Those weren’t the happiest days of my life, I’d never go that far, and the taste of Barlow’s blood never left my mouth, but they were days of grace. I didn’t think a lot. I just kept my head down and did whatever I was asked to do. I started to heal.
“Sometime during that winter, I realized that I’d started to change. It was as if I’d developed a kind of sixth sense. Sometimes I heard chiming bells. Horrible, yet at the same time sweet. Sometimes, when I was on the street, things would start to look dark even if the sun was shining. I can remember looking down to see if my shadow was still there. I’d be positive it wouldn’t be, but it always was.”
Roland’s ka-tet exchanged a glance.
“Sometimes there was an olfactory element to these fugues. It was a bitter smell, like strong onions all mixed with hot metal. I began to suspect that I had developed a form of epilepsy.”
“Did you see a doctor?” Susannah asked.
“I did not. I was afraid of what else he might find. A brain tumor seemed most likely. What I did was keep my head down and keep working. And then one night I went to a movie in Times Square. It was a revival of two Clint Eastwood Westerns. What they used to call Spaghetti Westerns?”
“Yeah,” Eddie said.
“I started hearing the bells. The chimes. And smelling that smell, stronger than ever. All this was coming from in front of me, and to the left. I looked there and saw two men, one rather elderly, the other younger.
They were easy enough to pick out, because the place was three-quarters empty. The younger man leaned close to the older man. The older man never took his eyes off the screen, but he put his arm around the younger man’s shoulders. If I’d seen that on any other night, I would have been pretty positive what was going on, but not that night. I watched. And I started to see a kind of dark blue light, first just around the younger man, then around both of them. It was like no other light I’d ever seen. It was like the darkness I felt sometimes on the street, when the chimes started to play in my head. Like the smell. You knew those things weren’t there, and yet they were. And I understood. I didn’t accept it—that came later—but I understood. The younger man was a vampire.”
He stopped, thinking about how to tell his tale. How to lay it out.
“I believe there are at least three types of vampires at work in our world. I call them Types One, Two, and Three. Type Ones are rare. Barlow was a Type One. They live very long lives, and may spend extended periods—fifty years, a hundred, maybe two hundred—in deep hibernation. When they’re active, they’re capable of making new vampires, what we call the undead. These undead are Type Twos. They are also capable of making new vampires, but they aren’t cunning.” He looked at Eddie and Susannah. “Have you seen Night of the Living Dead?”
Susannah shook her head. Eddie nodded.
“The undead in that movie were zombies, utterly brain-dead. Type Two vampires are more intelligent than that, but not much. They can’t go out during the daylight hours. If they try, they are blinded, badly burned, or
killed. Although I can’t say for sure, I believe their life-spans are usually short. Not because the change from living and human to undead and vampire shortens life, but because the existences of Type Two vampires are extremely perilous.
“In most cases—this is what I believe, not what I know—Type Two vampires create other Type Two vampires, in a relatively small area. By this phase of the disease—and it is a disease—the Type One vampire, the king vampire, has usually moved on. In ‘Salem’s Lot, they actually killed the son of a bitch, one of what might have been only a dozen in the entire world.
“In other cases, Type Twos create Type Threes. Type Threes are like mosquitoes. They can’t create more vampires, but they can feed. And feed. And feed.”
“Do they catch AIDS?” Eddie asked. “I mean, you know what that is, right?”
“I know, although I never heard the term until the spring of 1983, when I was working at the Lighthouse Shelter in Detroit and my time in America had grown short. Of course we’d known for almost ten years that there was something. Some of the literature called it GRID—Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. In 1982 there started to be newspaper articles about a new disease called ‘Gay Cancer,’ and speculations that it might be catching. On the street some of the men called it Fucksore Disease, after the blemishes it left. I don’t believe that vampires die of it, or even get sick from it. But they can have it. And they can pass it on. Oh, yes. And I have reason to think that.” Callahan’s lips quivered, then firmed.
“When this vampire-demon made you drink his blood, he gave you the ability to see these things,” Roland said.
“Yes.”
“All of them, or just the Threes? The little ones?”
“The little ones,” Callahan mused, then voiced a brief and humorless laugh. “Yes. I like that. In any case, Threes are all I’ve ever seen, at least since leaving Jerusalem’s Lot. But of course Type Ones like Barlow are very rare, and Type Twos don’t last long. Their very hunger undoes them. They’re always ravenous. Type Threes, however, can go out in daylight. And they take their principal sustenance from food, just as we do.”
“What did you do that night?” Susannah asked. “In the theater?”
“Nothing,” Callahan said. “My whole time in New York— my first time in New York—I did nothing until April. I wasn’t sure, you see. I mean, my heart was sure, but my head refused to go along. And all the time, there was interference from the most simple thing of all: I was a dry alcoholic. An alcoholic is also a vampire, and that part of me was getting thirstier and thirstier, while the rest of me was trying to deny my essential nature. So I told myself I’d seen a couple of homosexuals canoodling in the movies, nothing more than that. As for the rest of it—the chimes, the smell, the dark-blue light around the young one—I convinced myself it was epilepsy, or a holdover from what Barlow had done to me, or both. And of course about Barlow I was right His blood was awake inside me. It saw.”
“It was more than that,” Roland said.
Callahan turned to him.
“You went todash, Pere. Something was calling you from this world. The thing in your church, I suspect, although it would not have been in your church when you first knew of it.”
“No,” Callahan said. He was regarding Roland with wary respect. “It was not. How do you know? Tell me, I beg.”
Roland did not. “Go on,” he said. “What happened to you next?”
“Lupe happened next,” Callahan said.
NINE
His last name was Delgado.
Roland registered only a moment of surprise at this—a widening of the eyes—but Eddie and Susannah knew the gunslinger well enough to understand that even this was extraordinary. At the same time they had become almost used to these coincidences that could not possibly be coincidences, to the feeling that each one was the click of some great turning cog.
Lupe Delgado was thirty-two, an alcoholic almost five one-day-at-a-time years from his last drink, and had been working at Home since 1974. Magruder had founded the place, but it was Lupe Delgado who invested it with real life and purpose. During his days, he was part of the maintenance crew at the Plaza Hotel, on Fifth Avenue. Nights, he worked at the shelter. He had helped to craft Home’s “wet” policy, and had been the first person to greet Callahan when he walked in.
“I was in New York a little over a year that first time,” Callahan said, “but by March of 1976, I had…” He paused, struggling to say what all three of them understood from the look on his face. His skin had flushed rosy except for where the scar lay; that seemed to glow an almost preternatural white by comparison.
“Oh, okay, I suppose you’d say that by March I’d fallen in love with him. Does that make me a queer? A faggot? I don’t know. They say we all are, don’t they? Some do, anyway. And why not? Every month or two there seemed to be another story in the paper about a priest with a penchant for sticking his hand up the altar boys’ skirts. As for myself, I had no reason to think of myself as queer. God knows I wasn’t immune to the turn of a pretty female leg, priest or not, and molesting the altar boys never crossed my mind. Nor was there ever anything physical between Lupe and me. But I loved him, and I’m not just talking about his mind or his dedication or his ambitions for Home. Not just because he’d chosen to do his real work among the poor, like Christ, either. There was a physical attraction.”