Wolves of the Calla (9 page)

Second Avenue,
he thought. Then:
My God
—

Before he could finish the thought, he saw Eddie Dean standing outside of the Barcelona Luggage store, looking dazed and more than a little out of place in old jeans, a deerskin shirt, and deerskin moccasins. His hair was clean, but it hung to his shoulders in a way that suggested no professional had seen to it in quite some time. Jake realized he himself didn’t look much better; he was also wearing a deerskin shirt and, on his lower half, the battered remains of the Dockers he’d had on the day he left home for good, setting sail for Brooklyn, Dutch Hill, and another world.

Good thing no one can see us,
Jake thought, then decided that wasn’t true. If people could see them, they’d probably get rich on spare change before noon. The thought made him grin. “Hey, Eddie,” he said. “Welcome home.”

Eddie nodded, looking bemused. “See you brought your friend.”

Jake reached down and gave Oy an affectionate pat. “He’s my version of the American Express Card. I don’t go home without him.”

Jake was about to go on—he felt witty, bubbly, full of amusing things to say—when someone came around the corner, passed them without
looking (as everyone else had), and changed everything. It was a kid wearing Dockers that looked like Jake’s because they
were
Jake’s. Not the pair he had on now, but they were his, all right. So were the sneakers. They were the ones Jake had lost in Dutch Hill. The plaster-man who guarded the door between the worlds had torn them right off his feet.

The boy who had just passed them was John Chambers, it was
him,
only this version looked soft and innocent and painfully young.
How did you survive?
he asked his own retreating back.
How did you survive the mental stress of losing your mind, and running away from home, and that horrible house in Brooklyn? Most of all, how did you survive the doorkeeper? You must be tougher than you look.

Eddie did a doubletake so comical that Jake laughed in spite of his own shocked surprise. It made him think of those comic-book panels where Archie or Jughead is trying to look in two directions at the same time. He looked down and saw a similar expression on Oy’s face. Somehow that made the whole thing even funnier.

“What the
fuck
?” Eddie asked.

“Instant replay,” Jake said, and laughed harder. It came out sounding goofy as shit, but he didn’t care. He
felt
goofy. “It’s like when we watched Roland in the Great Hall of Gilead, only this is New York and it’s May 31st, 1977! It’s the day I took French Leave from Piper! Instant replay, baby!”

“French—?” Eddie began, but Jake didn’t give him a chance to finish. He was struck by another realization. Except
struck
was too mild a word. He was
buried
by it, like a man who just happens to be
on the beach when a tidal wave rolls in. His face blazed so brightly that Eddie actually took a step back.

“The rose!” he whispered. He felt too weak in the diaphragm to speak any louder, and his throat was as dry as a sandstorm. “Eddie,
the rose
!”

“What about it?”

“This is the day I see it!” He reached out and touched Eddie’s forearm with a trembling hand. “I go to the bookstore . . . then to the vacant lot. I think there used to be a delicatessen—”

Eddie was nodding and beginning to look excited himself. “Tom and Jerry’s Artistic Deli, corner of Second and Forty-sixth—”

“The deli’s gone but the rose is there! That me walking down the street is going to see it,
and we can see it, too
!”

At that, Eddie’s own eyes blazed. “Come on, then,” he said. “We don’t want to lose you. Him. Whoever the fuck.”

“Don’t worry,” Jake said. “I know where he’s going.”

The Jake ahead of them—New York Jake, spring-of-1977 Jake—walked slowly, looking everywhere, clearly digging the day. Mid-World Jake remembered exactly how that boy had felt: the sudden relief when the arguing voices in his mind

(I died!)

(I didn’t!)

had finally stopped their squabbling. Back by the board fence that had been, where the two businessmen had been playing tic-tac-toe with a Mark Cross pen. And, of course, there had been the relief of being away from the Piper School and the insanity of his Final Essay for Ms. Avery’s English class. The Final Essay counted a full twenty-five per cent toward each student’s final grade, Ms. Avery had made that perfectly clear, and Jake’s had been gibberish. The fact that his teacher had later given him an A+ on it didn’t change that, only made it clear that it wasn’t just him; the whole world was losing its shit, going nineteen.

