Wolves of the Calla (99 page)

“Eddie,” Roland said.

Eddie looked over his shoulder and gave him Roland’s own impatient twirl of the hand:
let’s go
.

Roland pointed at the track, instead. “This was some sort of motor.”

“Did you hear one?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t know that.”

“But I do,” Roland said. “Someone sent her a ride. Or some
thing
.”

“You can’t
know
that, goddam you!”

“Andy could have left a ride for her,” Jake said. “If someone told him to.”

“Who would have told him to do a thing like that?” Eddie rasped.

Finli,
Jake thought.
Finli o’ Tego, whoever he is. Or maybe Walter
. But he said nothing. Eddie was upset enough already.

Roland said, “She’s gotten away. Prepare yourself for it.”

“Go fuck yourself!” Eddie snarled, and turned to the path leading upward. “Come on!”

Yet in his heart, Eddie knew Roland was right. He attacked the path to the Doorway Cave not with hope but with a kind of desperate determination. At the place where the boulder had fallen, blocking most of the path, they found an abandoned vehicle with three balloon tires and an electric motor that was still softly humming, a low and constant
ummmmm
sound. To Eddie, the gadget looked like one of those funky ATV things they sold at Abercrombie & Fitch. There was a handgrip accelerator and handgrip brakes. He bent close and read what was stamped into the steel of the left one:

Behind the bicycle-style seat was a little carry-case. Eddie flipped it up and was totally unsurprised to see a six-pack of Nozz-A-La, the drink favored by discriminating bumhugs everywhere. One can had
been taken off the ring. She’d been thirsty, of course. Moving fast made you thirsty. Especially if you were in labor.

“This came from the place across the river,” Jake murmured. “The Dogan. If I’d gone out back, I would have seen it parked there. A whole fleet of them, probably. I bet it
was
Andy.”

Eddie had to admit it made sense. The Dogan was clearly an outpost of some sort, probably one that predated the current unpleasant residents of Thunderclap. This was exactly the sort of vehicle you’d want to make patrols on, given the terrain.

From this vantage-point beside the fallen boulder, Eddie could see the battleground where they’d stood against the Wolves, throwing plates and lead. That stretch of East Road was so full of people it made him think of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The whole Calla was out there partying, and oh how Eddie hated them in that moment.
My wife’s gone because of you chickenshit motherfuckers,
he thought. It was a stupid idea, stupendously unkind, as well, yet it offered a certain hateful satisfaction. What was it that poem by Stephen Crane had said, the one they’d read back in high school? “I like it because it is bitter, and because it is my heart.” Something like that. Close enough for government work.

Now Roland was standing beside the abandoned, softly humming trike, and if it was sympathy he saw in the gunslinger’s eyes—or, worse, pity—he wanted none of it.

“Come on, you guys. Let’s find her.”

This time the voice that greeted them from the Doorway Cave’s depths belonged to a woman Eddie had never actually met, although he had heard of her—aye, much, say thankya—and knew her voice at once.

“She’s gone, ye great dick-led galoot!” cried Rhea of the Cöos from the darkness. “Taken her labor elsewhere, ye ken! And I’ve no doubt that when her cannibal baby finally comes out, it’ll munch its mother north from the cunt, aye!” She laughed, a perfect (and perfectly grating) Witch Hazel cackle. “No titty-milk fer this one, ye grobbut lost lad! This one’ll have
meat
!”

“Shut up!” Eddie screamed into the darkness. “Shut up, you . . . you fucking
phantom
!”

And for a wonder, the phantom did.

Eddie looked around. He saw Tower’s goddamned two-shelf bookcase—first editions under glass, may they do ya fine—but no pink metal-mesh bag with
MID-WORLD LANES
printed on it; no engraved ghostwood box, either. The unfound door was still here, its hinges still hooked to nothing, but now it had a strangely dull look. Not just unfound but unremembered; only one more useless piece of a world that had moved on.

“No,” Eddie said. “No, I don’t accept that. The power is still here.
The power is still here
.”

He turned to Roland, but Roland wasn’t looking at him. Incredibly, Roland was studying the books. As if the search for Susannah had begun to bore him and he was looking for a good read to pass the time.

