Wolves of the Calla

  Like the old robots, the woman in the yard below wanted to go someplace, but didn't know where. She wanted to get something, but didn't know what. The question was, what was he supposed to do?

  Just watch and wait. Use the time to think up some other bullshit story in case one of them wakes up and sees her in the dooryard, pacing around in her wheelchair. More post-traumatic stress syndrome from Lud, maybe.

  "Hey, it works for me," he murmured, but just then Susannah had turned and wheeled back toward the barn, now moving with a purpose. Eddie had lain down, prepared to feign sleep, but instead of hearing her coming upstairs, he'd heard a faint cling, a grunt of effort, then the creak of boards going away toward the rear of the barn. In his mind's eye he saw her getting out of her chair and heading back there at her usual speedy crawl . . . for what?

  Five minutes of silence. He was just beginning to get really nervous when there was a single squeal, short and sharp. It was so much like the cry of an infant that his balls pulled up tight and his skin broke out in gooseflesh. He looked toward the ladder leading down to the barn floor and made himself wait some more.

  That was a pig. One of the young ones. Just a shoat, that's all.

  Maybe, but what he kept picturing was the younger set of twins. Especially the girl. Lia, rhymes with Mia. No more than babies, and it was crazy to think of Susannah cutting a child's throat, totally insane, but . . .

  But that's not Susannah down there, and if you start thinking it is, you're apt to get hurt, the way you almost got hurt before.

  Hurt, hell. Almost killed was what he'd been. Almost gotten his face chewed off by the lobstrosities.

  It was Detta who threw me to the creepy-crawlies. This one isn't her.

  Yes, and he had an idea--only an intuition, really--that this one might be a hell of a lot nicer than Detta, but he'd be a fool to bet his life on it.

  Or the lives of the children? Tian and Zalia's children?

  He sat there sweating, not knowing what to do.

  Now, after what seemed an interminable wait, there were more squeaks and creaks. The last came from directly beneath the ladder leading to the loft. Eddie lay back again and closed his eyes. Not quite all the way, though. Peering through his lashes, he saw her head appear above the loft floor. At that moment the moon sailed out from behind a cloud and flooded the loft with light. He saw blood at the corners of her mouth, as dark as chocolate, and reminded himself to wipe it off her in the morning. He didn't want any of the Jafford clan seeing it.

  What I want to see is the twins, Eddie thought. Both sets, all four, alive and well. Especially Lia. What else do I want? For Tian to come out of the barn with a frown on his face. For him to ask us if we heard anything in the night, maybe a fox or even one of those rock-cats they talk about. Because, see, one of the shoats has gone missing. Hope you hid whatever was left of it, Mia or whoever you are. Hope you hid it well.

  She came to him, lay down, turned over once and fell asleep--he could tell by the sound of her breathing. Eddie turned his head and looked toward the sleeping Jaffords home place.

  She didn't go anywhere near the house.

  No, not unless she'd wheeled her chair all the way through the barn and right out the back, that was. Gone around that way . . . slipped in a window . . . taken one of the younger twins . . . taken the little girl . . . taken her back to the barn . . . and . . .

  She didn't do that. Didn't have the time, for one thing.

  Maybe not, but he'd feel a lot better in the morning, just the same. When he saw all the kids at breakfast. Including Aaron, the little boy with the chubby legs and the little sticking-out belly. He thought of what his mother sometimes said when she saw a mother wheeling a little one like that along the street: So cute! Looks good enough to eat!

  Quit it. Go to sleep!

  But it was a long time before Eddie got back to sleep.

  THREE

  Jake awoke from his nightmare with a gasp, not sure where he was. He sat up, shivering, arms wrapped around himself. He was wearing nothing but a plain cotton shirt--too big for him--and flimsy cotton shorts, sort of like gym shorts, that were also too big for him. What . . . ?

