SIX
If the third answer was the correct one, Roland reckoned the road to the Tower would be difficult indeed. But to look beyond the horizon was not much in the gunslinger’s nature, and in this case his lack of imagination was surely a blessing.
He saw what he needed to see. Although the can-toi-Callahan’s low folk-had surrounded Jake and Callahan on all sides (the two of them hadn’t even seen the duo behind them, the ones who’d been guarding the doors to Sixty-first Street),
the Pere had frozen them with the carving, just as Jake had been able to freeze and fascinate people with the key he’d found in the vacant lot. A yellow taheen with the body of a man and the head of a waseau had some sort of gun near at hand but made no effort to grab it.
Yet there was another problem, one Roland’s eye, trained to see every possible snare and ambush, fixed upon at once. He saw the blasphemous parody of Eld’s Last Fellowship on the wall and understood its significance completely in the seconds before it was ripped away. And the smell: not just flesh but human flesh. This too he would have understood earlier, had he had time to think about it… only life in Calla Bryn Sturgis had allowed him little time to think. In die Calla, as in a storybook, life had been one damned thing after another.
Yet it was clear enough now, wasn’t it? The low folk might only be taheen; a child’s ogres, if it did ya. Those behind the tapestry were what Callahan had called Type One vampires and what Roland himself knew as the Grandfathers, perhaps the most gruesome and powerful survivors of the Prims long-ago recession. And while such as the taheen might be content to stand as they were, gawking at the sigul Callahan held up, the Grandfathers wouldn’t spare it a second glance.
Now clattering bugs came pouring out from under the table. They were of a sort Roland had seen before, and any doubts he might still have held about what was behind that tapestry departed at the sight of them. They were parasites, blood-drinkers, camp-followers: Grandfather-fleas. Probably not dangerous while there was a bumbler present, but of course when you spied the little doctors in such numbers, the Grandfathers were never far behind.
As Oy charged at the bugs, Roland of Gilead did the only thing he could think of: he swam down to Callahan.
Into Callahan.
SEVEN
Pere, I am here.
Aye, Roland. What-
No time. GET HIM OUT OF HERE. You must. Get him out while there’s still time!
EIGHT
And Callahan tried. The boy, of course, didn’t want to go.
Looking at him through the Pere’s eyes, Roland thought with some bitterness: / should have schooled him better in betrayal. Yet all the gods know I did the best I could.
“Go while you can,” Callahan told Jake, striving for calmness.
“Catch up to her ifyou can. This is the command of your dinh. This is also the will of the White.”
It should have moved him but it didn’t, he still argued-gods, he was nearly as bad as Eddie!-and Roland could wait no longer.
Pere, let me.
Roland seized control without waiting for a reply. He could already feel the wave, the aven kal, beginning to recede. And the Grandfathers would come at any second.
“Go, Jake!” he cried, using the Pere’s mouth and vocal cords like a loudspeaker. If he had thought about how one might do something like this, he would have been lost completely, but thinking about things had also never been his way, and he was grateful to see the boy’s eyes flash wide. “You have this one chance and must take it! Find her! As dinh I command you!”
Then, as in the hospital ward with Susannah, he felt himself once more tossed upward like something without weight, blown out of Callahan’s mind and body like a bit of cobweb or a fluff of dandelion thistle. For a moment he tried to flail his way back, like a swimmer trying to buck a strong currentjust long enough to reach the shore, but it was impossible.
Roland/That was Eddie’s voice, and filled with dismay. Jesus, Roland, what in God’s name are those things?
The tapestry had been torn aside. The creatures which rushed out were ancient and freakish, their warlock faces warped with teeth growing wild, their mouths propped open by fangs as thick as the gunslinger’s wrists, their wrinkled and stubbled chins slick with blood and scraps of meat.
And still-gods, oh gods-the boy remained!
“They’ll kill Oy first!” Callahan shouted, only Roland didn’t think it was Callahan. He thought it was Eddie, using Callahan’s voice as Roland had. Somehow Eddie had found either smoother currents or more strength. Enough to get inside after Roland had been blown out. “They ’II kill him in front of you and drink his blood!”
It was finally enough. The boy turned and fled with Oy running beside him. He cut directly in front of the waseautaheen and between two of the low folken, but none made any effort to grab him. They were still staring at the raised Turtle on Callahan’s palm, mesmerized.
The Grandfathers paid no attention to the fleeing boy at all, as Roland had felt sure they would not. He knew from Pere Callahan’s story that one of the Grandfathers had come to the little town of “Salem’s Lot” where the Pere had for awhile preached. The Pere had lived through the experience-not common for those who faced such monsters after losing their weapons and siguls of power-but the thing had forced Callahan to drink of its tainted blood before letting him go. It had marked him for these others.
Callahan was holding his cross-sigul out toward them, but before Roland could see anything else, he was exhaled back into darkness. The chimes began again, all but driving him mad with their awful tintinnabulation. Somewhere, faintly, he could hear Eddie shouting. Roland reached for him in the dark, brushed Eddie’s arm, lost it, found his hand, and seized it. They rolled over and over, clutching each other, trying not to be separated, hoping not to be lost in the doorless dark between the worlds.
Chapter III:
EDDIE MAKES A CALL
ONE
Eddie returned to John Cullum’s old car the way he’d sometimes come out of nightmares as a teenager: tangled up and panting with fright, totally disoriented, not sure of who he was, let alone where.
He had a second to realize that, incredible as it seemed, he and Roland were floating in each other’s arms like unborn twins in the womb, only this was no womb. A pen and a paperclip were drifting in front of his eyes. So was a yellow plastic case he recognized as an eight-track tape. Don’t waste your time, John, he thought. No true thread there, that’s a dead-end gadget if there ever was one.
Something was scratching the back of his neck. Was it the domelight of John Cullum’s scurgy old Galaxie? By God he thought it w-
Then gravity reasserted itself and they fell, with meaningless objects raining down all around them. The floormat which had been floating around in the Ford’s cabin landed draped over the steering wheel. Eddie’s midsection hit the top of the front seat and air exploded out of him in a rough whoosh.
Roland landed beside him, and on his bad hip. He gave a single barking cry and then began to pull himself back into the front seat.
Eddie opened his mouth to speak. Before he could, Callahan’s voice filled his head: Hile, Roland! Hile, gunslinger!
How much psychic effort had it cost the Pere to speak from that other world? And behind it, faint but there, the sound of besual, triumphant cries. Howls that were not quite words.
Eddie’s wide and startled eyes met Roland’s faded blue ones. He reached out for the gunslinger’s left hand, thinking-
He’s going. Great God, I think the Pere is going.
May you find your Tower, Roland, and breach it-
“-and may you climb to the top,” Eddie breathed.
They were back in John Cullum’s car and parked-askew but otherwise peacefully enough-at the side of Kansas Road in the shady early-evening hours of a summer’s day, but what Eddie saw was the orange hell-light of that restaurant that wasn’t a restaurant at all but a den of cannibals. The thought that there could be such things, that people walked past their hiding place each and every day, not knowing what was inside, not feeling the greedy eyes that perhaps marked them and measured them-