Eddie took Roland’s shoulder, turned him. “What happened, Roland? Do you know?”

“What happened is obvious,” Roland said. Callahan had come up beside him. Only Jake, who was visiting the Doorway Cave for the first time, hung back at the entrance. “She took her wheelchair as far as she could, then went on her hands and knees to the foot of the path, no mean feat for a woman who’s probably in labor. At the foot of the path, someone—probably Andy, just as Jake says—left her a ride.”

“If it was Slightman, I’ll go back and kill him myself.”

Roland shook his head. “Not Slightman.”
But Slightman might know for sure,
he thought. It probably didn’t matter, but he liked loose ends no more than he liked crooked pictures hanging on walls.

“Hey, bro, sorry to tell you this, but your poke-bitch is dead,” Henry Dean called up from deep in the cave. He didn’t sound sorry; he sounded gleeful. “Damn thing ate her all the way up! Only stopped long enough on its way to the brain to spit out her teeth!”

“Shut up!”
Eddie screamed.

“The brain’s the ultimate brain-food, you know,” Henry said. He had assumed a mellow, scholarly tone. “Revered by cannibals the world over. That’s quite the chap she’s got, Eddie! Cute but
hongry
.”

“Be still, in the name of God!” Callahan cried, and the voice of Eddie’s brother ceased. For the time being, at least, all the voices ceased.

Roland went on as if he had never been interrupted. “She came here. Took the bag. Opened
the box so that Black Thirteen would open the door. Mia, this is—not Susannah but Mia. Daughter of none. And then, still carrying the open box, she went through. On the other side she closed the box, closing the door. Closing it against us.”

“No,” Eddie said, and grabbed the crystal doorknob with the rose etched into its geometric facets. It wouldn’t turn. There was not so much as a single iota of give.

From the darkness, Elmer Chambers said: “If you’d been quicker, son, you could have saved your friend. It’s your fault.” And fell silent again.

“It’s not real, Jake,” Eddie said, and rubbed a finger across the rose. The tip of his finger came away dusty. As if the unfound door had stood here, unused as well as unfound, for a score of centuries. “It just broadcasts the worst stuff it can find in your own head.”

“I was always hatin yo’ guts, honky!” Detta cried triumphantly from the darkness beyond the door. “Ain’t I glad to be shed of you!”

“Like that,” Eddie said, cocking a thumb in the direction of the voice.

Jake nodded, pale and thoughtful. Roland, meanwhile, had turned back to Tower’s bookcase.

“Roland?” Eddie tried to keep the irritation out of his voice, or at least add a little spark of humor to it, and failed at both. “Are we boring you, here?”

“No,” Roland said.

“Then I wish you’d stop looking at those books and help me think of a way to open this d—”

“I know how to open it,” Roland said. “The first question is where will it take us now that the ball is
gone? The second question is where do we want to go? After Mia, or to the place where Tower and his friend are hiding from Balazar and
his
friends?”

“We go after Susannah!” Eddie shouted. “Have you been listening to any of the shit those voices are saying? They’re saying it’s a cannibal! My wife could be giving birth to some kind of a cannibal monster
right now,
and if you think anything’s more important than that—”

“The
Tower’s
more important,” Roland said. “And somewhere on the other side of this door there’s a man whose
name
is Tower. A man who owns a certain vacant lot and a certain rose growing there.”

Eddie looked at him uncertainly. So did Jake and Callahan. Roland turned again to the little bookcase. It looked strange indeed, here in this rocky darkness.

“And he owns these books,” Roland mused. “He risked all things to save them.”

“Yeah, because he’s one obsessed motherfucker.”

“Yet all things serve ka and follow the Beam,” Roland said, and selected a volume from the upper shelf of the bookcase. Eddie saw it had been placed in there upside down, which struck him as a very un-Calvin Tower thing to do.

Roland held the book in his seamed, weather-chapped hands, seeming to debate which one to give it to. He looked at Eddie . . . looked at Callahan . . . and then gave the book to Jake.

“Read me what it says on the front,” he said. “The words of your world make my head hurt. They swim to my eye easily enough, but when I reach my mind toward them, most swim away again.”