Being out from under all that—even for a little while—had been great. Of course he was digging the day.

Only the day’s not quite right,
Jake thought—the Jake walking along behind his old self.
Something about it
. . .

He looked around but couldn’t figure it out. Late May, bright summer sun, lots of strollers and window-shoppers on Second Avenue, plenty of taxis, the occasional long black limo; nothing wrong with any of this.

Except there was.

Everything
was wrong with it.

Eddie felt the kid twitch his sleeve. “What’s wrong with this picture?” Jake asked.

Eddie looked around. In spite of his own adjustment problems (his involved coming back to a New York that was clearly a few years behind his
when), he knew what Jake meant. Something
was
wrong.

He looked down at the sidewalk, suddenly sure he wouldn’t have a shadow. They’d lost their shadows like the kids in one of the stories . . . one of the nineteen fairy tales . . . or was it maybe something newer, like
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
or
Peter Pan
? One of what might be called the Modern Nineteen?

Didn’t matter in any case, because their shadows were there.

Shouldn’t be, though,
Eddie thought.
Shouldn’t be able to see our shadows when it’s this dark.

Stupid thought. It
wasn’t
dark. It was
morning,
for Christ’s sake, a bright May morning, sunshine winking off the chrome of passing cars and the windows of the stores on the east side of Second Avenue brightly enough to make you squint your eyes. Yet still it seemed somehow dark to Eddie, as if all this were nothing but fragile surface, like the canvas backdrop of a stage set. “At rise we see the Forest of Arden.” Or a Castle in Denmark. Or the Kitchen of Willy Loman’s House. In this case we see Second Avenue, midtown New York.

Yes, like that. Only behind this canvas you wouldn’t find the workshop and storage areas of backstage but only a great bulging darkness. Some vast dead universe where Roland’s Tower had already fallen.

Please let me be wrong,
Eddie thought.
Please let this just be a case of culture shock or the plain old heebie-jeebies
.

He didn’t think it was.

“How’d we get here?” he asked Jake. “There was no door . . . ” He trailed off, and then asked with some hope: “Maybe it
is
a dream?”

“No,” Jake said. “It’s more like when we traveled in the Wizard’s Glass. Except this time there was no ball.” A thought struck him. “Did you hear music, though? Chimes? Just before you wound up here?”

Eddie nodded. “It was sort of overwhelming. Made my eyes water.”

“Right,” Jake said. “Exactly.”

Oy sniffed a fire hydrant. Eddie and Jake paused to let the little guy lift his leg and add his own notice to what was undoubtedly an already crowded bulletin board. Ahead of them, that other Jake—Kid Seventy-seven—was still walking slowly and gawking everywhere. To Eddie he looked like a tourist from Michigan. He even craned up to see the tops of the buildings, and Eddie had an idea that if the New York Board of Cynicism caught you doing that, they took away your Bloomingdale’s charge card. Not that he was complaining; it made the kid easy to follow.

And just as Eddie was thinking that, Kid Seventy-seven disappeared.

“Where’d you go? Christ, where’d you go?”

“Relax,” Jake said. (At his ankle, Oy added his two cents’ worth: “Ax!”) The kid was grinning. “I just went into the bookstore. The . . . um . . . Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, it’s called.”

“Where you got
Charlie the Choo-Choo
and the riddle book?”

“Right.”

Eddie loved the mystified, dazzled grin Jake was wearing. It lit up his whole face. “Remember how excited Roland got when I told him the owner’s name?”

Eddie did. The owner of The Manhattan Restaurant
of the Mind was a fellow named Calvin Tower.

“Hurry up,” Jake said. “I want to watch.”

Eddie didn’t have to be asked twice. He wanted to watch, too.

Jake stopped in the doorway to the bookstore. His smile didn’t fade, exactly, but it faltered.

“What is it?” Eddie asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Dunno. Something’s different, I think. It’s just . . . so much has happened since I was here . . . ”

He was looking at the chalkboard in the window, which Eddie thought was actually a very clever way of selling books. It looked like the sort of thing you saw in diners, or maybe the fish markets.

