Roland unbuckled the gunbelt and handed it to Eddie, who was wearing the other one. Then he unslung his purse and handed it to Susannah. “Five minutes,” he said. “If there’s trouble, I might be able to call.” Or I might not, he didn’t add.
“Jake should be here by then,” Eddie said.
“If they come, hold them out here,” Roland told him.
“Eisenhart and the Slightmans won’t try to come in,” Callahan said. “What worship they have is for Oriza.
Lady Rice.” He grimaced to show what he thought of Lady Rice and the rest of the Calla’s second-rate gods.
“Let’s go, then,” Roland said.
NINE
It had been a long time since Roland Deschain had been afraid in the deeply superstitious way that goes with a believed religion. Since his childhood, perhaps. But fear fell upon him as soon as Pere Callahan opened the door of his modest wooden church and held it, gesturing for Roland to precede him inside. There was a foyer with a faded rug on the floor. On the other side of the foyer, two doors stood open. Beyond them was a largish room with pews on each side and kneelers on the floor. At the room’s far end was a raised platform and what Roland thought of as a lectern flanked by pots of white flowers. Their mild scent pervaded the still
air. There were narrow windows of clear glass. Behind the lectern, on the far wall, was an ironwood cross.
He could hear the Old Fella’s secret treasure, not with his ears but with his bones. A steady low hum. Like the rose, that hum conveyed a sense of power, but it was like the rose in no other way. This hum spoke of colossal emptiness. A void like the one they had all sensed behind the surface reality of todash New York. A void that could become a voice.
Yes, this is what took us, he thought. It took us to New York— one New York of many, according to Callahan’s story— but it could take us anywhere or anywhen. It could take us… or it could fling us.
He remembered the conclusion of his long palaver with Walter, in the place of the bones. He had gone todash then, too; he understood that now. And there had been a sense of growing, of swelling, until he had been bigger than the earth, the stars, the very universe itself. That power was here, in this room, and he was afraid of it.
Gods grant it sleep, he thought, but the thought was followed by an even more dismaying one: sooner or later they would have to wake it up. Sooner or later they would have to use it to get back to the New York whens they needed to visit.
There was a bowl of water on a stand beside the door. Callahan dipped his fingers, then crossed himself.
“You can do that now?” Roland murmured in what was little more than a whisper.
“Aye,” Callahan said. “God has taken me back, gunslinger. Although I think only on what might be called ‘a trial basis.’ Do you ken?”
Roland nodded. He followed Callahan into the church without dipping his fingers in the font.
Callahan led him down the center aisle, and although he moved swiftly and surely, Roland sensed the man was as frightened as Roland was himself, perhaps more. The religious wanted to be rid of the thing, of course, there was that, but Roland still gave him high marks for courage.
On the far right side of the preacher’s cove was a little flight of three steps. Callahan mounted them. “No need for you to come up, Roland; you can see well enough from where you are. You’d not have it this minute, I ken?”
“Not at all,” Roland said. Now they were whispering.
“Good.” Callahan dropped to one knee. There was an audible pop as the joint flexed, and they both started at the sound. “I’d not even touch the box it’s in, if I don’t have to. I haven’t since I put it here. The hidey-hole I made myself, asking God’s pardon for using a saw in His house.”
“Take it up,” Roland said. He was on complete alert, every sense drawn fine, feeling and listening for any slightest change in that endless void hum. He missed the weight of the gun on his hip. Did the people who came here to worship not sense the terrible thing the Old Fella had hidden here? He supposed they must not, or they’d stay away. And he supposed there was really no better place for such a thing; the simple faith of the parishioners might neutralize it to some degree. Might even soothe it and thus deepen its doze.
But it could wake up, Roland thought. Wake up and send them all to the nineteen points of nowhere in the blink of an eye. This was an especially terrible thought, and he turned his mind from it. Certainly the idea of using it to secure protection for the rose seemed more and more like a bitter joke. He had faced both men and monsters in his time, but had never been close to anything like this. The sense of its evil was terrible, almost unmanning. The sense of its malevolent emptiness was far, far worse.
Callahan pressed his thumb into the groove between two boards. There was a faint click and a section of the preacher’s cove popped out of place. Callahan pulled the boards free, revealing a square hole roughly fifteen inches long and wide. He rocked back on his haunches, holding the boards across his chest. The hum was much louder now. Roland had a brief image of a gigantic hive with bees the size of waggons crawling sluggishly over it. He bent forward and looked into the Old Fella’s hidey-hole.
The thing inside was wrapped in white cloth, fine linen from the look of it.
“An altar boy’s surplice,” Callahan said. Then, seeing Roland didn’t know the word: “A thing to wear.” He shrugged. “My heart said to wrap it up, and so I did.”
“Your heart surely said true,” Roland whispered. He was thinking of the bag Jake had brought out of the vacant lot, the one with nothing but strikes at mid-world lanes on the side. They would need it, aye and aye, but he didn’t like to think of the transfer.
Then he put thought aside—fear as well—and folded back the cloth. Beneath the surplice, wrapped in it, was a wooden box.
Despite his fear, Roland reached out to touch that dark, heavy wood. It will be like touching some lightly oiled metal, he thought, and it was. He felt an erotic shiver shake itself deep inside him; it kissed his fear like an old lover and then was gone.
“This is black ironwood,” Roland whispered. “I have heard of it. but never seen it.”
“In my Tales of Arthur, it’s called ghostwood,” Callahan whispered back.
“Aye? Is it so?”
Certainly the box had a ghostly air to it, as of something derelict which had come to rest, however temporarily, after long wandering. The gunslinger very much would have liked to give it a second caress—
the dark, dense wood begged his hand—but he had heard the vast hum of the thing inside rise a notch before falling back to its former drone. The wise man doesn’t poke a sleeping bear with a stick, he told himself. It was true, but it didn’t change what he wanted. He did touch the wood once more, lightly, with just the tips of his fingers, then smelled them. There was an aroma of camphor and fire and—he would have sworn it—the flowers of the far north country, the ones that bloom in the snow.
Three objects had been carved on top of the box: a rose, a stone, and a door. Beneath the door was this: Roland reached out again. Callahan made a move forward, as if to stop him, and then subsided. Roland touched the carving beneath the image of the door. Again the hum beneath it rose—the hum of the black ball hidden inside the box.
“Un… ?” he whispered, and ran the ball of his thumb across the raised symbols again. “Un… found?” Not what he read but what his fingertips heard.
“Yes, I’m sure that’s what it says,” Callahan whispered back. He looked pleased, but still grasped Roland’s wrist and pushed it, wanting the gunslinger’s hand away from the box. A fine sweat had broken on his brow and forearms. “It makes sense, in a way. A leaf, a stone, an unfound door. They’re symbols in a book from my side. Look Homeward, Angel, it’s called.”
A leaf, a stone, a door, Roland thought. Only substitute rose for leaf. Yes. That feels right.
“Will you take it?” Callahan asked. Only his voice rose slightly now, out of its whisper, and the gunslinger realized he was begging.