Stephen King – The Dark Tower 5 – The Wolves of the Calla

Nothing at all. Just blackness.

“Then things steadied again. The chimes faded… faded… finally gone. I started to walk, very slowly. Like a man walking on thin ice. What I was afraid of was that if I stepped too heavily, I might plunge right out of the world and into the darkness behind it. I know that makes absolutely no sense— hell, I knew it then—but knowing a thing doesn’t always help. Does it?”

“No,” Eddie said, thinking of his days snorting heroin with Henry.

“No,” said Susannah.

“No,” Roland agreed, thinking of Jericho Hill. Thinking of the fallen horn.

“I walked one block, then two, then three. I started to think it was going to be okay. I mean, I might get the bad smell, and I might see a few Type Threes, but I could handle those things. Especially since the Type Threes didn’t seem to recognize me. Looking at them was like looking through one-way glass at suspects in a police interrogation room. But that night I saw something much, much worse than a bunch of vampires.”

“You saw someone who was actually dead,” Susannah said.

Callahan turned to her with a look of utter, flabbergasted surprise. “How… how do you…”

“I know because I’ve been todash in New York, too,” Susannah said. “We all have. Roland says those are people who either don’t know they’ve passed on or refuse to accept it. They’re… what’d you call em, Roland?”

“The vagrant dead,” the gunslinger replied. “There aren’t many.”

“There were enough,” Callahan said, “and they knew I was there. Mangled people on Park Avenue, one of them a man without eyes, one a woman missing the arm and leg on the right side of her body and burned all over, both of them looking at me, as if they thought I could… fix them, somehow.

“I ran. And I must have run one hell of a long way, because when I came back to something like sanity, I was sitting on the curb at Second Avenue and Nineteenth Street, head hung down, panting like a steam engine.

“Some old geezer came along and asked if I was all right. By then I’d caught enough of my breath to tell him that I was. He said that in that case I’d better move along, because there was an NYPD radio-car just a couple of blocks away and it was coming in our direction. They’d roust me for sure, maybe bust me. I looked the old guy in the eyes and said, ‘I’ve seen vampires. Killed one, even. And I’ve seen the walking dead. Do you think I’m afraid of a couple of cops in a radio-car?’

“He backed off. Said to keep away from him. Said I’d looked okay, so he tried to do me a favor. Said this was what he got. ‘In New York, no good deed goes unpunished,’ he said, and stomped off down the street like a kid having a tantrum.

“I started laughing. I got up off the curb and looked down at myself. My shirt was untucked all the way around. I had crud on my pants from running into something, I couldn’t even remember what. I looked around, and there by all the saints and all the sinners was the Americano Bar. I found out later there are several of them in New York, but I thought then that one had moved down from the Forties just for me. I went inside, took the stool at the end of the bar, and when the bartender came down, I said, “You’ve been keeping something for me.’

” ‘Is that so, my pal?’ he said.

” ‘Yes,’ I said.

” ‘Well,’ he said, “you tell me what it is, and I’ll get it for you.’

” ‘It’s Bushmill’s, and since you’ve had it since last October, why don’t you add the interest and make it a double.’

Eddie winced. “Bad idea, man.”

“Right then it seemed like the finest idea ever conceived by the mind of mortal man. I’d forget Lupe, stop seeing dead people, perhaps even stop seeing the vampires… the mosquitoes, as I came to think of them.

“By eight o’clock I was drunk. By nine, I was very drunk. By ten, I was as drunk as I’d ever been. I have a vague memory of the barman throwing me out. A slightly better one of waking up the next morning in the park, under a blanket of newspapers.”

“Back to the beginning,” Susannah murmured.

“Aye, lady, back to the beginning, you say true, I say thankya. I sat up. I thought my head was going to split wide open. I put it down between my knees, and when it didn’t explode, I raised it again. There was an old woman sitting on a bench about twenty yards away from me, just an old lady with a kerchief on her head feeding the squirrels from a paper bag filled with nuts.