TODAY’S SPECIALS

From Mississippi! Pan-Fried William Faulkner

Hardcovers Market Price

Vintage Library Paperbacks 75c each

From Maine! Chilled Stephen King

Hardcovers Market Price

Book Club Bargains

Paperbacks 75c each

From California! Hard-Boiled Raymond Chandler

Hardcovers Market Price

Paperbacks 7 for $5.00

Eddie looked beyond this and saw that other Jake—the one without the tan or the look of hard
clarity in his eyes—standing at a small display table. Kiddie books. Probably both the Nineteen Fairy Tales and the Modern Nineteen.

Quit it,
he told himself.
That’s obsessive-compulsive crap and you know it
.

Maybe, but good old Jake Seventy-seven was about to make a purchase from that table which had gone on to change—and very likely to save—their lives. He’d worry about the number nineteen later. Or not at all, if he could manage it.

“Come on,” he told Jake. “Let’s go in.”

The boy hung back.

“What’s the matter?” Eddie asked. “Tower won’t be able to see us, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“
Tower
won’t be able to,” Jake said, “but what if
he
can?” He pointed at his other self, the one who had yet to meet Gasher and Tick-Tock and the old people of River Crossing. The one who had yet to meet Blaine the Mono and Rhea of the Cöos.

Jake was looking at Eddie with a kind of haunted curiosity. “What if I see
myself
?”

Eddie supposed that might really happen. Hell,
anything
might happen. But that didn’t change what he felt in his heart. “I think we’re supposed to go in, Jake.”

“Yeah . . . ” It came out in a long sigh. “I do, too.”

They went in and they weren’t seen and Eddie was relieved to count twenty-one books on the display table that had attracted the boy’s notice. Except, of course, when Jake picked up the two he wanted—
Charlie the Choo-Choo
and the riddle book—that left nineteen.

“Find something, son?” a mild voice inquired. It was a fat fellow in an open-throated white shirt. Behind him, at a counter that looked as if it might have been filched from a turn-of-the-century soda fountain, a trio of old guys were drinking coffee and nibbling pastries. A chessboard with a game in progress sat on the marble counter.

“The guy sitting on the end is Aaron Deepneau,” Jake whispered. “He’s going to explain the riddle about Samson to me.”

“Shh!” Eddie said. He wanted to hear the conversation between Calvin Tower and Kid Seventy-seven. All of a sudden that seemed very important . . . only why was it so fucking
dark
in here?

Except it’s not dark at all
.
The east side of the street gets plenty of sun at this hour, and with the door open, this place is getting all of it. How can you say it’s dark?

Because it somehow was. The sunlight—the
contrast
of the sunlight—only made it worse. The fact that you couldn’t exactly
see
that darkness made it worse still . . . and Eddie realized a terrible thing: these people were in danger. Tower, Deepneau, Kid Seventy-seven. Probably him and Mid-World Jake and Oy, as well.

All of them.

Jake watched his other, younger self take a step back from the bookshop owner, his eyes widening in surprise.
Because his name is Tower,
Jake thought.
That’s what surprised me. Not because of Roland’s Tower,
though
—
I didn’t know about that yet
—
but because of the picture I put on the last page of my Final Essay
.

He had pasted a photo of the Leaning Tower of Pisa on the last page, then had scribbled all over it with a black Crayola, darkening it as best he could.

Tower asked him his name. Seventy-seven Jake told him and Tower joked around with him a little. It was good joking-around, the kind you got from adults who really didn’t mind kids.

“Good handle, pard,” Tower was saying. “Sounds like the footloose hero in a Western novel—the guy who blows into Black Fork, Arizona, cleans up the town, and then travels on. Something by Wayne D. Overholser, maybe . . . ”

Jake took a step closer to his old self (part of him was thinking what a wonderful sketch all this would make on
Saturday Night Live
), and his eyes widened slightly. “Eddie!” He was still whispering, although he knew the people in the bookstore couldn’t—

Except maybe on some level they could. He remembered the lady back on Fifty-fourth Street, twitching her skirt up at the knee so she could step over Oy. And now Calvin Tower’s eyes shifted slightly in his direction before going back to the other version of him.