Wolves of the Calla - Page 18/26

ONE

"Beds're ready," Rosalita Munoz said when they got back.

Eddie was so tired that he believed she'd said something else entirely - Time to weed the garden , perhaps, or There's fifty or sixty more people'd like 't'meet ye waitin up to the church . After all, who spoke of beds at three in the afternoon?

"Huh?" Susannah asked blearily. "What-say, hon? Didn't quite catch it."

"Beds're ready," the Pere's woman of work repeated. "You two'll go where ye slept night before last; young soh's to have the Pere's bed. And the bumbler can go in with ye, Jake, if ye'd like; Pere said for me to tell'ee so. He'd be here to tell you himself, but it's his afternoon for sick-rounds. He takes the Communion to em." She said this last with unmistakable pride.

"Beds," Eddie said. He couldn't quite get the sense of this. He looked around, as if to confirm that it was still midafternoon, the sun still shining brightly. "Beds?"

"Pere saw'ee at the store," Rosalita amplified, "and thought ye'd want naps after talking to all those people."

Eddie understood at last. He supposed that at some point in his life he must have felt more grateful for a kindness, but he honestly couldn't remember when or what that kindness might have been. At first those approaching them as they sat in the rockers on the porch of Took's had come slowly, in hesitant little clusters. But when no one turned to stone or took a bullet in the head - when there was, in fact, animated conversation and actual laughter - more and more came. As the trickle became a flood, Eddie at last discovered what it was to be a public person. He was astounded by how difficult it was, how draining. They wanted simple answers to a thousand difficult questions - where the gunslingers came from and where they were going were only the first two. Some of their questions could be answered honestly, but more and more Eddie heard himself giving weaselly politicians' answers, and heard his two friends doing the same. These weren't lies, exactly, but little propaganda capsules that sounded like answers. And everyone wanted a look straight in the face and a Do ya fine that sounded straight from the heart. Even Oy came in for his share of the work; he was petted over and over again, and made to speak until Jake got up, went into the store, and begged a bowl of water from Eben Took. That gentleman gave him a tin cup instead, and told him he could fill it at the trough out front. Jake was surrounded by townsfolk who questioned him steadily even as he did this simple chore. Oy lapped the cup dry, then faced his own gaggle of curious questioners while Jake went back to the trough to fill the cup again.

All in all, they had been five of the longest hours Eddie had ever put in, and he thought he would never regard celebrity in quite the same way again. On the plus side, before finally leaving the porch and heading back to the Old Fella's residence, Eddie reckoned they must have talked to everyone who lived in town and a good number of farmers, ranchers, cowpokes, and hired hands who lived beyond it. Word traveled fast: the outworlders were sitting on the porch of the General Store, and if you wanted to talk to them, they would talk to you.

And now, by God, this woman - this angel  - was speaking of beds.

"How long have we got?" he asked Rosalita.

"Pere should be back by four," she said, "but we won't eat until six, and that's only if your dinh gets back in time. Why don't I wake you at five-thirty? That'll give ye time to wash. Does it do ya?"

"Yeah," Jake said, and gave her a smile. "I didn't know just talking to folks could make you so tired. And thirsty."

She nodded. "There's a jug of cool water in the pantry."

"I ought to help you get the meal ready," Susannah said, and then her mouth opened in a wide yawn.

"Sarey Adams is coming in to help," Rosalita said, "and it's nobbut a cold meal, in any case. Go on, now. Take your rest. You're all in, and it shows."

TWO

In the pantry, Jake drank long and deep, then poured water into a bowl for Oy and carried it into Pere Callahan's bedroom. He felt guilty about being in here (and about having a billy-bumbler in here with him), but the bedcovers on Callahan's narrow bed had been turned down, the pillow had been plumped up, and both beckoned him. He put down the bowl and Oy quiety began to lap water. Jake undressed down to his new underwear, then lay back and closed his eyes.

Probably won't be able to actually sleep , he thought, I wasn't ever any good at taking naps, even back when Mrs. Shaw used to call me 'Bama .

Less than a minute later he was snoring lightly, with one arm slung over his eyes. Oy slept on the floor beside him with his nose on one paw.

THREE

Eddie and Susannah sat side by side on the bed in the guest room. Eddie could still hardly believe this: not only a nap, but a nap in an actual bed. Luxury piled on luxury. He wanted nothing more than to lie down, take Suze in his arms, and sleep that way, but one matter needed to be addressed first. It had been nagging him all day, even during the heaviest of their impromptu politicking.

"Suze, about Tian's Gran-pere - "

"I don't want to hear it," she said at once.

He raised his eyebrows, surprised. Although he supposed he'd known.

"We could get into this," she said, "but I'm tired. I want to go to sleep. Tell Roland what the old guy told you, and tell Jake if you want to, but don't tell me. Not yet." She sat next to him, her brown thigh touching his white one, her brown eyes looking steadily into his hazel ones. "Do you hear me?"

"Hear you very well."

"Say thankya big-big."

He laughed, took her in his arms, kissed her.

And shortly they were also asleep with their arms around each other and their foreheads touching. A rectangle of light moved steadily up their bodies as the sun sank. It had moved back into the true west, at least for the time being. Roland saw this for himself as he rode slowly down the drive to the Old Fella's rectory-house with his aching legs kicked free of the stirrups.

FOUR

Rosalita came out to greet him. "Hile, Roland - long days and pleasant nights."

He nodded. "May you have twice the number."

"I ken ye might ask some of us to throw the dish against the Wolves, when they come."

"Who told you so?"

"Oh... some little bird whispered it in my ear."

"Ah. And would you? If asked?"

She showed her teeth in a grin. "Nothing in this life would give me more pleasure." The teeth disappeared and the grin softened into a true smile. "Although perhaps the two of us together could discover some pleasure that comes close. Would'ee see my little cottage, Roland?"

"Aye. And would you rub me with that magic oil of yours again?"

"Is it rubbed ye'd be?"

"Aye."

"Rubbed hard, or rubbed soft?"

"I've heard a little of both best eases an aching joint."

She considered this, then burst into laughter and took his hand. "Come. While the sun shines and this little corner of the world sleeps."

He came with her willingly, and went where she took him. She kept a secret spring surrounded by sweet moss, and there he was refreshed.

FIVE

Callahan finally returned around five-thirty, just as Eddie, Susannah, and Jake were turning out. At six, Rosalita and Sarey Adams served out a dinner of greens and cold chicken on the screened-in porch behind the rectory. Roland and his friends ate hungrily, the gunslinger taking not just seconds but thirds. Callahan, on the other hand, did little but move his food from place to place on his plate. The tan on his face gave him a certain look of health, but didn't hide the dark circles under his eyes. When Sarey - a cheery, jolly woman, fat but light on her feet - brought out a spice cake, Callahan only shook his head.

When there was nothing left on the table but cups and the coffee pot, Roland brought out his tobacco and raised his eyebrows.

"Do ya," Callahan said, then raised his voice. "Rosie, bring this guy something to tap into!"

"Big man, I could listen to you all day," Eddie said.

"So could I," Jake agreed.

Callahan smiled. "I feel the same way about you boys, at least a little." He poured himself half a cup of coffee. Rosalita brought Roland a pottery cup for his ashes. When she had gone, the Old Fella said, "I should have finished this story yesterday. I spent most of last night tossing and turning, thinking about how to tell the rest."

"Would it help if I told you I already know some of it?" Roland asked.

"Probably not. You went up to the Doorway Cave with Henchick, didn't you?"

"Yes. He said there was a song on the speaking machine that sent them up there to find you, and that you wept when you heard it. Was it the one you spoke of?"

" 'Someone Saved My Life Tonight,' yes. And I can't tell you how strange it was to be sitting in a Manni cabin in Calla Bryn Sturgis, looking toward the darkness of Thunderclap and listening to Elton John."

"Whoa, whoa," Susannah said. "You're way ahead of us, Pere. Last we knew, you were in Sacramento, it was 1981, and you'd just found out your friend got cut up by these so-called Hitler Brothers." She looked sternly from Callahan to Jake and finally to Eddie. "I have to say, gendemen, that you don't seem to have made much progress in the matter of peaceful living since the days when I left America."

"Don't blame it on me," Jake said. "I was in school."

"And I was stoned," Eddie said.

"All right, I'll take the blame," Callahan said, and they all laughed.

"Finish your story," Roland said. "Maybe you'll sleep better tonight."

"Maybe I will," Callahan said. He thought for a minute, then said: "What I remember about the hospital - what I guess everyone remembers - is the smell of the disinfectant and the sound of the machines. Mostly the machines. The way they beep. The only other stuff that sounds like that is the equipment in airplane cockpits. I asked a pilot once, and he said the navigational gear makes that sound. I remember thinking that night that there must be a hell of a lot of navigating going on in hospital ICUs.

"Rowan Magruder wasn't married when I worked at Home, but I guessed that must have changed, because there was a woman sitting in the chair by his bed, reading a paperback. Well-dressed, nice green suit, hose, low-heeled shoes. At least I felt okay about facing her; I'd cleaned up and combed up as well as I could, and I hadn't had a drink since Sacramento. But once we were actually face-to-face, I wasn't okay at all. She was sitting with her back to the door, you see. I knocked on the jamb, she turned toward me, and my so-called self-possession took a hike. I took a step back and crossed myself. First time since the night Rowan and I visited Lupe in that same joint. Can you guess why?"

"Of course," Susannah said. "Because the pieces fit together. The pieces always fit together. We've seen it again and again and again. We just don't know what the picture is."

"Or can't grasp it," Eddie said.

Callahan nodded. "It was like looking at Rowan, only with long blond hair and breasts. His twin sister. And she laughed. She asked me if I thought I'd seen a ghost. I felt... surreal. As if I'd slipped into another of those other worlds, like the real one - if there is such a thing - but not quite the same. I felt this mad urge to drag out my wallet and see who was on the bills. It wasn't just the resemblance; it was her laughing. Sitting there beside a man who had her face, assuming he had any face left at all under the bandages, and laughing."

"Welcome to Room 19 of the Todash Hospital," Eddie said.

"Beg pardon?"

"I only meant I know the feeling, Don. We all do. Go on."

"I introduced myself and asked if I could come in. And when I asked it, I was thinking back to Barlow, the vampire. Thinking, You have to invite them in the first time. After that, they can come and go as they please . She told me of course I could come in. She said she'd come from Chicago to be with him in what she called 'his closing hours.' Then, in that same pleasant voice, she said, 'I knew who you were right away. It's the scar on your hand. In his letters, Rowan said he was quite sure you were a religious man in your other life. He used to talk about people's other lives all the time, meaning before they started drinking or taking drugs or went insane or all three. This one was a carpenter in his other life. That one was a model in her other life. Was he right about you?' All in that pleasant voice. Like a woman making conversation at a cocktail party. And Rowan lying there with his head covered in bandages. If he'd been wearing sunglasses, he would have looked like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man .

"I came in. I said I'd once been a religious man, yes, but that was all in the past. She put out her hand. I put out mine. Because, you see, I thought..."

