Wolves of the Calla (13 page)

Because Cuthbert and Alain would have told him, that was why.

Are you sure?

Some feeling so strange as to be unidentifiable rose in the gunslinger’s bosom—was it indignation? horror? perhaps even a sense of betrayal?—as he realized that no, he
wasn’t
sure. All he knew was that the ball had taken him deep into itself, and he had been lucky to ever get out again.

There’s no ball here,
he thought, and again it was that other voice—the dry, implacable voice of his old limping tutor, whose grief for his only son had never really ended—that answered him, and the words were the same:

Are you sure?

Gunslinger, are you
sure?

It started with a low crackling sound. Roland’s first thought was the campfire: one of them had gotten some green fir boughs in there, the coals had finally reached them, and they were producing that sound as the needles smoldered. But—

The sound grew louder, became a kind of electric buzzing. Roland sat up and looked across the dying fire. His eyes widened and his heart began to speed up.

Susannah had turned from Eddie, had drawn away a little, too. Eddie had reached out and so had Jake. Their hands touched. And, as Roland looked at them, they commenced fading in and out of existence in a series of jerky pulses. Oy was doing the same thing. When they were gone, they were replaced by a dull gray glow that approximated the shapes and positions of their bodies, as if something was holding their places in reality. Each time they came back, there would be that crackling buzz. Roland could see their closed eyelids ripple as the balls rolled beneath.

Dreaming. But not
just
dreaming. This was todash, the passing between two worlds. Supposedly the Manni could do it. And supposedly some pieces of the Wizard’s Rainbow could
make
you do it, whether you wanted to or not. One piece of it in particular.

They could get caught between and fall,
Roland thought.
Vannay said that, too. He said that going todash was full of peril
.

What else had he said? Roland had no time to recall, for at that moment Susannah sat up, slipped the soft leather caps Roland had made her over the stumps of her legs, then hoisted herself into her
wheelchair. A moment later she was rolling toward the ancient trees on the north side of the road. It was directly away from the place where the watchers were camped; there was that much to be grateful for.

Roland stayed where he was for a moment, torn. But in the end, his course was clear enough. He couldn’t wake them up while they were in the todash state; to do so would be a horrible risk. All he could do was follow Susannah, as he had on other nights, and hope she didn’t get herself into trouble.

You might also do some thinking about what happens next
. That was Vannay’s dry, lecturely voice. Now that his old tutor was back, he apparently meant to stay for awhile.
Reason was never your strong point, but you must do it, nevertheless. You’ll want to wait until your visitors make themselves known, of course
—
until you can be sure of what they want
—
but eventually, Roland, you must act. Think first, however. Sooner would be better than later.

Yes, sooner was always better than later.

There was another loud, buzzing crackle. Eddie and Jake were back, Jake lying with his arm curled around Oy, and then they were gone again, nothing left where they had been but a faint ectoplasmic shimmer. Well, never mind. His job was to follow Susannah. As for Eddie and Jake, there would be water if God willed it.

Suppose you come back here and they’re gone? It happens, Vannay said so. What will you tell her if she wakes and finds them both gone, her husband and her adopted son?

It was nothing he could worry about now. Right now there was Susannah to worry about, Susannah to keep safe.

On the north side of the road, old trees with enormous trunks stood at considerable distances from each other. Their branches might entwine and create a solid canopy overhead, but at ground level there was plenty of room for Susannah’s wheelchair, and she moved along at a good pace, weaving between the vast ironwoods and pines, rolling downhill over a fragrant duff of mulch and needles.

Not Susannah. Not Detta or Odetta, either. This one calls herself Mia.

Roland didn’t care if she called herself Queen o’ Green Days, as long as she came back safe, and the other two were still there when she did.

He began to smell a brighter, fresher green: reeds and water-weeds. With it came the smell of mud, the thump of frogs, the sarcastic
hool! hool!
salute of an owl, the splash of water as something jumped. This was followed by a thin shriek as something died, maybe the jumper, maybe the jumped-upon. Underbrush began to spring up in the duff, first dotting it and then crowding it out. The tree-cover thinned. Mosquitoes and chiggers whined. Binnie-bugs stitched the air. The bog-smells grew stronger.

The wheels of the chair had passed over the duff without leaving any trace. As duff gave way to straggling low growth, Roland began to see broken twigs and torn-off leaves marking her passage. Then, as she reached the more or less level low ground, the wheels began to sink into the increasingly soft earth. Twenty paces farther on, he began to see liquid seeping into the tracks. She was too wise to get
stuck, though—too crafty. Twenty paces beyond the first signs of seepage, he came to the wheelchair itself, abandoned. Lying on the seat were her pants and shirt. She had gone on into the bog naked save for the leather caps that covered her stumps.

