by Stephen King
Slow down, Roland, he thought. It's not like we can call 911 if you vapor-lock.
Then, on some signal neither Eddie, Susannah, nor Jake understood, Roland and the Calla-folken stopped in mid-career, threw their hands to the sky, and thrust their hips forward, as if in coitus. "COMMALA!" they shouted, and that was the end.
Roland swayed, sweat pouring down his cheeks and brow . . . and tumbled off the stage into the crowd. Eddie's heart took a sharp upward lurch in his chest. Susannah cried out and began to roll her wheelchair forward. Jake stopped her before she could get far, grabbing one of the push-handles.
"I think it's part of the show!" he said.
"Yar, I'm pretty sure it is, too," Benny Slightman said.
The crowd cheered and applauded. Roland was conveyed through them and above them by willing upraised arms. His own arms were raised to the stars. His chest heaved like a bellows. Eddie watched in a kind of hilarious disbelief as the gunslinger rolled toward them as if on the crest of a wave.
"Roland sings, Roland dances, and to top it all off," he said, "Roland stage-dives like Joey Ramone."
"What are you talking about, sugar?" Susannah asked.
Eddie shook his head. "Doesn't matter. But nothing can top that. It's got to be the end of the party."
It was.
TWELVE
Half an hour later, four riders moved slowly down the high street of Calla Bryn Sturgis. One was wrapped in a heavy salide. Frosty plumes came from their mouths and those of their mounts on each exhale. The sky was filled with a cold strew of diamond-chips, Old Star and Old Mother brightest among them. Jake had already gone his way with the Slightmans to Eisenhart's Rocking B. Callahan led the other three travelers, riding a bit ahead of them. But before leading them anywhere, he insisted on wrapping Roland in the heavy blanket.
"You say it's not even a mile to your place--" Roland began.
"Never mind your blather," Callahan said. "The clouds have rolled away, the night's turned nigh-on cold enough to snow, and you danced a commala such as I've never seen in my years here."
"How many years would that be?" Roland asked.
Callahan shook his head. "I don't know. Truly, gunslinger, I don't. I know well enough when I came here--that was the winter of 1983, nine years after I left the town of Jerusalem's Lot. Nine years after I got this." He raised his scarred hand briefly.
"Looks like a burn," Eddie remarked.
Callahan nodded, but said no more on the subject. "In any case, time over here is different, as you all must very well know."
"It's in drift," Susannah said. "Like the points of the compass."
Roland, already wrapped in the blanket, had seen Jake off with a word . . . and with something else, as well. Eddie heard the clink of metal as something passed from the hand of the gunslinger to that of the 'prentice. A bit of money, perhaps.
Jake and Benny Slightman rode off into the dark side by side. When Jake turned and offered a final wave, Eddie had returned it with a surprising pang. Christ, you're not his father, he thought. That was true, but it didn't make the pang go away.
"Will he be all right, Roland?" Eddie had expected no other answer but yes, had wanted nothing more than a bit of balm for that pang. So the gunslinger's long silence alarmed him.
At long last Roland replied, "We'll hope so." And on the subject of Jake Chambers, he would say no more.
THIRTEEN
Now here was Callahan's church, a low and simple log building with a cross mounted over the door.
"What name do you call it, Pere?" Roland asked.
"Our Lady of Serenity."
Roland nodded. "Good enough."
"Do you feel it?" Callahan asked. "Do any of you feel it?" He didn't have to say what he was talking about.
Roland, Eddie, and Susannah sat quietly for perhaps an entire minute. At last Roland shook his head.
Callahan nodded, satisfied. "It sleeps." He paused, then added: "Tell God thankya."
"Something's there, though," Eddie said. He nodded toward the church. "It's like a . . . I don't know, a weight, almost."
"Yes," Callahan said. "Like a weight. It's awful. But tonight it sleeps. God be thanked." He sketched a cross in the frosty air.
Down a plain dirt track (but smooth, and bordered with carefully tended hedges) was another log building. Callahan's house, what he called the rectory.
"Will you tell us your story tonight?" Roland said.