SIX

He puts out his hand because he has made the assumption that she wants to shake with him. The pleasant voice has fooled him. He doesn't realize that what Rowena Magruder Rawlings is actually doing is raising her hand, not putting it out. At first he doesn't even realize he has been slapped, and hard enough to make his left ear ring and his left eye water; he has a confused idea that the sudden warmth rising in his left cheek must be some sort of cockamamie allergy thing, perhaps a stress reaction. Then she is advancing on him with tears streaming down her weirdly Rowan-like face .

"Go on and look at him ," she says. "Because guess what ? This is my brother's other life! The only one he has left! Get right up close and get a good look at it. They poked out his eyes, they took off one of his cheeks  - you can see the teeth in there, peekaboo! The police showed me photographs. They didn't want to, but I made them. They poked a hole in his heart, but I guess the doctors plugged that. It's his liver that's killing him. They poked a hole in that, too, and it's dying ."

"Miss Magruder, I  -  "

"It's Mrs. Rawlings," she tells him, "not that it's anything to you, one way or the other. Go on. Get a good look. See what you've done to him."

"I was in California... I saw it in the paper ..."

"Oh, I'm sure," she says. "I'm sure. But you're the only one I can get hold of, don't you see! The only one who was close to him. His other pal died of the Queer's Disease, and the rest aren't here. They're eating free food down at his flophouse, I suppose, or talking about what happened at their meetings. How it makes them feel. Well, Reverend Callahan  - or is it Father? I saw you cross yourself  - let me tell you how this makes me feel. It... makes... me ... FURIOUS. " She is still speaking in the pleasant voice, but when he opens his mouth to speak again she puts a finger across his lips and there is so much force pressing back against his teeth in that single finger that he gives up. Let her talk, why not? It's been years since he's heard a confession, but some things are like riding a bicycle .

"He graduated from NYU cum laude," she says. "Did you know that? He took second in the Beloit Poetry Prize Competition in 1949, did you know that ? As an undergraduate! He wrote a novel... a beautiful novel... and it's in my attic, gathering dust."

Callahan can feel soft warm dew settling on his face. It is coming from her mouth.

"I asked him  - no, begged him  - to go on with his writing and he laughed at me, said he was no good. 'Leave that to the Mailers and 0'Haras and Irwin Shaws,' he said, 'people who can really do it. I'll wind up in some ivory-tower office, puffing on a meerschaum pipe and looking like Mr. Chips .'

"And that would have been all right, too, " she says, "but then he got involved in the Alcoholics Anonymous program, and from there it was an easy jump to running the flophouse. And hanging with his friends. Friends like you. "

Callahan is amazed. He has never heard the word friends invested with such contempt .

"But where are they now that he's down and going out?" Rowena Magruder Rowlings asks him. "Hmmm? Where are all the people he cured, all the newspaper feature reporters who called him a genius? Where's Jane Pauley? She interviewed him on the Today show, you know. Twice! Where's that fucking Mother Teresa? He said in one of his letters they were calling her the little saint when she came to Home, well he could use a saint now, my brother could use a saint right now, some laying-on of hands, so where the hell is she ?"

Tears rolling down her cheeks. Her bosom rising and falling. She is beautiful and terrible. Callahan thinks of a picture he saw once of Shiva, the Hindu destroyer-god . Not enough arms, he thinks, and has to fight a crazy, suicidal urge to laugh.

"They're not here. There's just you and me, right? And him. He could have won a Nobel Prize for literature. Or he could have taught four hundred students a year for thirty years. Could have touched twelve thousand minds with his. Instead, he's lying here in a hospital bed with his face cut off, and they'll have to take up a subscription from his fucking flophouse to pay for his last illness  - if you call getting cut to pieces an illness  - and his coffin, and his burial."

She looks at him, face naked and smiling, her cheeks gleaming with moisture and runners of snot hanging from her nose.

"In his previous other life, Father Callahan, he was the Street Angel. But this is his final other life. Glamorous, isn't it? I'm going down the hall to the canteen for coffee and a danish. I'll be therefor ten minutes or so. Plenty of time for you to have your little visit. Do me a favor and be gone when I get back. You and all the rest of his do-gooders make me sick ."

She leaves. Her sensible low heels go clicking away along the hall. It's not until they've faded completely and left him with the steady beeping of the machines that he realizes he's trembling all over. He doesn't think it's the onset of the dt's, but by God that's what it feels like.

When Rowan speaks from beneath his stiff veil of bandages, Callahan nearly screams. What his old friend says is pretty mushy, but Callahan has no trouble figuring it out.

"She's given that little sermon at least eight times today, and she never bothers to tell anyone that the year I took second in the Beloit, only four other people entered. I guess the war knocked a lot of the poetry out of folks. How you doing, Don?"

The diction is bad, the voice driving it little more than a rasp, but it's Rowan, all right. Callahan goes to him and takes the hands that lie on the counterpane. They curl over his with surprising firmness.

"As far as the novel goes... man, it was third-rate James Jones, and that's bad ."

"How you doing, Rowan?" Callahan asks. Now he's crying himself. The goddam room will be floating soon.

"Oh, well, pretty sucky," says the man under the bandages. Then: "Thanks for coming."

"Not a problem, " Callahan says. "What do you need from me, Rowan ? What can I do?"

"You can stay away from Home," Rowan says. His voice is fading, but his hands still clasp Callahan's. "They didn't want me. It was you they were after. Do you understand me, Don ? They were looking for you. They kept asking me where you were, and by the end I would have told them if I'd known, believe me. But of course I didn't. "

One of the machines is beeping faster, the beeps running toward a merge that will trip an alarm. Callahan has no way of knowing this but knows it anyway. Somehow.

"Rowan  - did they have red eyes ? Were they wearing... I don't know... long coats? Like trenchcoats? Did they come in big fancy cars?"

"Nothing like that," Rowan whispers. "They were probably in their thirties but dressed like teenagers. They looked like teenagers, too. These guys'll look like teenagers for another twenty years  - if they live that long  - and then one day they'll just be old . "

Callahan thinks , Just a couple of punks. Is that what he's saying? It is, it almost certainly is, but that doesn't mean the Hitler Brothers weren't hired by the low men for this particular job. It makes sense. Even the newspaper article, brief as it was, pointed out that Rowan Magruder wasn't much like the Brothers' usual type of victim .

"Stay away from Home," Rowan whispers, but before Callahan can promise, the alarm does indeed go off. For a moment the hands holding his tighten, and Callahan feels a ghost of this man's old energy, that wild fierce energy that somehow kept Home's doors open in spite of all the times the bank account went absolutely flat-line, the energy that attracted men who could do all the things Rowan Magruder himself couldn't.

Then the room begins filling up with nurses, there's a doctor with an arrogant face yelling for the patient's chart, and pretty soon Rowan's twin sister will be back, this time possibly breathing fire. Callahan decides it's time to blow this pop-shop, and the greater pop-shop that is New York City. The low men are still interested in him, it seems, very interested indeed, and if they have a base of operations, it's probably right here in Fun City, USA. Consequently, a return to the West Coast would probably be an excellent idea. He can't afford another plane ticket, but he has enough cash to ride the Big Gray Dog. Won't be for the first time, either. Another trip west, why not ? He can see himself with absolute clarity, the man in Seat 29-C: a fresh, unopened package of cigarettes in his shirt pocket; afresh, unopened bottle of Early Times in a paper bag; the new Jfohn D. MacDonald novel, also fresh and unopened, lying on his lap. Maybe he'll be on the far side of the Hudson and riding through Fort Lee, deep into Chapter One and nipping his second drink before they finally turn off all the machines in Room 577 and his old friend goes out into the darkness and toward whatever waits for us there.

SEVEN

"577," Eddie said.

"Nineteen," Jake said.

"Beg pardon?" Callahan asked again.

"Five, seven, and seven," Susannah said. "Add them, you get nineteen."

"Does that mean something?"

"Put them all together, they spell mother, a word that means the world to me," Eddie said with a sentimental smile.

Susannah ignored him. "We don't know," she said. "You didn't leave New York, did you? If you had, you'd have never gotten that." She pointed to the scar on his forehead.

"Oh, I left," Callahan said. "Just not quite as soon as I intended. My intention when I left the hospital really was to go back down to Port Authority and buy a ticket on the Forty bus."

"What's that?" Jake asked.

"Hobo-speak for the farthest you can go. If you buy a ticket to Fairbanks, Alaska, you're riding on the Forty bus."

"Over here, it'd be Bus Nineteen," Eddie said.

"As I was walking, I got thinking about all the old times. Some of them were funny, like when a bunch of the guys at Home put on a circus show. Some of them were scary, like one night just before dinner when one guy says to this other one, 'Stop picking your nose, Jeffy, it's making me sick' and Jeffy goes 'Why don't you pick this, homeboy,' and he pulls out this giant spring-blade knife and before any of us can move or even figure out what's happening, Jeffy cuts the other guy's throat. Lupe's screaming and I'm yelling Jesus! Holy Jesus!' and the blood is spraying everywhere because he got the guy's carotid - or maybe it was the jugular - and then Rowan comes running out of the bathroom holding his pants up with one hand and a roll of toilet paper in the other, and do you know what he did?"

"Used the paper," Susannah said.

Callahan grinned. It made him a younger man. "Yer-bugger, he did. Slapped the whole roll right against the place where the blood was spurting and yelled for Lupe to call 211, which got you an ambulance in those days. And I'm standing there, watching that white toilet paper turn red, working its way in toward the cardboard core. Rowan said 'Just think of it as the world's biggest shaving cut' and we started laughing. We laughed until the tears came out of our eyes.

"I was running through a lot of old times, do ya. The good, the bad, and the ugly. I remember - vaguely - stopping in at a Smiler's Market and getting a couple of cans of Bud in a paper sack. I drank one of them and kept on walking. I wasn't thinking about where I was going - not in my conscious mind, at least - but my feet must have had a mind of their own, because all at once I looked around and I was in front of this place where we used to go to supper sometimes if we were - as they say - in funds. It was on Second and Fifty-second."

"Chew Chew Mama's," Jake said.

Callahan stared at him with real amazement, then looked at Roland. "Gunslinger, you boys are starting to scare me a little."

Roland only twirled his fingers in his old gesture: Keep going, partner .

"I decided to go in and get a hamburger for old times' sake," Callahan said. "And while I was eating the burger, I decided I didn't want to leave New York without at least looking into Home through the front window. I could stand across the street, like the times when I swung by there after Lupe died. Why not? I'd never been bothered there before. Not by the vampires, not by the low men, either." He looked at them. "I can't tell you if I really believed that, or if it was some kind of elaborate, suicidal mind-game. I can recapture a lot of what I felt that night, what I said and how I thought, but not that.

"In any case, I never got to Home. I paid up and I went walking down Second Avenue. Home was at First and Forty-seventh, but I didn't want to walk directly in front of it So I decided to go down to First and Forty-sixth and cross over there."

"Why not Forty-eighth?" Eddie asked him quietly. "You could have turned down Forty-eighth, that would have been quicker. Saved you doubling back a block."

Callahan considered the question, then shook his head. "If there was a reason, I don't remember."

