room. It wore straight-leg jeans and a plain white shirt, but the head rising from that shirt
was painted with sleek feathers of dark yellow. Its eyes looked like drops of liquid tar.
“Get them!” this horridly ridiculous thing shouted, and brushed aside a napkin. Beneath it
was some sort of weapon. Callahan supposed it was a gun, but it looked like the sort you
saw onStar Trek . What did they call them? Phasers? Stunners?
It didn’t matter. Callahan had a far better weapon, and wanted to make sure they all saw it.
He swept the place-settings and the glass container with the candle in it from the nearest
table, then snatched away the tablecloth like a magician doing a trick. The last thing he
wanted to do was to trip over a swatch of linen at the crucial moment. Then, with a
nimbleness he wouldn’t have believed even a week ago, he stepped onto one of the chairs
and from the chair to the table-top. Once on the table, he lifted thesköldpadda with his
fingers supporting the turtle’s flat undershell, giving them all a good look at it.
I could croon something,he thought.Maybe “Moonlight Becomes You” or “I Left My
Heart in San Francisco.”
At that point they had been inside the Dixie Pig for exactly thirty-four seconds.
Five
High school teachers faced with a large group of students in study hall or a school
assembly will tell you that teenagers, even when freshly showered and groomed, reek of
the hormones which their bodies are so busy manufacturing. Any group of people under
stress emits a similar stink, and Jake, with his senses tuned to the most exquisite pitch,
smelled it here. When they passed themaître d ’s stand (Blackmail Central, his Dad liked to
call such stations), the smell of the Dixie Pig’s diners had been faint, the smell of people
coming back to normal after some sort of dust-up. But when the bird-creature in the far
corner shouted, Jake had smelled the patrons more strongly. It was a metallic aroma,
enough like blood to incite his temper and his emotions. Yes, he saw Tweety Bird knock
aside the napkin on his table; yes, he saw the weapon beneath; yes, he understood that
Callahan, standing on the table, was an easy shot. That was of far less concern to Jake than
the mobilizing weapon that was Tweety Bird’s mouth. Jake was drawing back his right arm,
meaning to fling the first of his nineteen plates and amputate the head in which that mouth
resided, when Callahan raised the turtle.
It won’t work, not in here,Jake thought, but even before the idea had been completely
articulated in his mind, he understood itwas working. He knew by the smell of them. The
aggressiveness went out of it. And the few who had begun to rise from their tables—the red
holes in the foreheads of the low people gaping, the blue auras of the vampires seeming to
pull in and intensify—sat back down again, and hard, as if they had suddenly lost
command of their muscles.
“Get them, those are the ones Sayre…”Then Tweety stopped talking. His left hand—if
you could call such an ugly talon a hand—touched the butt of his high-tech gun and then
fell away. The brilliance seemed to leave his eyes. “They’re the ones Sayre…S-S-
Sayre…” Another pause. Then the bird-thing said, “Oh sai, what is the lovely thing that you hold?”
“You know what it is,” Callahan said. Jake was moving and Callahan, mindful of what the
boy gunslinger had told him outside—Make sure that every time I look on my right, I see
your face—stepped back down from the table to move with him, still holding the turtle
high. He could almost taste the room’s silence, but—
But there wasanother room. Rough laughter and hoarse, carousing yells—a party from the
sound of it, and close by. On the left. From behind the tapestry showing the knights and
their ladies at dinner.Something going on back there, Callahan thought,and probably not
Elks’ Poker Night.
He heard Oy breathing fast and low through his perpetual grin, a perfect little engine. And
something else. A harsh rattling sound with a low and rapid clicking beneath. The
combination set Callahan’s teeth on edge and made his skin feel cold. Something was
hiding under the tables.
Oy saw the advancing insects first and froze like a dog on point, one paw raised and his
snout thrust forward. For a moment the only part of him to move was the dark and velvety
skin of his muzzle, first twitching back to reveal the clenched needles of his teeth, then
relaxing to hide them, then twitching back again.