Callahan glanced at the gunslinger's thin, exhausted face and shook his head. "Not a word of it, sai. Not even if you were fresh. Mine is no story for starlight. Tomorrow at breakfast, before you and your friends are off on your errands--would that suit?"
"Aye," Roland said.
"What if it wakes up in the night?" Susannah asked, and cocked her head toward the church. "Wakes up and sends us todash?"
"Then we'll go," Roland said.
"You've got an idea what to do with it, don't you?" Eddie asked.
"Perhaps," Roland said. They started down the path to the house, including Callahan among them as naturally as breathing.
"Anything to do with that old Manni guy you were talking to?" Eddie asked.
"Perhaps," Roland repeated. He looked at Callahan. "Tell me, Pere, has it ever sent you todash? You know the word, don't you?"
"I know it," Callahan said. "Twice. Once to Mexico. A little town called Los Zapatos. And once . . . I think . . . to the Castle of the King. I believe that I was very lucky to get back, that second time."
"What King are you talking about?" Susannah asked. "Arthur Eld?"
Callahan shook his head. The scar on his forehead glared in the starlight. "Best not to talk about it now," he said. "Not at night." He looked at Eddie sadly. "The Wolves are coming. Bad enough. Now comes a young man who tells me the Red Sox lost the World Series again . . . to the Mets?"
"Afraid so," Eddie said, and his description of the final game--a game that made little sense to Roland, although it sounded a bit like Points, called Wickets by some--carried them up to the house. Callahan had a housekeeper. She was not in evidence but had left a pot of hot chocolate on the hob.
While they drank it, Susannah said: "Zalia Jaffords told me something that might interest you, Roland."
The gunslinger raised his eyebrows.
"Her husband's grandfather lives with them. He's reputed to be the oldest man in Calla Bryn Sturgis. Tian and the old man haven't been on good terms in years--Zalia isn't even sure what they're pissed off about, it's that old--but Zalia gets on with him very well. She says he's gotten quite senile over the last couple of years, but he still has his bright days. And he claims to have seen one of these Wolves. Dead." She paused. "He claims to have killed it himself."
"My soul!" Callahan exclaimed. "You don't say so!"
"I do. Or rather, Zalia did."
"That," Roland said, "would be a tale worth hearing. Was it the last time the Wolves came?"
"No," Susannah said. "And not the time before, when even Overholser would have been not long out of his clouts. The time before that."
"If they come every twenty-three years," Eddie said, "that's almost seventy years ago."
Susannah nodded. "But he was a man grown, even then. He told Zalia that a moit of them stood out on the West Road and waited for the Wolves to come. I don't know how many a moit might be--"
"Five or six," Roland said. He was nodding over his chocolate.
"Anyway, Tian's Gran-pere was among them. And they killed one of the Wolves."
"What was it?" Eddie asked. "What did it look like with its mask off?"
"She didn't say," Susannah replied. "I don't think he told her. But we ought to--"
A snore arose, long and deep. Eddie and Susannah turned, startled. The gunslinger had fallen asleep. His chin was on his breastbone. His arms were crossed, as if he'd drifted off to sleep still thinking of the dance. And the rice.
FOURTEEN
There was only one extra bedroom, so Roland bunked in with Callahan.
Eddie and Susannah were thus afforded a sort of rough honeymoon: their first night together by themselves, in a bed and under a roof. They were not too tired to take advantage of it. Afterward, Susannah passed immediately into sleep. Eddie lay awake a little while. Hesitantly, he sent his mind out in the direction of Callahan's tidy little church, trying to touch the thing that lay within. Probably a bad idea, but he couldn't resist at least trying. There was nothing. Or rather, a nothing in front of a something.
I could wake it up, Eddie thought. I really think I could.
Yes, and someone with an infected tooth could rap it with a hammer, but why would you?
We'll have to wake it up eventually. I think we're going to need it.
Perhaps, but that was for another day. It was time to let this one go.
Yet for awhile Eddie was incapable of doing that. Images flashed in his mind, like bits of broken mirror in bright sunlight. The Calla, lying spread out below them beneath the cloudy sky, the Devar-Tete Whye a gray ribbon. The green beds at its edge: rice come a-falla. Jake and Benny Slightman looking at each other and laughing without a word passed between them to account for it. The aisle of green grass between the high street and the Pavilion. The torches changing color. Oy, bowing and speaking (Eld! Thankee!) with perfect clarity. Susannah singing: "I've known sorrow all my days."