"There was a reason," Susannah said. "You wanted to walk past the vacant lot."

"Why would I - "

"For the same reason people want to walk past a bakery when the doughnuts are coming out of the oven," Eddie said. "Some things are just nice, that's all."

Callahan received this doubtfully, then shrugged. "If you say so."

"I do, sai."

"In any case, I was walking along, sipping my other beer. I was almost at Second and Forty-sixth when - "

"What was there?" Jake asked eagerly. "What was on that corner in 1981?"

"I don't..." Callahan began, and then he stopped. "A fence," he said. "Quite a high one. Ten, maybe twelve feet."

"Not the one we climbed over," Eddie said to Roland. "Not unless it grew five feet on its own."

"There was a picture on it," Callahan said. "I do remember that. Some sort of street mural, but I couldn't see what it was, because the street-lights on the corner were out. And all at once it hit me that wasn't right. All at once an alarm started going off in my head. Sounded a lot like the one that brought all the people into Rowan's room at the hospital, if you want to know the truth. All at once I couldn't believe I was where I was. It was nuts. But at the same time I'm thinking..."

EIGHT

At the same time he's thinking lt's all right, just a few lights out is all it is, if there were vampires you'd see them and if there were low men you'd hear the chimes and smell rancid onions and hot metal. All the same he decides to vacate this area, and immediately. Chimes or no chimes, every nerve in his body is suddenly out on his skin, sparking and sizzling .

He turns and there are two men right behind him. There is a space of seconds when they are so surprised by his abrupt change of direction that he probably could have darted between them like an aging running back and gone sprinting back up Second Avenue. But he is surprised, too, and for a further space of seconds the three of them only stand there, staring.

There's a big Hitler Brother and a little Hitler Brother. The little one is no more than five-two. He's wearing a loose chambray shirt over black slacks. On his head is a baseball cap turned around backwards. His eyes are as black as drops of tar and his complexion is bad. Callahan immediately thinks of him as Lennie. The big one is maybe six-feet-six, wearing a Yankees sweatshirt, blue jeans, and sneakers. He's got a sandy mustache. He's wearing a fanny-pack, only around in front so it's actually a belly-pack. Callahan names this one George.

Callahan turns around, planning to flee down Second Avenue if he's got the light or if it looks like he can beat the traffic. If that's impossible, he'll go down Forty-sixth to the U.N. Plaza Hotel and duck into their lob  -

The big one, George, grabs him by the shirt and yanks him back by his collar. The collar rips, but unfortunately not enough to set him free.

"No you don't doc, " the little one says. "No you don't . " Then bustles forward, quick as an insect, and before Callahan's clear on what's happening, Lennie has reached between his legs, seized his testicles, and squeezed them violently together. The pain is immediate and enormous, a swelling sickness like liquid lead .

"Like-at, niggah-lovvah?" Lennie asks him in a tone that seems to convey genuine concern, that seems to say "We want this to mean as much to you as it does to us." Then he yanks Callahan's testicles forward and the pain trebles. Enormous rusty saw-teeth sink into Callahan's belly and he thinks , He'll rip them off, he's already turned them to jelly and now he's going to rip them right off, there's nothing holding them on but a little loose skin and he's going to -

He begins to scream and George clamps a hand over his mouth. "Quit it!" he snarls at his partner. "We're on the fucking street, did you forget that?"

Even while the pain is eating him alive, Callahan is mulling the situation's queerly inverted quality: George is the Hitler Brother in charge, not Lennie. George is the smart Hitler Brother. It's certainly not the way Steinbeck would have written it .

Then, from his right, a humming sound arises. At first he thinks it's the chimes, but the humming is sweet. It's strong, as well. George and Lennie feel it. And they don't like it.

"Whazzat ? " Lennie asks. "Did you hear sumpun?"

"I don't know. Let's get him back to the place. And keep your hands off his balls. Later you can yank em all you want, but for now just help me."

One on either side of him, and all at once he is being propelled back up Second Avenue. The high board fence runs past on their right. That sweet, powerful humming sound is coming from behind it . If I could get over that fence, I'd be all right, Callahan thinks. There's something in there, something powerful and good. They wouldn't dare go near it .

Perhaps this is so, but he doubts he could scramble over a board fence ten feet high even if his balls weren't blasting out enormous bursts of their own painful Morse Code, even if he couldn't feel them swelling in his underwear. All at once his head lolls forward and he vomits a hot load of half-digested food down the front of his shirt and pants. He can feel it soaking through to his skin, warm as piss.

Two young couples, obviously together, are headed the other way. The young men are big, they could probably mop up the street with Lennie and perhaps even give George a run for his money if they ganged up on him, but right now they are looking disgusted and clearly want nothing more than to get their dates out of Callahan's general vicinity as quickly as they possibly can.

"He just had a little too much to drink ," George says, smiling sympathetically, "and then whoopsy-daisy. Happens to the best of us from time to time ."

They're the Hitler Brothers! Callahan tries to scream . These guys are the Hitler Brothers! They killed my friend and now they're going to kill me! Get the police! But of course nothing comes out, in nightmares like this it never does, and soon the couples are headed the other way. George and Lennie continue to move Callahan briskly along the block of Second Avenue between Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh. His feet are barely touching the concrete. His Chew Chew Mama Swissburger is now steaming on his shirt. Oh boy, he can even smell the mustard he put on it .

"Lemme see his hand, " George says as they near the next intersection, and when Lennie grabs Callahan's left hand, Rowan says, "No, dipstick, the other one."

Lennie holds out Callahan's right hand. Callahan couldn't stop him if he tried. His lower belly has been filled with hot, wet cement. His stomach, meanwhile, seems to be quivering at the back of his throat like a small, frightened animal.

George looks at the scar on Callahan's right hand and nods. "Yuh, it's him, all right. Never hurts to be sure. Come on, let's go, Faddah. Double-time, hup-hup !"

When they get to Forty-seventh, Callahan is swept off the main thoroughfare. Down the hill on the left is a pool of bright white light: Home. He can even see a few slope-shouldered silhouettes, men standing on the corner, talking Program and smoking . I might even know some of them, he thinks confusedly . Hell, probably do.

But they don't go that far. Less than a quarter of the way down the block between Second Avenue and First, George drags Callahan into the doorway of a deserted storefront with a FOR SALE OR LEASE sign in both of its soaped-over windows. Lennie just kind of circles them, like a yapping terrier around a couple of slow-moving cows.

"Gonna fuck you up, niggah-lovvah!" he's chanting. "We done a thousand just like you, gonna do a million before we're through, we can cut down any niggah, even when the niggah's biggah, that's from a song I'm writin, it's a song called 'Kill All Niggah-Lovin Fags,' I'm gonna send it to Merle Haggard when I'm done, he's the best, he's the one told all those hippies to squat n shit in their hats, fuckin Merle's for America, I got a Mustang 380 and I got Hermann Goering's Luger, you know that, niggah-lovvah?"

"Shut up, ya little punkass , " George says, but he speaks with fond absentmindedness, reserving his real attention for finding the key he wants on a fat ring of them and then opening the door of the empty storefront. Callahan thinks , To him Lennie's like the radio that's always playing in an auto repair shop or the kitchen of a fast-food restaurant, he doesn't even hear him anymore, he's just part of the background noise.

"Yeah, Nort," Lennie says, and then goes right on. "Fuckin Goering's fuckin Luger, that's right, and I might blow your fuckin balls off with it, because we know the truth about what niggah-lovvahs like you are doin to this country, right, Nort?"

"Told you, no names," George/Nort says, but he speaks indulgently and Callahan knows why: he'll never be able to give any names to the police, not if things go the way these douchebags plan.

"Sorry Nort but you niggah-lovvahs you fuckin Jewboy intellectuals are the ones fuckin this country up, so I want you to think about that when I pull your fuckin balls right off your fuckin scrote  -  "

"The balls are the scrote, numbwit," George/Nort says in a weirdly scholarly voice, and then: "Bingo !"

The door opens. George/Nort shoves Callahan through it. The storefront is nothing but a dusty shadowbox smelling of bleach, soap, and starch. Thick wires and pipes stick out of two walls. He can see cleaner squares on the walls where coin-op washing machines and dryers once stood. On the floor is a sign he can just barely read in the dimness : TURTLE BAY WASHATERIA U WASH OR WE WASH EITHER WAY IT ALL COMES KLEEN!

All comes kleen, right, Callahan thinks. He turns toward them and isn't very surprised to see George/Nort pointing a gun at him. It's not Hermann Goering's Luger, looks more to Callahan like the sort of cheap .32 you'd buy for sixty dollars in a bar uptown, but he's sure it would do the job. George/Nort unzips his belly-pack without taking his eyes from Callahan  - he's done this before, both of them have, they are old hands, old wolves who have had a good long run for themselves  -  and pulls out a roll of duct tape. Callahan remembers Lupe's once saying America would collapse in a week without duct tape. "The secret weapon," he called it. George/Nort hands the roll to Lennie, who takes it and scurries forward to Callahan with that same insectile speed .

"Putcha hands behind ya, niggah-reebop, " Lennie says.

Callahan doesn't.

George/Nort waggles the pistol at him. "Do it or I put one in your gut, Faddah. You ain't never felt pain like that, I promise you."

Callahan does it. He has no choice. Lennie darts behind him.

"Put em togetha, niggah-reebop, " Lennie says. "Don 'tchoo know how this is done? Ain'tchoo ever been to the movies'?" He laughs like a loon.

Callahan puts his wrists together. There comes a low snarling sound as Lennie pulls duct-tape off the roll and begins taping Callahan's arms behind his back. He stands taking deep breaths of dust and bleach and the comforting, somehow childlike perfume of fabric softener.

"Who hired you ? " he asks George/Nort. "Was it the low men ?"

George/Nort doesn't answer, but Callahan thinks he sees his eyes flicker. Outside, traffic passes in bursts. A few pedestrians stroll by. What would happen if he screamed? Well, he supposes he knows the-answer to that, doesn't he? The Bible says the priest and the Levite passed by the wounded man, and heard not his cries, "but a certain Samaritan . . . had compassion on him." Callahan needs a good Samaritan, but in New York they are in short supply .

"Did they have red eyes, Nort?"

Nort's own eyes flicker again, but the barrel of the gun remains pointed at Callahan's midsection, steady as a rock.

"Did they drive big fancy cars? They did, didn't they? And how much do you think your life and this little shitpoke's life will be worth, once  -  "

Lennie grabs his balls again, squeezes them, twists them, pulls them down like windowshades. Callahan screams and the world goes gray. The strength runs out of his legs and his knees come totally unbuckled.

"Annnd hee's DOWN!" Lennie cries gleefully . "Mo-Hammerhead A-Lee is DOWN! THE GREAT WHITE HOPE HAS PULLED THE TRIGGAH ON THAT LOUDMOUTH NIG-GAH AND PUT 'IM ON THE CANVAS! I DON'T BE-LEEEEVE IT!" It's a Howard Cosell imitation, and so good that even in his agony Callahan feels like laughing. He hears another wild purring sound and now it's his ankles that are being taped together .

