Wolves of the Calla

TWO

Roland gave him a full minute by count and then said, 'Do you feel better?'

Eddie sat up. 'Actually I do.'

Roland nodded, smiling a little. 'Then can you say more? If you can't, we'll let it go, but I've come to respect your feelings, Eddie—far more than you realize—and if you'd speak, I'd hear.'

What he said was true. The gunslinger's initial feelings for Eddie had wavered between caution and contempt for what Roland saw as his weakness of character. Respect had come more slowly. It had begun in Balazar's office, when Eddie had fought naked. Very few men Roland had known could have done that. It had grown with his realization of how much Eddie was like Cuthbert. Then, on the mono, Eddie had acted with a kind of desperate creativity that Roland could admire but never equal. Eddie Dean was possessed of Cuthbert Allgood's always puzzling and sometimes annoying sense of the ridiculous; he was also possessed of Alain Johns's deep flashes of intuition. Yet in the end, Eddie was like neither of Roland's old friends. He was sometimes weak and self-centered, but possessed of deep reservoirs of courage and courage's good sister, what Eddie himself sometimes called 'heart.'

But it was his intuition Roland wanted to tap now.

'All right, then,' Eddie said. 'Don't stop me. Don't ask questions. Just listen.'

Roland nodded. And hoped Susannah and Jake wouldn't come back, at least not just yet.

'I look in the sky—up there where the clouds are breaking right this minute—and I see the number nineteen written in blue.'

Roland looked up. And yes, it was there. He saw it, too. But he also saw a cloud like a turtle, and another hole in the thinning dreck that looked like a gunnywagon.

'I look in the trees and see nineteen. Into the fire, see nineteen. Names make nineteen, like Overholser's and Callahan's. But that's just what I can say , what I can see , what I can get hold of.' Eddie was speaking with desperate speed, looking directly into Roland's eyes. 'Here's another thing. It has to do with todash. I know you guys sometimes think everything reminds me of getting high, and maybe that's right, but Roland, going todash is like being stoned.'

Eddie always spoke to him of these things as if Roland had never put anything stronger than graf into his brain and body in all his long life, and that was far from the truth. He might remind Eddie of this at another time, but not now.

'Just being here in your world is like going todash. Because… ah, man, this is hard… Roland, everything here is real, but it's not.'

Roland thought of reminding Eddie this wasn't his world, not anymore—for him the city of Lud had been the end of Mid-World and the beginning of all the mysteries that lay beyond— but again kept his mouth closed.

Eddie grasped a handful of duff, scooping up fragrant needles and leaving five black marks in the shape of a hand on the forest floor. 'Real,' he said. 'I can feel it and smell it.' He put the handful of needles to his mouth and ran out his tongue to touch them. 'I can taste it. And at the same time, it's as unreal as a nineteen you might see in the fire, or that cloud in the sky that looks like a turtle. Do you understand what I'm saying?'

'I understand it very well,' Roland murmured.

'The people are real. You… Susannah…Jake… that guy Gasher who snatched Jake… Overholser and the Slightmans.

'But the way stuff from my world keeps showing up over here, that's not real. It's not sensible or logical, either, but that's not what I mean. It's just not real Why do people over here sing 'Hey Jude'? I don't know. That cyborg bear, Shardik—where do I know that name from? Why did it remind me of rabbits? All that shit about the Wizard of Oz, Roland—all that happened to us, I have no doubt of it, but at the same time it doesn't seem real to me. It seems like todash. Like nineteen. And what happens after the Green Palace? Why, we walk into the woods, just like Hansel and Gretel. There's a road for us to walk on. Muffin-balls for us to pick. Civilization has ended. Everything is coming unraveled. You told us so. We saw it in Lud. Except guess what? It's not! Booya, assholes, gotcha again!'

Eddie gave a short laugh. It sounded shrill and unhealthy. When he brushed his hair back from his forehead, he left a dark smear of forest earth on his brow.

'The joke is that, out here a billion miles from nowhere, we come upon a storybook town. Civilized. Decent. The kind of folks you feel you know. Maybe you don't like em all—Overholser's a little hard to swallow—but you feel you know em.'

Eddie was right about that, too, Roland thought. He hadn't even seen Calla Bryn Sturgis yet, and already it reminded him of Mejis. In some ways that seemed perfectly reasonable— farming and ranching towns the world over bore similarities to each other—but in other ways it was disturbing. Disturbing as hell . The sombrero Slightman had been wearing, for instance. Was it possible that here, thousands of miles from Mejis, the men should wear similar hats? He supposed it might be. But was it likely that Slightman's sombrero should remind Roland so strongly of the one worn by Miguel, the old mozo at Seafront in Mejis, all those years before? Or was that only his imagination?

As for that, Eddie says I have none , he thought.

'The storybook town has a fairy-tale problem,' Eddie was continuing. 'And so the storybook people call on a band of movie-show heroes to save them from the fairy tale villains. I know it's real—people are going to die, very likely, and the blood will be real, the screams will be real, the crying afterward will be real—but at the same time there's something about it that feels no more real than stage scenery.'

'And New York?' Roland asked. 'How did that feel to you?'

'The same,' Eddie said. 'I mean, think about it. Nineteen books left on the table after Jake took Charlie the Choo-Choo and the riddle book… and then, out of all the hoods in New York, Balazar shows up! That fuck!'

Here, here, now!' Susannah called merrily from behind them. 'No profanity, boys.' Jake was pushing her up the road, and her lap was full of muffin-balls. They both looked cheerful and happy. Roland supposed that eating well earlier in the day had something to do with it.

Roland said, 'Sometimes that feeling of unreality goes away, doesn't it?'

'It's not exactly unreality, Roland. It—'

'Never mind splitting nails to make tacks. Sometimes it goes away. Doesn't it?'

'Yes,' Eddie said. 'When I'm with her.'

He went to her. Bent. Kissed her. Roland watched them, troubled.

THREE

The light was fading out of the day. They sat around the fire and let it go. What little appetite they'd been able to muster had been easily satisfied by the muffin-balls Susannah and Jake had brought back to camp. Roland had been meditating on something Slightman had said, and more deeply than was probably healthy. Now he pushed it aside still half-chewed and said, 'Some of us or all of us may meet later tonight in the city of New York.'

'I only hope I get to go this time,' Susannah said.

'That's as ka will,' Roland said evenly. 'The important thing is that you stay together. If there's only one who makes the journey, I think it's apt to be you who goes, Eddie. If only one makes the journey, that one should stay exactly where he… or mayhap she … is until the bells start again.'

'The kammen ,' Eddie said. 'That's what Andy called em.'

'Do you all understand that?'

They nodded, and looking into their faces, Roland realized that each one of them was reserving the right to decide what to do when the time came, based upon the circumstances. Which was exactly right. They were either gunslingers or they weren't, after all.

He surprised himself by uttering a brief snort of a laugh.

'What's so funny?' Jake asked.

'I was just thinking that long life brings strange companions,' Roland said.