Stephen King - Wolves of the Calla

"If I can, gunslinger, and do'ee fine."

"They of the signs: did you see them in your travels?"

Callahan nodded slowly. "Aye, gunslinger, so I did." He looked at Eddie and Susannah. "Have you ever seen a color photo of people-one taken with a flash-where everyone's eyes are red?"

"Yeah," Eddie said.

"Their eyes are like that. Crimson eyes. And your second question, Roland?"

"Are they the Wolves, Pere? These low men? These soldiers of the Crimson King? Are they the Wolves?"

Callahan hesitated a long time before replying. "I can't say for sure," he said at last. "Not a hundred per cent, kennit. But I don't think so. Yet certainly they're kidnappers, although it's not just children they take." He thought over what he'd said. "Wolves of a kind, perhaps." He hesitated, thought it over some more, then said it again: "Aye, Wolves of a kind."

The walk from the back yard of the rectory to the front door of Our Lady of Serenity was a short one, taking no more than five minutes. That was surely not enough time for the Old Fella to tell them about the years he had spent on the bum before seeing a news story in the Sacramento Bee which had brought him back to New York in 1981, and yet the three gunslingers heard the entire tale, nevertheless. Roland suspected that Eddie and Susannah knew what this meant as well as he did: when they moved on from Calla Bryn Sturgis-always assuming they didn't die here-there was every likelihood that Donald Callahan would be moving on with them. This was not just storytelling but khef, the sharing of water. And, leaving the touch, which was a different matter, to one side, khef could only be shared by those whom destiny had welded together for good or for ill. By those who were ka-tet.

Callahan said, "Do you know how folks say, 'We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto?'"

"The phrase has some vague resonance for us, sugar, yes," Susannah said dryly.

"Does it? Yes, I see just looking at you that it does. Perhaps you'll tell me your own story someday. I have an idea it would put mine to shame. In any case, I knew I wasn't in Kansas anymore as I approached the far end of the footbridge. And it seemed that I wasn't entering New Jersey, either. At least not the one I'd always expected to find on the other side of the Hudson. There was a newspaper crumpled against the"

footrail of the bridge - which seems completely deserted except for him, although vehicle traffic on the big suspension bridge to his left is heavy and constant - and Callahan bends to pick it up. The cool wind blowing along the river ruffles his shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair .

There's only one folded sheet, but the top of it's the front page of the Leabrook Register. Callahan has never heard of Leabrook. No reason he should have, he's no New Jersey scholar, hasn't even been over there since arriving in Manhattan the previous year, but he always thought the town on the other side of the GWB was Fort Lee .

Then his mind is taken over by the headlines. The one across the top seems right enough; RACIAL TENSIONS IN MIAMI EASE, it reads. The New York papers have been full of these troubles over the last few days. But what to make of WAR OF KITES CONTINUES IN TEANECK, HACKENSACK, complete with a picture of a burning building'? There's a photo of firemen arriving on a pumper, but they are all laughing! What to make of PRESIDENT AGNEW SUPPORTS NASA TERRAFORM DREAM? What to make of the item at the bottom, written in Cyrillic?

What has happened to me? Callahan asks himself. All through the business of the vampires and the walking dead - even through the appearance of lost-pet posters which clearly refer to him - he has never questioned his sanity. Now, standing on the New Jersey end of this humble (and most remarkable!) footbridge across the Hudson - this footbridge which is being utilized by no one except himself - he finally does. The idea of Spiro Agnew as President is enough all by itself, he thinks, to make anyone with a speck of political sense doubt his sanity. The man resigned in disgrace years ago, even before his boss did .

What has happened to me? he wonders, but if he's a raving lunatic imagining all of this, he really doesn't want to know .

" Bombs away," he says, and tosses the four-page remnant of the Leabrook Register over the railing of the bridge. The breeze catches it and carries it away toward the George Washington . That's reality, he thinks , right over there. Those cars, those trucks, those Peter Pan charter buses. But then, among them, he sees a red vehicle that appears to be speeding along on a number of circular treads. Above the vehicle's body - it's about as long as a medium-sized schoolbus - a crimson cylinder is turning. BANDY, it says on one side. BROOKS, it says on the other. BANDY BROOKS. Or BANDYBROOKS. What the hell's Bandy Brooks? He has no idea. Nor has he ever seen such a vehicle in his life, and would not have believed such a thing - look at the treads, for heaven's sake - would have been allowed on a public highway .

So the George Washington Bridge isn't the safe world, either. Or not anymore.

Callahan grabs the railing of the footbridge and squeezes down tightly as a wave of dizziness courses through him, making him feel unsteady on his feet and unsure of his balance. The railing feels real enough, wood warmed by the sun and engraved with thousands of interlocking initials and messages. He sees DK L MB in a heart. He sees FREDDY amp; HELENA = TRU LUV. He sees KILL ALL SPIX and NIGERS, the message flanked by swastikas, and wonders at verbal depletion so complete the sufferer cannot even spell his favorite epithets. Messages of hate, messages of love, and all of them as real as the rapid beating of his heart or the weight of the few coins and bills in the right front pocket of his jeans. He takes a deep breath of the breeze, and that's real, too, right down to the tang of diesel fuel .

This is happening to me, I know it is, he thinks . I am not in some psychiatric hospital's Ward 9. I am me, I am here, and I'm even sober-at least for the time being-and New York is at my back. So is the town of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine, with its uneasy dead. Before me is the weight of America, with all its possibilities.

This thought lifts him, and is followed by one that lifts him even higher: not just one America, perhaps, but a dozen… or a thousand… or a million. If that's Leabrook over there instead of Fort Lee, maybe there's another version of New Jersey where the town on the other side of the Hudson is Leeman or Leighman or Lee Bluffs or Lee Palisades or Leghorn Village. Maybe instead of forty-two continental United States on the other side of the Hudson, there are forty-two hundred, or forty-two thousand, all of them stacked in vertical geographies of chance .

And he understands instinctively that this is almost certainly true. He has stumbled upon a great, possibly endless, confluence of worlds.

They are all America, but they are all different. There are highways which lead through them , and he can see them.

He walks rapidly to the Leabrook end of the footbridge, then pauses again . Suppose I can't find my way back? he thinks . Suppose I get lost and wander and never find my way back to the America where Fort Lee is on the west side of the George Washington Bridge and Gerald Ford (of all people!) is the President of the United States?

And then he thinks : So what if I do? So fucking what?