George/Nort brings a knapsack over from the corner. He opens it and rummages out a Polaroid One-Shot. He bends over Callahan and suddenly the world goes dazzle-bright. In the immediate aftermath, Callahan can see nothing but phantom shapes behind a hanging blue ball at the center of his vision. From it comes George/Nort's voice.

"Remind me to get another one, after. They wanted both."

"Yeah, Nort, yeah!" The little one sounds almost rabid with excitement now, and Callahan knows the real hurting's about to start. He remembers an old Dylan song called "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" and thinks , It fits. Better than "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," that's for sure.

He's enveloped by a fog of garlic and tomatoes. Someone had Italian for dinner, possibly while Callahan was getting his face slapped in the hospital. A shape looms out of the dazzle. The big guy. "Doesn't matter to you who hired us," says George/Nort. "Thing is, we were hired, and as far as anyone's ever gonna be concerned, Faddah, you're just another niggah-lovvah like that guy Magruder and the Hitler Brothers done cleaned your clock. Mostly we're dedicated, but we will work for a dollar, like any good American." He pauses, and then comes the ultimate, existential absurdity: "We're popular in Queens, you know ."

"Fuck yourself, " Callahan says, and then the entire right side of his face explodes in agony. Lennie has kicked him with a steel-toed work-boot, breaking his jaw in what will turn out to be a total of four places.

"Nice talk ," he hears Lennie say dimly from the insane universe where God has clearly died and lies stinking on the floor of a pillaged heaven. "Nice talk for a Faddah." Then his voice goes up, becomes the excited, begging whine of a child: "Let me, Nort! C'mon, let me! I wanna do it !"

"No way," George/Nort says. "I do the forehead swastikas, you always fuck them up. You can do the ones on his hands, okay?"

"He's tied up! His hands re covered in thatfuckin  -  "

"After he's dead, " George/Nort explains with a terrible patience. "We'll unwrap his hands after he's dead and you can  -  "

"Nort , please/ I'll do that thing you like. And listen!" Lennie's voice brightens. "Tell you what! If I start to fuck up, you tell me and I'll stop! Please, Nort ? Please?"

"Well ..." Callahan has heard this tone before, too. The indulgent father who can't deny a favorite, if mentally challenged, child. "Well, okay ."

His vision is clearing. He wishes to God it wasn't. He sees Lennie remove a flashlight from the backpack. George has pulled a folded scalpel from his fanny-pack. They exchange tools. George trains the flashlight on Callahan's rapidly swelling face. Callahan winces and slits his eyes. He has just enough vision to see Lennie swing the scalpel out with his tiny yet dexterous fingers.

"Ain't this gonna be good/" Lennie cries. He is rapturous with excitement. "Ain't this gonna be so good /"

"Just don't fuck it up," George says.

Callahan thinks , If this was a movie, the cavalry would come just about now. Or the cops. Or fucking Sherlock Holmes in H. G. Wells's time machine.

But Lennie kneels in front of him, the hardon in his pants all too visible, and the cavalry doesn't come. He leans forward with the scalpel outstretched, and the cops don't come. Callahan can smell not garlic and tomatoes on this one but sweat and cigarettes.

"Wait a second, Bill," George/Nort says, "I got an idea, let me draw it on for you first. I got a pen in my pocket. "

"Fuck that," Lennie/Bill breathes. He stretches out the scalpel. Callahan can see the razor-sharp blade trembling as the little man's excitement is communicated to it, and then it passes from his field of vision. Something cold traces his brow, then turns hot, and Sherlock Holmes doesn't come. Blood pours into his eyes, dousing his vision, and neither does James Bond Perry Mason Travis McGee Hercule Poirot Miss Fucking Marple.

The long white face of Barlow rises in his mind. The vampire's hair floats around his head. Barlow reaches out. "Come, false priest, "he's saying "learn of a true religion." There are two dry snapping sounds as the vampire's fingers break off the arms of the cross his mother gave him.

"Oh you fuckin nutball ," George/Nort groans, "that ain't a swastika, that's a fuckin cross/ Gimme that !"

"Stop it, Nort, gimme a chance, I ain't done!"

Squabbling over him like a couple of kids while his balls ache and his broken jaw throbs and his sight drowns in blood. All those seventies-era arguments about whether or not God was dead, and Christ, look at him! Just look at him! How could there be any doubt?

And that is when the cavalry arrives.

NINE

"What exactly do you mean?" Roland asked. "I would hear this part very well, Pere."

They were still sitting at the table on the porch, but the meal was finished, the sun was down, and Rosalita had brought 'seners. Callahan had broken his story long enough to ask her to sit with them and so she had. Beyond the screens, in the rectory's dark yard, bugs hummed, thirsty for the light.

Jake touched what was in the gunslinger's mind. And, suddenly impatient with all this secrecy, he put the question himself: "Were we the cavalry, Pere?"

Roland looked shocked, then actually amused. Callahan only looked surprised.

"No," he said. "I don't think so."

"You didn't see them, did you?" Roland asked. "You never actually saw the people who rescued you."

"I told you the Hitler Brothers had a flashlight," Callahan said. "Say true. But these other guys, the cavalry..."

TEN

Whoever they are, they have a searchlight. It fills the abandoned Washateria with a glare brighter than the flash of the cheapie Polaroid, and unlike the Polaroid, it's constant. George/Nort and Lennie/Bill cover their eyes. Callahan would cover his, if his arms weren't duct-taped behind him .

"Nort, drop the gun! Bill, drop the scalpel!" The voice coming from the huge light is scary because it's scared. It's the voice of someone who might do damn near anything. "I'm gonna count to five and then I'm gonna shoot the both of yez, which is what'chez deserve. "And then the voice behind the light begins to count not slowly and portentously but with alarming speed. "Onetwothreefour  - "It's as if the owner of the voice wants to shoot, wants to hurry tip and get the bullshit formality over with. George/Nort and Lennie/Bill have no time to consider their options. They throw down the pistol and the scalpel and the pistol goes off when it hits the dusty lino, a loud BANG like a kid's toy pistol that's been loaded with double caps. Callahan has no idea where the bullet goes. Maybe even into him. Would he even feel it if it did? Doubtful .

"Don't shoot, don't shoot!" Lennie/Bill shrieks. "We ain't, we ain't we ain't  -  "Ain't what? Lennie/Bill doesn't seem to know .

"Hands up!" It's a different voice, but also coming from behind the sun-gun dazzle of the light. "Reach for the sky! Right now, you momzers!"

Their hands shoot up.

"Nah, belay that ," says the first one. They may be great guys, Callahan's certainly willing to put them on his Christmas card list, but it's clear they've never done anything like this before. "Shoes off! Pants off! Now! Right now! "

"What the fuck  -  " George/Nort begins. "Are you guys the cops ? If you're the cops, you gotta give us our rights, ourfuckin Miranda  -  "

From behind the glaring light, a gun goes off. Callahan sees an orange flash of fire. Its probably a pistol, but it is to the Hitler Brothers' modest barroom .32 as a hawk is to a hummingbird. The crash is gigantic, immediately followed by a crunch of plaster and a puff of stale dust. George/Nort and Lennie/Bill both scream. Callahan thinks one of his rescuers  - probably the one who didn't shoot  - also screams .

"Shoes off and pants off! Now! Now! You better have em off before I get to thirty, or you're dead. Onetwothreefourfi  - "

Again, the speed of the count leaves no time for consideration, let alone remonstrance. George/Nort starts to sit down and Voice Number Two says: "Sit down and we'll kill you. "

And so the Hitler Brothers stagger around the knapsack, the Polaroid, the gun, and the flashlight like spastic cranes, pulling off their footgear while Voice Number One runs his suicidally rapid count. The shoes come off and the pants go down. George is a boxers guy while Lennie favors briefs of the pee-stained variety. There is no sign of Lennie's hardon; Lennie's hardon has decided to take the rest of the night off.

"Now get out," Voice Number One says.

George faces into the light. His Yankees sweatshirt hangs down over his underwear shorts, which billow almost to his knees. He's still wearing his fanny-pack. His calves are heavily muscled, but they are trembling. And George's face is long with sudden dismayed realization.

"Listen, you guys, " he says, "if we go out of here without finishing this guy, they'll kill us. These are very bad  -  "

"If you schmucks aren't out of here by the time I get to ten, " says Voice Number One, "I'll kill you myself."

To which Voice Number Two adds, with a kind of hysterical contempt : "Gai cocknif en yom, you cowardly motherfuckers! Stay, get shot, who cares ?"

Later, after repeating this phrase to a dozen Jews who only shake their heads in bewilderment, Callahan will happen on an elderly fellow in Topeka who translates gai cocknif en yom for him. It means go shit in the ocean .

Voice Number One starts reeling them off again: "Onetwothree-four - "

George/Nort and Lennie/Bill exchange a cartoon look of indecision, then bolt for the door in their underwear. The big searchlight turns to follow them. They are out; they are gone.

"Follow, " Voice Number One says gruffly to his partner. "If they get the idea to turn back  -  "

"Yeahyeah , " says Voice Number Two, and he's gone .

The brilliant light clicks off. "Turn over on your stomach," says Voice Number One.

Callahan tries to tell him he doesn't think he can, that his balls now feel roughly the size of teapots, but all that comes from his mouth is mush, because of his broken jaw. He compromises by rolling over on his left side as far as he can.

"Hold still ," says Voice Number One. "I don't want to cut you." It's not the voice of a man who does stuff like this for a living. Even in his current state, Callahan can tell that. The guy's breathing in rapid wheezes that sometimes catch in an alarming way and then start up again. Callahan wants to thank him. It's one thing to save a stranger if you're a cop or a fireman or a lifeguard, he supposes. Quite another when you're just an ordinary member of the greater public. And that's what his rescuer is, he thinks , both his rescuers, although how they came so well prepared he doesn't know. How could they know the Hitler Brothers ' names ? And exactly where were they waiting? Did they come in from the street, or were they in the abandoned laundrymat the whole time? Other stuff Callahan doesn't know. And doesn't really care. Because someone saved, someone saved, someone saved his life tonight, and that's the big thing, the only thing that matters. George and Lennie almost had their hooks in him, din't they, dear, but the cavalry came at the last minute, just like in a John Wayne movie .

What Callahan wants to do is thank this guy. Where Callahan wants to be is safe in an ambulance and on his way to the hospital before the punks blindside the owner of Voice Number Two outside, or the owner of Voice Number One has an excitement-induced heart attack. He tries and more mush comes out of his mouth. Drunkspeak, what Rowan used to call gubbish. It sounds like fann-ou.

His hands are cut free, then his feet. The guy doesn't have a heart attack. Callahan rolls over onto his back again, and sees a pudgy white hand holding the scalpel. On the third finger is a signet ring. It shows an open book. Below it are the words Ex Libris. Then the searchlight goes on again and Callahan raises an arm over his eyes. "Christ, man, why areyou doing that?"It comes out Cry-mah, I-oo oonnat, but the owner of Voice Number One seems to understand .

"I should think that would be obvious, my wounded friend, " he says. "Should we meet again, I'd like it to be for the first time. If we pass on the street, I would as soon go unrecognized. Safer that way. "

Gritting footsteps. The light is backing away.

