“And on you, Pere. One… two… three.” Jake opened the door and together they went into the dim light and the sweet tangy smell of roasting meat.
TWO
Take went to what he was sure would be his death remembering two things Roland Deschain, his true father, had said. Battles that last five minutes spawn legends that live a thousand years. And You needn’t die happy when your day comes, but you must die satisfied, for you have lived your life from beginning to end and ka is always served.
Jake Chambers surveyed the Dixie Pig with a satisfied mind.
THREE
Also with crystal clarity. His senses were so heightened that he could smell not just roasting flesh but the rosemary with which it had been rubbed; could hear not only the calm rhythm of his breath but the tidal murmur of his blood climbing brainward on one side of his neck and descending heartward on the other.
He also remembered Roland’s saying that even the shortest battle, from first shot to final falling body, seemed long to those taking part. Time grew elastic; stretched to the point of vanishment. Jake had nodded as if he understood, although he hadn’t.
Now he did.
His first diought was that there were too many of them-far, far too many. He put their number at close to a hundred, the majority certainly of the sort Pere Callahan had referred to as “low men.” (Some were low women, but Jake had no doubt the principle was the same.) Scattered among them, all less fleshy than the low folken and some as slender as fencing weapons, their complexions ashy and their bodies surrounded in dim blue auras, were what had to be vampires.
Oy stood at Jake’s heel, his small, foxy face stern, whining low in his throat.
That smell of cooking meat wafting through the air was not pork.
FOUR
Ten feet between us any time we have ten feet to give, Pere-so Jake had said out on the sidewalk, and even as they approached the maitre d’s platform, Callahan was drifting to Jake’s right, putting the required distance between them.
Jake had also told him to scream as loud as he could for as long as he could, and Callahan was opening his mouth to begin doing just that when the voice of the White spoke up inside again. Only one word, but it was enough.
Skoldpadda, it said.
Callahan was still holding the Ruger up by his right cheek.
Now he dipped into his breast pocket with his left hand. His awareness of the scene before him wasn’t as hyper-alert as his young companion’s, but he saw a great deal: the orangeycrimson electric flambeaux on the walls, the candles on each table immured in glass containers of a brighter, Halloweenish orange, the gleaming napkins. To the left of the dining room was a tapestry showing knights and their ladies sitting at a long banquet table. There was a sense in here-Callahan wasn’t sure exactly what provoked it, the various tells and stimuli were too subtle-of people just resettling themselves after some bit of excitement: a small kitchen fire, say, or an automobile accident on the street.
Or a lady having a baby, Callahan thought as he closed his hand on the Turtle. That’s always good for a little pause between the appetizer and the entree.
“Now come Gilead’s ka-mais!” shouted an excited, nervous voice. Not a human one, of that Callahan was almost positive. It was too buzzy to be human. Callahan saw what appeared to be some sort of monstrous bird-human hybrid standing at the far end of the room. It wore straight-leg jeans and a plain white shirt, but the head rising from that shirt was painted with sleek feathers of dark yellow. Its eyes looked like drops of liquid tar.
“Get them!” this horridly ridiculous thing shouted, and brushed aside a napkin. Beneath it was some sort of weapon.
Callahan supposed it was a gun, but it looked like the sort you saw on Star Trek. What did they call them? Phasers? Stunners?
It didn’t matter. Callahan had a far better weapon, and wanted to make sure they all saw it. He swept the place-settings and the glass container with the candle in it from the nearest table, then snatched away the tablecloth like a magician doing a trick. The last thing he wanted to do was to trip over a swatch of linen at the crucial moment. Then, with a nimbleness he wouldn’t have believed even a week ago, he stepped onto one of the chairs and from the chair to the table-top. Once on the table, he lifted the skoldpaddavnth his fingers supporting the turtle’s flat undershell, giving them all a good look at it.
I could croon something, he thought. Maybe “Moonlight Becomes You” or “Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
At that point they had been inside the Dixie Pig for exactly thirty-four seconds.
