And, beginning perhaps a hundred and twenty years ago (or mayhap a hundred and fifty; with time the way it was, such things were impossible to pin down with any certainty), the Wolves had begun their raids. They did not come exactly once every generation; that would have been each twenty years or so, and it was longer than that. Still, it was close to that.
Eddie thought of asking Overholser and Slightman how the Old People could have shut Andy’s mouth concerning the Wolves if the Wolves had been raiding out of Thunderclap for less than two centuries, then didn’t bother. Asking what couldn’t be answered was a waste of time, Roland would have said. Still, it was interesting, wasn’t it? Interesting to wonder when someone (or some thing) had last programmed Andy the Messenger (Many Other Functions).
And why.
The children, Overholser said, one of each set between the ages of perhaps three and fourteen, were taken east, into the land of Thunderclap. (Slightman the Elder put his arm around his boy’s shoulders during this part of the tale, Eddie noticed.) There they remained for a relatively short period of time— mayhap four
weeks, mayhap eight. Then most of them would be returned. The assumption made about those few who did not return was that they had died in the Land of Darkness, that whatever evil rite was performed on them killed a few instead of just ruining them.
The ones who came back were at best biddable idiots. A five-year-old would return with all his hard-won talk gone, reduced to nothing but babble and reaching for the things he wanted. Diapers which had been left forgotten two or three years before would go back on and might stay on until such a roont child was ten or even twelve.
“Yer-bugger, Tia still pisses herself one day out of every six, and can be counted on to shit herself once a moon, as well,” Jaffords said.
“Hear him,” Overholser agreed gloomily. “My own brother, Welland, was much the same until he died. And of course they have to be watched more or less constant, for if they get something they like, they’ll eat it until they bust. Who’s watching yours, Tian?”
“My cuz,” Zalia said before Tian could speak. “Heddon n Hedda can help a little now, as well; they’ve come to a likely enough age—” She stopped and seemed to realize what she was saying. Her mouth twisted and she fell silent. Eddie guessed he understood. Heddon and Hedda could help now, yes. Next year, one of them would still be able to help. The other one, though…
A child taken at the age of ten might come back with a few rudiments of language left, but would never get much beyond that. The ones who were taken oldest were somehow the worst, for they seemed to come back with some vague understanding of what had been done to them. What had been stolen from them. These had a tendency to cry a great deal, or to simply creep off by themselves and peer into the east, like lost things. As if they might see their poor brains out there, circling like birds in the dark sky. Half a dozen such had even committed suicide over the years. (At this, Callahan once more crossed himself.)
The roont ones remained childlike in stature as well as in speech and behavior until about the age of sixteen.
Then, quite suddenly, most of them sprouted to the size of young giants.
“Ye can have no idea what it’s like if ye haven’t seen it and been through it,” Tian said. He was looking into the ashes of the fire. ‘Ye can have no idea of the pain it causes them. When a babby cuts his teeth, ye ken how they cry?”
“Yes,” Susannah said.
Tian nodded. “It’s as if their whole bodies are teething, kennit.”
“Hear him,” Overholser said. “For sixteen or eighteen months, all my brother did was sleep and eat and cry and grow. I can remember him crying even in his sleep. I’d get out of my bed and go across to him and there’d be a whispering sound from inside his chest and legs and head. ‘Twere the sound of his bones growing in the night, hear me.”
Eddie contemplated the horror of it. You heard stories about giants—fee-fi-fo-fum, and all that—but until now he’d never considered what it might be like to become a giant. As if their whole bodies are teething, Eddie thought, and shivered.
“A year and a half, no longer than that and it were done, but I wonder how long it must seem to them, who’re brought back with no more sense of time than birds or bugs.”
“Endless,” Susannah said. Her face was very pale and she sounded ill. “It must seem endless.”
“The whispering in the nights as their bones grow,” Overholser said. “The headaches as their skulls grow.”
“Zalman screamed one time for nine days without stopping,” Zalia said. Her voice was expressionless, but Eddie could see the horror in her eyes; he could see it very well. “His cheekbones pushed up. You could see it happening. His forehead curved out and out, and if you held an ear close to it you could hear the skull creaking as it spread. It sounded like a tree-branch under a weight of ice.
“Nine days he screamed. Nine. Morning, noon, and in the dead of night. Screaming and screaming. Eyes gushing water. We prayed to all the gods there were that he’d go hoarse—that he’d be stricken dumb, even—
but none such happened, say thankee. If we’d had a gun, I believe we would have slew him as he lay on his pallet just to end his pain. As it was, my good old da’ was ready to slit ‘een’s thr’ut when it stopped. His bones went on yet awhile—his skellington, do ya—but his head was the worst of it and it finally stopped, tell gods thankya, and Man Jesus too.”
She nodded toward Callahan. He nodded back and raised his hand toward her, outstretched in the air for a moment. Zalia turned back to Roland and his friends.
“Now I have five of my own,” she said. “Aaron’s safe, and say thankee, but Heddon and Hedda’s ten, a prime age. Lyman and Lia’s only five, but five’s old enough. Five’s…”
She covered her face with her hands and said no more.
FOUR
Once the growth-spurt was finished, Overholser said, some of them could be put to work. Others—the majority—weren’t able to manage even such rudimentary tasks as pulling stumps or digging postholes. You saw these sitting on the steps of look’s General Store or sometimes walking across the countryside in gangling groups, young men and women of enormous height, weight, and stupidity, sometimes grinning at each other and babbling, sometimes only goggling up at the sky.
They didn’t mate, there was that to be grateful for. While not all of them grew to prodigious size and their mental skills and physical abilities might vary somewhat, there seemed to be one universal: they came back sexually dead. “Beggin your pardon for the crudity,” Overholser said, “but I don’t b’lieve my brother Welland had so much as a piss-hardon after they brought him back. Zalia? Have you ever seen your brother with a…
you know…”
Zalia shook her head.
“How old were you when they came, sai Overholser?” Roland asked.
“First time, ye mean. Welland and I were nine.” Overholser now spoke rapidly. It gave what he said the air of a rehearsed speech, but Eddie didn’t think that was it. Overholser was a force in Calla Bryn Sturgis; he was, God save us and stone the crows, the big farmer. It was hard for him to go back in his mind to a time when he’d been a child, small and powerless and terrified. “Our Ma and Pa tried to hide us away in the cellar. So I’ve been told, anyway. I remember none of it, m’self, to be sure. Taught myself not to, I’s’pose. Yar, quite likely. Some remember better’n others, Roland, but all the tales come to the same: one is took, one is left behind. The one took comes back roont, maybe able to work a little but dead in the b’low the waist. Then…
when they get in their thirties…”
When they reached their thirties, the roont twins grew abruptly, shockingly old. Their hair turned white and often fell completely out. Their eyes dimmed. Muscles that had been prodigious (as Tia Jaffords’s and Zalman Hoonik’s were now) went slack and wasted away. Sometimes they died peacefully, in their sleep.
More often, their endings weren’t peaceful at all. The sores came, sometimes out on the skin but more often in the stomach or the head. In the brain. All died long before their natural span would have been up, had it not been for the Wolves, and many died as they had grown from the size of normal children to that of giants: screaming in pain. Eddie wondered how many of these idiots, dying of what sounded to him like terminal cancer, were simply smothered or perhaps fed some strong sedative that would take them far beyond pain, far beyond sleep. It wasn’t the sort of question you asked, but he guessed the answer would have been many.