Wolves of the Calla dt-5

by Stephen King

  "Nineteen," Eddie said. "This whole deal has gone nineteen."

  He fell backward onto the fragrant forest floor, covered his eyes, and kicked his feet like a kid doing a tantrum. He thought: Maybe killing a few Wolves will set me right. Maybe that's all it will take.

  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.

  "If you mean us," Eddie said, "lemme tell you som
ething, Roland-you're not exacdy Norman Normal yourself."

  "I suppose not," Roland said. "If it's a group that crosses- two, a trio, perhaps all of us-we should join hands when the chimes start."

  "Andy said we had to concentrate on each other," Eddie said. "To keep from getting lost."

  Susannah surprised them all by starting to sing. Only to Roland, it sounded more like a galley-chorus-a thing made to be shouted out verse by verse-than an actual song. Yet even without a real tune to carry, her voice was melodious enough: "Children, when ye hear the music of the clarinet... Children, when ye hear the music of the flute! Children, when ye hear the music of the tam-bou-rine… Ye must bow down and worship the iyyy-DOL!"

  "What is it?"

  "A field-chant," she said. "The sort of thing my grandparents and great-grandparents might have sung while they were picking ole massa's cotton. But times change." She smiled. "I first heard it in a Greenwich Village coffee-house, back in 1962. And the man who sang it was a white blues-shouter named Dave Van Ronk."

  "I bet Aaron Deepneau was there, too," Jake breathed. "Hell, I bet he was sitting at the next damn table."

  Susannah turned to him, surprised and considering. "Why do you say so, sugar?"

  Eddie said, "Because he overheard Calvin Tower saying this guy Deepneau had been hanging around the Village since… what'd he say, Jake?"

  "Not the Village, Bleecker Street," Jake said, laughing a little. "Mr. Tower said Mr. Deepneau was hanging around Bleecker Street back before Bob Dylan knew how to blow more than open G on his Hohner. That must be a harmonica."

  "It is," Eddie said, "and while I might not bet the farm on what Jake's saying, I'd go a lot more than pocket-change. Sure, Deepneau was there. It wouldn't even surprise me to find out that Jack Andolini was tending the bar. Because that's just how things work in the Land of Nineteen."

  "In any case," Roland said, "those of us who cross should stay together. And I mean within a hand's reach, all the time."

  "I don't think I'll be there," Jake said.

  "Why do you say so, Jake?" the gunslinger asked, surprised.

  "Because I'll never fall asleep," Jake said. "I'm too excited."

  But eventually they all slept.

  FOUR

  He knows it's a dream, something brought on by no more than Slightman's chance remark, and yet he can't escape it. Always look for the back door, Cort used to tell them, but if there's a back door in this dream, Roland cannot find it. I heard of Jericho Hill and such blood-and-thunder tales of pretend, that was what Eisenhart's foreman had said, only Jericho Hill had seemed real enough to Roland. Why would it not? He had been there. It had been the end of them. The end of a whole world.

  The day is suffocatingly hot; the sun reaches its roofpeak and then seems to stay there, as if the hours have been suspended. Below them is a long sloping field filled with great gray-black stone faces, eroded statues left by people who are long gone, and Grissom's men advance relentlessly among them as Roland and his final few companions withdraw ever upward, shooting as they go. The gunfire is constant, unending, the sound of bullets whining off the stone faces a shrill counterpoint that sinks into their heads like the bloodthirsty whine of mosquitoes. Jamie DeCurry has been killed by a sniper, perhaps Grissom's eagle-eyed son or Grissom himself. With Alain the end was far worse; he was shot in the dark the night before the final battle by his two best friends, a stupid error, a horrible death. There was no help. DeMullet's column was ambushed and slaughtered at Rimrocks and when Alain rode back after midnight to tell them, Roland and Cuthbert… the sound of their guns… and oh, when Alain cried out their names -

  And now they're at the top and there's nowhere left to run. Behind them to the east is a shale-crumbly drop to the Salt -what five hundred miles south of here is called the Clean Sea. To the west is the hill of the stone faces, and Grissom's screaming, advancing men. Roland and his own men have killed hundreds, but there are still two thousand left, and that's a conservative estimate. Two thousand men, their howling faces painted blue, some armed with guns and even a few with Bolts - against a dozen. That's all that's left of them now, here at the top of Jericho Hill, under the burning sky. Jamie dead, Alain dead under the guns of his best friends -stolid, dependable Alain, who could have ridden on to safety but chose not to -and Cuthbert has been shot. How many times'? Five"? Six? His shirt is soaked crimson to his skin. One side of his face has been drowned in blood; the eye on that side bulges sightlessly on his cheek. Yet he still has Roland's horn, the one which was blown by Arthur Eld, or so the stories did say. He will not give it back. "For I blow it sweeter than you ever did, " he tells Roland, laughing. "You can have it again when I'm dead. Neglect not to pluck it up, Roland, for it's your property."

