He begins to walk toward Callahan. Callahan backs toward the stable where the unfound door awaits. He
doesn’t want to go there, but there’s nowhere else. “Get away from me, ” he says.
“Nope,” says Walter, the man in black. “I can’t go for that, no can do.” He holds the box out toward Callahan. At the same time he reaches over the top of it and grasps the lid.
“Don’t!” Callahan says sharply. Because the man in the black robe mustn’t open the box. There’s something terrible inside the box, something that would terrify even Barlow, the wily vampire who forced Callahan to drink his blood and then sent him on his way into the prisms of America like a fractious child whose company has become tiresome.
“Keep moving and perhaps I won’t have to, ” Walter teases.
Callahan backs into the stable’s scant shadow. Soon he’ll be inside again. No help for it. And he can feel that strange only-there-on-one-side door waiting like a weight. “You’re cruel! ” he bursts out.
Walter’s eyes widen, and for a moment he looks deeply hurt. This may be absurd, but Callahan is looking into the man’s deep eyes and feels sure the emotion is nonetheless genuine. And the surety robs him of any last hope that all this might be a dream, or a final brilliant interval before true death. In dreams— his, at least—
the bad guys, the scary guys, never have complex emotions.
“I am what ka and the King and the Tower have made me. We all are. We’re caught.”
Callahan remembers the dream-west through which he traveled: the forgotten silos, the neglected sunsets and long shadows, his own bitter joy as he dragged his trap behind him, singing until the jingle of the very chains that held him became sweet music.
” I know, ” he says.
” Yes, I see you do. Keep moving. ”
Callahan’s back in the stable now. Once again he can smell the faint, almost exhausted aroma of old hay.
Detroit seems impossible, a hallucination. So do all his memories of America.
“Don’t open that thing, ” Callahan says, “and I will.”
“What an excellent Faddah you are, Faddah. ”
“You promised not to call me that.”
“Promises are made to be broken, Faddah.”
“I don’t think you’ll be able to kill him,” Callahan said.
Walter grimaces. “That’s ka’s business, not mine.”
“Maybe not ka, either. Suppose he’s above ka?”
Walter recoils, as if struck. I’ve blasphemed, Callahan thinks. And with this guy, I’ve an idea that’s no mean feat.
No one’s above ka, false priest, ” the man in black spits at him. “And the room at the top of the Tower is empty, I know it is.”
Although Callahan is not entirely sure what the man is talking about, his response is quick and sure. “You’re wrong. There is a God. He waits and sees all from His high place. He— ”
Then a great many things happen at exactly the same time. The water pump in the alcove goes on, starting its weary thudding cycle. And Callahan’s ass bumps into the heavy, smooth wood of the door. And the man in black thrusts the box forward, opening it as he does so. And his hood falls back, revealing the pallid, snarling face of a human weasel. (It’s not Sayre, but upon Walter’s forehead like a Hindu caste-mark is the same welling red circle, an open wound that never clots or flows.) And Callahan sees what’s inside the box: he sees Black Thirteen crouched on its red velvet like the slick eye of a monster that grew outside God’s shadow.
And Callahan begins to shriek at the sight of it, for he senses its endless power: it may fling him anywhere or to the farthest blind alley of nowhere. And the door clicks open. And even in his panic— or perhaps below his panic— Callahan is able to think Opening the box has opened the door. And he is stumbling backward into some other place. He can hear shrieking voices. One of them is Lupe’s, asking Callahan why Callahan let him die. Another belongs to Rowena Magruder and she is telling him this is his other life, this is it, and how does he like it? And his hands come up to cover his ears even as one ancient boot trips over the other and he begins to fall backward, thinking it’s Hell the man in black has pushed him into, actual Hell. And when his hands come up, the weasel-faced man thrusts the open box with its terrible glass ball into them. And the ball moves. It rolls like an actual eye in an invisible socket. And Callahan thinks, It’s alive, it’s the stolen eye of some awful monster from beyond the world, and oh God, oh dear God, it is seeing me.
But he takes the box. It’s the last thing in life he wants to do, but he is powerless to stop himself. Close it, you have to close it, he thinks, but he is falling, he has tripped himself (or the robed man’s ka has tripped him) and he’s falling, twisting around as he goes down. From somewhere below him all the voices of his past are calling to him, reproaching him (his mother wants to know why he allowed that filthy Barlow to break the cross she brought him all the way from Ireland), and incredibly, the man in black cries “Bon voyage, Faddah!” merrily after him.
Callahan strikes a stone floor. It’s littered with the bones of small animals. The lid of the box closes and he feels a moment of sublime relief… but then it opens again, very slowly, disclosing the eye.
” No, ” Callahan whispers. “Please, no. ”
But he’s not able to close the box— all his strength seems to have deserted him— and it will not close itself.
Deep down in the black eye, a red speck forms, glows… grows. Callahan’s horror swells, filling his throat, threatening to stop his heart with its chill. It’s the King, he thinks. It’s the Eye of the Crimson King as he looks down from his place in the Dark Tower. And he is seeing me.
“NO!” Callahan shrieks as he lies on the floor of a cave in the northern arroyo country of Calla Bryn Sturgis, a place he will eventually come to love. “NO! NO! DON’T LOOK AT ME! OH FOR THE LOVE OF
GOD, DON’T LOOK AT ME!”
But the Eye does look, and Callahan cannot bear its insane regard. That is when he passes out. It will be three days before he opens his own eyes again, and when he does he’ll be with the Manni.
NINETEEN
Callahan looked at them wearily. Midnight had come and gone, we all say thankya, and now it was twenty-two days until the Wolves would come for their bounty of children. He drank off the final two inches of cider in his glass, grimaced as if it had been corn whiskey, then set the empty tumbler down. “And all the rest, as they say, you know. It was Henchick and Jemmin who found me. Henchick closed the box, and when he did, the door closed. And now what was the Cave of the Voices is Doorway Cave.”
“And you, Pere?” Susannah asked. “What did they do with you?”
“Took me to Henchick’s cabin—his kra. That’s where I was when I opened my eyes. During my unconsciousness, his wives and daughters fed me water and chicken broth, squeezing drops from a rag, one by one.”
“Just out of curiosity, how many wives does he have?” Eddie asked.
“Three, but he may have relations with only one at a time,” Callahan said absently. “It depends on the stars, or something. They nursed me well. I began to walk around the town; in those days they called me the Walking Old Fella. I couldn’t quite get the sense of where I was, but in a way my previous wanderings had prepared me for what had happened. Had toughened me mentally. I had days, God knows, when I thought all of this was happening in the second or two it would take me to fall from the window I’d broken through down to Michigan Avenue—that the mind prepares itself for death by offering some wonderful final hallucination, the actual semblance of an entire life. And I had days when I decided that I had finally become what we all dreaded most at both Home and Lighthouse: a wet brain. I thought maybe I’d been socked away in a moldy institution somewhere, and was imagining the whole thing. But mostly, I just accepted it. And was glad to have finished up in a good place, real or imagined.
“When I got my strength back, I reverted to making a living the way I had during my years on the road.
There was no ManPower or Brawny Man office in Calla Bryn Sturgis, but those were good years and there was plenty of work for a man who wanted to work—they were big-rice years, as they do say, although stockline and the rest of the crops also did fine. Eventually I began to preach again. There was no conscious decision to do so—it wasn’t anything I prayed over, God knows—and when I did, I discovered these people knew all about the Man Jesus.” He laughed. “Along with The Over, and Oriza, and Buffalo Star… do you know Buffalo Star, Roland?”