Yet what he remembered most clearly was Roland standing slim and gunless on the boards with his arms crossed at the chest and his hands pressed against his cheeks; those faded blue eyes looking out at the folken. Roland asking questions, two of three. And then the sound of his boots on the boards, slow at first, then speeding up. Faster and faster, until they were a blur in the torchlight. Clapping. Sweating. Smiling. Yet his eyes didn't smile, not those blue bombardier's eyes; they were as cold as ever.
Yet how he had danced! Great God, how he had danced in the light of the torches.
Come-come-commala, rice come a-falla, Eddie thought.
Beside him, Susannah moaned in some dream.
Eddie turned to her. Slipped his hand beneath her arm so he could cup her breast. His last thought was for Jake. They had better take care of him out at that ranch. If they didn't, they were going to be one sorry-ass bunch of cowpunchers.
Eddie slept. There were no dreams. And beneath them as the night latened and the moon set, this borderland world turned like a dying clock.
CHAPTER II:
DRY TWIST
ONE
Roland awoke from another vile dream of Jericho Hill in the hour before dawn. The horn. Something about Arthur Eld's horn. Beside him in the big bed, the Old Fella slept with a frown on his face, as if caught in his own bad dream. It creased his broad brow zigzag, breaking the arms of the cross scarred into the skin there.
It was pain that had wakened Roland, not his dream of the horn spilling from Cuthbert's hand as his old friend fell. The gunslinger was caught in a vise of it from the hips all the way down to his ankles. He could visualize the pain as a series of bright and burning rings. This was how he paid for his outrageous exertions of the night before. If that was all, all would have been well, but he knew there was more to this than just having danced the commala a little too enthusiastically. Nor was it the rheumatiz, as he had been telling himself these last few weeks, his body's necessary period of adjustment to the damp weather of this fall season. He was not blind to the way his ankles, especially the right one, had begun to thicken. He had observed a similar thickening of his knees, and although his hips still looked fine, when he placed his hands on them, he could feel the way the right one was changing under the skin. No, not the rheumatiz that had afflicted Cort so miserably in his last year or so, keeping him inside by his fire on rainy days. This was something worse. It was arthritis, the bad kind, the dry kind. It wouldn't be long before it reached his hands. Roland would gladly have fed his right one to the disease, if that would have satisfied it; he had taught it to do a good many things since the lobstrosities had taken the first two fingers, but it was never going to be what it was. Only ailments didn't work that way, did they? You couldn't placate them with sacrifices. The arthritis would come when it came and go where it wanted to go.
I might have a year, he thought, lying in bed beside the sleeping religious from Eddie and Susannah and Jake's world. I might even have two.
No, not two. Probably not even one. What was it Eddie sometimes said? Quit kidding yourself. Eddie had a lot of sayings from his world, but that was a particularly good one. A particularly apt one.
Not that he would cry off the Tower if Old Bone-Twist Man took his ability to shoot, saddle a horse, cut a strip of rawhide, even to chop wood for a campfire, so simple a thing as that; no, he was in it until the end. But he didn't relish the picture of riding along behind the others, dependent upon them, perhaps tied to his saddle with the reins because he could no longer hold the pommel. Nothing but a drag-anchor. One they wouldn't be able to pull up if and when fast sailing was required.
If it gets to that, I'll kill myself.
But he wouldn't. That was the truth. Quit kidding yourself.
Which brought Eddie to mind again. He needed to talk to Eddie about Susannah, and right away. This was the knowledge with which he had awakened, and perhaps worth the pain. It wouldn't be a pleasant talk, but it had to be done. It was time Eddie knew about Mia. She would find it more difficult to slip away now that they were in a town--in a house--but she would have to, just the same. She could argue with her baby's needs and her own cravings no more than Roland could argue with the bright rings of pain which circled his right hip and knee and both ankles but had so far spared his talented hands. If Eddie wasn't warned, there might be terrible trouble. More trouble was something they didn't need now; it might sink them.
