Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower #5)

Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower #5) Page 26

ONE

They moved fast, but Mia moved faster. A mile beyond the place where the arroyo path divided, they found her wheelchair. She had pushed it hard, using her strong arms to give it a savage beating against the unforgiving terrain. Finally it had struck a jutting rock hard enough to bend the lefthand wheel out of true and render the chair useless. It was a wonder, really, that she had gotten as far in it as she had.

"Fuck-commala," Eddie murmured, looking at the chair. At the dents and dings and scratches. Then he raised his head, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted. "Fight her, Susannah!Fight her! We're coming! " He pushed past the chair and headed on up the path, not looking to see if the others were following.

"She can't make it up the path to the cave, can she?" Jake asked. "I mean, her legs are gone."

"Wouldn't think so, would you?" Roland asked, but his face was dark. And he was limping. Jake started to say something about this, then thought better of it.

"What would she want up there, anyway?" Callahan asked.

Roland turned a singularly cold eye on him. "To go somewhere else," he said. "Surely you see that much. Come on."

TWO

As they neared the place where the path began to climb, Roland caught up to Eddie. The first time he put his hand on the younger man's shoulder, Eddie shook it off. The second time he turned - reluctantly - to look at his dinh. Roland saw there was blood spattered across the front of Eddie's shirt. He wondered if it was Benny's, Margaret's, or both.

"Mayhap it'd be better to let her alone awhile, if it's Mia," Roland said.

"Are you crazy? Did fighting the Wolves loosen your screws ?"

"If we let her alone, she may finish her business and be gone." Even as he spoke the words, Roland doubted them.

"Yeah," Eddie said, studying him with burning eyes, "she'll finish her business, all right. First piece, have the kid. Second piece, kill my wife."

"That would be suicide."

"But she might do it. We have to go after her."

Surrender was an art Roland practiced rarely but with some skill on the few occasions in his life when it had been necessary. He took another look at Eddie Dean's pale, set face and practiced it now. "All right," he said, "but we'll have to be careful. She'll fight to keep from being taken. She'll kill, if it comes to that. You before any of us, mayhap."

"I know," Eddie said. His face was bleak. He looked up the path, but a quarter of a mile up, it hooked around to the south side of the bluff and out of sight. The path zigged back to their side just below the mouth of the cave. That stretch of the climb was deserted, but what did that prove? She could be anywhere. It crossed Eddie's mind that she might not even be up there at all, that the crashed chair might have been as much a red herring as the children's possessions Roland had had scattered along the arroyo path.

I won't believe that. There's a million ratholes in this part of the Calla, and if I believe that she could be in any of them ...

Callahan and Jake had caught up and stood there looking at Eddie.

"Come on," he said. "I don't care who she is, Roland. If four able-bodied men can't catch one no-legs lady, we ought to turn in our guns and call it a day."

Jake smiled wanly. "I'm touched. You just called me a man."

"Don't let it go to your head, Sunshine. Come on."

THREE

Eddie and Susannah spoke and thought of each other as man and wife, but he hadn't exactly been able to take a cab over to Carrier's and buy her a diamond and a wedding band. He'd once had a pretty nice high school class ring, but that he'd lost in the sand at Coney Island during the summer he turned seventeen, the summer of Mary Jean Sobieski. Yet on their journeyings from the Western Sea, Eddie had rediscovered his talent as a wood-carver ("wittle baby-ass whittler," the great sage and eminent junkie would have said), and Eddie had carved his beloved a beautiful ring of willowgreen, light as foam but strong. This Susannah had worn between her breasts, hung on a length of rawhide.

They found it at the foot of the path, still on its rawhide loop. Eddie picked it up, looked at it grimly for a moment, then slipped it over his own head, inside his own shirt.

"Look," Jake said.

They turned to a place just off the path. Here, in a patch of scant grass, was a track. Not human, not animal. Three wheels in a configuration that made Eddie think of a child's tricycle. What the hell?