Only that blue light was crawling all over her cheeks and brow, going into and out of her mouth when she breathed. She was one of them. A mosquito. The walking dead were gone, but I could still see the Type Threes.

“Getting drunk again seemed like a logical response to this, but I had one small problem: no money.

Someone had apparendy rolled me while I was sleeping it off under my newspaper blanket, and there goes your ballgame.” Callahan smiled. There was nothing pleasant about it.

“That day I did find ManPower. I found it the next day, too, and the day after that. Then I got drunk. That became my habit during the Summer of the Tall Ships: work three days sober, usually shoving a wheelbarrow on some construction site or lugging big boxes for some company moving floors, then spend one night getting enormously drunk and the next day recovering. Then start all over again. Take Sundays off. That was my life in New York that summer. And everywhere I went, it seemed that I heard that Elton John song,

‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ I don’t know if that was the summer it was popular or not. I only know I heard it everywhere. Once I worked five days straight for Covay Movers. The Brother Outfit, they called themselves. For sobriety, that was my personal best that July. The guy in charge came up to me on the fifth day and asked me how I’d like to hire on full-time.

” ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘The day-labor contracts specifically forbid their guys from taking a steady job with any outside company for a month.’

” ‘Ah, fuck that,’ he says, ‘everyone winks at that bullshit. What do you say, Donnie? You’re a good man. And I got an idea you could do a little more than buck furniture up on the truck. You want to think about it tonight?’

“I thought about it, and thinking led back to drinking, as it always did that summer. As it always does for those of the alcoholic persuasion. Back to me sitting in some little bar across from the Empire State Building, listening to Elton John on the juke-box. ‘Almost had your hooks in me, din’tcha, dear?’ And when I went back to work, I checked in with a different day-labor company, one that had never heard of the fucking Brother Outfit.”

Callahan spat out the word fucking in a kind of desperate snarl, as men do when vulgarity has become for them a kind of linguistic court of last resort.

“You drank, you drifted, you worked,” Roland said. “But you had at least one other piece of business that summer, did you not?”

“Yes. It took me a little while to get going. I saw several of them—the woman feeding the squirrels in the park was only the first—but they weren’t doing anything. I mean, I knew what they were, but it was still hard to kill them in cold blood. Then, one night in Battery Park, I saw another one feeding. I had a fold-out knife in my pocket by then, carried it everywhere. I walked up behind him while he was eating and stabbed him four times: once in the kidneys, once between the ribs, once high up in the back, once in the neck. I put all my strength into the last one. The knife came out the other side with the thing’s Adam’s apple skewered on it like a piece of steak on a shish kebab. Made a kind of ripping sound.”

Callahan spoke matter-of-factly, but his face had grown very pale.

“What had happened in the alley behind Home happened again—the guy disappeared right out of his clothes.

I’d expected it, but of course I couldn’t be sure until it actually happened.”

“One swallow does not make a summer,” Susannah said.

Callahan nodded. “The victim was this kid of about fifteen, looked Puerto Rican or maybe Dominican. He had a boombox between his feet. I don’t remember what it was playing, so it probably wasn’t ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ Five minutes went by. I was about to start snapping my fingers under his nose or maybe patting his cheeks, when he blinked, staggered, shook his head, and came around. He saw me standing there in front of him and the first thing he did was grab his boombox. He held it to his chest, like it was a baby. Then he said, ‘What joo want, man?’ I said I didn’t want anything, not a single thing, no harm and no foul, but I was curious about those clothes lying beside him. The kid looked, then knelt down and started going through the pockets. I thought he’d find enough to keep him occupied—more than enough—and so I just walked away. And that was the second one. The third one was easier. The fourth one, easier still. By the end of August, I’d gotten half a dozen. The sixth was the woman I’d seen in the Marine Midland Bank. Small world, isn’t it?”