Roland lay in the bed, and throbbed, and watched the sky lighten. He was dismayed to see that brightness no longer bloomed dead east; it was a little off to the south, now.
Sunrise was also in drift.
TWO
The housekeeper was good-looking, about forty. Her name was Rosalita Munoz, and when she saw the way Roland walked to the table, she said: "One cup coffee, then you come with me."
Callahan cocked his head at Roland when she went to the stove to get the pot. Eddie and Susannah weren't up yet. The two of them had the kitchen to themselves. "How bad is it with you, sir?"
"It's only the rheumatiz," Roland said. "Goes through all my family on my father's side. It'll work out by noon, given bright sunshine and dry air."
"I know about the rheumatiz," Callahan said. "Tell God thankya it's no worse."
"I do." And to Rosalita, who brought heavy mugs of steaming coffee. "I tell you thankya, as well."
She put down the cups, curtsied, and then regarded him shyly and gravely. "I never saw the rice-dance kicked better, sai."
Roland smiled crookedly. "I'm paying for it this morning."
"I'll fix you," she said. "I've a cat-oil, special to me. It'll first take the pain and then the limp. Ask Pere."
Roland looked at Callahan, who nodded.
"Then I'll take you up on it. Thankee-sai."
She curtsied again, and left them.
"I need a map of the Calla," Roland said when she was gone. "It doesn't have to be great art, but it has to be accurate, and true as to distance. Can you draw one for me?"
"Not at all," Callahan said composedly. "I cartoon a little, but I couldn't draw you a map that would take you as far as the river, not even if you put a gun to my head. It's just not a talent I have. But I know two that could help you there." He raised his voice. "Rosalita! Rosie! Come to me a minute, do ya!"
THREE
Twenty minutes later, Rosalita took Roland by the hand, her grip firm and dry. She led him into the pantry and closed the door. "Drop yer britches, I beg," she said. "Be not shy, for I doubt you've anything I haven't seen before, unless men are built summat different in Gilead and the Inners."
"I don't believe they are," Roland said, and let his pants fall.
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br /> The sun was now up but Eddie and Susannah were still down. Roland was in no hurry to wake them. There would be plenty of early days ahead--and late evenings, too, likely--but this morning let them enjoy the peace of a roof over their heads, the comfort of a feather mattress beneath their bodies, and the exquisite privacy afforded by a door between their secret selves and the rest of the world.
Rosalita, a bottle of pale, oily liquid in one hand, drew in a hiss over her full lower lip. She looked at Roland's right knee, then touched his right hip with her left hand. He flinched away a bit from the touch, although it was gentleness itself.
She raised her eyes to him. They were so dark a brown they were almost black. "This isn't rheumatiz. It's arthritis. The kind that spreads fast."
"Aye, where I come from some call it dry twist," he said. "Not a word of it to the Pere, or to my friends."
Those dark eyes regarded him steadily. "You won't be able to keep this a secret for long."
"I hear you very well. Yet while I can keep the secret, I will keep the secret. And you'll help me."
"Aye," she said. "No fear. I'll bide'ee."
"Say thankya. Now, will that help me?"
She looked at the bottle and smiled. "Aye. It's mint and spriggum from the swamp. But the secret's the cat's bile that's in it--not but three drops in each bottle, ye ken. They're the rock-cats that come in out of the desert, from the direction of the great darkness." She tipped up the bottle and poured a little of the oily stuff into her palm. The smell of the mint struck Roland's nose at once, followed by some other smell, a lower smell, which was far less pleasant. Yes, he reckoned that could be the bile of a puma or a cougar or whatever they meant by a rock-cat in these parts.
When she bent and rubbed it into his kneecaps, the heat was immediate and intense, almost too strong to bear. But when it moderated a bit, there was more relief than he would have dared hope for.
When she had finished anointing him, she said: "How be your body now, gunslinger-sai?"
Instead of answering with his mouth, he crushed her against his lean, undressed body and hugged her tightly. She hugged him back with an artless lack of shame and whispered in his ear, "If 'ee are who 'ee say 'ee are, 'ee mustn't let un take the babbies. No, not a single one. Never mind what the big bugs like Eisenhart and Telford might say."