The bugs came on. Whatever they were, the Turtle Maturin upraised in the Pere’s hand
meant nothing to them. A fat guy wearing a tuxedo with plaid lapels spoke weakly, almost
questioningly, to the bird-thing: “They weren’t to come any further than here, Meiman, nor
to leave. We were told…”
Oy lunged forward, a growl coming through his clamped teeth. It was a decidedly
un-Oylike sound, reminding Callahan of a comic-strip balloon:Arrrrrr!
“No!” Jake shouted, alarmed. “No, Oy!”
At the sound of the boy’s shout, the yells and laughter from behind the tapestry abruptly
ceased, as if thefolken back there had suddenly become aware that something had changed
in the front room.
Oy took no notice of Jake’s cry. He crunched three of the bugs in rapid succession, the
crackle of their breaking carapaces gruesomely clear in the new stillness. He made no
attempt to eat them but simply tossed the corpses, each the size of a mouse, into the air with a snap of the neck and a grinning release of the jaws.
And the others retreated back under the tables.
He was made for this,Callahan thought.Perhaps once in the long-ago all bumblers were.
Made for it the way some breeds of terrier are made to —
A hoarse shout from behind the tapestry interrupted these thoughts:“Humes! ” one voice cried, and then a second:“Ka-humes! ”
Callahan had an absurd impulse to yellGesundheit!
Before he could yell that or anything else, Roland’s voice suddenly filled his head.
Six
“Jake, go.”
The boy turned toward Pere Callahan, bewildered. He was walking with his arms crossed,
ready to fling the ’Rizas at the first low man or woman who moved. Oy had returned to his
heel, although he was swinging his head ceaselessly from side to side and his eyes were
bright with the prospect of more prey.
“We go together,” Jake said. “They’re buffaloed, Pere! And we’re close! They took her
through here…this room…and then through the kitchen—”
Callahan paid no attention. Still holding the turtle high (as one might hold a lantern in a
deep cave), he had turned toward the tapestry. The silence from behind it was far more
terrible than the shouts and feverish, gargling laughter. It was silence like a pointed weapon.
And the boy had stopped.
“Go while you can,” Callahan said, striving for calmness. “Catch up to herif you can. This
is the command of your dinh. This is also the will of the White.”
“But you can’t—”
“Go, Jake!”
The low men and women in the Dixie Pig, whether in thrall to thesköldpadda or not,
murmured uneasily at the sound of that shout, and well they might have, for it was not
Callahan’s voice coming from Callahan’s mouth.
“You have this one chance and must take it! Find her! As dinh I command you!”
Jake’s eyes flew wide at the sound of Roland’s voice issuing from Callahan’s throat. His
mouth dropped open. He looked around, dazed.
In the second before the tapestry to their left was torn aside, Callahan saw its black joke,
what the careless eye would first surely overlook: the roast that was the banquet’s main
entrée had a human form; the knights and their ladies were eating human flesh and drinking
human blood. What the tapestry showed was a cannibals’ communion.
Then the ancient ones who had been at their own sup tore aside the obscene tapestry and burst out, shrieking through the great fangs that propped their deformed mouths forever
open. Their eyes were as black as blindness, the skin of their cheeks and brows—even the
backs of their hands—tumorous with wild teeth. Like the vampires in the dining room, they
were surrounded with auras, but these were of a poisoned violet so dark it was almost black.
Some sort of ichor dribbled from the corners of their eyes and mouths. They were
gibbering and several were laughing: seeming not to create the sounds but rather to snatch
them out of the air like something that could be rent alive.
And Callahan knew them. Of course he did. Had he not been sent hence by one of their
number? Here were thetrue vampires, the Type Ones, kept like a secret and now loosed on
the intruders.
The turtle he held up did not slow them in the slightest.