Wolves of the Calla (80 page)

They hadn’t gone far before Jake realized Oy was following an actual path that wound through the hilly, rocky, arid land on this side of the river. He began to see signs of technology: a cast-off, rusty
electrical coil, something that looked like an ancient circuit-board poking out of the sand, tiny shards and shatters of glass. In the black moonlight-created shadow of a large boulder, he spied what looked like a whole bottle. He dismounted, picked it up, poured out God knew how many decades (or centuries) of accumulated sand, and looked at it. Written on the side in raised letters was a word he recognized: Nozz-A-La.

“The drink of finer bumhugs everywhere,” Jake murmured, and put the bottle down again. Beside it was a crumpled-up cigarette pack. He smoothed it out, revealing a picture of a red-lipped woman wearing a jaunty red hat. She was holding a cigarette between two glamorously long fingers.
PARTI
appeared to be the brand name.

Oy, meanwhile, was standing ten or twelve yards farther along and looking back at him over one low shoulder.

“Okay,” Jake said. “I’m coming.”

Other paths joined the one they were on, and Jake realized this was a continuation of the East Road. He could see only a few scattered bootprints and smaller, deeper footprints. These were in places guarded by high rocks—wayside coves the prevailing winds didn’t often reach. He guessed the bootprints were Slightman’s, the deep footprints Andy’s. There were no others. But there
would
be, and not many days from now, either. The prints of the Wolves’ gray horses, coming out of the east. They would also be deep prints, Jake reckoned. Deep like Andy’s.

Up ahead, the path breasted the top of a hill. On either side were fantastically misshapen organ-pipe
cactuses with great thick barrel arms that seemed to point every which way. Oy was standing there, looking down at something, and once more seeming to grin. As Jake approached him, he could smell the cactus-plants. The odor was bitter and tangy. It reminded him of his father’s martinis.

He sat astride his pony beside Oy, looking down. At the bottom of the hill on the right was a shattered concrete driveway. A sliding gate had been frozen half-open ages ago, probably long before the Wolves started raiding the borderland Callas for children. Beyond it was a building with a curved metal roof. Small windows lined the side Jake could see, and his heart lifted at the sight of the steady white glow that came through them. Not ’seners, and not lightbulbs, either (what Roland called “sparklights”). Only fluorescents threw that kind of white light. In his New York life, fluorescent lights made him think mostly of unhappy, boring things: giant stores where everything was always on sale and you could never find what you wanted, sleepy afternoons at school when the teacher droned on and on about the trade routes of ancient China or the mineral deposits of Peru and rain poured endlessly down outside and it seemed the Closing Bell would never ring, doctors’ offices where you always wound up sitting on a tissue-covered exam table in your underpants, cold and embarrassed and somehow positive that you would be getting a shot.

Tonight, though, those lights cheered him up.

“Good boy!” he told the bumbler.

Instead of responding as he usually did, by repeating his name, Oy looked past Jake and commenced a low growl. At the same moment the pony
shifted and gave a nervous whinny. Jake reined him, realizing that bitter (but not entirely unpleasant) smell of gin and juniper had gotten stronger. He looked around and saw two spiny barrels of the cactus-tangle on his right swiveling slowly and blindly toward him. There was a faint grinding sound, and dribbles of white sap were running down the cactus’s central barrel. The needles on the arms swinging toward Jake looked long and wicked in the moonlight. The thing had smelled him, and it was hungry.

“Come on,” he told Oy, and booted the pony’s sides lightly. The pony needed no further urging. It hurried downhill, not quite trotting, toward the building with the fluorescent lights. Oy gave the moving cactus a final mistrustful look, then followed them.

Jake reached the driveway and stopped. About fifty yards farther down the road (it was now very definitely a road, or had been once upon a time), train-tracks crossed and then ran on toward the Devar-Tete Whye, where a low bridge took them across. The
folken
called that bridge “the causeway.” The older
folken,
Callahan had told them, called it the
devil’s
causeway.

“The trains that bring the roont ones back from Thunderclap come on those tracks,” he murmured to Oy. And did he feel the tug of the Beam? Jake was sure he did. He had an idea that when they left Calla Bryn Sturgis—
if
they left Calla Bryn Sturgis—it would be along those tracks.

