciousness, his wives and daughters fed me water and chicken broth, squeezing drops from a rag, one by one.”

“Just out of curiosity, how many wives does he have?” Eddie asked.

“Three, but he may have relations with only one at a time,” Callahan said absently. “It depends on the stars, or something. They nursed me well. I began to walk around the town; in those days they called me the Walking Old Fella. I couldn’t quite get the sense of where I was, but in a way my previous wanderings had prepared me for what had happened. Had toughened me mentally. I had days, God knows, when I thought all of this was happening in the second or two it would take me to fall from the window I’d broken through down to Michigan Avenue—that the
mind prepares itself for death by offering some wonderful final hallucination, the actual semblance of an entire life. And I had days when I decided that
I
had finally become what we all dreaded most at both Home and Lighthouse: a wet brain. I thought maybe I’d been socked away in a moldy institution somewhere, and was imagining the whole thing. But mostly, I just accepted it. And was glad to have finished up in a good place, real or imagined.

“When I got my strength back, I reverted to making a living the way I had during my years on the road. There was no Manpower or Brawny Man office in Calla Bryn Sturgis, but those were good years and there was plenty of work for a man who wanted to work—they were big-rice years, as they do say, although stockline and the rest of the crops also did fine. Eventually I began to preach again. There was no conscious decision to do so—it wasn’t anything I prayed over, God knows—and when I did, I discovered these people knew all about the Man Jesus.” He laughed. “Along with The Over, and Oriza, and Buffalo Star . . . do you know Buffalo Star, Roland?”

“Oh yes,” the gunslinger said, remembering a preacher of the Buff whom he had once been forced to kill.

“But they listened,” Callahan said. “A lot did, anyway, and when they offered to build me a church, I said thankya. And that’s the Old Fella’s story. As you see, you were in it . . . two of you, anyway. Jake, was that after you died?”

Jake lowered his head. Oy, sensing his distress, whined uneasily. But when Jake answered, his voice
was steady enough. “After the first death. Before the second.”

Callahan looked visibly startled, and he crossed himself. “You mean it can happen more than once? Mary save us!”

Rosalita had left them. Now she came back, holding a ’sener high. Those which had been placed on the table had almost burned down, and the porch was cast in a dim and failing glow that was both eerie and a little sinister.

“Beds is ready,” she said. “Tonight the boy sleeps with Pere. Eddie and Susannah, as you were night before last.”

“And Roland?” asked Callahan, his bushy brows raising.

“I have a cosy for him,” she said stolidly. “I showed it to him earlier.”

“Did you,” Callahan said. “Did you, now. Well, then, that’s settled.” He stood. “I can’t remember the last time I was so tired.”

“We’ll stay another few minutes, if it does ya,” Roland said. “Just we four.”

“As you will,” Callahan said.

Susannah took his hand and impulsively kissed it. “Thank you for your story, Pere.”

“It’s good to have finally told it, sai.”

Roland asked, “The box stayed in the cave until the church was built? Your church?”

“Aye. I can’t say how long. Maybe eight years; maybe less. ’Tis hard to tell with certainty. But there came a time when it began to call to me. As much as I hated and feared that Eye, part of me wanted to see it again.”

Roland nodded. “All the pieces of the Wizard’s
Rainbow are full of glammer, but Black Thirteen was ever told to be the worst. Now I think I understand why that is. It’s this Crimson King’s actual watching Eye.”

“Whatever it is, I felt it calling me back to the cave . . . and further. Whispering that I should resume my wanderings, and make them endless. I knew I could open the door by opening the box. The door would take me anywhere I wanted to go. And any
when
! All I had to do was concentrate.” Callahan considered, then sat down again. He leaned forward, looking at them in turn over the gnarled carving of his clasped hands. “Hear me, I beg. We had a President, Kennedy was his name. He was assassinated some thirteen years before my time in ’Salem’s Lot . . . assassinated in the West—”

“Yes,” Susannah said. “Jack Kennedy. God love him.” She turned to Roland. “He was a gunslinger.”

