Stephen King - Wolves of the Calla

Yes! Yes, there is something! Two somethings! Two tiny moving dots at the far horizon!

"You see them! How excellent your eyes must be, Faddah!"

The man in the robe - it's black, his face within the hood nothing but a pallid suggestion - stands about twenty paces from him. He titters. Callahan cares for the sound no more than for the waxy look of his fingers. It's like the sound of mice scampering over bones. That makes no actual sense, but -

"Who are they?" Callahan asks in a dry voice. "Who are you? Where is this place?"

The man in black sighs theatrically. "So much backstory, so little time," he says. "Call me Walter, if you like. As for this place, it's a way station, just as I told you. A little rest stop between the hoot of your world and the holler of the next. Oh, you thought you were quite the far wanderer, didn't you? Following all those hidden highways of yours? But now, Faddah, you're on a real journey. "

"Stop calling me that!" Callahan shouts. His throat is already dry. The sunny heat seems to be accumulating on top of his head like actual weight.

" Faddah, Faddah, Faddah!" the man in black says. He sounds petulant, but Callahan knows he's laughing inside. He has an idea this man - if he is a man - spends a great deal of time laughing on the inside. "Oh well, no need to be pissy about it, I suppose. I'll callyouDon. Do you like that better ?"

The black specks in the distance are wavering now; the rising thermals cause them to levitate, disappear, then reappear again. Soon they'll be gone for good.

"Who are they? " he asks the man in black.

" Folks you'll almost certainly never meet, " the man in black says dreamily. The hood shifts; for a moment Callahan can see the waxy blade of a nose and the curve of an eye, a small cup filled with dark fluid. "They'll die under the mountains. If they don't die under the mountains, there are things in the Western Sea that will eat them alive . Dod-a-chock! " He laughs again. But -

But all at once you don't sound completely sure of yourself, my friend, Callahan thinks .

"If all else fails, " Walter says, "this will kill them." He raises the box. Again, faintly, Callahan hears the unpleasant ripple of the chimes. "And who will bring it to them"? Ka, of course, yet even ka needs a friend, a kai-mai. That would be you."

"I don't understand."

" No," the man in black agrees sadly, "and I don't have time to explain. Like the White Rabbit in Alice, I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date. They're following me, you see, but I needed to double back and talk to you. Busy-busy-busy! Now I must get ahead of them again - how else will I draw them on? You and I, Don, must be done with our palaver, regrettably short though it has been. Back into the stable with you, amigo. Quick as a bunny !"

" What if I don't want to?" Only there's really no what-if about it. He's never wanted to go anyplace less. Suppose he asks this fellow to let him go and try to catch up with those wavering specks? What if he tells the man in black, "That's where I'm supposed to be, where what you call ka wants me to be "? He guesses he knows. Might as well spit in the ocean .

As if to confirm this, Walter says, "What you want hardly matters. You'll go where the King decrees, and there you will wait. If yon two die on their course - as they almost certainly must - you will live a life of rural serenity in the place to which I send you, and there you too will die, full of years and possibly with a false but undoubtedly pleasing sense of redemption. You'll live on your level of the Tower long after I'm bone-dust on mine. This I promise you, faddah, for I have seen it in the glass, say true! And if they keep coming? If they reach you in the place to which you are going? Why, in that unlikely case you'll aid them in every way you can and kill them by doing so. It's a mind-blower, isn't it? Wouldn't you say it's a mind-blower ?"

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.