Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower, #5)

by Stephen King

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?”

Now there was a fourth woman. She had been born out of the third in yet another time of stress and change. She cared nothing for Odetta, Detta, or Susannah; she cared for nothing save the new chap who was on his way. The new chap needed to be fed. The banqueting hall was near. That was what mattered and all that mattered. This new woman, every bit as dangerous in her own way as Detta Walker had been, was Mia. She bore the name of no man’s father, only the word that in the High Speech means mother.

The stranger wore a long black coat open over a dark shirt with a notched collar. His hair was long and white, sticking up on the sides and in front as if scared. His forehead was marked with a T-shaped scar. “My friends are still back there a little piece,” he said, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the woods in a deliberately nonspecific way. “I now call Calla Bryn Sturgis my home. Before that, Detroit, Michigan, where I worked in a homeless shelter, making soup and running AA meetings. Work I knew quite well. Before that—for a short while—Topeka, Kansas.” He observed the way the three younger ones started at that with a kind of interested amusement. “Before that, New York City. And before that, a little town called Jerusalem’s Lot, in the state of Maine.”

“You’re from our side,” Eddie said. He spoke in a kind of sigh. “Holy God, you’re really from our side!” “Yes, I think I am,” the man in the turned-around collar said. “My name is Donald Callahan.” “You’re a priest,” Susannah said. She looked from the cross that hung around his neck—small and discreet, but gleaming gold—to the larger, cruder one that scarred his forehead. Callahan shook his head. “No more. Once. Perhaps one day again, with the blessing, but not now. Now I’m just a man of God. May I ask . . . when are you from?” “1964,” Susannah said. “1977,” Jake said. “1987,” Eddie said. Callahan’s eyes gleamed at that. “1987. And I came here in 1983, counting as we did then. So tell me something, young man, something very important. Had the Red Sox won the World Series yet when you left?”

“If,” Roland said. “An old teacher of mine used to call it the only word a thousand letters long.”