He stood where he was a moment longer, feet out of the stirrups, then headed the pony up the crumbling driveway toward the building. To Jake it looked like a Quonset hut on a military base. Oy, with his short legs, was having hard going on the broken-up surface. That busted-up paving would be dangerous for his horse, too. Once the frozen gate was behind them, he dismounted and looked for a place to tether his mount. There were bushes close by, but something told him they were
too
close. Too visible. He led the pony out onto the hardpan, stopped, and looked around at Oy. “Stay!”

“Stay! Oy! Ake!”

Jake found more bushes behind a pile of boulders like a strew of huge and eroded toy blocks. Here he felt satisified enough to tether the pony. Once it was done, he stroked the long, velvety muzzle. “Not long,” he said. “Can you be good?”

The pony blew through his nose and appeared to nod. Which meant exactly nothing, Jake knew. And it was probably a needless precaution, anyway. Still, better safe than sorry. He went back to the driveway and bent to scoop the bumbler up. As soon as he straightened, a row of brilliant lights flashed on, pinning him like a bug on a microscope stage. Holding Oy in the curve of one arm, Jake raised the other to shield his eyes. Oy whined and blinked.

There was no warning shout, no stern request for identification, only the faint snuffle of the breeze. The lights were turned on by motion-sensors, Jake guessed. What came next? Machine-gun fire directed by dipolar computers? A scurry
of small but deadly robots like those Roland, Eddie, and Susannah had dispatched in the clearing where the Beam they were following had begun? Maybe a big net dropping from overhead, like in this jungle movie he’d seen once on TV?

Jake looked up. There was no net. No machine-guns, either. He started walking forward again, picking his way around the deepest of the potholes and jumping over a washout. Beyond this latter, the driveway was tilted and cracked but mostly whole. “You can get down now,” he told Oy. “Boy, you’re heavy. Watch out or I’ll have to stick you in Weight Watchers.”

He looked straight ahead, squinting and shielding his eyes from the fierce glare. The lights were in a row running just beneath the Quonset’s curved roof. They threw his shadow out behind him, long and black. He saw rock-cat corpses, two on his left and two more on his right. Three of them were little more than skeletons. The fourth was in a high state of decomposition, but Jake could see a hole that looked too big for a bullet. He thought it had been made by a bah-bolt. The idea was comforting. No weapons of super-science at work here. Still, he was crazy not to be hightailing it back toward the river and the Calla beyond it. Wasn’t he?

“Crazy,” he said.

“Razy,” Oy said, once more padding along at Jake’s heel.

A minute later they reached the door of the hut. Above it, on a rusting steel plate, was this:

On the door itself, now hanging crooked by only two screws, was another sign. A joke? Some sort of nickname? Jake thought it might be a little of both. The letters were choked with rust and eroded by God knew how many years of blowing sand and grit, but he could still read them:

Jake expected the door to be locked and wasn’t disappointed. The lever handle moved up and down only the tiniest bit. He guessed that when it had been new, there’d been no give in it at all. To the left of the door was a rusty steel panel with a button and a speaker grille. Beneath it was the word
VERBAL
. Jake reached for the button, and suddenly the lights lining the top of the building went out, leaving him in what at first seemed like utter darkness.
They’re on a timer,
he thought, waiting for his eyes to adjust.
A pretty short one. Or maybe they’re just getting tired, like everything else the Old People left behind.

His eyes readapted to the moonlight and he could see the entry-box again. He had a pretty
good idea of what the verbal entry code must be. He pushed the button.

“WELCOME TO ARC QUADRANT OUTPOST 16,” said a voice. Jake jumped back, stifling a cry. He had expected a voice, but not one so eerily like that of Blaine the Mono. He almost expected it to drop into a John Wayne drawl and call him little trailhand. “THIS IS A MEDIUM SECURITY OUTPOST. PLEASE GIVE THE VERBAL ENTRY CODE. YOU HAVE TEN SECONDS. NINE . . . EIGHT . . . ”

“Nineteen,” Jake said.

“INCORRECT ENTRY CODE. YOU MAY RETRY ONCE. FIVE . . . FOUR . . . THREE . . . ”

“Ninety-nine,” Jake said.

“THANK YOU.”