"We're going to call an ambulance from the pay phone across the street - "

"No! Don't do that! What if they come back?" In his quite genuine terror, these words come out with perfect clarity.

"We'll be watching," says Voice Number One. The wheeze is fading now. The guy's getting himself back under control. Good for him. "I think it is possible that they'll come back, the big one was really quite distressed, but if the Chinese are correct, I'm now responsible for your life. It's a responsibility I intend to live up to. Should they reappear, I'll throw a bullet at them. Not over their heads, either. " The shape pauses. He looks like a fairly big man himself. Got a gut on him, that much is for sure. "Those were the Hitler Brothers, my friend. Do you know who I'm talking about ?"

"Yes, " Callahan whispers. "And you won't tell me who you are ? "

"Better you not know," says Mr. Ex Libris.

"Do you know who I am?"

A pause. Gritting steps. Mr. Ex Libris is now standing in the doorway of the abandoned laundrymat. "No, " he says. Then, "A priest. It doesn't matter."

"How did you know I was here?"

"Wait for the ambulance," says Voice Number One. "Don't try to move on your own. You've lost a lot of blood, and you may have internal injuries."

Then he's gone. Callahan lies on the floor, smelling bleach and detergent and sweet departed fabric softener . U wash or we wash, he thinks , either way it all comes kleen. His testicles throb and swell. His jaw throbs and there's swelling there, too. He can feel his whole face tightening as the flesh puffs up. He lies there and waits for the ambulance and life or the return of the Hitler Brothers and death. For the lady or the tiger. For Diana's treasure or the deadly biter-snake. And some interminable, uncountable time later, red pulses of light wash across the dusty floor and he knows this time it's the lady. This time it's the treasure .

This time it's life.

ELEVEN

"And that," Callahan said, "is how I ended up in Room 577 of that same hospital that same night."

Susannah looked at him, wide-eyed. "Are you serious?"

"Serious as a heart attack," he said. "Rowan Magruder died, I got the living shit beaten out of me, and they slammed me back into the same bed. They must have had just about enough time to re-make it, and until the lady came with the morphine-cart and put me out, I lay there wondering if maybe Magruder's sister might not come back and finish what the Hitler Brothers had started. But why should such things surprise you? There are dozens of these odd crossings in both our stories, do ya. Have you not thought about the coincidence of Calla Bryn Sturgis and my own last name, for instance?"

"Sure we have," Eddie said.

"What happened next?" Roland asked.

Callahan grinned, and when he did, the gunslinger realized the two sides of the man's face didn't quite line up. He'd been jaw-broke, all right. "The storyteller's favorite question, Roland, but I think what I need to do now is speed my tale up a bit, or we'll be here all night. The important thing, the part you really want to hear, is the end part, anyway."

Well, you may think so , Roland mused, and wouldn't have been surprised to know all three of his friends were harboring versions of the same thought.

"I was in the hospital for a week. When they let me out, they sent me to a welfare rehab in Queens. The first place they offered me was in Manhattan and a lot closer, but it was associated with Home - we sent people there sometimes. I was afraid that if I went there, I might get another visit from the Hitler Brothers."

"And did you?" Susannah asked.

"No. The day I visited Rowan in Room 577 of Riverside Hospital and then ended up there myself was May 19th, 1981," Callahan said. "I went out to Queens in the back of a van with three or four other walking-wounded guys on May 25th. I'm going to say it was about six days after that, just before I checked out and hit the road again, that I saw the story in the Post . It was in the front of the paper, but not on the front page, TWO MEN FOUND SHOT TO DEATH IN CONEY ISLAND, the headline said. COPS SAY 'IT LOOKS LIKE A MOB JOB.' That was because the faces and hands had been burned with acid. Nevertheless, the cops ID'd both of them: Norton Randolph and William Garton, both of Brooklyn. There were photos. Mug shots; both of them had long records. They were my guys, all right. George and Lennie."

"You think the low men got them, don't you? "Jake asked.

"Yes. Payback's a bitch."

"Did the papers ever ID them as the Hitler Brothers?" Eddie asked. "Because, man, we were still scarin each other with those guys when I came along."

"There was some speculation about that possibility in the tabloids," Callahan said, "and I'll bet that in their hearts the reporters who covered the Hitler Brothers murders and mutilations knew it was Randolph and Garton - there was nothing afterward but a few halfhearted copycat cuttings - but no one in the tabloid press wants to kill the bogeyman, because the bogeyman sells papers."

"Man," Eddie said. "You have been to the wars."

"You haven't heard the last act yet," Callahan said. "It's a dilly."

Roland made the twirling go-on gesture, but it didn't look urgent. He'd rolled himself a smoke and looked about as content as his three companions had ever seen him. Only Oy, sleeping at Jake's feet, looked more at peace with himself.

"I looked for my footbridge when I left New York for the second time, riding across the GWB with my paperback and my bottle," Callahan said, "but my footbridge was gone. Over the next couple of months I saw occasional flashes of the highways in hiding - and I remember getting a ten-dollar bill with Chadbourne on it a couple of times - but mostly they were gone. I saw a lot of Type Three Vampires and remember thinking that they were spreading. But I did nothing about them. I seemed to have lost the urge, the way Thomas Hardy lost the urge to write novels and Thomas Hart Benton lost the urge to paint his murals. 'Just mosquitoes,' I'd think. 'Let them go.' My job was getting into some town, finding the nearest Brawny Man or ManPower or Job Guy, and also finding a bar where I felt comfortable. I favored places that looked like the Americano or the Blarney Stone in New York."

"You liked a little steam-table with your booze, in other words," Eddie said.

"That's right," Callahan said, looking at Eddie as one does at a kindred spirit. "Do ya! And I'd protect those places until it was time to move on. By which I mean I'd get tipsy in my favorite neighborhood bar, then finish up the evening - the crawling, screaming, puking-down-the-front-of-your-shirt part - somewhere else. Alfresco , usually."

Jake began, "What - "

"Means he got drunk outdoors, sug," Susannah told him. She ruffled his hair, then winced and put the hand on her own midsection, instead.

"All right, sai?" Rosalita asked.

"Yes, but if you had somethin with bubbles in it, I surely would drink it."

Rosalita rose, tapping Callahan on the shoulder as she did so. "Go on, Pere, or it'll be two in the morning and the cats tuning up in the badlands before you're done."

"All right," he said. "I drank, that's what it comes down to. I drank every night and raved to anyone who'd listen about Lupe and Rowan and Rowena and the black man who picked me up in Issaquena County and Ruta, who really might have been full of fun but. who sure wasn't a Siamese cat. And finally I'd pass out.

"This went on until I got to Topeka. Late winter of 1982. That was where I hit my bottom. Do you folks know what that means, to hit a bottom?"

There was a long pause, and then they nodded. Jake was thinking of Ms. Avery's English class, and his Final Essay. Susannah was recalling Oxford Mississippi, Eddie the beach by the Western Sea, leaning over the man who had become his dinh, meaning to cut his throat because Roland wouldn't let him go through one of those magic doors and score a little H.

"For me, the bottom came in a jail cell," Callahan said. "It was early morning, and I was actually relatively sober. Also, it was no drunk tank but a cell with a blanket on the cot and an actual seat on the toilet. Compared to some of the places I'd been in, I was farting through satin. The only bothersome things were the name guy... and that song."

TWELVE

The light falling through the cell's small chickenwire-reinforced window is gray, which consequently makes his skin gray. Also his hands are dirty and covered with scratches. The crud under some of his nails is black (dirt) and under some it's maroon (dried blood). He vaguely remembers tussling with someone who kept calling him sir, so he guesses that he might be here on the ever-popular Penal Code 48, Assaulting an Officer. All he wanted  - Callahan has a slightly clearer memory of this  -  was to try on the kid's cap, which was very spiffy. He remembers trying to tell the young cop (from the look of this one, pretty soon they'll be hiring kids who aren't even toilet-trained as police officers, at least in Topeka) that he's always on the lookout for funky new lids, he always wears a cap because he's got the Mark of Cain on his forehead. "Looksh like a crossh," he remembers saying (or trying to say), "but it'sh rilly the Marga-Gain. " Which, in his cups, is about as close as he can come to saying Mark of Cain.

Was really drunk last night, but he doesn't feel so bad as he sits here on the bunk, rubbing a hand through his crazy hair. Mouth doesn't taste so good  - sort of like Ruta the Siamese Cat took a dump in it, if you wanted the truth  - but his head isn't aching too badly. If only the voices would shut up!Down the hall someone's droning out a seemingly endless list of names in alphabetical order. Closer by, someone is singing his least favorite song: "Someone saved, someone saved, someone saved my li-ife tonight ..."

"Nailor!... Naughton!... O'Connor!... O'Shaugnessy!... Oskowski!... Osmer!"

He is just beginning to realize that he is the one singing when the trembling begins in his calves. It works its way up to his knees, then to his thighs, deepening and strengthening as it comes. He can see the big muscles in his legs popping up and down like pistons. What is happening to him ?

"Palmer!... Palmgren!"

The trembling hits his crotch and lower belly. His underwear shorts darken as he sprays them with piss. At the same time his feet start snapping out into the air, as if he's trying to punt invisible footballs with both of them at the same time . I'm seizing, he thinks . This is probably it. I'm probably going out. Bye-bye blackbird. He tries to call for help and nothing conies out of his mouth but a low chugging sound. His arms begin to fly up and down. Now he's punting invisible footballs with his feet while his arms shout hallelujah, and the guy down the hall is going to go on until the end of the century, maybe until the next Ice Age .

"Peschier!... Peters!... Pike!... Polovik!... Ranee!... Rancourt!"

Callahan's upper body begins to snap back and forth. Each time it snaps forward he comes closer to losing his balance and falling on the floor. His hands fly up. His feet fly out. There is a sudden spreading pancake of warmth on his ass and he realizes he has just shot the chocolate.

"Ricupero!... Robillard!... Rossi!"

He snaps backward, all the way to the whitewashed concrete wall where someone has scrawled BANGO SKANK and Just had my 19th Nervous Breakdown! Then forward, this time with the full-body enthusiasm of a Muslim at morning prayers. For a moment he's staring at the concrete floor from between his naked knees and then he overbalances and goes down on his face. His jaw, which has somehow healed in spite of the nightly binges, rebreaks in three of the original four places. But, just to bring things back into perfect balance  - four's the magic number  - this time his nose breaks, too. He lies jerking on the floor like a hooked fish, his body fingerpaintingin the blood, shit, and piss.Yeah , I'm going out, he thinks.

"Ryan!... Sannelli!... Scher!"

But gradually the extravagant grand mal jerks of his body moderate to petit mal, and then to little more than twitches. He thinks someone must come, but no one does, not at first. The twitches fade away and now he's just Donald Frank Callahan, lying on the floor of a jail cell in Topeka, Kansas, where somewhere farther down the hall a man continues working his way through the alphabet .

"Seavey!... Sharrow!... Shatzer!"

