Stephen King - Wolves of the Calla

"Yes. It took me a little while to get going. I saw several of them-the woman feeding the squirrels in the park was only the first-but they weren't doing anything. I mean, I knew what they were, but it was still hard to kill them in cold blood. Then, one night in Battery Park, I saw another one feeding. I had a fold-out knife in my pocket by then, carried it everywhere. I walked up behind him while he was eating and stabbed him four times: once in the kidneys, once between the ribs, once high up in the back, once in the neck. I put all my strength into the last one. The knife came out the other side with the thing's Adam's apple skewered on it like a piece of steak on a shish kebab. Made a kind of ripping sound."

Callahan spoke matter-of-factly, but his face had grown very pale.

"What had happened in the alley behind Home happened again-the guy disappeared right out of his clothes. I'd expected it, but of course I couldn't be sure until it actually happened."

"One swallow does not make a summer," Susannah said.

Callahan nodded. "The victim was this kid of about fifteen, looked Puerto Rican or maybe Dominican. He had a boombox between his feet. I don't remember what it was playing, so it probably wasn't 'Someone Saved My Life Tonight' Five minutes went by. I was about to start snapping my fingers under his nose or maybe patting his cheeks, when he blinked, staggered, shook his head, and came around. He saw me standing there in front of him and the first thing he did was grab his boombox. He held it to his chest, like it was a baby. Then he said, 'What joo want, man?' I said I didn't want anything, not a single thing, no harm and no foul, but I was curious about those clothes lying beside him. The kid looked, then knelt down and started going through the pockets. I thought he'd find enough to keep him occupied-more than enough-and so I just walked away. And that was the second one. The third one was easier. The fourth one, easier still. By the end of August, I'd gotten half a dozen. The sixth was the woman I'd seen in the Marine Midland Bank. Small world, isn't it?"

"Quite often I'd go down to First and Forty-seventh and stand across from Home. Sometimes I'd find myself there in the late afternoon, watching the drunks and the homeless people showing up for dinner. Sometimes Rowan would come out and talk to them. He didn't smoke, but he always kept cigarettes in his pockets, a couple of packs, and he'd pass them out until they were gone. I never made any particular effort to hide from him, but if he ever pegged me, I never saw any sign of it."

"You'd probably changed by then," Eddie said.

Callahan nodded. "Hair down to my shoulders, and coming in gray. A beard. And of course I no longer took any pains about my clothes. Half of what I was wearing by then came from the vampires I'd killed. One of them was a bicycle messenger guy, and he had a great pair of motorcycle boots. Not Bally loafers, but almost new, and my size. Those things last forever. I've still got them." He nodded toward the house. "But I don't think any of that was why he didn't recognize me. In Rowan Magruder's business, dealing with drunks and hypes and homeless people who've got one foot in reality and the other in the Twilight Zone, you get used to seeing big changes in people, and usually not changes for the better. You teach yourself to see who's under the new bruises and the fresh coats of dirt. I think it was more like I'd become one of what you call the vagrant dead, Roland. Invisible to the world. But I think those people- those former people-must be tied to New York-"

"They never go far," Roland agreed. His cigarette was done; the dry paper and crumbles of tobacco had disappeared up to his fingernails in two puffs. "Ghosts always haunt the same house."

"Of course they do, poor things. And I wanted to leave. Every day the sun would set a little earlier, and every day I'd feel the call of those roads, those highways in hiding, a little more strongly. Some of it might have been the fabled geographic cure, to which I believe I have already alluded. It's a wholly illogical but nonetheless powerful belief that things will change for the better in a new place; that the urge to self-destruct will magically disappear. Some of it was undoubtedly the hope that in another place, a wider place, there would be no more vampires or walking dead people to cope with. But mostly it was other things. Well… one very big thing." Callahan smiled, but it was no more than a stretch of the lips exposing the gums. "Someone had begun hunting me."

"The vampires," Eddie said.

"Ye-ess…" Callahan bit at his lip, then repeated it with a little more conviction. "Yes. But not just the vampires. Even when that had to be the most logical idea, it didn't seem entirely right. I knew it wasn't the dead, at least; they could see me, but didn't care about me one way or another, except maybe for the hope that I might be able to fix them or put them out of their misery. But the Type Threes couldn't see me, as I've told you-not as the thing hunting them, anyway. And their attention spans are short, as if they're infected to some degree by the same amnesia they pass on to their victims.

"I first became aware that I was in trouble one night in Washington Square Park, not long after I killed the woman from the bank. That park had become a regular haunt of mine, almough God knows I wasn't the only one. In the summer it was a regular open-air dormitory. I even had my own favorite bench, although I didn't get it every night… didn't even go there every night.

"On this particular evening-thundery and sultry and close-I got there around eight o'clock. I had a bottle in a brown bag and a book of Ezra Pound's Cantos. I approached the bench, and there, spray-painted across the back of another bench near mine, I saw a graffito that said HE COMES HERE. HE HAS A BURNED HAND."

"Oh my Lord God," Susannah said, and put a hand to her throat.

"I left the park at once and slept in an alley twenty blocks away. There was no doubt in my mind that I was the subject of that graffito. Two nights later I saw one on the sidewalk outside a bar on Lex where I liked to drink and sometimes have a sandwich if I was, as they say, in funds. It had been done in chalk and the foot-traffic had rubbed it to a ghost, but I could still read it. It said the same thing: he comes here, he has a burned hand. There were comets and stars around the message, as if whoever wrote it had actually tried to dress it up. A block down, spray-painted on a No Parking sign: his hair is mostly white now. The next morning, on the side of a cross-town bus: his name might be collingwood. Two or three days after that, I started to see lost-pet posters around a lot of the places that had come to be my places-Needle Park, the Central Park West side of The Ramble, the City Lights bar on Lex, a couple of folk music and poetry clubs down in the Village."

" Pet posters," Eddie mused. "You know, in a way that's brilliant."

"They were all the same," Callahan said, "HAVE YOU SEEN OUR IRISH SETTER? HE IS A STUPID OLD THING BUT WE LOVE HIM. BURNED RIGHT FOREPAW. ANSWERS TO THE NAME OF KELLY, COLLINS, OR COLLINGWOOD. WE WILL PAY A VERY LARGE REWARD. And then a row of dollar signs."

"Who would posters like that be aimed at?" Susannah asked.

Callahan shrugged. "Don't know, exacdy. The vampires, perhaps."

Eddie was rubbing his face wearily. "All right, let's see. We've got the Type Three vampires… and the vagrant dead… and now this third group. The ones that went around putting up lost-pet posters that weren't about pets and writing stuff on buildings and sidewalks. Who were they?"

"The low men," Callahan said. "They call themselves that, sometimes, although there are women among them. Sometimes they call themselves regulators. A lot of them wear long yellow coats… but not all. A lot of them have blue coffins tattooed on their hands… but not all."