Wolves of the Calla

Callahan thanked the shine-boy for his insights, then turned and started back down Second Avenue. He kept touching himself furtively, trying to convince himself that this was really happening. He kept taking deep breaths of the city air with its tang of hydrocarbons, and relished every city sound, from the snore of the buses (there were ads for Charlie's Angels on some of them) to the pounding of the jackhammers and the incessant honking of horns. As he approached Tower of Power Records, he paused for a moment, transfixed by the music pouring from the speakers over the doors. It was an oldie he hadn't heard in years, one that had been popular way back in his Lowell days. Something about following the Pied Piper.

'Crispin St. Peters,' he murmured. 'That was his name. Good God, say Man Jesus, I'm really here. I'm really in New York !'

As if to confirm this, a harried-sounding woman said, 'Maybe some people can stand around all day, but some of us are walking here. Think yez could move it along, or at least get over to the side?'

Callahan spoke an apology which he doubted was heard (or appreciated if it was), and moved along. That sense of being in a dream—an extraordinarily vivid dream—persisted until he neared Forty-sixth Street. Then he began to hear the rose, and everything in his life changed.

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