Wolves of the Calla (36 page)

“I know you would,” Roland said.

“It’s the rose I care about,” Eddie said. “That’s the only thing worth risking her for. But even so, you’ve got to promise me that if things go wrong—if she goes into labor, or if this Mia chick starts taking over—we’ll try to save her.”

“I would always try to save her,” Roland said, and then had a brief, nightmare image—brief but very clear—of Jake dangling over the drop under the mountains.

“You swear that?” Eddie asked.

“Yes,” Roland said. His eyes met those of the younger man. In his mind, however, he saw Jake falling into the abyss.

They reached the rectory door just as Callahan was ushering the two young people out. They were, Roland thought, very likely the most gorgeous children he had ever seen. Their hair was black as coal, the boy’s shoulder-length, the girl’s bound by a white ribbon and falling all the way to her bottom. Their eyes were dark, perfect blue. Their skin was creamy-pale, their lips a startling, sensuous red. There were faint spatters of freckles on their cheeks. So far as Roland could tell, the spatters were also identical. They looked from him to Eddie and then back to Susannah, who leaned in the kitchen doorway with a dish-wiper in one hand and a coffee cup in the other. Their shared expression was one of curious wonder. He saw caution in their faces, but no fear.

“Roland, Eddie, I’d like you to meet the Tavery twins, Frank and Francine. Rosalita fetched them—the Taverys live not half a mile away, do ya. You’ll have your map by this afternoon, and I doubt if you’ll ever have seen a finer one in all your life. It’s but one of the talents they have.”

The Tavery twins made their manners, Frank with a bow and Francine with a curtsy.

“You do us well and we say thankya,” Roland told them.

An identical blush suffused their astoundingly creamy complexions; they muttered their thanks and prepared to slip away. Before they could, Roland put an arm around each narrow but well-made pair of shoulders and led the twins a little way down the walk. He was taken less by their perfect child’s beauty than by the piercing intelligence he saw in their blue eyes. He had no doubt they would make his map; he also had no doubt that Callahan had had Rosalita fetch them as a kind of object lesson, were one still needed: with no interference, one of these beautiful children would be a grizzling idiot a month from now.

“Sai?” Frank asked. Now there
was
a touch of worry in his voice.

“Fear me not,” Roland said, “but hear me well.”

Callahan and Eddie watched Roland walk the Tavery twins slowly along the rectory’s flagstoned path and toward the dirt drive. Both men shared the same thought: Roland looked like a benevolent gran-pere.

Susannah joined them, watched, then plucked Eddie’s shirt. “Come with me a minute.”

He followed her into the kitchen. Rosalita was gone and they had it to themselves. Susannah’s brown eyes were enormous, shining.

“What is it?” he asked her.

“Pick me up.”

He did.

“Now kiss me quick, while you have the chance.”

“Is that all you want?”

“Isn’t it enough? It better be, Mister Dean.”

He kissed her, and willingly, but couldn’t help marking how much larger her breasts were as they pressed against him. When he drew his face away from hers, he found himself looking for traces of the other one in her face. The one who called herself Mother in the High Speech. He saw only Susannah, but he supposed that from now on he would be condemned to look. And his eyes kept trying to go to her belly. He tried to keep them away, but it was as if they were weighted. He wondered how much that was between them would change now. It was not a pleasant speculation.

“Is that better?” he asked.

“Much.” She smiled a little, and then the smile faded. “Eddie? Is something wrong?”

He grinned and kissed her again. “You mean other than that we’re all probably gonna die here? Nope. Nothing at all.”

Had he lied to her before? He couldn’t remember, but he didn’t think so. And even if he had, he had never done so with such baldness. With such calculation.

This was bad.

Ten minutes later, rearmed with fresh mugs of coffee (and a bowl of pokeberries), they went out into the rectory’s small back yard. The gunslinger lifted his face into the sun for a moment, relishing its weight and heat. Then he turned to Callahan. “We three would hear your story now, Pere, if you’d tell it. And then mayhap stroll up to your church and see what’s there.”

