"Now I have five of my own," she said. "Aaron's safe, and say thankee, but Heddon and Hedda's ten, a prime age. Lyman and Lia's only five, but five's old enough. Five's..."
She covered her face with her hands and said no more.
FOUR
Once the growth-spurt was finished, Overholser said, some of them could be put to work. Others - the majority - weren't able to manage even such rudimentary tasks as pulling stumps or digging postholes. You saw these sitting on the steps of look's General Store or sometimes walking across the countryside in gangling groups, young men and women of enormous height, weight, and stupidity, sometimes grinning at each other and babbling, sometimes only goggling up at the sky.
They didn't mate, there was that to be grateful for. While not all of them grew to prodigious size and their mental skills and physical abilities might vary somewhat, there seemed to be one universal: they came back sexually dead. "Beggin your pardon for the crudity," Overholser said, "but I don't b'lieve my brother Welland had so much as a piss-hardon after they brought him back. Zalia? Have you ever seen your brother with a... you know..."
Zalia shook her head.
"How old were you when they came, sai Overholser?" Roland asked.
"First time, ye mean. Welland and I were nine." Overholser now spoke rapidly. It gave what he said the air of a rehearsed speech, but Eddie didn't think that was it. Overholser was a force in Calla Bryn Sturgis; he was, God save us and stone the crows, the big farmer. It was hard for him to go back in his mind to a time when he'd been a child, small and powerless and terrified. "Our Ma and Pa tried to hide us away in the cellar. So I've been told, anyway. I remember none of it, m'self, to be sure. Taught myself not to, I's'pose. Yar, quite likely. Some remember better'n others, Roland, but all the tales come to the same: one is took, one is left behind. The one took comes back roont, maybe able to work a little but dead in the b'low the waist. Then... when they get in their thirties..."
When they reached their thirties, the roont twins grew abruptly, shockingly old. Their hair turned white and often fell completely out. Their eyes dimmed. Muscles that had been prodigious (as Tia Jaffords's and Zalman Hoonik's were now) went slack and wasted away. Sometimes they died peacefully, in their sleep. More often, their endings weren't peaceful at all. The sores came, sometimes out on the skin but more often in the stomach or the head. In the brain. All died long before their natural span would have been up, had it not been for the Wolves, and many died as they had grown from the size of normal children to that of giants: screaming in pain. Eddie wondered how many of these idiots, dying of what sounded to him like terminal cancer, were simply smothered or perhaps fed some strong sedative that would take them far beyond pain, far beyond sleep. It wasn't the sort of question you asked, but he guessed the answer would have been many. Roland sometimes used the word delah , always spoken with a light toss of the hand toward the horizon.
Many.
The visitors from the Calla, their tongues and memories untied by distress, might have gone on for some time, piling one sorry anecdote on another, but Roland didn't allow them to. "Now speak of the Wolves, I beg. How many come to you?"
"Forty," Tian Jaffords said.
"Spread across the whole Calla?" Slightman the Elder asked. "Nay, more than forty." And to Tian, slightly apologetic: "You were no more'n nine y'self last time they came, Tian. I were in my young twenties. Forty in town, maybe, but more came to the outlying farms and ranches. I'd say sixty in all, Roland-sai, maybe eighty."
Roland looked at Overholser, eyebrows raised.
"It's been twenty-three years, ye mind," Overholser said, "but I'd call sixty about right."
"You call them Wolves, but what are they really? Are they men? Or something else?"
Overholser, Slightman, Tian, Zalia: for a moment Eddie could feel them sharing khef, could almost hear them. It made him feel lonely and left-out, the way you did when you saw a couple kissing on a streetcorner, wrapped in each other's arms or looking into each other's eyes, totally lost in each other's regard. Well, he didn't have to feel that way anymore, did he? He had his own ka-tet, his own khef. Not to mention his own woman.
Meanwhile, Roland was making the impatient little finger-twirling gesture with which Eddie had become so familiar. Come on, folks , it said, day's wasting .
"No telling for sure what they are," Overholser said. "They look like men, but they wear masks."
"Wolf-masks," Susannah said.
"Aye, lady, wolf-masks, gray as their horses."
"Do you say all come on gray horses?" Roland asked.