Stephen King – The Dark Tower

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.