“I want you to take it,” Callahan said. “It hasn’t desecrated the church, how could it when Our Lady was never consecrated to begin with? But it’s changed it for the worse. Even when the church was still a-building, I felt the spirit of God inside it. No more. That thing has driven it out. I want you to take it.”

Roland opened his mouth to say something noncommittal, but Susannah spoke before he could. “Roland? You all right?”

He turned to her. “Why, yes. Why would I not be?”

“You keep rubbing your hip.”

Had he been? Yes, he saw, he had. The pain was creeping back already, in spite of the warm sun, in spite of Rosalita’s cat-oil. The dry twist.

“It’s nothing,” he told her. “Just a touch of the rheumatiz.”

She looked at him doubtfully, then seemed to accept.
This is a hell of a way to start,
Roland thought,
with at least two of us keeping secrets. We can’t go on so. Not for long.

He turned to Callahan. “Tell us your tale. How you came by your scars, how you came here, and how you came by Black Thirteen. We would hear every word.”

“Yes,” Eddie murmured.

“Every word,” Susannah echoed.

All three of them looked at Callahan—the Old Fella, the religious who would allow himself to be called Pere but not priest. His twisted right hand went to the scar on his forehead and rubbed at it. At last he said: “ ’Twas the drink. That’s what I believe now. Not God, not devils, not predestination, not the company of saints. ’Twas the drink.” He paused, thinking, then smiled at them. Roland remembered Nort, the weed-eater in Tull who had been brought back from the dead by the man in black. Nort had smiled like that. “But if God made the world, then God made the drink. And that is also His will.”

Ka,
Roland thought.

Callahan sat quiet, rubbing the scarred crucifix on his forehead, gathering his thoughts. And then he began to tell his story.

It was the drink, that was what he came to believe when he finally stopped it and clarity came. Not God, not Satan, not some deep psychosexual battle between his blessed mither and his blessed Da’. Just the drink. And was it surprising that whiskey should have taken him by the ears? He was Irish, he was a priest, one more strike and you’re out.