Roland’s eyebrows rose. “Do you say so?”

“Aye. And I say true.”

“In any case,” Callahan said, “there’s always been a question as to whether the man who killed him acted alone, or whether he was part of a larger conspiracy. And sometimes I’d wake in the middle of the night and think, ‘Why don’t you go and see? Why don’t you stand in front of that door with the box in your arms and think, “Dallas, November 22nd, 1963”? Because if you do that the door will open and you can go there, just like the man in Mr. Wells’s story of the time machine. And perhaps you could change what happened that day. If there was ever a watershed
moment in American life, that was it. Change that, change everything that came after. Vietnam . . . the race riots . . . everything.’”

“Jesus,” Eddie said respectfully. If nothing else, you had to respect the ambition of such an idea. It was right up there with the peg-legged sea captain chasing the white whale. “But Pere . . . what if you did it and changed things for the
worse
?”

“Jack Kennedy was not a bad man,” Susannah said coldly. “Jack Kennedy was a good man. A
great
man.”

“Maybe so. But do you know what? I think it takes a great man to make a great mistake. And besides, someone who came after him might have been a really bad guy. Some Big Coffin Hunter who never got a chance because of Lee Harvey Oswald, or whoever it was.”

“But the ball doesn’t allow such thoughts,” Callahan said. “I believe it lures people on to acts of terrible evil by whispering to them that they will do good. That they’ll make things not just a little better but
all
better.”

“Yes,” Roland said. His voice was as dry as the snap of a twig in a fire.

“Do you think such traveling might actually be possible?” Callahan asked him. “Or was it only the thing’s persuasive lie? Its glammer?”

“I believe it’s so,” Roland said. “And I believe that when we leave the Calla, it will be by that door.”

“Would that I could come with you!” Callahan said. He spoke with surprising vehemence.

“Mayhap you will,” Roland said. “In any case, you finally put the box—and the ball within—inside your church. To quiet it.”

“Yes. And mostly it’s worked. Mostly it sleeps.”

“Yet you said it sent you todash twice.”

Callahan nodded. The vehemence had flared like a pine-knot in a fireplace and disappeared just as quickly. Now he only looked tired. And very old, indeed. “The first time was to Mexico. Do you remember way back to the beginning of my story? The writer and the boy who believed?”

They nodded.

“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.”

“And the second time the ball sent you todash?”
Roland asked. “The time it sent you to the Castle of the King?”

“There were birds. Great fat black birds. And beyond that I’ll not speak. Not in the middle of the night.” Callahan spoke in a dry voice that brooked no argument. He stood up again. “Another time, perhaps.”

Roland bowed acceptance of this. “Say thankya.”

“Will’ee not turn in, folks?”

“Soon,” Roland said.

They thanked him for his story (even Oy added a single, sleepy bark) and bade him goodnight. They watched him go and for several seconds after, they said nothing.

It was Jake who broke the silence. “That guy Walter was
behind
us, Roland! When we left the way station, he was
behind
us! Pere Callahan, too!”

“Yes,” Roland said. “As far back as that, Callahan was in our story. It makes my stomach flutter. As though I’d lost gravity.”

Eddie dabbed at the corner of his eye. “Whenever you show emotion like that, Roland,” he said, “I get all warm and squashy inside.” Then, when Roland only looked at him, “Ah, come on, quit laughin. You know I love it when you get the joke, but you’re embarrassing me.”

“Cry pardon,” Roland said with a faint smile. “Such humor as I have turns in early.”

“Mine stays up all night,” Eddie said brightly. “Keeps me awake. Tells me jokes. Knock-knock, who’s there, icy, icy who, icy your underwear, yock-yock-yock!”

“Is it out of your system?” Roland asked when he had finished.

“For the time being, yeah. But don’t worry, Roland, it always comes back. Can I ask you something?”

“Is it foolish?”

“I don’t think so. I hope not.”

“Then ask.”

“Those two men who saved Callahan’s bacon in the laundrymat on the East Side—were they who I think they were?”