Wolves of the Calla dt-5

by Stephen King

  Ka, Roland thought.

  Callahan sat quiet, rubbing the scarred crucifix on his forehead, gathering his thoughts. And then he began to tell his story.

  Chapter III:

  The Priest's Tale (New York)

  ONE

  It was the drink, that was what he came to believe when he finally stopped it and clarity came. Not God, not Satan, not some deep psychosexual battle between his blessed mither and his blessed Da'. Just the drink. And was it surprising that whiskey should have taken him by the ears? He was Irish, he was a priest, one more strike and you're out.

  From seminary in Boston he'd gone to a city parish in Lowell, Massachusetts. His parishioners had loved him (he wouldn't refer to them as his flock, flocks were what you called seagulls on their way to the town dump), but after seven years in Lowell, Callahan had grown uneasy. When talking to Bishop Dugan in the Diocese office, he had used all the correct buzzwords of the time to express this unease: anomie, urban malaise, an increasing lack of empathy, a sense of disconnection from the life of the spirit. He'd had a nip in the bathroom before his appointment (followed by a couple of Wintergreen Life Savers, no fool he), and had been particularly eloquent that day. Eloquence does not always proceed from belief, but often proceeds from the bottle. And he was no liar. He had believed what he was saying that day in Dugan's study. Every word. As he believed in Freud, the future of the Mass spoken in English, the nobility of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, and the idiocy of his widening war in Vietnam: waist-deep in the Wide Muddy, and the big fool said to push on, as the old folk-tune had it. He believed in large part because those ideas (if they were ideas and not just cocktail-party chatter) had been currently trading high on the intellectual Big Board. Social Conscience is up two and a third, Hearth and Home down a quarter but still your basic blue-chip stock. Later it all became simpler. Later he came to understand that he wasn't drinking too much because he was spiritually unsettled but spiritually unsettled because he was drinking too much. You wanted to protest, to say that couldn't be it, or not just that, it was too simple. But it was that, just that. God's voice is still and small, the voice of a sparrow in a cyclone, so said the prophet Isaiah, and we all say thankya. It's hard to hear a small voice clearly if you're shitass drunk most of the time. Callahan left America for Roland's world before the computer revolution spawned the acronym GIGO-garbage in, garbage out-but in plenty of time to hear someone at an AA meeting observe that if you put an asshole on a plane in San Francisco and flew him to the east coast, the same asshole got off in Boston. Usually with four or five drinks under his belt. But that was later. In 1964 he had believed what he believed, and plenty of people had been anxious to help him find his way. From Lowell he had gone to Spofford, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton. There he stayed for five years, and then he began to feel restless again. Consequently, he began to talk the talk again. The kind the Diocesan Office listened to. The kind that got you moved on down the line. Anomie. Spiritual disconnection (this time from his suburban parishioners). Yes, they liked him (and he liked them), but something still seemed to be wrong. And there was something wrong, mostly in the quiet bar on the corner (where everybody also liked him) and in the liquor cabinet in the rectory living room. Beyond small doses, alcohol is a toxin, and Callahan was poisoning himself on a nightly basis. It was the poison in his system, not the state of the world or that of his own soul, which was bringing him down. Had it always been that obvious? Later (at another AA meeting) he'd heard a guy refer to alcoholism and addiction as the elephant in the living room: how could you miss it? Callahan hadn't told him, he'd still been in the first ninety days of sobriety at that point and that meant he was supposed to just sit there and be quiet ("Take the cotton out of your ears and stick it in your mouth," the old-timers advised, and we all say thankya), but he could have told him, yes indeed. You could miss the elephant if it was a magic elephant, if it had the power-like The Shadow-to cloud men's minds. To actually make you believe that your problems were spiritual and mental but absolutely not boozical. Good Christ, just the alcohol-related loss of the REM sleep was enough to screw you up righteously, but somehow you never thought of that while you were active. Booze turned your thought-processes into something akin to that circus routine where all the clowns come piling out of the little car. When you looked back in sobriety, the things you'd said and done made you wince ("I'd sit in a bar solving all the problems of the world, then not be able to find my car in the parking lot," one fellow at a meeting remembered, and we all say thankya). The things you thought were even worse. How could you spend the morning puking and the afternoon believing you were having a spiritual crisis? Yet he had. And his superiors had, possibly because more than a few of them were having their own problems with the magic elephant. Callahan began thinking that a smaller church, a rural parish, would put him back in touch with God and himself. And so, in the spring of 1969, he found himself in New England again. Northern New England, this time. He had set up shop-bag and baggage, crucifix and chasuble-in the pleasant little town of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine. There he had finally met real evil. Looked it in the face.

