Ah, but the boy was agunslinger, and that made a difference. He was more than ka's child; he was Roland of Gilead's child as well, his adopted son.
Don't you see how pale he is? He's as scared as you are, for Christ's sake! Now get hold of yourself, man!
Perhaps it was perverse, but observing Jake's extreme pallor steadied him. When an old bit of nonsense song occurred to him and he began to sing under his breath, he steadied yet more.
"Round and round the mulberry bush," he sang in a whisper, "the monkey chased the weasel...the monkey thought 'twas all in fun..."
Jake eased open the closet. There was a room safe inside. He tried 1919 and nothing happened. He paused to let the safe mechanism reset itself, wiped sweat from his forehead with both hands (they were shaking), and tried again. This time he punched 1999, and the safe swung open.
Black Thirteen's droning song and the contrapuntal jangle of the todash chimes both increased. The sounds were like chilly fingers prying around in their heads.
And it can send you places,Callahan thought.All you have to do is let down your guard a little bit...open the bag...open the box...and then...oh, the places you'll go! Pop goes the weasel!
True though he knew this to be, part of himwanted to open the box.Lusted to. Nor was he the only one; as he watched, Jake knelt before the safe like a worshipper at an altar. Callahan reached to stop him from lifting the bag out with an arm that seemed incredibly heavy.
It doesn't matter if you do or don't,a voice whispered in his mind. It was sleep-inducing, that voice, and incredibly persuasive. Nonetheless, Callahan kept reaching. He grasped Jake's collar with fingers from which all feeling seemed to have departed.
"No," he said. "Don't." His voice sounded draggy, dispirited, depressed. When he pulled Jake to one side, the boy seemed to go as if in slow motion, or underwater. The room now seemed lit by the sick yellow light that sometimes falls over a landscape before a ruinous storm. As Callahan fell onto his own knees before the open safe (he seemed to descend through the air for at least a full minute before touching down), he heard the voice of Black Thirteen, louder than ever. It was telling him to kill the boy, to open the boy's throat and give the ball a refreshing drink of his warm life's blood. Then Callahan himself would be allowed to leap from the room's window.
All the way down to Forty-sixth Street you will praise me,Black Thirteen assured him in a voice both sane and lucid.
"Do it," Jake sighed. "Oh yes, do it, who gives a damn."
"Ake!" Oy barked from the doorway."Ake!" They both ignored him.
As Callahan reached for the bag, he found himself remembering his final encounter with Barlow, the king vampire - the Type One, in Callahan's own parlance - who had come to the little town of 'Salem's Lot. Found himself remembering how he'd confronted Barlow in Mark Petrie's house, with Mark's parents lying lifeless on the floor at the vampire's feet, their skulls crushed and their oh-so-rational brains turned to jelly.
While you fall, I'll let you whisper the name ofmyking, Black Thirteen whispered.The Crimson King.
As Callahan watched his hands grasp the bag - whatever had been there before, NOTHING BUT STRIKES AT MID-WORLD LANES was now printed on the side - he thought of how his crucifix had first glared with some otherworldly light, driving Barlow back...and then had begun to darken again.
"Open it!" Jake said eagerly. "Open it, I want to see it!"
Oy was barking steadily now. Down the hall someone yelled "Shut that dog up!" and was likewise ignored.
Callahan slipped the ghostwood box from the bag - the box that had spent such a blessedly quiet time hidden beneath the pulpit of his church in Calla Bryn Sturgis. Now he would open it. Now he would observe Black Thirteen in all its repellent glory.
And then die. Gratefully.
Ten
Sad to see a man's faith fail,the vampire Kurt Barlow had said, and then he'd plucked Don Callahan's dark and useless cross from his hand. Why had he been able to do that? Because - behold the paradox, consider the riddle - Father Callahanhad failed to throw the cross away himself. Because he had failed to accept that the cross was nothing but one symbol of a far greater power, one that ran like a river beneath the universe, perhaps beneath a thousand universes -
I need no symbol,Callahan thought; and then:Is that why God let me live? Was He giving me a second chance to learn that?
It was possible, he thought as his hands settled on the lid of the box. Second chances were one of God's specialties.
"Folks, you got to shut your dogup. " The querulous voice of a hotel maid, but very distant. Then it said: "Madre de Dios,why's it sodark in here? What's that...what's that...n...n..."