  There was a grunt, followed by a muffled fart. Jake looked toward these sounds, saw Benny Slightman buried up to the eyes under two blankets, and everything fell into place. He was wearing one of Benny's undershirts and a pair of Benny's undershorts. They were in Benny's tent. They were on the bluff overlooking the river. The riverbanks out here were stony, Benny had said, no good for rice but plenty good for fishing. If they were just a little bit lucky, they'd be able to catch their own breakfast out of the Devar-Tete Whye. And although Benny knew Jake and Oy would have to return to the Old Fella's house to be with their dinh and their ka-mates for a day or two, maybe longer, perhaps Jake could come back later on. There was good fishing here, good swimming a little way upstream, and caves where the walls glowed in the dark and the lizards glowed, too. Jake had gone to sleep well satisfied by the prospect of these wonders. He wasn't crazy about being out here without a gun (he had seen too much and done too much to ever feel entirely comfortable without a gun these days), but he was pretty sure Andy was keeping an eye on them, and he'd allowed himself to sleep deep.

  Then the dream. The horrible dream. Susannah in the huge, dirty kitchen of an abandoned castle. Susannah holding up a squirming rat impaled on a meat-fork. Holding it up and laughing while blood ran down the fork's wooden handle and pooled around her hand.

  That was no dream and you know it. You have to tell Roland.

  The thought which followed this was somehow even more disturbing: Roland already knows. So does Eddie.

  Jake sat with his knees against his chest and his arms linked around his shins, feeling more miserable than at any time since getting a good look at his Final Essay in Ms. Avery's English Comp class. My Understanding of the Truth, it had been called, and although he understood it a lot better now--understood how much of it must have been called forth by what Roland called the touch--his first reaction had been pure horror. What he felt now wasn't so much horror as it was . . . well . . .

  Sadness, he thought.

  Yes. They were supposed to be ka-tet, one from many, but now their unity had been lost. Susannah had become another person and Roland didn't want her to know, not with Wolves on the way both here and in the other world.

  Wolves of the Calla, Wolves of New York.

  He wanted to be angry, but there seemed no one to be angry at. Susannah had gotten pregnant helping him, after all, and if Roland and Eddie weren't telling her stuff, it was because they wanted to protect her.

  Yeah, right, a resentful voice spoke up. They also want to make sure she's able to help out when the Wolves come riding out of Thunderclap. It'd be one less gun if she was busy having a miscarriage or a nervous breakdown or something.

  He knew that wasn't fair, but the dream had shaken him badly. The rat was what he kept coming back to; that rat writhing on the meat-fork. Her holding it up. And grinning. Don't want to forget that. Grinning. He'd touched the thought in her mind at that moment, and the thought had been rat-kebab.

  "Christ," he whispered.

  He guessed he understood why Roland wasn't telling Susannah about Mia--and about the baby, what Mia called the chap--but didn't the gunslinger understand that something far more important had been lost, and was getting more lost every day this was allowed to go on?

  They know better than you, they're grown-ups.

  Jake thought that was bullshit. If being a grown-up really meant knowing better, why did his father go on smoking three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day and snorting cocaine until his nose bled? If being a grown-up gave you some sort of special knowledge of the right things to do, how come his mother was sleeping with her masseuse, who had huge biceps and no brains? Why had neither of them noticed, as the spring of 1977 marched toward summer, that their kid (who had a nickname--'Bama--known only to the housekeeper) was losing his fucking mind?

&
nbsp; This isn't the same thing.

  But what if it was? What if Roland and Eddie were so close to the problem they couldn't see the truth?

  What is the truth? What is your understanding of the truth?

  That they were no longer ka-tet, that was his understanding of the truth.

  What was it Roland had said to Callahan, at that first palaver? We are round, and roll as we do. That had been true then, but Jake didn't think it was true now. He remembered an old joke people told when they got a blowout: Well, it's only flat on the bottom. That was them now, flat on the bottom. No longer truly ka-tet--how could they be, when they were keeping secrets? And were Mia and the child growing in Susannah's stomach the only secrets? Jake thought not. There was something else, as well. Something Roland was keeping back not just from Susannah but from all of them.