Suddenly, for the first time in months, he thinks of how the cavalry came when the Hitler Brothers were getting ready to carve him up there in that deserted laundrymat on East Forty-seventh. And they were really going to do it  - the next day or the day after, someone would have found one Donald Frank Callahan, dead as the fabled mackerel and probably wearing his balls for earrings. But then the cavalry came and  -

That was no cavalry, he thinks as he lies on the floor, his face swelling up again, meet the new face, same as the old face . That was Voice Number One and Voice Number Two. Only that isn't right, either. That was two men, middle-aged at the least, probably getting a little on the old side. That was Mr. Ex Libris and Mr. Gai Cock-nifEn Yom, whatever that means. Both of them scared to death. And right to be scared. The Hitler Brothers might not have done a thousand as Lennie had boasted, but they had done plenty and killed some of them, they were a couple of human copperheads, and yes, Mr. Ex Libris and Mr. Gai Cocknif were absolutely right to be scared. It had turned out all right for them, but it might not have done. And if George and Lennie had turned the tables, what then? Why, instead of finding one dead man in the Turtle Bay Washateria, whoever happened in there first would have found three. That would have made the frontpage of the Post for sure! So those guys had risked their lives, and here was what they'd risked it for, six or eight months on down the line: a dirty emaciated busted up asshole drunk, his underwear drenched with piss on one side and full of shit on the other. A daily drinker and a nightly drunk .

And that is when it happens. Down the hall, the steady slow-chanting voice has reached Sprang, Steward, and Sudby; in this cell up the hall, a man lying on a dirty floor in the long light of dawn finally reaches his bottom, which is, by definition, that point from which you can descend no lower unless you find a shovel and actually start to dig.

Lying as he is, staring directly along the floor, the dust-bunnies look like ghostly groves of trees and the lumps of dirt look like the hills in some sterile mining country. He thinks : What is it, February? February of 1982? Something like that. Well, I tell you what. I'll give myself one year to try and clean up my act. One year to do something - anything - to justify the risk those two guys took. If I can do something, I'll go on. But if I'm still drinking in February of 1983, I'll kill myself.

Down the corridor, the chanting voice has finally reached Targenfield.

THIRTEEN

Callahan was silent for a moment. He sipped at his coffee, grimaced, and poured himself a knock of sweet cider, instead.

"I knew how the climb back starts," he said. "I'd taken enough low-bottom drunks to enough AA meetings on the East Side, God knows. So when they let me out, I found AA in Topeka and started going every day. I never looked ahead, never looked behind. 'The past is history, the future's a mystery,' they say. Only this time, instead of sitting in the back of the room and saying nothing, I forced myself to go right down front, and during the introductions I'd say, 'I'm Don C. and I don't want to drink anymore.' I did want to, every day I wanted to, but in AA they have sayings for everything, and one of them is 'Fake it till you make it.' And little by little, I did make it. I woke up one day in the fall of 1982 and realized I really didn't want to drink anymore. The compulsion, as they say, had been lifted.

"I moved on. You're not supposed to make any big changes in the first year of sobriety, but one day when I was in Gage Park - the Reinisch Rose Garden, actually..." He trailed off, looking at them. "What? Do you know it? Don't tell me you know the Reinisch!"

"We've been there," Susannah said quietly. "Seen the toy train."

"That," Callahan said, "is amazing."

"It's nineteen o'clock and all the birds are singing," Eddie said. He wasn't smiling.

"Anyway, the Rose Garden was where I spotted the first poster. HAVE YOU SEEN CALLAHAN, OUR IRISH SETTER. SCAR ON PAW, SCAR ON FOREHEAD. GENEROUS REWARD. Et cetera, et cetera. They'd finally gotten the name right. I decided it was time to move on while I still could. So I went to Detroit, and there I found a place called The Lighthouse Shelter. It was a wet shelter. It was, in fact, Home without Rowan Magruder. They were doing good work there, but they were barely staggering along. I signed on. And that's where I was in December of 1983, when it happened."

"When what happened?" Susannah asked.

It was Jake Chambers who answered. He knew, was perhaps the only one of them who could know. It had happened to him, too, after all.

"That was when you died," Jake said.

"Yes, that's right," Callahan said. He showed no surprise at all. They might have been discussing rice, or the possibility that Andy ran on ant-nomics. "That's when I died. Roland, I wonder if you'd roll me a cigarette? I seem to need something a little stronger than apple cider."

FOURTEEN

There's an old tradition at Lighthouse, one that goes back ... jeez, must be all of four years (The Lighthouse Shelter has only been in existence for five). It's Thanksgiving in the gym of Holy Name High School on West Congress Street. A bunch of the drunks decorate the place with orange and brown crepe paper, cardboard turkeys, plastic fruit and vegetables. American reap-charms, in other words. You had to have at least two weeks' continuous sobriety to get on this detail. Also  - this is something Ward Huckman, Al McCowan, and Don Callahan have agreed to among themselves  - no wet brains are allowed on Decoration Detail, no matter how long they've been sober .

On Turkey Day, nearly a hundred of Detroit's finest alkies, hypes, and half-crazed homeless gather at Holy Name for a wonderful dinner of turkey, taters, and all the trimmings. They are seated at a dozen long tables in the center of the basketball court (the legs of the tables are protected by swags of felt, and the diners eat in their stocking feet). Before they dig in  - this is part of the custom  - they go swiftly around the tables ("Take more than ten seconds, boys, and I'm cutting you off, " Al has warned) and everyone says one thing they're grateful for. Because it's Thanksgiving, yes, but also because one of the principal tenets of the AA program is that a grateful alcoholic doesn't get drunk and a grateful addict doesn't get stoned .

It goes fast, and because Callahan is just sitting there, not thinking of anything in particular, when it's his turn he almost blurts out something that could have caused him trouble. At the very least, he would have been tabbed as a guy with a bizarre sense of humor.

"I'm grateful I haven't..." he begins, then realizes what he's about to say, and bites it back. They're looking at him expectantly, stubble-faced men and pale, doughy women with limp hair, all carrying about them the dirty-breeze subway station aroma that's the smell of the streets. Some already call him Faddah, and how do they know ? How could they know ? And how would they feel if they knew what a chill it gives him to hear that? How it makes him remember the Hitler Brothers and the sweet, childish smell of fabric softener? But they're looking at him. "The clients. " Ward and Al are looking at him, too .

"I'm grateful I haven't had a drink or a drug today," he says, falling back on the old faithful, there's always that to be grateful for. They murmur their approval, the man next to Callahan says he's grateful his sister's going to let him come for Christmas, and no one knows how close Callahan has come to saying "I'm grateful I haven't seen any Type Three vampires or lost-pet posters lately ."

He thinks it's because God has taken him back, at least on a trial basis, and the power of Barlow's bite has finally been cancelled. He thinks he's lost the cursed gift of seeing, in other words. He doesn't test this by trying to go into a church, however  - the gym of Holy Name High is close enough for him, thanks. It never occurs to him  - at least in his conscious mind  - that they want to make sure the net's all the way around him this time. They may be slow learners, Callahan will eventually come to realize, but they're not no learners .

Then, in early December, Ward Huckman receives a dream letter. "Christmas done come early, Don! Wait'll you see this, Al!" Waving the letter triumphantly. "Play our cards right, and boys, our worries about next year are over!"

Al McCowan takes the letter, and as he reads it his expression of conscious, careful reserve begins to melt. By the time he hands the letter to Don, he's grinning from ear to ear.

The letter is from a corporation with offices in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. It's on rag bond so luxurious you want to cut it into a shirt and wear it next to your skin. It says that the corporation is planning to give away twenty million dollars to twenty charitable organizations across the United States, a million each. It says that the corporation must do this before the end of the calendar year 1983. Potential recipients include food pantries, homeless shelters, two clinics for the indigent, and a prototype AIDS testing program in Spokane. One of the shelters is Lighthouse. The signature is Richard P. Sayre, Executive Vice President, Detroit. It all looks on the up-and-up, and the fact that all three of them have been invited to the corporation's Detroit offices to discuss this gift also seems on the up-and-up. The date of the meeting  - what will be the date of Donald Callahan's death  - is December 19th, 1983. A Monday .

The name on the letterhead is THE SOBRA CORPORATION.

FIFTEEN

"You went," Roland said.

"We all went," Callahan said. "If the invitation had been for me alone, I never would've. But, since they were asking for all three of us... and wanted to give us a million dollars... do you have any idea what a million bucks would have meant to a fly-by-night outfit like Home or Lighthouse? Especially during the Reagan years?"

Susannah gave a start at this. Eddie shot her a nakedly triumphant look. Callahan clearly wanted to ask the reason for this byplay, but Roland was twirling his finger in that hurry-up gesture again, and now it really was getting late. Pressing on for midnight. Not that any of Roland's ka-tet looked sleepy; they were tightly focused on the Pere, marking every word.

"Here is what I've come to believe," Callahan said, leaning forward. "There is a loose league of association between the vampires and the low men. I think if you traced it back, you'd find the roots of their association in the dark land. In Thunderclap."

"I've no doubt," Roland said. His blue eyes flashed out of his pale and tired face.

"The vampires - those who aren't Type Ones - are stupid. The low men are smarter, but not by a whole lot. Otherwise I never would have been able to escape them for as long as I did. But then - finally - someone else took an interest. An agent of the Crimson King, I should think, whoever or whatever he is. The low men were drawn away from me. So were the vampires. There were no posters during those last months, not that I saw; no chalked messages on the sidewalks of West Fort Street or Jefferson Avenue, either. Someone giving the orders, that's what I think. Someone a good deal smarter. And a million dollars!" He shook his head. A small and bitter smile touched his face. "In the end, that was what blinded me. Nothing but money. 'Oh yes, but it's to do good!' I told myself... and we told each other, of course. 'It'll keep us independent for at least five years! No more going to the Detroit City Council, begging with our hats in our hands!' All true. It didn't occur to me until later that there's another truth, very simple: greed in a good cause is still greed."

"What happened?" Eddie asked.

"Why, we kept our appointment," the Pere said. His face wore a rather ghastly smile. "The Tishman Building, 982 Michigan Avenue, one of the finest business addresses in the D. December 19th, 4:20 p.m."

"Odd time for an appointment," Susannah said.

"We thought so, too, but who questions such minor matters with a million dollars at stake? After some discussion, we agreed with Al - or rather Al's mother. According to her, one should show up for important appointments five minutes early, no more and no less. So we walked into the lobby of the Tishman Building at 4:10 p.m., dressed in our best, found Sombra Corporation on the directory board, and went on up to the thirty-third floor."

"Had you checked this corporation out?" Eddie asked.

Callahan looked at him as if to say duh . "According to what we could find in the library, Sombra was a closed corporation - no public stock issue, in other words - that mostly bought other companies. They specialized in high-tech stuff, real estate, and construction. That seemed to be all anyone knew. Assets were a closely guarded secret."

"Incorporated in the U.S.?" Susannah asked.

"No. Nassau, the Bahamas."

Eddie started, remembering his days as a cocaine mule and the sallow thing from whom he had bought his last load of dope. "Been there, done that," he said. "Didn't see anyone from the Sombra Corporation, though."

