NINE
“What about it?” Roland asked. “What about todash?”
“Haven’t you gone?” Callahan looked momentarily unsure of himself. “Haven’t any of you gone?”
“Say we have,” Roland said. “What’s that to you, and to your problem in this place you call the Calla?”
Callahan sighed. Although it was still early in the day, he looked tired. “This is harder than I thought it would be,” he said, “and by quite a lot. You are considerably more—what’s the word?—trig, I suppose. More trig than I expected.”
“You expected to find nothing but saddle-tramps with fast hands and empty heads, isn’t that about the size of it?” Susannah asked. She sounded angry. “Well, joke’s on you, honeybunch. Anyway, we may be tramps, but we got no saddles. No need for saddles with no horses.”
“We’ve brought you horses,” Callahan said, and that was enough. Roland didn’t understand everything, but he thought he now had enough to clarify the situation quite a bit. Callahan had known they were coming, known how many they were, known they were walking instead of riding. Some of those things could have been passed on by spies, but not all. And todash . . . knowing that some or all of them had gone todash . . .
“As for empty heads, we may not be the brightest four on the planet, but—” She broke off suddenly, wincing. Her hands went to her stomach.
“Suze?” Eddie asked, instantly concerned. “Suze, what is it? You okay?”
“Just gas,” she said, and gave him a smile. To Roland that smile didn’t look quite real. And he thought he saw tiny lines of strain around the corners of her eyes. “Too many muffin-balls last night.” And before Eddie could ask her any more questions, Susannah turned her attention back to Callahan. “You got something else to say, then say it, sugar.”
“All right,” Callahan said. “I have an object of great power. Although you are still many wheels from my church in the Calla, where this object is hidden, I think it’s already reached out to you. Inducing the todash state is only one of the things it does.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “If you will render us—for the Calla is my town now, too, ye ken, where I hope to finish my days and then be buried—the service I beg, I will give you this . . . this thing.”
“For the last time, I’d ask you to speak no more so,” Roland said. His tone was so harsh that Jake looked around at him with dismay. “It dishonors me and my an-tet. We’re bound to do as you ask, if we judge your Calla in the White and those you call Wolves as agents of the outer dark: Beam-breakers, if you ken. We may take no reward for our services, and you must not offer. If one of your own mates were to speak so—the one you call Tian or the one you call Overholster—”
(Eddie thought to correct the gunslinger’s pronunciation and then decided to keep his mouth shut—when Roland was angry, it was usually best to stay silent.)
“—that would be different. They know nothing but legends, mayhap. But you, sai, have at least one book which should have taught you better. I told you we deal in lead, and so we do. But that doesn’t make us hired guns.”
“All right, all right—”
“As for what you have,” Roland said, his voice rising and overriding Callahan’s, “you’d be rid of it, would you not? It terrifies you, does it not? Even if we decide to ride on past your town, you’d beg us to take it with us, would you not? Would you not?”
“Yes,” Callahan said miserably. “You speak true and I say thankee. But . . . it’s just that I heard a bit of your palaver . . . enough to know you want to go back . . . to pass over, as the Manni say . . . and not just to one place but two . . . or maybe more . . . and time . . . I heard you speak of aiming time like a gun . . . ”
Jake’s face filled with understanding and horrified wonder. “Which one is it?” he asked. “It can’t be the pink one from Mejis, because Roland went inside it, it never sent him todash. So which one?”
A tear spilled down Callahan’s right cheek, then another. He wiped them away absently. “I’ve never dared handle it, but I’ve seen it. Felt its power. Christ the Man Jesus help me, I have Black Thirteen under the floorboards of my church. And it’s come alive. Do you understand me?” He looked at them with his wet eyes. “It’s come alive.”
Callahan put his face in his hands, hiding it from them.
TEN
When the holy man with the scar on his forehead left to get his trailmates, the gunslinger stood watching him go without moving. Roland’s thumbs were hooked into the waistband of his old patched jeans, and he looked as if he could stand that way well into the next age. The moment Callahan was out of sight, however, he turned to his own mates and made an urgent, almost bearish, clutching gesture at the air: Come to me. As they did, Roland squatted on his hunkers. Eddie and Jake did the same (and to Susannah, hunkers were almost a way of life). The gunslinger spoke almost curtly.
“Time is short, so tell me, each of you, and don’t shilly-shally: honest or not?”
“Honest,” Susannah said at once, then gave another little wince and rubbed beneath her left breast.
“Honest,” said Jake.
“Onnes,” said Oy, although he had not been asked.
