“Oh yes,” the gunslinger said, remembering a preacher of the Buff whom he had once been forced to kill.
“But they listened,” Callahan said. “A lot did, anyway, and when they offered to build me a church, I said thankya. And that’s the Old Fella’s story. As you see, you were in it… two of you, anyway. Jake, was that after you died?”
Jake lowered his head. Oy, sensing his distress, whined uneasily. But when Jake answered, his voice was steady enough. “After the first death. Before the second.”
Callahan looked visibly startled, and he crossed himself. “You mean it can happen more than once? Mary save us!”
Rosalita had left them. Now she came back, holding a ‘sener high. Those which had been placed on the table had almost burned down, and the porch was cast in a dim and failing glow that was both eerie and a little sinister.
“Beds is ready,” she said. “Tonight the boy sleeps with Pere. Eddie and Susannah, as you were night before last.”
“And Roland?” asked Callahan, his bushy brows raising.
“I have a cosy for him,” she said stolidly. “I showed it to him earlier.”
“Did you,” Callahan said. “Did you, now. Well, then, that’s settled.” He stood. “I can’t remember the last time I was so tired.”
“We’ll stay another few minutes, if it does ya,” Roland said. “Just we four.”
“As you will,” Callahan said.
Susannah took his hand and impulsively kissed it. “Thank you for your story, Pere.”
“It’s good to have finally told it, sai.”
Roland asked, “The box stayed in the cave until the church was built? Your church?”
“Aye. I can’t say how long. Maybe eight years; maybe less. Tis hard to tell with certainty. But there came a time when it began to call to me. As much as I hated and feared that Eye, part of me wanted to see it again.”
Roland nodded. “All the pieces of the Wizard’s Rainbow are full of glammer, but Black Thirteen was ever told to be the worst. Now I think I understand why that is. It’s this Crimson King’s actual watching Eye.”
“Whatever it is, I felt it calling me back to the cave… and further. Whispering that I should resume my wanderings, and make them endless. I knew I could open the door by opening the box. The door would take me anywhere I wanted to go. And anywhen! All I had to do was concentrate.” Callahan considered, then sat down again. He leaned forward, looking at them in turn over the gnarled carving of his clasped hands. “Hear me, I beg. We had a President, Kennedy was his name. He was assassinated some thirteen years before my time in ‘ Salem’s Lot… assassinated in the West—”
“Yes,” Susannah said. “Jack Kennedy. God love him.” She turned to Roland. “He was a gunslinger.”
Roland’s eyebrows rose. “Do you say so?”
“Aye. And I say true.”
“In any case,” Callahan said, “there’s always been a question as to whether the man who killed him acted alone, or whether he was part of a larger conspiracy. And sometimes I’d wake in the middle of the night and think, ‘Why don’t you go and see? Why don’t you stand in front of that door with the box in your arms and think, “Dallas, November 22nd, 1963″? Because if you do that the door will open and you can go there, just like the man in Mr. Wells’s story of the time machine. And perhaps you could change what happened that day.
If there was ever a watershed moment in American life, that was it. Change that, change everything that came after. Vietnam… the race riots… everything.'”
“Jesus,” Eddie said respectfully. If nothing else, you had to respect the ambition of such an idea. It was right up there with the peg-legged sea captain chasing the white whale. “But Pere… what if you did it and changed things for the worse?”
“Jack Kennedy was not a bad man,” Susannah said coldly. “Jack Kennedy was a good man. A great man.”
“Maybe so. But do you know what? I think it takes a great man to make a great mistake. And besides, someone who came after him might have been a really bad guy. Some Big Coffin Hunter who never got a chance because of Lee Harvey Oswald, or whoever it was.”
“But the ball doesn’t allow such thoughts,” Callahan said. “I believe it lures people on to acts of terrible evil by whispering to them that they will do good. That they’ll make things not just a little better but all better.”
“Yes,” Roland said. His voice was as dry as the snap of a twig in a fire.