  Cuthbert Allgood, who had once ridden into the Barony of Mejis with a rook's skull mounted on the pommel of his saddle. "The lookout, " he had called it, and talked to it just as though it were alive, for such was his fancy and sometimes he drove Roland half-mad with his foolishness, and here he is under the burning sun, staggering toward him with a smoking revolver in one hand and Eld's Horn in the other, blood-bolted and half-blinded and dying… but still laughing. Ah dear gods, laughing and laughing.

  "Roland!"he cries. "We've been betrayed! We're outnumbered! Our backs are to the sea! We've got em right where we want em! Shall we charge?"

  And Roland understands he is right. If their quest for the Dark Tower is really to end here on Jericho Hill -betrayed by one of their own and then overwhelmed by this barbaric remnant of John Farson's army -then let it end splendidly.

  "Aye!" he shouts. "Aye, very well. Ye of the castle, to me! Gunslingers, to me! To me, I say!"

  "As for gunslingers, Roland," Cuthbert says, "I am here. And we are the last."

  Roland first looks at him, then embraces him under that hideous sky. He can feel Cuthbert's burning body, its suicidal trembling thinness. And yet he's laughing. Bert is still laughing.

  "All right," Roland says hoarsely, looking around at his few remaining men. "We're going into them. And will accept no quarter. "

  "Nope, no quarter, absolutely none, " Cuthbert says.

  "We will not accept their surrender if offered. "

  "Under no circumstances!" Cuthbert agrees, laughing harder than ever. "Not even should all two thousand lay down their arms."

  "Then blow that fucking horn."

  Cuthbert raises the horn to his bloody lips and blows a great blast - the final blast, for when it drops from his fingers a minute later (or perhaps it's five, or ten; time has no meaning in that final battle), Roland will let it lie in the dust. In his grief and bloodlust he will forget all about Eld's Horn.

  "And now, my friends -hile!"

  "Hile!" the last dozen cry beneath that blazing sun. It is the end of them, the end of Gilead, the end of everything, and he no longer cares. The old red fury, dry and maddening, is settling over his mind, drowning all thought. One last time, then, he thinks. Let it be so.

  "To me!" cries Roland of Gilead. "Forward! For the Tower! "

  "The Tower!" Cuthbert cries out beside him, reeling. He holds Eld's Horn up to the sky in one hand, his revolver in the other.

  "No prisoners!" Roland screams. "NO PRISONERS!"

  They rush forward and down toward Grissom's blue-faced horde, he and Cuthbert in the lead, and as they pass the first of the great gray-blackfaces leaning in the high grass, spears and bolts and bullets flying all around them, the chimes begin. It is a melody far beyond beautiful; it threatens to tear him to pieces with its stark loveliness.

  Not now, he thinks, ah, gods, not now-let me finish it Let me finish it with my friend at my side and have peace at last. Please.

  He reaches for Cuthbert's hand. For one moment he feels the touch of his friend's blood-sticky fingers, there on Jericho Hill where his brave and laughing existence was snuffed out… and then the fingers touching his are gone. Or rather, his have melted clean through Bert's. He is falling, he is falling, the world is darke
ning, he is falling, the chimes are playing, the kammen are playing ("Sounds Hawaiian, doesn't it?") and he is falling, Jericho Hill is gone, Eld's Horn is gone, there's darkness and red letters in the darkness, some are Great Letters, enough so he can read what they say, the words say -

  FIVE

  They said don't walk. Although, Roland saw, people were crossing the street in spite of the sign. They would take a quick look in the direction of the flowing traffic, and then go for it. One fellow crossed in spite of an oncoming yellow tack-see. The tack-see swerved and blared its horn. The walking man yelled fearlessly at it, then shot up the middle finger of his right hand and shook it after the departing vehicle. Roland had an idea that this gesture probably did not mean long days and pleasant nights.

  It was night in New York City, and although there were people moving everywhere, none were of his ka-tet. Here, Roland admitted to himself, was one contingency he had hardly expected: that the one person to show up would be him. Not Eddie, but him. Where in the name of all the gods was he supposed to go? And what was he supposed to do when he got there?

  Remember your own advice, he thought. "If you show up alone," you told them, "stay where you are. "

  But did that mean to just roost on… he looked up at the green street-sign… on the corner of Second Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, doing nothing but watching a sign change from don't walk in red to walk in white?

  While he was pondering this, a voice called out from behind him, high and delirious with joy. "Roland! Sugarbunch! Turn around and see me! See me very well!"

  Roland turned, already knowing what he would see, but smiling all the same. How terrible to relive that day at Jericho Hill, but what an antidote was this-Susannah Dean, flying down Fifty-fourth Street toward him, laughing and weeping with joy, her arms held out.

  "My legs!" She was screaming it at the top of her voice. "My legs! I have my legs back! Oh Roland, honeydoll, praise the Man Jesus, I HAVE MY LEGS BACK!"