  And flinched.

  TWO

  "A writer came to me," he said. "A man named Ben Mears."

  "I think I read one of his books," Eddie said. "Air Dance, it was called. About a man who gets hung for the murder his brother committed?"

  Callahan nodded. "That's the one. There was also a teacher named Matthew Burke, and they both believed there was a vampire at work in 'Salem's Lot, the kind who makes other vampires."

  "Is there any other kind?" Eddie asked, remembering about a hundred movies at the Majestic and maybe a thousand comic books purchased at (and sometimes stolen from) Dahlie's.

  "There is, and we'll get there, but never mind that now. Most of all, there was a boy who believed. He was about the same age as your Jake. They didn't convince me-not at first-but they were convinced, and it was hard to stand against their belief. Also, something-was going on in The Lot, that much was certain. People were disappearing. There was an atmosphere of terror in the town. Impossible to describe it now, sitting here in the sun, but it was there. I had to officiate at the funeral of another boy. His name was Daniel Glick. I doubt he was this vampire's first victim in The Lot, and he certainly wasn't the last, but he was the first one who turned up dead. On the day of Danny Glick's burial, my life changed, somehow. And I'm not talking about the quart of whiskey a day anymore, either. Something changed in my head. I felt it. Like a switch turning. And although I haven't had a drink in years, that switch is still turned."

  Susannah thought: That's when you went todash, Father Callahan.

  Eddie thought: That's when you went nineteen, pal. Or maybe it's ninety-nine. Or maybe it's both, somehow.

  Roland simply listened. His mind was clear of reflection, a perfect receiving machine.

  "The writer, Mears, had fallen in love with a town girl named Susan Norton. The vampire took her. I believe he did it partly because he could, and partly to punish Mears for daring to form a group-a ka-tet-that would try to hunt him. We went to the place the vampire had bought, an old wreck called the Marsten House. The thing staying there went by the name of Barlow."

  Callahan sat, considering, looking through them and back to those old days. At last he resumed.

  "Barlow was gone, but he'd left the woman. And a letter. It was addressed to all of us, but was directed principally to me. The moment I saw her lying there in the cellar of the Marsten House I understood it was all true. The doctor with us listened to her chest and took her blood pressure, though, just to be sure. No heartbeat. Blood pressure zero. But when Ben pounded the stake into her, she came alive. The blood flowed. She screamed, over and over. Her hands… I remembered the shadows of her hands on the wall…"

  Eddie's hand gripped Susannah's. They listened in a horrified suspension that was neither belief nor disbelief. This wasn't a talking train powered by malfunctioning computer circuits, nor men and women who had reverted to
savagery. This was something akin to the unseen demon that had come to the place where they had drawn Jake. Or the doorkeeper in Dutch Hill.

  "What did he say to you in his note, this Barlow?" Roland asked.

  "That my faith was weak and I would undo myself. He was right, of course. By then the only thing I really believed in was Bushmill's. I just didn't know it. He did, though. Booze is also a vampire, and maybe it takes one to know one.

  "The boy who was with us became convinced that this prince of vampires meant to kill his parents next, or turn them. For revenge. The boy had been taken prisoner, you see, but he escaped and killed the vampire's half-human accomplice, a man named Straker."

  Roland nodded, thinking this boy sounded more and more like Jake. "What was his name?"

