Wolves of the Calla

SEVEN

At first it was little more than a murmur, but as he drew closer, he thought he could hear many voices, angelic voices, singing. Raising their confident, joyful psalms to God. He had never heard anything so sweet, and he began to run. He came to the fence and laid his hands against it. He began to weep, couldn't help it. He supposed people were looking at him, but he didn't care. He suddenly understood a great deal about Roland and his friends, and for the first time felt a part of them. No wonder they were trying so hard to survive, and to go on! No wonder, when this was at stake! There was something on the other side of this fence with its tattered overlay of posters… something so utterly and completely wonderful…

A young man with his long hair held back in a rubber band and wearing a tipped-back cowboy hat stopped and clapped him briefly on the shoulder. 'It's nice here, isn't it?' the hippie cowboy said. 'I don't know just why, but it really is. I come once a day. You want to know something?'

Callahan turned toward the young man, wiping at his streaming eyes. 'Yes, I guess so.'

The young man brushed a hand across his brow, then his cheek. 'I used to have the world's worst acne. I mean, pizza-face wasn't even in it, I was roadkill-face. Then I started coming here in late March or early April, and… everything cleared up.' The young man laughed. 'The dermo guy my Dad sent me to says it's the zinc oxide, but I think it's this place. Something about this place. Do you hear it?'

Although Callahan's voice was ringing with sweetly singing voices-it was like being in Notre Dame cathedral, and surrounded by choirs-he shook his head. Doing so was nothing more than instinct.

'Nah,' said the hippie in the cowboy hat, 'me neither. But sometimes I think I do.' He raised his right hand to Callahan, the first two fingers extended in a V. 'Peace, brother.'

'Peace,' Callahan said, and returned the sign.

When the hippie cowboy was gone, Callahan ran his hand across the splintery boards of the fence, and a tattered poster advertising War of the Zombies. What he wanted more than anything was to climb over and see the rose… possibly to fall on his knees and adore it. But the sidewalks were packed with people, and already he had attracted too many curious looks, some no doubt from people who, like the hippie cowboy, knew a bit about the power of this place. He would best serve the great and singing force behind this fence (was it a rose? could it be no more than that?) by protecting it. And that meant protecting Calvin Tower from whoever had burned down his store.

Still trailing his hand along the rough boards, he turned onto Forty-sixth Street. Down at the end on this side was the glassy-green bulk of the U.N. Plaza Hotel. Calla, Callahan, he thought, and then: Calla, Callahan, Calvin. And then: Calla-come-four, there's a rose behind the door, Calla-come-Callahan, Calvin's one more!

He reached the end of the fence. At first he saw nothing, and his heart sank. Then he looked down, and there it was, at knee height: five numbers written in black. Callahan reached into his pocket for the stub of pencil he always kept there, then pulled off a corner of a poster for an off-Broadway play called Dungeon Plunger, A Revue. On this he scribbled five numbers.

He didn't want to leave, but knew he had to; clear thinking this close to the rose was impossible.

I'll be back, he told it, and to his delighted amazement, a thought came back, clear and true: Yes, Father, anytime. Come-commala.

On the corner of Second and Forty-sixth, he looked behind him. The door to the cave was still there, the bottom floating about three inches off the sidewalk. A middle-aged couple, tourists judging by the guide-books in their hands, came walking up from the direction of the hotel. Chatting to each other, they reached the door and swerved around it. They don't see it, but they feel it, Callahan thought. And if the sidewalk had been crowded and swerving had been impossible? He thought in that case they would have walked right through the place where it hung and shimmered, perhaps feeling nothing but a momentary coldness and sense of vertigo. Perhaps hearing, faintly, the sour tang of chimes and catching a whiff of something like burnt onions or seared meat. And that night, perhaps, they'd have transient dreams of places far stranger than Fun City.

He could step back through, probably should; he'd gotten what he'd come for. But a brisk walk would take him to the New York Public Library. There, behind the stone lions, even a man with no money in his pocket could get a little information. The location of a certain zip code, for instance. And-tell the truth and shame the devil-he didn't want to leave just yet.

He waved his hands in front of him until the gunslinger noticed what he was doing. Ignoring the looks of the passersby, Callahan raised his fingers in the air once, twice, three times, not sure the gunslinger would get it. Roland seemed to. He gave an exaggerated nod, then thumbs-up for good measure.

Callahan set off, walking so fast he was nearly jogging. It wouldn't do to linger, no matter how pleasant a change New York made. It couldn't be pleasant where Roland was waiting. And, according to Eddie, it might be dangerous, as well.