"Come on," he said, and wondered how many times he'd said it since realizing she was gone. He also wondered how long they'd keep following him if he kept on saying it. Not that it mattered. He'd go on until he had her again, or until he was dead. Simple as that. What frightened him most was the baby... what she called the chap. Suppose it turned on her? And he had an idea it might do just that.

"Eddie," Roland said.

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

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

"Did you hear one?"

"No."

"Then you can't know that."

"But I do," Roland said. "Someone sent her a ride. Or something ."

"You can't know that, goddam you!"

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

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

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

Roland said, "She's gotten away. Prepare yourself for it."

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

FOUR

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

"SQUEEZIE-PIE" BRAKES, BY NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS

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

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

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

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

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

"Come on, you guys. Let's find her."

FIVE

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

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

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

And for a wonder, the phantom did.

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

"No," Eddie said. "No, I don't accept that. The power is still here. The power is still here ."

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

Eddie took Roland's shoulder, turned him. "What happened, Roland? Do you know?"

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

"If it was Slightman, I'll go back and kill him myself."

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

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

"Shut up !" Eddie screamed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No," Roland said.

"Then I wish you'd stop looking at those books and help me think of a way to open this d - "

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah, because he's one obsessed motherfucker."

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

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

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

Jake was paying little attention; his eyes were riveted on the book jacket with its picture of a little country church at sunset. Callahan, meanwhile, had stepped past him in order to get a closer look at the door standing here in the gloomy cave. At last the boy looked up. "But... Roland, isn't this the town Pere Callahan told us about? The one where the vampire broke his cross and made him drink his blood?"

Callahan whirled away from the door. "What ?"

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

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

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

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

SIX

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

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

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

Callahan found the page, and read this:

" 'In the early days at the seminary, a friend of Father...' " He trailed off, eyes racing ahead over the words on the page.

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

Slowly, Callahan resumed.

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

" 'Now, standing before Danny Glick's... Danny Glick's mourners, that old credo... that old credo returned.' "

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

"You had it, didn't you?" Eddie said. "You actually had a sampler saying that."

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

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

"Stop," Callahan said dully. "It makes my head hurt."

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

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

"It is," Jake said simply.

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

"Yes, but - "

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

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

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

"And you know how to open that door?" Eddie pointed at

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

Eddie nodded. "All right, then, let me tell you this much: I'm pretty sure I have seen the name Stephen King before, at least once."

"On the Specials board," Jake said without looking up from the book. "Yeah, I remember. It was on the Specials board the first time we went todash."

"Specials board?" Roland asked, frowning.

"Tower's Specials board," Eddie said. "It was in the window, remember? Part of his whole Restaurant-of-the-Mind thing."

Roland nodded.

"But I'll tell you guys something," Jake said, and now he did look up from the book. "The name was there when Eddie and I went todash, but it wasn't on the board the first time I went in there. The time Mr. Deepneau told me the river riddle, it was someone else's name. It changed, just like the name of the writer on Charlie the Choo-Choo ."

"I can't be in a book," Callahan was saying. "I am not a fiction... am I?"

"Roland." It was Eddie. The gunslinger turned to him. "I need to find her. I don't care who's real and who's not. I don't care about Calvin Tower, Stephen King, or the Pope of Rome. As far as reality goes, she's all of it I want. I need to find my wife.'" His voice dropped. "Help me, Roland."

Roland reached out and took the book in his left hand. With his right he touched the door. If she's still alive , he thought. If we can find her, and if she's come back to herself. If and if and if.

Eddie took Roland's arm. "Please," he said. "Please don't make me try to do it on my own. I love her so much. Help me find her."

Roland smiled. It made him younger. It seemed to fill the cave with its own light. All of Eld's ancient power was in that smile: the power of the White.

"Yes," he said. "We go."

And then he said again, all the affirmation necessary in this dark place.