From seminary in Boston he’d gone to a city parish in Lowell, Massachusetts. His parishioners had loved him (he wouldn’t refer to them as his flock, flocks were what you called seagulls on their way to the town dump), but after seven years in Lowell, Callahan had grown uneasy. When talking to Bishop Dugan in the Diocese office, he had used all the correct buzzwords of the time to express this unease: anomie, urban malaise, an increasing lack of empathy, a sense of disconnection from the life of the spirit. He’d had a nip in the bathroom before his appointment (followed by a couple of Wintergreen Life Savers, no fool he), and had been particularly eloquent that day. Eloquence does not always proceed from belief, but often proceeds from the bottle. And he was no
liar. He
had
believed what he was saying that day in Dugan’s study. Every word. As he believed in Freud, the future of the Mass spoken in English, the nobility of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and the idiocy of his widening war in Vietnam: waist-deep in the Wide Muddy, and the big fool said to push on, as the old folk-tune had it. He believed in large part because those ideas (if they
were
ideas and not just cocktail-party chatter) had been currently trading high on the intellectual Big Board. Social Conscience is up two and a third, Hearth and Home down a quarter but still your basic blue-chip stock. Later it all became simpler. Later he came to understand that he wasn’t drinking too much because he was spiritually unsettled but spiritually unsettled because he was drinking too much. You wanted to protest, to say
that
couldn’t be it, or not
just
that, it was too simple. But it
was
that, just that. God’s voice is still and small, the voice of a sparrow in a cyclone, so said the prophet Isaiah, and we all say thankya. It’s hard to hear a small voice clearly if you’re shitass drunk most of the time. Callahan left America for Roland’s world before the computer revolution spawned the acronym GIGO—garbage in, garbage out—but in plenty of time to hear someone at an AA meeting observe that if you put an asshole on a plane in San Francisco and flew him to the east coast, the same asshole got off in Boston. Usually with four or five drinks under his belt. But that was later. In 1964 he had believed what he believed, and plenty of people had been anxious to help him find his way. From Lowell he had gone to Spofford, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton.
There he stayed for five years, and then he began to feel restless again. Consequently, he began to talk the talk again. The kind the Diocesan Office listened to. The kind that got you moved on down the line. Anomie. Spiritual disconnection (this time from his suburban parishioners). Yes, they liked him (and he liked them), but something still seemed to be wrong. And there
was
something wrong, mostly in the quiet bar on the corner (where everybody
also
liked him) and in the liquor cabinet in the rectory living room. Beyond small doses, alcohol is a toxin, and Callahan was poisoning himself on a nightly basis. It was the poison in his system, not the state of the world or that of his own soul, which was bringing him down. Had it always been that obvious? Later (at another AA meeting) he’d heard a guy refer to alcoholism and addiction as the elephant in the living room: how could you miss it? Callahan hadn’t told him, he’d still been in the first ninety days of sobriety at that point and that meant he was supposed to just sit there and be quiet (“Take the cotton out of your ears and stick it in your mouth,” the old-timers advised, and we all say thankya), but he
could
have told him, yes indeed. You could miss the elephant if it was a
magic
elephant, if it had the power—like The Shadow—to cloud men’s minds. To actually make you believe that your problems were spiritual and mental but absolutely not boozical. Good Christ, just the alcohol-related loss of the REM sleep was enough to screw you up righteously, but somehow you never thought of that while you were active. Booze turned your thought-processes into something
akin to that circus routine where all the clowns come piling out of the little car. When you looked back in sobriety, the things you’d said and done made you wince (“I’d sit in a bar solving all the problems of the world, then not be able to find my car in the parking lot,” one fellow at a meeting remembered, and we all say thankya). The things you
thought
were even worse. How could you spend the morning puking and the afternoon believing you were having a spiritual crisis? Yet he had. And his superiors had, possibly because more than a few of them were having their own problems with the magic elephant. Callahan began thinking that a smaller church, a rural parish, would put him back in touch with God and himself. And so, in the spring of 1969, he found himself in New England again. Northern New England, this time. He had set up shop—bag and baggage, crucifix and chasuble—in the pleasant little town of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine. There he had finally met real evil. Looked it in the face.

And flinched.

“A writer came to me,” he said. “A man named Ben Mears.”

“I think I read one of his books,” Eddie said. “
Air Dance,
it was called. About a man who gets hung for the murder his brother committed?”

Callahan nodded. “That’s the one. There was also a teacher named Matthew Burke, and they both believed there was a vampire at work in ’Salem’s Lot, the kind who makes other vampires.”

“Is there any other kind?” Eddie asked, remembering about a hundred movies at the Majestic and maybe a thousand comic books purchased at (and sometimes stolen from) Dahlie’s.

“There is, and we’ll get there, but never mind that now. Most of all, there was a boy who believed. He was about the same age as your Jake. They didn’t convince me—not at first—but
they
were convinced, and it was hard to stand against their belief. Also,
something
was going on in The Lot, that much was certain. People were disappearing. There was an atmosphere of terror in the town. Impossible to describe it now, sitting here in the sun, but it was there. I had to officiate at the funeral of another boy. His name was Daniel Glick. I doubt he was this vampire’s first victim in The Lot, and he certainly wasn’t the last, but he was the first one who turned up dead. On the day of Danny Glick’s burial, my life changed, somehow. And I’m not talking about the quart of whiskey a day anymore, either. Something changed in my
head
. I felt it. Like a switch turning. And although I haven’t had a drink in years, that switch is still turned.”

Susannah thought:
That’s when you went todash, Father Callahan.

Eddie thought:
That’s when you went nineteen, pal. Or maybe it’s ninety-nine. Or maybe it’s both, somehow.

Roland simply listened. His mind was clear of reflection, a perfect receiving machine.

“The writer, Mears, had fallen in love with a town girl named Susan Norton. The vampire took her. I believe he did it partly because he could, and partly to punish Mears for daring to form a group—a ka-tet—that would try to hunt him. We went to the
place the vampire had bought, an old wreck called the Marsten House. The thing staying there went by the name of Barlow.”