EIGHT

The gunslinger had no problem understanding Callahan's message. Thirty fingers, thirty minutes. The Pere wanted another half an hour on the other side. Roland surmised he had thought of a way to turn the number written on the fence into an actual place. If he could do that, it would be all to the good.

Information was power. And sometimes, when time was tight, it was speed.

The bullets in his ears blocked the voices completely. The chimes got in, but even they were dulled. A good thing, because the sound of them was far worse than the warble of the thinny. A couple of days listening to that sound and he reckoned he'd be ready for the lunatic asylum, but for thirty minutes he'd be all right. If worse came to worst, he might be able to pitch something through the door, attract the Pere's attention, and get him to come back early.

For a little while Roland watched the street unroll before Callahan. The doors on the beach had been like looking through the eyes of his three: Eddie, Odetta, Jack Mort. This one was a little different. He could always see Callahan's back in it, or his face if he turned around to look, as he often did.

To pass the time, Roland got up to look at a few of the books which had meant so much to Calvin Tower that he'd made their safety a condition for his cooperation. The first one Roland pulled out had the silhouette of a man's head on it. The man was smoking a pipe and wearing a sort of gamekeeper's hat. Cort had had one like it, and as a boy, Roland had thought it much more stylish than his father's old dayrider with its sweat-stains and frayed tugstring. The words on the book were of the New York world. Roland was sure he could have read them easily if he'd been on that side, but he wasn't. As it was, he could read some, and the result was almost as maddening as the chimes.

'Sir-lock Hones,' he read aloud. 'No, Holmes. Like Odetta's fathername. Four… short… movels. Movels?' No, this one was anN. 'four short novels by Sirlock Holmes.' He opened the book, running a respectful hand over the title page and then smelling it: the spicy, faintly sweet aroma of good old paper. He could make out the name of one of the four short novels-The Sign of the Four. Other than the words Hound and Study, the titles of the others were gibberish to him.

'A sign is a sigul,' he said. When he found himself counting the number of letters in the title, he had to laugh at himself.

Besides, there were only sixteen. He put the book back and took up another, this one with a drawing of a soldier on the front. He could make out one word of the title: Dead. He looked at another. A man and woman kissing on the cover. Yes, there were always men and women kissing in stories; folks liked that. He put it back and looked up to check on Callahan's progress. His eyes widened slightly as he saw the Pere walking into a great room filled with books and what Eddie called Magda-seens… although Roland was still unsure what Magda had seen, or why there should be so much written about it.

He pulled out another book, and smiled at the picture on the cover. There was a church, with the sun going down red behind it. The church looked a bit like Our Lady of Serenity. He opened it and thumbed through it. A delah of words, but he could only make out one in every three, if that. No pictures. He was about to put it back when something caught his eye. Leaped at his eye. Roland stopped breathing for a moment.

He stood back, no longer hearing the todash chimes, no longer caring about the great room of books Callahan had entered. He began reading the book with the church on the front. Or trying to. The words swam maddeningly in front of his eyes, and he couldn't be sure. Not quite. But, gods! If he was seeing what he thought he was seeing-

Intuition told him that this was a key. But to what door?

He didn't know, couldn't read enough of the words to know. But the book in his hands seemed almost to thrum. Roland thought that perhaps this book was like the rose…

… but there were black roses, too.

NINE

'Roland, I found it! It's a little town in central Maine called East Stoneham, about forty miles north of Portland and…' He stopped, getting a good look at the gunslinger. 'What's wrong?'

'The chiming sound,' Roland said quickly. 'Even with my ears stopped up, it got through.' The door was shut and the chimes were gone, but there were still the voices. Callahan's father was currently asking if Donnie thought those magazines he'd found under his son's bed were anything a Christian boy would want to have, what if his mother had found them? And when Roland suggested they leave the cave, Callahan was more than willing to go. He remembered that conversation with his old man far too clearly. They had ended up praying together at the foot of his bed, and the three Playboys had gone into the incinerator out back.

Roland returned the carved box to the pink bag and once more stowed it carefully behind Tower's case of valuable books. He had already replaced the book with the church on it, turning it with the title down so he could find it again quickly.

They went out and stood side by side, taking deep breaths of the fresh air. 'Are you sure the chimes is all it was?' Callahan asked. 'Man, you looked as though you'd seen a ghost.'

'The todash chimes are worse than ghosts,' Roland said. That might or might not be true, but it seemed to satisfy Callahan. As they started down the path, Roland remembered the promise he had made to the others, and, more important, to himself: no more secrets within the tet. How quickly he found himself