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

by Stephen King

She walked slowly down long stone corridors toward the place of feasting. She walked past the rooms of ruin, past the empty naves and niches, past forgotten galleries where the apartments were hollow and none was the number.

“Nothing to report,” Roland said. As always, he would keep his own counsel until his instinct told him it was time to share.

“Huh!” Susannah said. “The very same bad boys! It’s almost like a Dickens novel.” “Who is Dickens, and what is a novel?” Roland asked. “A novel’s a long story set down in a book,” she said. “Dickens wrote about a dozen. He was maybe the best who ever lived. In his stories, folks in this big city called London kept meeting people they knew from other places or long ago. I had a teacher in college who hated the way that always happened. He said Dickens’s stories were full of easy coincidences.” “A teacher who either didn’t know about ka or didn’t believe in it,” Roland said.

“Sure they were,” Jake said. “Were,” Oy put in. “Sure were.”

Roland considered for a moment, then let it pass. If the number nineteen was somehow part of this, its meaning would declare itself in time. For now there were other matters.

“What’s Blue Car Syndrome?” Jake asked. “When you buy a blue car, you see blue cars everywhere.” “Not here, you don’t,” Jake said. “Not here,” Oy put in, and they all looked at him. Days, sometimes whole weeks would go by, and Oy would do nothing but give out the occasional echo of their talk. Then he would say something that might almost have been the product of original thought. But you didn’t know. Not for sure. Not even Jake knew for sure. The way we don’t know for sure about nineteen, Susannah thought, and gave the bumbler a pat on the head. Oy responded with a companionable wink.

Potentially deadly as well, of course, but she had come to learn that also had its charms. It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.

“But Gilead . . . ” Overholser paused. “Gilead’s long gone.” “I,” Roland said, “am not.”

Roland hesitated. This was the point where he could hammer the truth home, should he want to. If these people still believed a tet of gunslingers would be bound by what farmers and ranchers decided in a public meeting, they really had lost the shape of the world as it once was. But was that so bad? In the end, matters would play out and become part of his long history. Or not. If not, he would finish his history and his quest in Calla Bryn Sturgis, moldering beneath a stone. Perhaps not even that; perhaps he’d finish in a dead heap somewhere east of town, he and his friends with him, so much rotting meat to be picked over by the crows and the rusties. Ka would tell. It always did. Meanwhile, they were looking at him.

“A field-chant,” she said. “The sort of thing my grandparents and great-grandparents might have sung while they were picking ole massa’s cotton. But times change.” She smiled. “I first heard it in a Greenwich Village coffee-house, back in 1962. And the man who sang it was a white blues-shouter named Dave Van Ronk.”

The expression Jake saw on all the faces, oldest to youngest, was the same: pure joy. Not just that, he thought, and remembered a phrase his English teacher had used about how some books make us feel: the ecstasy of perfect recognition.

“I know,” Roland said. “And no matter. We spread the time as we can, but in the end the world takes it all back.”

“You say true, Eddie. Is there a point? If so, I hope you’ll get to it. Time is no longer just a face on the water, as you yourself pointed out. It’s become a precious commodity.”

Later he came to understand that he wasn’t drinking too much because he was spiritually unsettled but spiritually unsettled because he was drinking too much.

God’s voice is still and small, the voice of a sparrow in a cyclone, so said the prophet Isaiah, and we all say thankya. It’s hard to hear a small voice clearly if you’re shitass drunk most of the time.

Those weren’t the happiest days of my life, I’d never go that far, and the taste of Barlow’s blood never left my mouth, but they were days of grace. I didn’t think a lot. I just kept my head down and did whatever I was asked to do. I started to heal.

Yet in the end, he knew, the day would come and things would play out with shocking suddenness. They always did. Five minutes, ten at most, and all would be finished, for good or ill. The trick was to be ready when those few minutes came around.

but he was done with that kind of thinking. It was good for nothing but creating a truly excellent array of self-inflicted wounds.

But he sensed Roland was to some degree ashamed, and Jake found this frightening. He had an idea shame was pretty much reserved for people who didn’t know what they were doing.

My intention when I left the hospital really was to go back down to Port Authority and buy a ticket on the Forty bus.” “What’s that?” Jake asked. “Hobo-speak for the farthest you can go. If you buy a ticket to Fairbanks, Alaska, you’re riding on the Forty bus.” “Over here, it’d be Bus Nineteen,” Eddie said.

“I do not apologize for my beliefs,” he said, “but if I have complicated your work here in the Calla, I’m sorry.” “Your Man Jesus seems to me a bit of a son of a bitch when it comes to women,” Roland said. “Was He ever married?” The corners of Callahan’s mouth quirked. “No,” he said, “but His girlfriend was a whore.” “Well,” Roland said, “that’s a start.”

According to Roland, you always screamed at the top of your lungs when and if you were discovered. You might startle your enemy for a second or two, and sometimes a second or two made all the difference in the world.

He had great faith in Oy. Or maybe it was love. Or maybe those things were the same.

Oy opened his eyes—they were bright in the darkness—then winked at Jake. After that, he appeared to go back to sleep.

“My Da’ and Cuthbert’s Da’ used to have a rule between em: first the smiles, then the lies. Last comes gunfire.”

but still they were cheerful. And not, Roland thought, entirely for the sake of the children. There was great relief in finally deciding to do the right thing. Even when folk knew the price was apt to be high, that relief came. A kind of giddiness.