Wolves of the Calla

'What if it wakes up in the night?' Susannah asked, and cocked her head toward the church. 'Wakes up and sends us todash?'

'Then we'll go,' Roland said.

'You've got an idea what to do with it, don't you?' Eddie asked.

'Perhaps,' Roland said. They started down the path to the house, including Callahan among them as naturally as breathing.

'Anything to do with that old Manni guy you were talking to?' Eddie asked.

'Perhaps,' Roland repeated. He looked at Callahan. 'Tell me, Pere, has it ever sent you todash? You know the word, don't you?'

'I know it,' Callahan said. 'Twice. Once to Mexico. A little town called Los Zapatos. And once… I think… to the Castle of the King. I believe that I was very lucky to get back, that second time.'

'What King are you talking about?' Susannah asked. 'Arthur Eld?'

Callahan shook his head. The scar on his forehead glared in the starlight. 'Best not to talk about it now,' he said. 'Not at night.' He looked at Eddie sadly. 'The Wolves are coming. Bad enough. Now comes a young man who tells me the Red Sox lost the World Series again… to the Mets ?'

'Afraid so,' Eddie said, and his description of the final game—a game that made little sense to Roland, although it sounded a bit like Points, called Wickets by some—carried them up to the house. Callahan had a housekeeper. She was not in evidence but had left a pot of hot chocolate on the hob.

While they drank it, Susannah said: 'Zalia Jaffords told me something that might interest you, Roland.'

The gunslinger raised his eyebrows.

'Her husband's grandfadier lives with them. He's reputed to be the oldest man in Calla Bryn Sturgis. Tian and the old man haven't been on good terms in years—Zalia isn't even sure what they're pissed off about, it's that old—but Zalia gets on with him very well. She says he's gotten quite senile over the last couple of years, but he still has his bright days. And he claims to have seen one of these Wolves. Dead.' She paused. 'He claims to have killed it himself.'

'My soul!' Callahan exclaimed. 'You don't say so!'

'I do. Or rather, Zalia did.'

'That,' Roland said, 'would be a tale worth hearing. Was it the last time the Wolves came?'

'No,' Susannah said. 'And not the time before, when even Overholser would have been not long out of his clouts. The time before that.'

'If they come every twenty-three years,' Eddie said, 'that's almost seventy years ago.'

Susannah nodded. 'But he was a man grown, even then. He told Zalia that a moit of them stood out on the West Road and waited for the Wolves to come. I don't know how many a moit might be—'

'Five or six,' Roland said. He was nodding over his chocolate.

'Anyway, Tian's Gran-pere was among them. And they killed one of the Wolves.'

'What was it?' Eddie asked. 'What did it look like with its mask off?'

'She didn't say,' Susannah replied. 'I don't think he told her. But we ought to—'

A snore arose, long and deep. Eddie and Susannah turned, startled. The gunslinger had fallen asleep. His chin was on his breastbone. His arms were crossed, as if he'd drifted off to sleep still thinking of the dance. And the rice.

FOURTEEN

There was only one extra bedroom, so Roland bunked in with Callahan. Eddie and Susannah were thus afforded a sort of rough honeymoon: their first night together by themselves, in a bed and under a roof. They were not too tired to take advantage of it. Afterward, Susannah passed immediately into sleep. Eddie lay awake a litde while. Hesitantly, he sent his mind out in the direction of Callahan's tidy little church, trying to touch the thing that lay within. Probably a bad idea, but he couldn't resist at least trying. There was nothng. Or rather, a nothing in front of a something.

/ could wake it up , Eddie diought. I really think I could .

Yes, and someone with an infected tooth could rap it with a hammer, but why would you?

We'll have to wake it up eventually. I think we're going to need it.

Perhaps, but that was for another day. It was time to let this one go.

Yet for awhile Eddie was incapable of doing that. Images flashed in his mind, like bits of broken mirror in bright sunlight. The Calla, lying spread out below them beneath the cloudy sky, the Devar-Tete Whye a gray ribbon. The green beds at its edge: rice come a-falla. Jake and Benny Slightman looking at each other and laughing without a word passed between them to account for it. The aisle of green grass between the high street and the Pavilion. The torches changing color. Oy, bowing and speaking (Eld! Thankee!) with perfect clarity. Susannah singing: 'I've known sorrow all my days .'

Yet what he remembered most clearly was Roland standing slim and gunless on the boards with his arms crossed at the chest and his hands pressed against his cheeks; those faded blue eyes looking out at the folken . Roland asking questions, two of three. And then the sound of his boots on the boards, slow at first, then speeding up. Faster and faster, until they were a blur in the torchlight. Clapping. Sweating. Smiling. Yet his eyes didn't smile, not those blue bombardier's eyes; they were as cold as ever.

Yet how he had danced! Great God, how he had danced in the light of the torches.

Come-come-commala, rice come a-falla , Eddie thought.

Beside him, Susannah moaned in some dream.

Eddie turned to her. Slipped his hand beneath her arm so he could cup her breast His last thought was for Jake. They had better take care of him out at that ranch. If they didn't, they were going to be one sorry-ass bunch of cowpunchers.

Eddie slept. There were no dreams. And beneath them as the night latened and die moon set, this borderland world turned like a dying clock.

Chapter II: Dry Twist

ONE

Roland awoke from another vile dream of Jericho Hill in the hour before dawn. The horn. Something about Arthur Eld's horn. Beside him in the big bed, the Old Fella slept with a frown on his face, as if caught in his own bad dream. It creased his broad brow zigzag, breaking the arms of the cross scarred into the skin there.

It was pain that had wakened Roland, not his dream of the horn spilling from Cuthbert's hand as his old friend fell. The gunslinger was caught in a vise of it from the hips all the way down to his ankles. He could visualize the pain as a series of bright and burning rings. This was how he paid for his outrageous exertions of the night before. If that was all, all would have been well, but he knew there was more to this than just having danced the commala a little too enthusiastically. Nor was it the rheumatiz, as he had been telling himself these last few weeks, his body's necessary period of adjustment to the damp weather of this fall season. He was not blind to the way his ankles, especially the right one, had begun to thicken. He had observed a similar thickening of his knees, and although his hips still looked fine, when he placed his hands on them, he could feel the way the right one was changing under the skin. No, not the rheumatiz that had afflicted Cort so miserably in his last year or so, keeping