Wolves of the Calla

'Good luck to ye,' the postlady called.

Callahan turned his head to look at her and say thanks. He caught a glimpse of the unfound door when he did, still open. What he didn't see was Eddie. Eddie was gone.

SIX

Callahan turned to that strange door as soon he was outside the post office. Ordinarily you couldn't do that, ordinarily it swung with you as neatly as a square-dance partner, but it seemed to know when you intended to step back through. Then you could face it.

The minute he was back the todash chimes seized him, seeming to etch patterns on the surface of his brain. From the bowels of the cave his mother cried, 'There-now, Donnie, you've gone and let that nice boy commit suicide! He'll be in purgie forever, and it's your fault!'

Callahan barely heard. He dashed to the mouth of the cave, still carrying the Press-Herald he'd bought in the East Stoneham General Store under one arm. There was just time to see why the box hadn't closed, leaving him a prisoner in East Stoneham, Maine, circa 1977: there was a thick book sticking out of it Callahan even had time to read the title, Four Short Novels of Sherlock Holmes. Then he burst out into sunshine.

At first he saw nothing but the boulder on the path leading up to the mouth of the cave, and was sickeningly sure his mother's voice had told the truth. Then he looked left and saw Eddie ten feet away, at the end of the narrow path and tottering on the edge of the drop. His untucked shirt fluttered around the butt of Roland's big revolver. His normally sharp and rather foxy features now looked puffy and blank. It was the dazed face of a fighter out on his feet. His hair blew around his ears. He swayed forward… then his mouth tightened and his eyes became almost aware. He grasped an outcrop of rock and swayed back again.

He's fighting it, Callahan thought. And I'm sure he's fighting the good fight, but he's losing.

Calling out might actually send him over the edge; Callahan knew this with a gunslinger's intuition, always sharpest and most dependable in times of crisis. Instead of yelling he sprinted up the remaining stub of path and wound a hand in the tail of Eddie's shirt just as Eddie swayed forward again, this time removing his hand from the outcrop beside him and using it to cover his eyes in a gesture that was unmeaningly comic: Goodbye, cruel world.

If the shirt had torn, Eddie Dean would undoubtedly have been excused from ka's great game, but perhaps even the tails of homespun Calla Bryn Sturgis shirts (for that was what he was wearing) served ka. In any case the shirt didn't tear, and Callahan had held onto a great part of the physical strength he had built up during his years on the road. He yanked Eddie back and caught him in his arms, but not before the younger man's head struck the outcrop his hand had been on a few seconds before. His lashes fluttered and he looked at Callahan with a kind of stupid unrecognition. He said something that sounded like gibberish to Callahan: Ihsay ahkin fly-oo ower.

Callahan grabbed his shoulders and shook him. 'What? I don't understand you!' Nor did he much want to, but he had to make some kind of contact, had to bring Eddie back from wherever the accursed thing in the box had taken him. 'I don't… understand you?

This time the response was clearer: 'It says I can fly to the Tower. You can let me go. I want to go!'

'You can't fly, Eddie.' He wasn't sure that got through, so he put his head down-all the way, until he and Eddie were resting brow to brow, like lovers. 'It was trying to kill you.'

'No…' Eddie began, and then awareness came all the way back into his eyes. An inch from Callahan's own, they widened in understanding. 'Yes.'

Callahan lifted his head, but still kept a prudent grip on Eddie's shoulders. 'Are you all right now?'

'Yeah. I guess so, at least. I was going along good, Father. Swear I was. I mean, the chimes were doing a number on me, but otherwise I was fine. I even grabbed a book and started to read.' He looked around. 'Jesus, I hope I didn't lose it. Tower'll scalp me.'

'You didn't lose it. You stuck it partway into the box, and it's a damned good thing you did. Otherwise the door would have shut and you'd be strawberry jam about seven hundred feet down.'

Eddie looked over the edge and went completely pale. Callahan had just time enough to regret his frankness before Eddie vomited on his new shor'boots.