“Honest,” Eddie agreed, “but look.” He took an unburned twig from the edge of the campfire, brushed away a patch of pine-duff, and wrote in the black earth underneath:
“Live or Memorex?” Eddie said. Then, seeing Susannah’s confusion: “Is it a coincidence, or does it mean something?”
“Who knows?” Jake asked. They were all speaking in low tones, heads together over the writing in the dirt. “It’s like nineteen.”
“I think it’s only a coincidence,” Susannah said. “Surely not everything we encounter on our path is ka, is it? I mean, these don’t even sound the same.” And she pronounced them, Calla with the tongue up, making the broad-a sound, Callahan with the tongue down, making a much sharper a-sound. “Calla’s Spanish in our world . . . like many of the words you remember from Mejis, Roland. It means street or square, I think . . . don’t hold me to it, because high school Spanish is far behind me now. But if I’m right, using the word as a prefix for the name of a town—or a whole series of them, as seems to be the case in these parts—makes pretty good sense. Not perfect, but pretty good. Callahan, on the other hand . . . ” She shrugged. “What is it? Irish? English?”
“It’s sure not Spanish,” Jake said. “But the nineteen thing—”
“Piss on nineteen,” Roland said rudely. “This isn’t the time for number games. He’ll be back here with his friends in short order, and I would speak to you an-tet of another matter before he does.”
“Do you think he could possibly be right about Black Thirteen?” Jake asked.
“Yes,” Roland said. “Based just on what happened to you and Eddie last night, I think the answer is yes. Dangerous for us to have such a thing if he is right, but have it we must. I fear these Wolves out of Thunderclap will if we don’t. Never mind, that need not trouble us now.”
Yet Roland looked very troubled indeed. He turned his regard toward Jake.
“You started when you heard the big farmer’s name. So did you, Eddie, although you concealed it better.”
“Sorry,” Jake said. “I have forgotten the face of—”
“Not even a bit have you,” Roland said. “Unless I have, as well. Because I’ve heard the name myself, and recently. I just can’t remember where.” Then, reluctantly: “I’m getting old.”
“It was in the bookstore,” Jake said. He took his pack, fiddled nervously with the straps, undid them. He flipped the pack open as he spoke. It was as if he had to make sure Charlie the Choo-Choo and Riddle-De-Dum were still there, still real. “The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind. It’s so weird. Once it happened to me and once I watched it happen to me. That’d make a pretty good riddle all by itself.”
Roland made a rapid rotating gesture with his diminished right hand, telling him to go on and be quick.
“Mr. Tower introduced himself,” Jake said, “and then I did the same. Jake Chambers, I said. And he said—”
“ ‘Good handle, partner,’” Eddie broke in. “That’s what he said. Then he said Jake Chambers sounded like the name of the hero in a Western novel.”
“‘The guy who blows into Black Fork, Arizona, cleans up the town, then moves on,’” Jake quoted. “And then he said, ‘Something by Wayne D. Overholser, maybe.’ ” He looked at Susannah and repeated it. “Wayne D. Overholser. And if you tell me that’s a coincidence, Susannah . . . ” He broke into a sunny, sudden grin. “I’ll tell you to kiss my white-boy ass.”
Susannah laughed. “No need of that, sass-box. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence. And when we meet Callahan’s farmer friend, I intend to ask him what his middle name is. I set my warrant that it’ll not only begin with D, it’ll be something like Dean or Dane, just four letters—” Her hand went back to the place below her breast. “This gas! My! What I wouldn’t give for a roll of Tums or even a bottle of—” She broke off again. “Jake, what is it? What’s wrong?”
Jake was holding Charlie the Choo-Choo in his hands, and his face had gone dead white. His eyes were huge, shocked. Beside him, Oy whined uneasily. Roland leaned over to look, and his eyes also widened.
“Good gods,” he said.
Eddie and Susannah looked. The title was the same. The picture was the same: an anthropomorphic locomotive puffing up a hill, its cowcatcher wearing a grin, its headlight a cheerful eye. But the yellow letters across the bottom, Story and Pictures by Beryl Evans, were gone. There was no credit line there at all.
Jake turned the book and looked at the spine. It said Charlie the Choo-Choo and McCauley House, Publishers. Nothing else.
South of them now, the sound of voices. Callahan and his friends, approaching. Callahan from the Calla. Callahan of the Lot, he had also called himself.
“Title page, sugar,” Susannah said. “Look there, quick.”
Jake did. Once again there was only the title of the story and the publisher’s name, this time with a colophon.
“Look at the copyright page,” Eddie said.
Jake turned the page. Here, on the verso of the title page and beside the recto where the story began, was the copyright information. Except there was no information, not really.
Copyright 1936,
it said. Numbers which added up to nineteen.
The rest was blank.