  We can beat the Wolves if we're together, he thought. If we're ka-tet. But not the way we are now. Not over here, not in New York, either. I just don't believe it.

  Another thought came on the heels of that, one so terrible he first tried to push it away. Only he couldn't do that, he realized. Little as he wanted to, this was an idea that had to be considered.

  I could take matters into my own hands. I could tell her myself.

  And then what? What would he tell Roland? How would he explain?

  I couldn't. There'd be no explanation I could make or that he'd listen to. The only thing I could do--

  He remembered Roland's story of the day he'd stood against Cort. The battered old squireen with his stick, the untried boy with his hawk. If he, Jake, were to go against Roland's decision and tell Susannah what had so far been held back from her, it would lead directly to his own manhood test.

  And I'm not ready. Maybe Roland was--barely--but I'm not him. Nobody is. He'd best me and I'd be sent east into Thunderclap alone. Oy would try to come with me, but I couldn't let him. Because it's death over there. Maybe for our whole ka-tet, surely for a kid all by himself.

  And yet still, the secrets Roland was keeping, that was wrong. And so? They'd be together again, all of them, to hear the rest of Callahan's story and--maybe--to deal with the thing in Callahan's church. What should he do then?

  Talk to him. Try to persuade him he's doing the wrong thing.

  All right. He could do that. It would be hard, but he could do it. Should he talk to Eddie as well? Jake thought not. Adding Eddie would complicate things even more. Let Roland decide what to tell Eddie. Roland, after all, was the dinh.

  The flap of the tent shivered and Jake's hand went to his side, where the Ruger would have hung if he had been wearing the docker's clutch. Not there, of course, but this time that was all right. It was only Oy, poking his snout under the flap and tossing it up so he could get his head into the tent.

  Jake reached out to pat the bumbler's head. Oy seized his hand gently in his teeth and tugged. Jake went with him willingly enough; he felt as if sleep were a thousand miles away.

  Outside the tent, the world was a study in severe blacks and whites. A rock-studded slope led down to the river, which was broad and shallow at this point. The moon burned in it like a lamp. Jake saw two figures down there on the rocky strand and froze. As he did, the moon went behind a cloud and the world darkened. Oy's jaws closed on his hand again and pulled him forward. Jake went with him, found a four-foot drop, and eased himself down. Oy now stood above and just behind him, panting into his ear like a little engine.

  The moon came out from behind its cloud. The world brightened again. Jake saw Oy had led him to a large chunk of granite that came jutting out of the earth like the prow of a buried ship. It was a good hiding place. He peered around it and down at the river.

  There was no doubt about one of them; its height and the moonlight gleaming on metal were enough to identify Andy the Messenger Robot (Many Other Functions). The other one, though . . . who was the other one? Jake squinted but at first couldn't tell. It was at least two hundred yards from his hiding place to the riverbank below, and although the moonlight was brilliant, it was also tricky. The man's face was raised so he could look at Andy, and the moonlight fell squarely on him, but the features seemed to swim. Only the hat the guy was wearing . . . he knew the hat . . .

  You could be wrong.

  Then the man turned his head slightly, the moonlight sent twin glints back from his face, and Jake knew for sure. There might be lots of cowpokes in the Calla who wore round-crowned hats like the one yonder, but Jake had only seen a single guy so far who wore spectacles.

  Okay, it's Benny's Da'. What of it? Not all parents are like mine, some of them get worried about their kids, especially if they've already lost one the way Mr. Slightman lost Benny's twin sister. To hot-lung, Benny said, which probably means pneumonia. Six years ago. So we come out here camping, and Mr. Slightman sends Andy to keep an eye on us, only then he wakes up in the middle of the night and decides to check on us for himself. Maybe he had his own bad dream.

  Maybe so, but that didn't explain why Andy and Mr. Slightman were having their palaver way down there by the river, did it?

  Well, maybe he was afraid of waking us up. Maybe he'll come up to check on the tent now--in which case I better get back inside it--or maybe he'll take Andy's word that we're all right and head back to the Rocking B.