“Do you think such traveling might actually be possible?” Callahan asked him. “Or was it only the thing’s persuasive lie? Its glammer?”
“I believe it’s so,” Roland said. “And I believe that when we leave the Calla, it will be by that door.”
“Would that I could come with you!” Callahan said. He spoke with surprising vehemence.
“Mayhap you will,” Roland said. “In any case, you finally put the box—and the ball within—inside your church. To quiet it.”
“Yes. And mostly it’s worked. Mostly it sleeps.”
“Yet you said it sent you todash twice.”
Callahan nodded. The vehemence had flared like a pine-knot in a fireplace and disappeared just as quickly.
Now he only looked tired. And very old, indeed. “The first time was to Mexico. Do you remember way back to the beginning of my story? The writer and the boy who believed?”
They nodded.
“One night the ball reached out to me when I slept and took me todash to Los Zapatos, Mexico. It was a funeral. The writer’s funeral.”
“Ben Mears,” Eddie said. “The Air Dance guy.”
“Yes.”
“Did folks see you?” Jake asked. “Because they didn’t see us.”
Callahan shook his head. “No. But they sensed me. When I walked toward them, they moved away. It was as if I’d turned into a cold draft. In any case, the boy was there—Mark Petrie. Only he wasn’t a boy any longer.
He was in his young manhood. From that, and from the way he spoke of Ben—’There was a time when I would have called fifty-nine old’ is how he began his eulogy—I’d guess that this might have been the mid-1990s. In any case, I didn’t stay long… but long enough to decide that my young friend from all that long time ago had turned out fine. Maybe I did something right in ‘Salem’s Lot, after all.” He paused a moment and then said, “In his eulogy, Mark referred to Ben as his father. That touched me very, very deeply.”
“And the second time the ball sent you todash?” Roland asked. “The time it sent you to the Castle of the King?”
“There were birds. Great fat black birds. And beyond that I’ll not speak. Not in the middle of the night.”
Callahan spoke in a dry voice that brooked no argument. He stood up again. “Another time, perhaps.”
Roland bowed acceptance of this. “Say thankya.”
“Will’ee not turn in, folks?”
“Soon,” Roland said.
They thanked him for his story (even Oy added a single, sleepy bark) and bade him goodnight. They watched him go and for several seconds after, they said nothing.
TWENTY
It was Jake who broke the silence. “That guy Walter was behind us, Roland! When we left the way station, he was behind us! Pere Callahan, too!”
“Yes,” Roland said. “As far back as that, Callahan was in our story. It makes my stomach flutter. As though I’d lost gravity.”
Eddie dabbed at the corner of his eye. “Whenever you show emotion like that, Roland,” he said, “I get all warm and squashy inside.” Then, when Roland only looked at him, “Ah, come on, quit laughin. You know I love it when you get the joke, but you’re embarrassing me.”
“Cry pardon,” Roland said with a faint smile. “Such humor as I have turns in early.”
“Mine stays up all night,” Eddie said brightly. “Keeps me awake. Tells me jokes. Knock-knock, who’s there, icy, icy who, icy your underwear, yock-yock-yock!”
“Is it out of your system?” Roland asked when he had finished.
“For the time being, yeah. But don’t worry, Roland, it always comes back. Can I ask you something?”
“Is it foolish?”
“I don’t think so. I hope not.
“Then ask.”
“Those two men who saved Callahan’s bacon in the laundrymat on the East Side—were they who I think they were?”
“Who do you think they were?”
Eddie looked at Jake. “What about you, O son of Elmer? Got any ideas?”
“Sure,” Jake said. “It was Calvin Tower and the other guy from the bookshop, his friend. The one who told me the Samson riddle and the river riddle.” He snapped his fingers once, then twice, then grinned. “Aaron Deepneau.”
“What about the ring Callahan mentioned?” Eddie asked him. “The one with Ex Libris on it? I didn’t see either of them wearing a ring like that.”