by Stephen King
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 an
d 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-"