Wolves of the Calla

background.

' 'Now, standing before Danny Glick's… Danny Glick's mourners, that old credo… that old credo returned.' '

The hand holding the book sagged. If Jake hadn't caught it, it probably would have tumbled to the floor of the cave.

'You had it, didn't you?' Eddie said. 'You actually had a sampler saying that.'

'Frankie Foyle gave it to me,' Callahan said. His voice was hardly more than a whisper. 'Back in seminary. And Danny Glick… I officiated at his funeral, I think I told you that. That was when everything seemed to change, somehow. But this is a novel! A novel is fiction! How… how can it…' His voice suddenly rose to a damned howl. To Roland it sounded eerily like the false voices that rose up from below. 'Damn it, I'm a REAL PERSON !'

'Here's the part where the vampire broke your cross,' Jake reported. ' ' 'Together at last!' Barlow said, smiling. His face was strong and intelligent and handsome in a sharp, forbidding sort of way—yet, as the light shifted, it seemed—' '

'Stop,' Callahan said dully. 'It makes my head hurt.'

'It says his face reminded you of the bogeyman who lived in your closet when you were a kid. Mr. Flip.'

Callahan's face was now so pale he might have been a vampire's victim himself. 'I never told anyone about Mr. Flip, not even my mother. That can't be in that book. It just can't be.'

'It is,' Jake said simply.

'Let's get this straight,' Eddie said. 'When you were a kid, there was a Mr. Flip, and you did think of him when you faced this particular Type One vampire, Barlow. Correct?'

'Yes, but—'

Eddie turned to the gunslinger. 'Is this getting us any closer to Susannah, do you think?'

'Yes. We've reached the heart of a great mystery. Perhaps the great mystery. I believe the Dark Tower is almost close enough to touch. And if the Tower is close, Susannah is, too.'

Ignoring him, Callahan was flipping through the book. Jake was looking over his shoulder.

'And you know how to open that door?' Eddie pointed at

'Yes,' Roland said. 'I'd need help, but I think the people of Calla Bryn Sturgis owe us a little help, don't you?'

Eddie nodded. 'All right, then, let me tell you this much: I'm pretty sure I have seen the name Stephen King before, at least once.'

'On the Specials board,' Jake said without looking up from the book. 'Yeah, I remember. It was on the Specials board the first time we went todash.'

'Specials board?' Roland asked, frowning.

'Tower's Specials board,' Eddie said. 'It was in the window, remember? Part of his whole Restaurant-of-the-Mind thing.'

Roland nodded.

'But I'll tell you guys something,' Jake said, and now he did look up from the book. 'The name was there when Eddie and I went todash, but it wasn't on the board the first time I went in there. The time Mr. Deepneau told me the river riddle, it was someone else's name. It changed, just like the name of the writer on Charlie the Choo-Choo .'

'I can't be in a book,' Callahan was saying. 'I am not a fiction… am I?'

'Roland.' It was Eddie. The gunslinger turned to him. 'I need to find her. I don't care who's real and who's not. I don't care about Calvin Tower, Stephen King, or the Pope of Rome. As far as reality goes, she's all of it I want. I need to find my wife.'' His voice dropped. 'Help me, Roland.'

Roland reached out and took the book in his left hand. With his right he touched the door. If she's still alive , he thought. If we can find her, and if she's come back to herself. If and if and if.

Eddie took Roland's arm. 'Please,' he said. 'Please don't make me try to do it on my own. I love her so much. Help me find her.'

Roland smiled. It made him younger. It seemed to fill the cave with its own light. All of Eld's ancient power was in that smile: the power of the White.

'Yes,' he said. 'We go.'

And then he said again, all the affirmation necessary in this dark place.

'Yes.'

Bangor, Maine December 15, 2002

Author's Note

The debt I owe to the American Western in the composition of the Dark Tower novels should be clear without my belaboring the point; certainly the Calla did not come by the final part of its (slightly misspelled) name accidentally. Yet it should be pointed out that at least two sources for some of this material aren't American at all. Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly , etc.) was Italian. And Akira Kurosawa (The Seven Samurai) was, of course, Japanese. Would these books have been written without the cinematic legacy of Kurosawa, Leone, Peckinpah, Howard Hawkes, and John Sturgis? Probably not without Leone. But without the others, I would argue there could be no Leone.

I also owe a debt of thanks to Robin Furth, who managed to be there with the right bit of information every time I needed it, and of course to my wife, Tabitha, who is still patiently giving me the time and light and space I need to do this job to the best of my abilities.

S.K

Author's Afterword

Before you read this short afterword, I ask that you take a moment (may it do ya fine) to look again at the dedication page at the front of this story. I'll wait.

Thank you. I want you to know that Frank Muller has read a number of my books for the audio market, beginning with Different Seasons . I met him at Recorded Books in New York at that time and we liked each other immediately. It's a friendship that has lasted longer than some of my readers have been alive. In the course of our association, Frank recorded the first four Dark Tower novels, and I listened to them—all sixty or so cassettes— while preparing to finish the gunslinger's story. Audio is the perfect medium for such exhaustive preparation, because audio insists you absorb everything; your hurrying eye (or occasionally tired mind) cannot skip so much as a single word. That was what I wanted, complete immersion in Roland's world, and that was what Frank gave me. He gave me something more, as well, something wonderful and unexpected. It was a sense of newness and freshness that I had lost somewhere along the way; a sense of Roland and Roland's friends as actual people , with their own vital inner lives. When I say in the dedication that Frank heard the voices in my head, I am speaking the literal truth as I understand it. And, like a rather more benign version of the Doorway Cave, he brought them fully back to life. The remaining books are finished (this one in final draft, the last two in rough), and in large part I owe that to Frank Muller and his inspired readings.