Jake was paying little attention; his eyes were riveted on the book jacket with its picture of a little country church at sunset. Callahan, meanwhile, had stepped past him in order to get a closer look at the door standing here in the gloomy cave.

At last the boy looked up. “But . . . Roland, isn’t this the town Pere Callahan told us about? The one where the vampire broke his cross and made him drink his blood?”

Callahan whirled away from the door.
“What?”

Jake held the book out wordlessly. Callahan took it. Almost snatched it.

“ ’
Salem’s Lot,
” he read. “A novel by Stephen King.” He looked up at Eddie, then at Jake. “Heard of him? Either of you? He’s not from my time, I don’t think.”

Jake shook his head. Eddie began to shake his, as well, and then he saw something. “That church,” he said. “It looks like the Calla Gathering Hall. Close enough to be its twin, almost.”

“It also looks like the East Stoneham Methodist Meeting Hall, built in 1819,” Callahan said, “so I guess this time we’ve got a case of triplets.” But his voice sounded faraway to his own ears, as hollow as the false voices which floated up from the bottom of the cave. All at once he felt false to himself, not real. He felt
nineteen
.

It’s a joke,
part of his mind assured him.
It must be a joke, the cover of this book says it’s a novel, so
—

Then an idea struck him, and he felt a surge of relief. It was
conditional
relief, but surely better than
none at all. The idea was that sometimes people wrote make-believe stories about real places. That was it, surely. Had to be.

“Look at page one hundred and nineteen,” Roland said. “I could make out a little of it, but not all. Not nearly enough.”

Callahan found the page, and read this:

“ ‘In the early days at the seminary, a friend of Father . . . ’ ” He trailed off, eyes racing ahead over the words on the page.

“Go on,” Eddie said. “You read it, Father, or I will.”

Slowly, Callahan resumed.

“ ‘. . . a friend of Father Callahan’s had given him a blasphemous crewelwork sampler which had sent him into gales of horrified laughter at the time, but which seemed more true and less blasphemous as the years passed:
God grant me the SERENITY to accept what I cannot change, the TENACITY to change what I may, and the GOOD LUCK not to fuck up too often
. This in Old English script with a rising sun in the background.

“ ‘Now, standing before Danny Glick’s . . . Danny Glick’s mourners, that old credo . . . that old credo returned.’ ”

The hand holding the book sagged. If Jake hadn’t caught it, it probably would have tumbled to the floor of the cave.

“You had it, didn’t you?” Eddie said. “You actually had a sampler saying that.”

“Frankie Foyle gave it to me,” Callahan said. His voice was hardly more than a whisper. “Back in seminary. And Danny Glick . . . I officiated at his funeral, I think I told you that. That was
when everything seemed to change, somehow. But this is a
novel
! A novel is
fiction
! How . . . how can it . . . ” His voice suddenly rose to a damned howl. To Roland it sounded eerily like the false voices that rose up from below.
“Damn it, I’m a REAL PERSON!”

“Here’s the part where the vampire broke your cross,” Jake reported. “ ‘ “Together at last!” Barlow said, smiling. His face was strong and intelligent and handsome in a sharp, forbidding sort of way—yet, as the light shifted, it seemed—’ ”

“Stop,” Callahan said dully. “It makes my head hurt.”

“It says his face reminded you of the bogeyman who lived in your closet when you were a kid. Mr. Flip.”

Callahan’s face was now so pale he might have been a vampire’s victim himself. “I never told anyone about Mr. Flip, not even my mother. That can’t be in that book. It just can’t be.”

“It is,” Jake said simply.

“Let’s get this straight,” Eddie said. “When you were a kid, there
was
a Mr. Flip, and you
did
think of him when you faced this particular Type One vampire, Barlow. Correct?”

“Yes, but—”

Eddie turned to the gunslinger. “Is this getting us any closer to Susannah, do you think?”

“Yes. We’ve reached the heart of a great mystery. Perhaps
the
great mystery. I believe the Dark Tower is almost close enough to touch. And if the Tower is close, Susannah is, too.”

Ignoring him, Callahan was flipping through the book. Jake was looking over his shoulder.

“And you know how to open that door?” Eddie pointed at it.

“Yes,” Roland said. “I’d need help, but I think the people of Calla Bryn Sturgis owe us a little help, don’t you?”