But did he know that was true? Suppose the sallow thing with the British accent worked for Sombra? Was it so hard to believe that they were involved in the dope trade, along with whatever else they were into? Eddie supposed not. If nothing else, it suggested a tie to Enrico Balazar.

"Anyway, they were there in all the right reference books and yearlies," Callahan said. "Obscure, but there. And rich. I don't know exactly what Sombra is, and I'm at least half-convinced that most of the people we saw in their offices on the thirty-third floor were nothing but extras... stage-dressing... but there probably is an actual Sombra Corporation.

"We took the elevator up there. Beautiful reception area -  French Impressionist paintings on the walls, what else? - and a beautiful receptionist to go with it. The kind of woman - say pardon, Susannah - if you're a man, you can almost believe that if you were allowed to touch her breast, you'd live forever."

Eddie burst out laughing, looked sideways at Susannah, and stopped in a hurry.

"It was 4:17. We were invited to sit down. Which we did, feeling nervous as hell. People came and went. Every now and then a door to our left would open and we'd see a floor filled with desks and cubicles. Phones ringing, secretaries flitting hither and yon with files, the sound of a big copier. If it was a setup - and I think it was - it was as elaborate as a Hollywood movie. I was nervous about our appointment with Mr. Sayre, but no more than that. Extraordinary, really. I'd been on the run more or less constantly since leaving 'Salem's Lot eight years previous, and I'd developed a pretty good early-warning system, but it never so much as chirruped that day. I suppose if you could reach him via the Ouija board, John Dillinger would say much the same about his night at the movies with Anna Sage.

"At 4:19, a young man in a striped shirt and tie that looked just oh so Hugo Boss came out and got us. We were whisked down a corridor past some very upscale offices - with an upscale executive beavering away in every one, so far as I could see -  and to double doors at the end of the hall. This was marked conference room. Our escort opened the doors. He said, 'God luck, gentlemen.' I remember that very clearly. Not good luck, but god luck. That was when my perimeter alarms started to go off, and by then it was far too late. It happened fast, you see. They didn't..."

SIXTEEN

It happens fast. They have been after Callahanfor a long time now, but they waste little time gloating. The doors slam shut behind them, much too loudly and hard enough to shiver in their frames. Executive assistants who drag down eighteen thousand a year to start with close doors a certain way  - with respect for money and power  - and this isn't it. This is the way angry drunks and addicts on the jones close doors. Also crazy people, of course. Crazy people are ace doorslammers .

Callahan's alarm systems are fully engaged now, not pinging but howling, and when he looks around the executive conference room, dominated at the far end by a large window giving a terrific view of Lake Michigan, he sees there's good reason for this and has time to think Dear Christ - Mary, mother of God - how could I have been so foolish? He can see thirteen people in the room. Three are low men, and this is his first good look at their heavy, unhealthy-looking faces, red-glinting eyes, and full, womanish lips. All three are smoking. Nine are Type Three vampires. The thirteenth person in the conference room is wearing a loud shirt and clashing tie, low-men attire for certain, but his face has a lean and foxy look, full of intelligence and dark humor. On his brow is a red circle of blood that seems neither to ooze nor to clot .

There is a bitter crackling sound. Callahan wheels and sees Al and Ward drop to the floor. Standing to either side of the door through which they entered are numbers fourteen and fifteen, a low man and a low woman, both of them holding electrical stunners.

"Your friends will be all right, Father Callahan. "

He whirls around again. It's the man with the blood-spot on his forehead. He looks about sixty, but it's hard to tell. He's wearing a garish yellow shirt and a red tie. When his thin lips part in a smile, they reveal teeth that come to points . It's Sayre, Callahan thinks . Sayre, or whoever signed that letter. Whoever thought this little sting up.

"You, however, won't, " he continues.

The low men look at him with a kind of dull avidity: here he is, finally, their lost pooch with the burned paw and the scarred forehead. The vampires are more interested. They almost thrum within their blue auras. And all at once Callahan can hear the chimes. They're faint, somehow damped down, but they're there. Calling him.

Sayre  - if that's his name  - turns to the vampires. "He's the one," he says in a matter-of-fact tone. "He's killed hundreds of you in a dozen versions of America. My friends"  - he gestures to the low men  - "were unable to track him down, but of course they seek other, less suspecting prey in the ordinary course of things. In any case, he's here now. Go on, have at him. But don't kill him !"

He turns to Callahan. The hole in his forehead fills and gleams but never drips . It's an eye, Callahan thinks , a bloody eye. What is looking out of it? What is watching, and from where ?

Sayre says, "These particular friends of the King all carry the AIDS virus. You surely know what I mean, don't you ? We'll let that kill you. It will take you out of the game forever, in this world and all the others. This is no game for a fellow like you, anyway. A false priest like you ."

Callahan doesn't hesitate. If he hesitates, he will be lost. It's not AIDS he's afraid of, but of letting them put their filthy lips on him in the first place, to kiss him as the one was kissing Lupe Delgado in the alley. They don't get to win. After all the way he's come, after all the jobs, all the jail cells, after finally getting sober in Kansas , they don't get to win.

He doesn't try to reason with them. There is no palaver. He just sprints down the right side of the conference room's extravagant mahogany table. The man in the yellow shirt, suddenly alarmed, shouts "Get him! Get him!" Hands slap at his jacket  - specially bought at Grand River Menswear for this auspicious occasion  - but slip off. He has time to think The window won't break, it's made of some tough glass, anti-suicide glass, and it won't break... and he has just time enough to call on God for the first time since Barlow forced him to take of his poisoned blood.

"Help me! Please help me!" Father Callahan cries, and runs shoulder-first into the window. One more hand slaps at his head, tries to tangle itself in his hair, and then it is gone. The window shatters all around him and suddenly he is standing in cold air, surrounded by flurries of snow. He looks down between black shoes which were also specially purchased for this auspicious occasion, and he sees Michigan Avenue, with cars like toys and people like ants .

He has a sense of them  - Sayre and the low men and the vampires who were supposed to infect him and take him out of the game forever  -  clustered at the broken window, staring with disbelief .

He thinks , This does take me out of it forever... doesn't it?

And he thinks, with the wonder of a child : This is the last thought I'll ever have. This is goodbye.

Then he is falling.

SEVENTEEN

Callahan stopped and looked at Jake, almost shyly. "Do you remember it?" He asked. "The actual..." He cleared his throat. "The dying?"

Jake nodded gravely. "You don't?"

"I remember looking at Michigan Avenue from between my new shoes. I remember the sensation of standing there - seeming to, anyway - in the middle of a snow flurry. I remember Sayre behind me, yelling in some other language. Cursing. Words that guttural just about had to be curses. And I remember thinking, He's frightened . That was actually my last thought, that Sayre was frightened. Then there was an interval of darkness. I floated. I could hear the chimes, but they were distant. Then they came closer. As if they were mounted on some engine that was rushing toward me at terrible speed.

"There was light. I saw light in the darkness. I thought I was having the Kubler-Ross death experience, and I went toward it. I didn't care where I came out, as long as it wasn't on Michigan Avenue, all smashed and bleeding, with a crowd standing around me. But I didn't see how that could happen. You don't fall thirty-three stories, then regain consciousness.

"And I wanted to get away from the chimes. They kept getting louder. My eyes started to water. My ears hurt. I was glad I still had eyes and ears, but the chimes made any gratitude I might have felt pretty academic.

"I thought, I have to get into the light , and I lunged for it. I..."

EIGHTEEN

He opens his eyes, but even before he does, he is aware of a smell. It's the smell of hay, but very faint, almost exhausted. A ghost of its former self, you might say. And he? Is he a ghost?

He sits up and looks around. If this is the afterlife, then all the holy books of the world, including the one from which he himself used to preach, are wrong. Because he's not in heaven or hell; he's in a stable. There are white wisps of ancient straw on the floor. There are cracks in the board walls through which brilliant light streams. It's the light he followed out of the darkness, he thinks. And he thinks , It's desert light. Is there any concrete reason to think so ? Perhaps. The air is dry when he pulls it into his nostrils. It's like drawing the air of a different planet.

Maybe it is, he thinks . Maybe this is the Planet Afterlife.

The chimes are still there, both sweet and horrible, but now fading... fading... and gone. He hears the faint snuffle of hot wind. Some of it finds its way through the gaps between the boards, and a few bits of straw lift off from the floor, do a tired little dance, then settle back.

Now there is another noise. An arrhythmic thudding noise. Some machine, and not in the best of shape, from the sound. He stands up. It's hot in here, and sweat breaks immediately on his face and hands. He looks down at himself and sees his fine new Grand River Menswear clothes are gone. He is now wearing jeans and a blue chambray shirt, faded thin from many washings. On his feet is a pair of battered boots with rundown heels. They look like they have walked many a thirsty mile. He bends and feels his legs for breaks. There appear to be none. Then his arms. None. He tries snapping his fingers. They do the job easily, making little dry sounds like breaking twigs.

He thinks : Was my whole life a dream? Is this the reality? If so, who am I and what am I doing here?

And from the deeper shadows behind him comes that weary cycling sound : thud-THUD-thud-THUD-thud-THUD.

He turns in that direction, and gasps at what he sees. Standing behind him in the middle of the abandoned stable is a door. It's set into no wall, only stands free. It has hinges, but as far as he can see they connect the door to nothing but air. Hieroglyphs are etched upon it halfway up. He cannot read them. He steps closer, as if that would aid understanding. And in a way it does. Because he sees that the doorknob is made of crystal, and etched upon it is a rose. He has read his Thomas Wolfe: a stone, a rose, an unfound door; a stone, a rose, a door. There's no stone, but perhaps that is the meaning of the hieroglyph.

No, he thinks . No, the word is unfound. Maybe I'm the stone.

He reaches out and touches the crystal knob. As though it were a signal

(a sigul, he thinks)

the thudding machinery ceases. Very faint, very distant  - far and wee  - he hears the chimes. He tries the knob. It moves in neither direction. There's not even the slightest give. It might as well be set in concrete. When he takes his hand away, the sound of the chimes ceases .

He walks around the door and the door is gone. Walks the rest of the way around and it's back. He makes three slow circles, noting the exact point at which the thickness of the door disappears on one side and reappears on the other. He reverses his course, now going widder-shins. Same deal. What the hell?

He looks at the door for several moments, pondering, then walks deeper into the stable, curious about the machine he heard. There's no pain when he walks, if he just took a long fall his body hasn't yet got the news, but Kee-rist is it ever hot in here!

There are horse stalls, long abandoned. There's a pile of ancient hay, and beside it a neatly folded blanket and what looks like a breadboard. On the board is a single scrap of dried meat. He picks it up, sniffs it, smells salt . Jerky, he thinks, and pops it into his mouth. He's not very worried about being poisoned. How can you poison a man who's already dead ?