  "Mark Petrie. I went with him to his house, and with all the considerable power my church affords: the cross, the stole, the holy water, and of course the Bible. But I had come to think of these things as symbols, and that was my Achilles' heel. Barlow was there. He had Petrie's parents. And then he had the boy. I held up my cross. It glowed. It hurt him. He screamed." Callahan smiled, recalling that scream of agony. The look of it chilled Eddie's heart. "I told him that if he hurt Mark, I'd destroy him, and at that moment I could have done it. He knew it, too. His response was that before I did, he'd rip the child's throat out. And he could have done it."

  "Mexican standoff," Eddie murmured, remembering a day by the Western Sea when he had faced Roland in a strikingly similar situation. "Mexican standoff, baby."

  "What happened?" Susannah asked.

  Callahan's smile faded. He was rubbing his scarred right hand the way the gunslinger had rubbed his hip, without seeming to realize it. "The vampire made a proposal. He would let the boy go if I'd put down the crucifix I held. We'd face each other unarmed. His faith against mine. I agreed. God help me, I agreed. The boy"

  THREE

  The boy is gone, like an eddy of dark water.

  Barlow seems to grow taller. His hair, swept back from his brow in the European manner, seems to float around his skull. He's wearing a dark suit and a bright red tie, impeccably knotted, and to Callahan he seems part of the darkness that surrounds him. Mark Petrie's parents lie dead at his feet, their skulls crushed.

  "Fulfill your part of the bargain, shaman."

  But why should he? Why not drive him off, settle for a draw this night? Or kill him outright? Something is wrong with the idea, terribly wrong, but he cannot pick out just what it is. Nor will any of the buzzwords that have helped him in previous moments of crisis be of any help to him here. This isn't anomie, lack of empathy, or the existential grief of the twentieth century; this is a vampire. And -

  And his cross, which had been glowing fiercely, is growing dark.

  Fear leaps into his belly like a confusion of hot wires. Barlow is walking toward him across the Petrie kitchen, and Callahan can see the things fangs very clearly because Barlow is smiling. It is a winner's smile.

  Callahan takes a step backward. Then two. Then his buttocks strike the edge of the table, and the table pushes back against the wall, and then there is nowhere left to go.

  "Sad to see a man's faith fail, " says Barlow, and reaches out.

  Why should he not reach out? The cross Callahan is holding up is now dark. Now it's nothing but a piece of plaster, a cheap piece of rick-rack his mother bought in a Dublin souvenir shop, probably at a scalper's price. The power it had sent ramming up his arm, enough spiritual voltage to smash down walls and shatter stone, is gone.

  Barlow plucks it from his fingers. Callahan cries out miserably, the cry of a child who suddenly realizes the bogeyman has been real all along, waiting patiently in the closet for its chance. And now comes a sound that will haunt him for the rest of his life, from New York and the secret highways of America to the AA meetings in Topeka where he finally sobered up to the final stop in Detroit to his life here, in Calla Bryn Sturgis. He will remember that sound when his forehead is scarred and he fully expects to be killed. He will remember it when he is killed. The sound is two dry snaps as Barlow breaks the arms of the cross, and the meaningless thump as he throws what remains on the floor. And he'll also remember the cosmically ludicrous thought which came, even as Barlow reached for him: God, I need a drink.

  FOUR

  The Pere looked at Roland, Eddie, and Susannah with the eyes of one who is remembering the absolute worst moment of his life. "You hear all sorts of sayings and slogans in Alcoholics Anonymous. There's one that recurs to me whenever I think of that night. Of Barlow taking hold of my shoulders."

  "What?" Eddie asked.

  "Be careful what you pray for," Callahan said. "Because you just might get it."

  "You got your drink," Roland said.

  "Oh yes," Callahan said. "I got my drink."

  FIVE

  Barlow's hands are strong, implacable. As Callahan is drawn forward, he suddenly understands what is going to happen. Not death. Death would be a mercy compared to this.