SEVEN

'It crept up on me, Father,' he said when he could talk. 'Lulled me and then jumped.' 'Yes.'

'Did you get anything at all out of your time over there?'

'If they get my letter and do what it says, a great deal. You were right. Deepneau at least signed up for General Delivery. About Tower, I don't know.' Callahan shook his head angrily.

'I think we're gonna find that Tower talked Deepneau into it,' Eddie said. 'Cal Tower still can't believe what he's gotten himself into, and after what just happened to me-almost happened to me-I've got some sympathy for that kind of thinking.' He looked at what Callahan still had clamped under one arm. 'What's that?'

'The newspaper,' Callahan said, and offered it to Eddie. 'Care to read about Golda Meir?'

EIGHT

Roland listened carefully that evening as Eddie and Callahan recounted their adventures in the Doorway Cave and beyond. The gunslinger seemed less interested in Eddie's near-death experience than he was in the similarities between Calla Bryn Sturgis and East Stoneham. He even asked Callahan to imitate the accent of the storekeeper and the postlady. This Callahan (a former Maine resident, after all) was able to do quite well.

'Do ya,' said Roland, and then: 'Ayuh. Do ya, ayuh.' He sat thinking, one bootheel cocked up on the rail of the rectory porch.

'Will they be okay for awhile, do you think?' Eddie asked.

'I hope so,' Roland replied. 'If you want to worry about someone's life, worry about Deepneau's. If Balazar hasn't given up on the vacant lot, he has to keep Tower alive. Deepneau's nothing but a Watch Me chip now.'

'Can we leave them until after the Wolves?'

'I don't see what choice we have.'

'We could drop this whole business and go over there to East Overshoe and protect him!' Eddie said heatedly. 'How about that? Listen, Roland, I'll tell you exactly why Tower talked his friend into signing up for General Delivery: somebody's got a book he wants, that's why. He was dickering for it and negotiations had reached the delicate stage when I showed up and persuaded him to head for the hills. But Tower… man, he's like a chimp with a handful of grain. He won't let go. If Balazar knows that, and he probably does, he won't need a zip code to find his man, just a list of the people Tower did business with. I hope to Christ that if there was a list, it burned up in the fire.'

Roland was nodding. 'I understand, but we can't leave here. We're promised.'

Eddie thought it over, sighed, and shook his head. 'What the hell, three and a half more days over here, seventeen over there before the deal- letter Tower signed expires. Things'll probably hold together that long.' He paused, biting his lip. 'Maybe.'

'Is maybe the best we can do?' Callahan asked.

'Yeah,' Eddie said. 'For the time being, I guess it is.'

NINE

The following morning, a badly frightened Susannah Dean sat in the privy at the foot of the hill, bent over, waiting for her current cycle of contractions to pass. She'd been having them for a little over a week now, but these were by far the strongest. She put her hands on her lower belly. The flesh there was alarmingly hard.

Oh dear God, what if I'm having it right now? What if this is it?

She tried to tell herself this couldn't be it, her water hadn't broken and you couldn't go into genuine labor until that happened. But what did she actually know about having babies? Very little. Even Rosalita Munoz, a midwife of great experience, wouldn't be able to help her much, because Rosa's career had been delivering human babies, of mothers who actually looked pregnant. Susannah looked less pregnant now than when they'd first arrived in the Calla. And if Roland was right about this baby-

It's not a baby. It's a chap, and it doesn't belong to me. It belongs to Mia, whoever she is. Mia, daughter of none.

The cramps ceased. Her lower belly relaxed, losing that stony feel. She laid a finger along the cleft of her vagina. It felt the same as ever. Surely she was going to be all right for another few days. She had to be. And while she'd agreed with Roland that there should be no more secrets in their ka-tet, she felt she had to keep this one. When the fighting finally started, it would be seven against forty or fifty. Maybe as many as seventy, if the Wolves stuck together in a single pack. They would have to be at their very