  The moon went behind another cloud, and Jake thought it best to stay where he was until it came back out. When it did, what he saw filled him with the same sort of dismay he'd felt in his dream, following Mia through that deserted castle. For a moment he clutched at the possibility that this was a dream, that he'd simply gone from one to another, but the feel of the pebbles biting into his feet and the sound of Oy panting in his ear were completely undreamlike. This was happening, all right.

  Mr. Slightman wasn't coming up toward where the boys had pitched their tent, and he wasn't heading back toward the Rocking B, either (although Andy was, in long strides along the bank). No, Benny's father was wading across the river. He was heading dead east.

  He could have a reason for going over there. He could have a perfectly good reason.

  Really? What might that perfectly good reason be? It wasn't the Calla anymore over there, Jake knew that much. Over there was nothing but waste ground and desert, a buffer between the borderlands and the kingdom of the dead that was Thunderclap.

  First something wrong with Susannah--his friend Susannah. Now, it seemed, something wrong with the father of his new friend. Jake realized he had begun to gnaw at his nails, a habit he'd picked up in his final weeks at Piper School, and made himself stop.

  "This isn't fair, you know," he said to Oy. "This isn't fair at all."

  Oy licked his ear. Jake turned, put his arms around the bumbler, and pressed his face against his friend's lush coat. The bumbler stood patiently, allowing this. After a little while, Jake pulled himself back up to the more level ground where Oy stood. He felt a little better, a little comforted.

  The moon went behind another cloud and the world darkened. Jake stood where he was. Oy whined softly. "Just a minute," Jake murmured.

  The moon came out again. Jake looked hard at the place where Andy and Ben Slightman had palavered, marking it in his memory. There was a large round rock with a shiny surface. A dead log had washed up against it. Jake was pretty sure he could find this spot again, even if Benny's tent was gone.

  Are you going to tell Roland?

  "I don't know," he muttered.

  "Know," Oy said from beside his ankle, making Jake jump a little. Or was it no? Was that what the bumbler had actually said?

  Are you crazy?

  He wasn't. There was a time when he'd thought he was crazy--crazy or going there in one hell of a hurry--but he didn't think that anymore. And sometimes Oy did read his mind, he knew it.

  Jake slipped back into the tent. Benny was still fast asleep. Jake looked at the other boy--older in years but younger in a lot of the ways that mattered--for several seconds, biting his lip. He didn't want to get Benny's father in troubl
e. Not unless he had to.

  Jake lay down and pulled his blankets up to his chin. He had never in his life felt so undecided about so many things, and he wanted to cry. The day had begun to grow light before he was able to get back to sleep.

  CHAPTER VIII:

  TOOK'S STORE; THE UNFOUND DOOR

  ONE

  For the first half hour after leaving the Rocking B, Roland and Jake rode east toward the smallholds in silence, their horses ambling side by side in perfect good fellowship. Roland knew Jake had something serious on his mind; that was clear from his troubled face. Yet the gunslinger was still astounded when Jake curled his fist, placed it against the left side of his chest, and said: "Roland, before Eddie and Susannah join up with us, may I speak to you dandinh?"

  May I open my heart to your command. But the subtext was more complicated than that, and ancient--pre-dating Arthur Eld by centuries, or so Vannay had claimed. It meant to turn some insoluble emotional problem, usually having to do with a love affair, over to one's dinh. When one did this, he or she agreed to do exactly as the dinh suggested, immediately and without question. But surely Jake Chambers didn't have love problems--not unless he'd fallen for the gorgeous Francine Tavery, that was--and how had he known such a phrase in the first place?

  Meanwhile Jake was looking at him with a wide-eyed, pale-cheeked solemnity that Roland didn't much like.

  "Dandinh--where did you hear that, Jake?"

  "Never did. Picked it up from your mind, I think." Jake added hastily: "I don't go snooping in there, or anything like that, but sometimes stuff just comes. Most of it isn't very important, I don't think, but sometimes there are phrases."