  No, please no, he tries to say, but nothing comes out of his mouth but one small, whipped moan.

  "Now, priest," the vampire whispers.

  Callahan's mouth is pressed against the reeking flesh of the vampires cold throat. There is no anomie, no social dysfunction, no ethical or racial ramifications. Only the stink of death and one vein, open and pulsing with Barlow's dead, infected blood. No sense of existential bss, no postmodern grief for the death of the American value system, not even the religio-psychological guilt of Western man. Only the effort to hold his breath forever, or twist his head away, or both. He cannot. He holds on for what seems like aeons, smearing the blood across his cheeks and forehead and chin like warpaint. To no avail. In the end he does what all alcoholics must do once the booze has taken them by the ears: he drinks.

  Strike three. You're out.

  SIX

  "The boy got away. There was that much. And Barlow let me go. Killing me wouldn't have been any fun, would it? No, the fun was in letting me live.

  "I wandered for an hour or more, through a town that was less and less there. There aren't many Type One vampires, and that's a blessing because a Type One can cause one hell of a lot of mayhem in an extremely short period of time. The town was already half-infected, but I was too blind-too shocked -to realize it. And none of the new vampires approached me. Barlow had set his mark on me as surely as God set his mark on Cain before sending him off to dwell in the land of Nod. His watch and his warrant, as you'd say, Roland.

  "There was a drinking fountain in the alley beside Spencer's Drugs, the sort of thing no Public Health Office would have sanctioned a few years later, but back then there was one or two in every small town. I washed Barlow's blood off my face and neck there. Tried to wash it out of my hair, too. And then I went to St. Andrews, my church. I'd made up my mind to pray for a second chance. Not to the God of the theologians who believe that everything holy and unholy ultimately comes from inside us, but to the old God. The one who proclaimed to Moses that he should not suffer a witch to live and gave unto his own son the power to raise from the dead. A second chance is all I wanted. My life for that.

  "By the time I got to St. Andrews, I was almost running.

  There were three doors going inside. I reached for the middle one. Somewhere a car backfired, and someone laughed. I remember those sounds very clearly. It's as if they mark the border of my life as a priest of the Holy Roman Catholic Church."

  "What happened to you, sugar?" Susannah asked.

  "The door rejected me," Callahan said. "It had an iron handle, and when I touched it, fire came out of it like a reverse stroke of lightning. It knocked me all the way down the steps and onto the cement path. It did this." He raised his scarred right hand.

  "And that?" Eddie asked, and pointed to his forehead.

  "No," Callahan said. "That came later. I picked myself up. Walked some more. Wound up at Spencer's again. Only this time I went in. Bought a bandage for my hand. And then, while I was payin
g, I saw the sign. Ride The Big Gray Dog."

  "He means Greyhound, sugar," Susannah told Roland. "It's a nationwide bus company."

  Roland nodded and twirled a finger in his go-on gesture.

  "Miss Coogan told me the next bus went to New York, so I bought a ticket on that one. If she'd told me it went to Jacksonville or Nome or Hot Burgoo, South Dakota, I would have gone to one of those places. All I wanted to do was get out of that town. I didn't care that people were dying and worse than dying, some of them my friends, some of them my parishioners. I just wanted to get out Can you understand that?"

  "Yes," Roland said with no hesitation. "Very well."

  Callahan looked into his face, and what he saw there seemed to reassure him a little. When he continued, he seemed calmer.

  "Loretta Coogan was one of the town spinsters. I must have frightened her, because she said I'd have to wait for the bus outside. I went out. Eventually the bus came. I got on and gave the driver my ticket. He took his half and gave me my half. I sat down. The bus started to roll. We went under the flashing yellow blinker at the middle of town, and that was the first mile. The first mile on the road that took me here. Later on-maybe four-thirty in the morning, still dark outside-the bus stopped in"

  SEVEN

  "Hartford," the bus driver says. "This is Hartford, Mac. We got a twenty-minute rest stop. Do you want to go in and get a sandwich or something?"