The door clicked open.

Jake and Oy walked into a room that reminded him of the vast control-area Roland had carried him through beneath the city of Lud, as they had followed the steel ball which had guided them to Blaine’s cradle. This room was smaller, of course, but many of the dials and panels looked the same. There were chairs at some of the consoles, the kind that would roll along the floor so that the people who worked here could move from place to place without getting to their feet. There was a steady sigh of fresh air, but Jake could hear occasional rough rattling sounds from the machinery driving it. And while three-quarters of the panels were lighted, he could see a good many that were dark. Old and
tired: he had been right about that. In one corner was a grinning skeleton in the remains of a brown khaki uniform.

On one side of the room was a bank of TV monitors. They reminded Jake a little bit of his father’s study at home, although his father had had only three screens—one for each network—and here there were . . . he counted. Thirty. Three of them were fuzzy, showing pictures he couldn’t really make out. Two were rolling rapidly up and up, as if the vertical hold had fritzed out. Four were entirely dark. The other twenty-one were projecting pictures, and Jake looked at these with growing wonder. Half a dozen showed various expanses of desert, including the hilltop guarded by the two misshapen cactuses. Two more showed the outpost—the Dogan—from behind and from the driveway side. Under these were three screens showing the Dogan’s interior. One showed a room that looked like a galley or kitchen. The second showed a small bunkhouse that looked equipped to sleep eight (in one of the bunks, an upper, Jake spied another skeleton). The third inside-the-Dogan screen presented this room, from a high angle. Jake could see himself and Oy. There was a screen with a stretch of the railroad tracks on it, and one showing the Little Whye from this side, moonstruck and beautiful. On the far right was the causeway with the train-tracks crossing it.

It was the images on the other eight operating screens that astounded Jake. One showed Took’s General Store, now dark and deserted, closed up till daylight. One showed the Pavilion. Two showed the Calla high street. Another showed Our Lady of
Serenity Church, and one showed the living room of the rectory . . .
inside
the rectory! Jake could actually see the Pere’s cat, Snugglebutt, lying asleep on the hearth. The other two showed angles of what Jake assumed was the Manni village (he had not been there).

Where in hell’s name are the
cameras? Jake wondered.
How come nobody sees them?

Because they were too small, he supposed. And because they’d been hidden.
Smile, you’re on Candid Camera
.

But the church . . . the rectory . . . those were buildings that hadn’t even
existed
in the Calla until a few years previous. And
inside
?
Inside
the rectory? Who had put a camera there, and when?

Jake didn’t know when, but he had a terrible idea that he knew who. Thank God they’d done most of their palavering on the porch, or outside on the lawn. But still, how much must the Wolves—or their masters—know? How much had the infernal machines of this place, the infernal
fucking
machines of this place, recorded?

And transmitted?

Jake felt pain in his hands and realized they were tightly clenched, the nails biting into his palms. He opened them with an effort. He kept expecting the voice from the speaker-grille—the voice so much like Blaine’s—to challenge him, ask him what he was doing here. But it was mostly silent in this room of not-quite-ruin; no sounds but the low hum of the equipment and the occasionally raspy whoosh of the air-exchangers. He looked over his shoulder at the door and saw it had closed behind him on a pneumatic hinge. He wasn’t worried
about that; from this side it would probably open easily. If it didn’t, good old ninety-nine would get him out again. He remembered introducing himself to the
folken
that first night in the Pavilion, a night that already seemed a long time ago.
I am Jake Chambers, son of Elmer, the Line of Eld,
he had told them.
The ka-tet of the Ninety and Nine
. Why had he said that? He didn’t know. All he knew was that things kept showing up again. In school, Ms. Avery had read them a poem called “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats. There had been something in it about a hawk turning and turning in a widening gyre, which was—according to Ms. Avery—a kind of circle. But here things were in a spiral, not a circle. For the Ka-Tet of Nineteen (or of the Ninety and Nine; Jake had an idea they were really the same), things were tightening up even as the world around them grew old, grew loose, shut down, shed pieces of itself. It was like being in the cyclone which had carried Dorothy off to the Land of Oz, where witches were real and bumhugs ruled. To Jake’s heart it made perfect sense that they should be seeing the same things over and over, and more and more often, because—