FIVE
High school teachers faced with a large group of students in study hall or a school assembly will tell you that teenagers, even when freshly showered and groomed, reek of the hormones which their bodies are so busy manufacturing. Any group of people under stress emits a similar stink, and Jake, with his senses tuned to the most exquisite pitch, smelled it here.
When they passed the maitre d’s stand (Blackmail Central, his Dad liked to call such stations), the smell of the Dixie Pig’s diners had been faint, the smell of people coming back to normal after some sort of dust-up. But when the bird-creature in the far corner shouted, Jake had smelled the patrons more strongly. It was a metallic aroma, enough like blood to incite his temper and his emotions. Yes, he saw Tweety Bird knock aside the napkin on his table; yes, he saw the weapon beneath; yes, he understood that Callahan, standing on the table, was an easy shot. That was of far less concern to Jake than the mobilizing weapon that was Tweety Bird’s mouth. Jake was drawing back his right arm, meaning to fling the first of his nineteen plates and amputate the head in which that mouth resided, when Callahan raised the turtle.
It won’t work, not in here, Jake thought, but even before the idea had been completely articulated in his mind, he understood it was working. He knew by the smell of them. The aggressiveness went out of it. And the few who had begun to rise from their tables-the red holes in the foreheads of the low people gaping, the blue auras of the vampires seeming to pull in and intensify-sat back down again, and hard, as if they had suddenly lost command of their muscles.
“Get them, those are the ones Sayre…” Then Tweety stopped talking. His left hand-if you could call such an ugly talon a hand-touched the butt of his high-tech gun and then fell away.
The brilliance seemed to leave his eyes. “They’re the ones Sayre… S-S-Sayre… “Another pause. Then the bird-thing said, “Oh sai, what is the lovely thing that you hold?”
“You know what it is,” Callahan said. Jake was moving and Callahan, mindful of what the boy gunslinger had told him outside-
Make sure that every time I look on my right, I see your face-stepped back down from the table to move with him, still holding the turtle high. He could almost taste the room’s silence, but-
But there was another room. Rough laughter and hoarse, carousing yells-a party from the sound of it, and close by. On the left. From behind the tapestry showing the knights and their ladies at dinner. Something going on back there, Callahan thought, and probably not Elks’ Poker Night.
He heard Oy breathing fast and low through his perpetual grin, a perfect little engine. And something else. A harsh raiding sound with a low and rapid clicking beneath. The combination set Callahan’s teeth on edge and made his skin feel cold. Something was hiding under the tables.
Oy saw the advancing insects first and froze like a dog on point, one paw raised and his snout thrust forward. For a moment the only part of him to move was the dark and velvety skin of his muzzle, first twitching back to reveal the clenched needles of his teeth, then relaxing to hide them, then twitching back again.
The bugs came on. Whatever they were, the Turtle Maturin upraised in the Pere’s hand meant nothing to them. A fat guy wearing a tuxedo with plaid lapels spoke weakly, almost questioningly, to the bird-thing: “They weren’t to come any further than here, Meiman, nor to leave. We were told…”
Oy lunged forward, a growl coming through his clamped teeth. It was a decidedly un-Oylike sound, reminding Callahan of a comic-strip balloon: Arrrrrr!
“No!” Jake shouted, alarmed. “No, Oy!”
At the sound of the boy’s shout, the yells and laughter from behind the tapestry abruptly ceased, as if the folken back there had suddenly become aware that something had changed in the front room.
Oy took no notice of Jake’s cry. He crunched three of the bugs in rapid succession, the crackle of their breaking carapaces gruesomely clear in the new stillness. He made no attempt to eat them but simply tossed the corpses, each the size of a mouse, into the air with a snap of the neck and a grinning release of the jaws.
And the others retreated back under the tables.
He was made for this, Callahan thought. Perhaps once in the long-ago all bumblers were. Made for it the way some breeds of terrier are made to-
