Stephen King: Wolves of the Calla

And really, what could be so special about the number nineteen? Mystery Number, indeed. After some thought, Susannah had pointed out it was prime, at least, like the numbers that had opened the gate between them and Blaine the Mono. Eddie had added that it was the only one that came between eighteen and twenty every time you counted. Jake had laughed at that and told him to stop being a jerk. Eddie, who had been sitting close to the campfire and carving a rabbit (when it was done, it would join the cat and dog already in his pack), told Jake to quit making fun of his only real talent.

They might have been back on the Path of the Beam five or six weeks when they came to a pair of ancient double ruts that had surely once been a road. It didn't follow the Path of the Beam exactly, but Roland swung them onto it anyway. It bore closely enough to the Beam for their purposes, he said. Eddie thought being on a road again might refocus things, help them to shake that maddening becalmed-in-the-Horse-Latitudes feeling, but it didn't. The road carried them up and across a rising series of fields like steps. They finally topped a long north-south ridge. On the far side, their road descended into a dark wood. Almost a fairy-tale wood, Eddie thought as they passed into its shadows. Susannah shot a small deer on their second day in the forest (or maybe it was the third day… or the fourth), and the meat was delicious after a steady diet of vegetarian gunslinger burritos, but there were no ores or trolls in the deep glades, and no elves-Keebler or otherwise. No more deer, either.

"I keep lookin for the candy house," Eddie said. They'd been winding their way through the great old trees for several days by then. Or maybe it had been as long as a week. All he knew for sure was that they were still reasonably close to the Path of the Beam. They could see it in the sky… and they could feel it.

"What candy house is this?" Roland asked. "Is it another tale? If so, I'd hear."

Of course he would. The man was a glutton for stories, especially those that led off with a "Once upon a time when everyone lived in the forest." But the way he listened was a little odd. A little off. Eddie had mentioned this to Susannah once, and she'd nailed it with a single stroke, as she often did. Susannah had a poet's almost uncanny ability to put feelings into words, freezing them in place.

"That's 'cause he doesn't listen all big-eyed like a kid at bedtime," she said. "That's just how you want him to listen, honey-bunch."

"And how does he listen?"

"Like an anthropologist," she had replied promptly. "Like an anthropologist tryin to figure out some strange culture by their myths and legends."

She was right. And if Roland's way of listening made Eddie uncomfortable, it was probably because in his heart, Eddie felt that if anyone should be listening like scientists, it should be him and Suze and Jake. Because they came from a far more sophisticated where and when. Didn't they?

Whether they did or didn't, the four had discovered a great number of stories that were common to both worlds. Roland knew a tale called "Diana's Dream" that was eerily close to "The Lady or the Tiger," which all three exiled New Yorkers had read in school. The tale of Lord Perth was similar to the Bible story of David and Goliath. Roland had heard many tales of the Man Jesus, who died on the cross to redeem the sins of the world, and told Eddie, Susannah, and Jake that Jesus had His fair share of followers in Mid-World. There were also songs common to both worlds. "Careless Love" was one. "Hey Jude" was another, although in Roland's world, the first line of this song was "Hey Jude, I see you, lad."

Eddie passed at least an hour telling Roland the story of Hansel and Gretel, turning the wicked child-eating witch into Rhea of the Coos almost without thinking of it. When he got to the part about her trying to fatten the children up, he broke off and asked Roland: "Do you know this one? A version of this one?"

"No," Roland said, "but it's a fair tale. Tell it to the end, please."

Eddie did, finishing with the required They lived happily ever after , and the gunslinger nodded. "No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves, don't we?"

"Yeah," Jake said.

Oy was trotting at the boy's heel, looking up at Jake with the usual expression of calm adoration in his gold-ringed eyes. "Yeah," the bumbler said, copying the boy's rather glum inflection exactly.

Eddie threw an arm around Jake's shoulders. "Too bad you're over here instead of back in New York," he said. "If you were back in the Apple, Jakey-boy, you'd probably have your own child psychiatrist by now. You'd be working on these issues about your parents. Getting to the heart of your unresolved conflicts. Maybe getting some good drugs, too. Ritalin, stuff like that."

"On the whole, I'd rather be here," Jake said, and looked down at Oy.

"Yeah," Eddie said. "I don't blame you."

"Such stories are called 'fairy tales,' " Roland mused.

"Yeah," Eddie replied.

"There were no fairies in this one, though."

"No," Eddie agreed. "That's more like a category name than anything else. In our world you got your mystery and suspense stories… your science fiction stories… your Westerns… your fairy tales. Get it?"

"Yes," Roland said. "Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?"

"I guess that's close enough," Susannah said.

"Does no one eat stew?" Roland asked.

"Sometimes at supper, I guess," Eddie said, "but when it comes to entertainment, we do tend to stick with one flavor at a time, and don't let any one thing touch another thing on your plate. Although it sounds kinda boring when you put it that way."

"How many of these fairy tales would you say there are?"

With no hesitation-and certainly no collusion-Eddie, Susannah, and Jake all said the same word at exactly the same time: "Nineteen!" And a moment later, Oy repeated it in his hoarse voice: "Nineteen!"

They looked at each other and laughed, because "nineteen" had become a kind of jokey catchword among them, replacing "bumhug," which Jake and Eddie had pretty much worn out. Yet the laughter had a tinge of uneasiness about it, because this business about nineteen had gotten a trifle weird. Eddie had found himself carving it on the side of his most recent wooden animal, like a brand: Hey there, Pard, welcome to our spread! We call it the Bar-Nineteen . Both Susannah and Jake had confessed to bringing wood for the evening fire in armloads of nineteen pieces. Neither of them could say why; it just felt right to do it that way, somehow.

Then there was the morning Roland had stopped them at the edge of the wood through which they were now traveling. He had pointed at the sky, where one particularly ancient tree had reared its hoary branches. The shape those branches made against the sky was the number nineteen. Clearly nineteen. They had all seen it, but Roland had seen it first.

Yet Roland, who believed in omens and portents as routinely as Eddie had once believed in lightbulbs and Double-A batteries, had a tendency to dismiss his ka-tet's odd and sudden infatuation with the number. They had grown close, he said, as close as any ka-tet could, and so their thoughts, habits, and little obsessions had a tendency to spread among them all, like a cold. He believed that Jake was facilitating this to a certain degree.

"You've got the touch, Jake," he said. "I'm not sure that it's as strong in you as it was in my old friend Alain, but by the gods I believe it may be."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Jake had replied, frowning in puzzlement. Eddie did-sort of-and guessed that Jake would know, in time. If time ever began passing in a normal way again, that was.