Chewing, he continues his explorations. At the rear of the stable is a small room like an afterthought. There are a few chinks in the walls of this room, too, enough for him to see a machine squatting on a concrete pad. Everything in the stable whispers of long years and abandonment, but this gadget, which looks sort of like a milking machine, appears brand new. No rust, no dust. He goes closer. There's a chrome pipe jutting from one side. Beneath it is a drain. The steel collar around it looks damp. On top of the machine is a small metal plate. Next to the plate is a red button. Stamped on the plate is this:

LaMERK INDUSTRIES

834789-AA-45-776019

DO NOT REMOVE SLUG

ASK FOR ASSISTANCE

The red button is stamped with the word ON. Callahan pushes it. The weary thudding sound resumes, and after a moment water gushes from the chrome pipe. He puts his hands under it. The water is numbingly cold, shocking his overheated skin. He drinks. The water is neither sweet nor sour and he thinks , Such things as taste must be forgotten at great depths. This -

"Hello, Faddah."

Callahan screams in surprise. His hands fly up and for a moment jewels of water sparkle in a dusty sunray falling between two shrunken boards. He wheels around on the eroded heels of his boots. Standing just outside the door of the pump-room is a man in a hooded robe.

Sayre, he thinks . It's Sayre, he's followed me, he came through that damn door -

"Calm down," says the man in the robe . " 'Cool your jets,' as the gunslinger's new friend might say." Confidingly: "His name is Jake, but the housekeeper calls him 'Bama. "And then, in the bright tone of one just struck by a fine idea, he says, "I would show him to you! Both of them! Perhaps it's not too late! Come!" He holds out a hand. The fingers emerging from the robe's sleeve are long and white, somehow unpleasant. Like wax. When Callahan makes no move to come forward, the man in the robe speaks reasonably. "Come. You can't stay here, you know. This is only a way station, and nobody stays here for long. Come. "

"Who are you?"

The man in the robe makes an impatient tsking sound. "No time for all that, Faddah. Name, name, what's in a name, as someone or other said. Shakespeare? Virginia Woolf? Who can remember? Come, and I'll show you a wonder. And I won't touch you; I'll walk ahead of you. See?"

He turns. His robe swirls like the skirt of an evening dress. He walks back into the stable, and after a moment Callahan follows. The pump-room is no good to him, after all; the pump-room is a dead end. Outside the stable, he might be able to run.

Run where?

Well, that's to see, isn't it?

The man in the robe raps on the free-standing door as he passes it. "Knock on wood, Donnie be good!" he says merrily, and as he steps into the brilliant rectangle of light falling through the stable door, Callahan sees he's carrying something in his left hand. It's a box, perhaps a foot long and wide and deep. It looks like it might be made of the same wood as the door. Or perhaps it's a heavier version of that wood. Certainly it's darker, and even closer-grained.

Watching the robed man carefully, meaning to stop if he stops, Callahan follows into the sun. The heat is even stronger once he's in the light, the sort of heat he's felt in Death Valley. And yes, as they step out of the stable he sees that they are in a desert. Off to one side is a ramshackle building that rises from a foundation of crumbling sandstone blocks. It might once have been an inn, he supposes. Or an abandoned set from a Western movie. On the other side is a corral where most of the posts and rails have fallen. Beyond it he sees miles of rocky, stony sand. Nothing else but  -

Yes! Yes, there is something! Two somethings! Two tiny moving dots at the far horizon!

"You see them! How excellent your eyes must be, Faddah!"

The man in the robe  - it's black, his face within the hood nothing but a pallid suggestion  - stands about twenty paces from him. He titters. Callahan cares for the sound no more than for the waxy look of his fingers. It's like the sound of mice scampering over bones. That makes no actual sense, but  -

"Who are they?" Callahan asks in a dry voice. "Who are you? Where is this place?"

The man in black sighs theatrically. "So much backstory, so little time," he says. "Call me Walter, if you like. As for this place, it's a way station, just as I told you. A little rest stop between the hoot of your world and the holler of the next. Oh, you thought you were quite the far wanderer, didn't you? Following all those hidden highways of yours? But now, Faddah, you're on a real journey. "

"Stop calling me that!" Callahan shouts. His throat is already dry. The sunny heat seems to be accumulating on top of his head like actual weight.

"Faddah, Faddah, Faddah!" the man in black says. He sounds petulant, but Callahan knows he's laughing inside. He has an idea this man  - if he is a man  - spends a great deal of time laughing on the inside. "Oh well, no need to be pissy about it, I suppose. I'll callyouDon. Do you like that better ?"

The black specks in the distance are wavering now; the rising thermals cause them to levitate, disappear, then reappear again. Soon they'll be gone for good.

"Who are they ? " he asks the man in black.

"Folks you'll almost certainly never meet, " the man in black says dreamily. The hood shifts; for a moment Callahan can see the waxy blade of a nose and the curve of an eye, a small cup filled with dark fluid. "They'll die under the mountains. If they don't die under the mountains, there are things in the Western Sea that will eat them alive . Dod-a-chock! "He laughs again. But  -

But all at once you don't sound completely sure of yourself, my friend, Callahan thinks .

"If all else fails, " Walter says, "this will kill them." He raises the box. Again, faintly, Callahan hears the unpleasant ripple of the chimes. "And who will bring it to them"? Ka, of course, yet even ka needs a friend, a kai-mai. That would be you."

"I don't understand."

"No," the man in black agrees sadly, "and I don't have time to explain. Like the White Rabbit in Alice, I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date. They're following me, you see, but I needed to double back and talk to you. Busy-busy-busy! Now I must get ahead of them again  - how else will I draw them on ? You and I, Don, must be done with our palaver, regrettably short though it has been. Back into the stable with you, amigo. Quick as a bunny !"

"What if I don't want to?" Only there's really no what-if about it. He's never wanted to go anyplace less. Suppose he asks this fellow to let him go and try to catch up with those wavering specks ? What if he tells the man in black, "That's where I'm supposed to be, where what you call ka wants me to be "? He guesses he knows. Might as well spit in the ocean .

As if to confirm this, Walter says, "What you want hardly matters. You'll go where the King decrees, and there you will wait. If yon two die on their course  - as they almost certainly must  - you will live a life of rural serenity in the place to which I send you, and there you too will die, full of years and possibly with a false but undoubtedly pleasing sense of redemption. You'll live on your level of the Tower long after I'm bone-dust on mine. This I promise you, faddah, for I have seen it in the glass, say true! And if they keep coming? If they reach you in the place to which you are going? Why, in that unlikely case you'll aid them in every way you can and kill them by doing so. It's a mind-blower, isn't it? Wouldn't you say it's a mind-blower ?"

He begins to walk toward Callahan. Callahan backs toward the stable where the unfound door awaits. He doesn't want to go there, but there's nowhere else. "Get away from me, " he says.

"Nope," says Walter, the man in black. "I can't go for that, no can do." He holds the box out toward Callahan. At the same time he reaches over the top of it and grasps the lid.

"Don't!" Callahan says sharply. Because the man in the black robe mustn't open the box. There's something terrible inside the box, something that would terrify even Barlow, the wily vampire who forced Callahan to drink his blood and then sent him on his way into the prisms of America like a fractious child whose company has become tiresome.

"Keep moving and perhaps I won't have to, " Walter teases.

Callahan backs into the stable's scant shadow. Soon he'll be inside again. No help for it. And he can feel that strange only-there-on-one-side door waiting like a weight. "You're cruel ! " he bursts out .

Walter's eyes widen, and for a moment he looks deeply hurt. This may be absurd, but Callahan is looking into the man's deep eyes and feels sure the emotion is nonetheless genuine. And the surety robs him of any last hope that all this might be a dream, or a final brilliant interval before true death. In dreams  - his, at least  - the bad guys, the scary guys, never have complex emotions .

"I am what ka and the King and the Tower have made me. We all are. We're caught."

Callahan remembers the dream-west through which he traveled: the forgotten silos, the neglected sunsets and long shadows, his own bitter joy as he dragged his trap behind him, singing until the jingle of the very chains that held him became sweet music.

"Iknow , " he says .

"Yes, I see you do. Keep moving . "

Callahan's back in the stable now. Once again he can smell the faint, almost exhausted aroma of old hay. Detroit seems impossible, a hallucination. So do all his memories of America.

"Don't open that thing, " Callahan says, "and I will."

"What an excellent Faddah you are, Faddah. "

"You promised not to call me that."

"Promises are made to be broken, Faddah."

"I don't think you'll be able to kill him," Callahan said.

Walter grimaces. "That's ka's business, not mine."

"Maybe not ka, either. Suppose he's above ka?"

Walter recoils, as if struck . I've blasphemed, Callahan thinks . And with this guy, I've an idea that's no mean feat.

No one's above ka, false priest, " the man in black spits at him. "And the room at the top of the Tower is empty, I know it is ."

Although Callahan is not entirely sure what the man is talking about, his response is quick and sure. "You're wrong. There is a God. He waits and sees all from His high place. He  -  "

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 .

NINETEEN

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 stock-line 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 anywhen! 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.

TWENTY

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?"

"Who do you think they were?"

Eddie looked at Jake. "What about you, O son of Elmer? Got any ideas?"

"Sure," Jake said. "It was Calvin Tower and the other guy from the bookshop, his friend. The one who told me the Samson riddle and the river riddle." He snapped his fingers once, then twice, then grinned. "Aaron Deepneau."

"What about the ring Callahan mentioned?" Eddie asked him. "The one with Ex Libris on it? I didn't see either of them wearing a ring like that."

"Were you looking?" Jake asked him.

"No, not really. But - "

"And remember that we saw him in 1977," Jake said. "Those guys saved Pere's life in 1981. Maybe someone gave Mr. Tower the ring during the four years between. As a present. Or maybe he bought it himself."

"You're just guessing," Eddie said.

"Yeah," Jake agreed. "But Tower owns a bookshop, so him having a ring with Ex Libris on it fits. Can you tell me it doesn't feel right?"

"No. I'd have to put it in the ninetieth percentile, at least. But how could they know that Callahan..." Eddie trailed off, considered, then shook his head decisively. "Nah, I'm not even gonna get into it tonight. Next thing we'll be discussing the Kennedy assassination, and I'm tired."

"We're all tired," Roland said, "and we have much to do in the days ahead. Yet the Pere's story has left me in a strangely disturbed frame of mind. I can't tell if it answers more questions than it raises, or if it's the other way around."

None of them responded to d��s.

"We are ka-tet, and now we sit together an-tet," Roland said. "In council. Late as it is, is there anything else we need to discuss before we part from one another? If so, you must say." When there was no response, Roland pushed back his chair. "All right, then I wish you all - "

"Wait."

It was Susannah. It had been so long since she'd spoken that they had nearly forgotten her. And she spoke in a small voice not much like her usual one. Certainly it didn't seem to belong to the woman who had told Eben Took that if he called her brownie again, she'd pull the tongue out of his head and wipe his ass with it.

"There might be something."

That same small voice.

"Something else."

And smaller still.

She looked at them, each in turn, and when she came to the gunslinger he saw sorrow in those eyes, and reproach, and weariness. He saw no anger. If she'd been angry , he thought later, I might not have felt quite so ashamed .

"I think I might have a little problem," she said. "I don't see how it can be... how it can possibly be... but boys, I think I might be a little bit in the family way."

Having said that, Susannah Dean/Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker/Mia daughter of none put her hands over her face and began to cry.