"Yes."

Bangor, Maine December 15, 2002

Author's Note

The debt I owe to the American Western in the composition of the Dark Tower novels should be clear without my belaboring the point; certainly the Calla did not come by the final part of its (slightly misspelled) name accidentally. Yet it should be pointed out that at least two sources for some of this material aren't American at all. Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly , etc.) was Italian. And Akira Kurosawa (The Seven Samurai) was, of course, Japanese. Would these books have been written without the cinematic legacy of Kurosawa, Leone, Peckinpah, Howard Hawkes, and John Sturgis? Probably not without Leone. But without the others, I would argue there could be no Leone.

I also owe a debt of thanks to Robin Furth, who managed to be there with the right bit of information every time I needed it, and of course to my wife, Tabitha, who is still patiently giving me the time and light and space I need to do this job to the best of my abilities.

S.K

Author's Afterword

Before you read this short afterword, I ask that you take a moment (may it do ya fine) to look again at the dedication page at the front of this story. I'll wait.

Thank you. I want you to know that Frank Muller has read a number of my books for the audio market, beginning with Different Seasons . I met him at Recorded Books in New York at that time and we liked each other immediately. It's a friendship that has lasted longer than some of my readers have been alive. In the course of our association, Frank recorded the first four Dark Tower novels, and I listened to them - all sixty or so cassettes -  while preparing to finish the gunslinger's story. Audio is the perfect medium for such exhaustive preparation, because audio insists you absorb everything; your hurrying eye (or occasionally tired mind) cannot skip so much as a single word. That was what I wanted, complete immersion in Roland's world, and that was what Frank gave me. He gave me something more, as well, something wonderful and unexpected. It was a sense of newness and freshness that I had lost somewhere along the way; a sense of Roland and Roland's friends as actual people , with their own vital inner lives. When I say in the dedication that Frank heard the voices in my head, I am speaking the literal truth as I understand it. And, like a rather more benign version of the Doorway Cave, he brought them fully back to life. The remaining books are finished (this one in final draft, the last two in rough), and in large part I owe that to Frank Muller and his inspired readings.

I had hoped to have Frank on board to do the audio readings of the final three Dark Tower books (unabridged readings; I do not allow abridgments of my work and don't approve of them, as a rule), and he was eager to do them. We discussed the possibility at a dinner in Bangor during October of 2001, and in the course of the conversation, he called the Tower stories his absolute favorites. As he had read over five hundred novels for the audio market, I was extremely flattered.

Less than a month after that dinner and that optimistic, forward-looking discussion, Frank suffered a terrible motorcycle accident on a highway in California. It happened only days after discovering that he was to become a father for the second time. He was wearing his brain-bucket and that probably saved his life - motorcyclists please take note - but he suffered serious injuries nevertheless, many of them neurological. He won't be recording the final Dark Tower novel on tape, after all. Frank's final work will almost certainly be his inspired reading of Clive Barker's Coldheart Canyon , which was completed in September of 2001, just before his accident.

Barring a miracle, Frank Muller's working life is over. His work of rehabilitation, which is almost sure to be lifelong, has only begun. He'll need a lot of care and a lot of professional help. Such things cost money, and money's not a thing which, as a rule, freelance artists have a great deal of. I and some friends have formed a foundation to help Frank - and, hopefully, other freelance artists of various types who suffer similar cataclysms. All the income I receive from the audio version of Wolves of the Calla will go into this foundation's account. It won't be enough, but the work of funding The Wavedancer Foundation (Wavedancer was the name of Frank's sailboat), like Frank's rehabilitative work, is only beginning. If you've got a few bucks that aren't working and want to help insure the future of The Wavedancer Foundation, don't send them to me; send them to

The Wavedancer Foundation

c/o Mr. Arthur Greene

101 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10001

Frank's wife, Erika, says thankya. So do I.

And Frank would, if he could.

Bangor, Maine December 15, 2002