Down here there were ribbons of mist hanging over puddles of standing water. Grassy hummocks rose; on one, wired to a dead log that had been planted upright, was what Roland at first took for an ancient stuffy-guy. When he got closer, he saw it was a human skeleton. The skull’s forehead had been smashed inward, leaving a triangle of darkness between the staring sockets. Some sort of primitive war-club had made that wound, no doubt, and the corpse (or its lingering
spirit
) had been left to mark this as the edge of some tribe’s territory. They were probably long dead or moved on, but caution was ever a virtue. Roland drew his gun and continued after the woman, stepping from hummock to hummock, wincing at the occasional jab of pain in his right hip. It took all his concentration and agility to keep up with her. Partly this was because she hadn’t Roland’s interest in staying as dry as possible. She was as naked as a mermaid and moved like one, as comfortable in the muck and swamp-ooze as on dry land. She crawled over the larger hummocks, slid through the water between them, pausing every now and then to pick off a leech. In the darkness, the walking and sliding seemed to merge into a single slithering motion that was eely and disturbing.

She went on perhaps a quarter of a mile into the increasingly oozy bog with the gunslinger following patiently along behind her. He kept as quiet as possible,
although he doubted if there was any need; the part of her that saw and felt and thought was far from here.

At last she came to a halt, standing on her truncated legs and holding to tough tangles of brush on either side in order to keep her balance. She looked out over the black surface of a pond, head up, body still. The gunslinger couldn’t tell if the pond was big or small; its borders were lost in the mist. Yet there was light here, some sort of faint and unfocused radiance which seemed to lie just beneath the surface of the water itself, perhaps emanating from submerged and slowly rotting logs.

She stood there, surveying this muck-crusted woodland pond like a queen surveying a . . . a what? What did she see? A banquet hall? That was what he had come to believe. Almost to see. It was a whisper from her mind to his, and it dovetailed with what she said and did. The banqueting hall was her mind’s ingenious way of keeping Susannah apart from Mia as it had kept Odetta apart from Detta all those years. Mia might have any number of reasons for wanting to keep her existence a secret, but surely the greatest of these had to do with the life she carried inside her.

The chap, she called it.

Then, with a suddenness that still startled him (although he had seen this before, as well), she began to hunt, slipping in eerie splashless silence first along the edge of the pond and then a little way out into it. Roland watched her with an expression that contained both horror and lust as she knitted and wove her way in and out of the reeds, between and over the tussocks. Now, instead of
picking the leeches off her skin and throwing them away, she tossed them into her mouth like pieces of candy. The muscles in her thighs rippled. Her brown skin gleamed like wet silk. When she turned (Roland had by this time stepped behind a tree and become one of the shadows), he could clearly see the way her breasts had ripened.

The problem, of course, extended beyond “the chap.” There was Eddie to consider, as well.
What the hell’s wrong with you, Roland?
Roland could hear him saying.
That might be
our
kid. I mean, you can’t know for sure that it isn’t. Yeah, yeah, I know something had her while we were yanking Jake through, but that doesn’t necessarily mean
. . .

On and on and on, blah-blah-blah as Eddie himself might say, and why? Because he loved her and would want the child of their union. And because arguing came as naturally to Eddie Dean as breathing. Cuthbert had been the same.

In the reeds, the naked woman’s hand pistoned forward and seized a good-sized frog. She squeezed and the frog popped, squirting guts and a shiny load of eggs between her fingers. Its head burst. She lifted it to her mouth and ate it greedily down while its greenish-white rear legs still twitched, licking the blood and shiny ropes of tissue from her knuckles. Then she mimed throwing something down and cried out
“How you like that, you stinkin Blue Lady?”
in a low, guttural voice that made Roland shiver. It was Detta Walker’s voice. Detta at her meanest and craziest.

With hardly a pause she moved on again, questing. Next it was a small fish . . . then another frog . . . and then a real prize: a water-rat that squeaked and
writhed and tried to bite. She crushed the life out of it and stuffed it into her mouth, paws and all. A moment later she bent her head down and regurgitated the waste—a twisted mass of fur and splintered bones.

Show him this, then
—
always assuming that he and Jake get back from whatever adventure they’re on, that is. And say, “I know that women are supposed to have strange cravings when they carry a child, Eddie, but doesn’t this seem a little
too
strange? Look at her, questing through the reeds and ooze like some sort of human alligator. Look at her and tell me she’s doing that in order to feed your child.
Any
human child.”

Still he would argue. Roland knew it. What he
didn’t
know was what Susannah herself might do when Roland told her she was growing something that craved raw meat in the middle of the night. And as if this business wasn’t worrisome enough, now there was todash. And strangers who had come looking for them. Yet the strangers were the least of his problems. In fact, he found their presence almost comforting. He didn’t know what they wanted, and yet he
did
know. He had met them before, many times. At bottom, they always wanted the same thing.

Now the woman who called herself Mia began to talk as she hunted. Roland was familiar with this part of her ritual as well, but it chilled him nevertheless. He was looking right at her and it was still hard to believe all those different voices could be coming from the same throat. She asked herself
how she was. She told herself she was doing fine, thank you so
vereh
much. She spoke of someone named Bill, or perhaps it was Bull. She asked after someone’s mother. She asked someone about a place called Morehouse, and then in a deep, gravelly voice—a man’s voice, beyond doubt—she told herself that she didn’t go to Morehouse or
no
house. She laughed raucously at this, so it must have been some sort of joke. She introduced herself several times (as she had on other nights) as Mia, a name Roland knew well from his early life in Gilead. It was almost a holy name. Twice she curtsied, lifting invisible skirts in a way that tugged at the gunslinger’s heart—he had first seen that sort of curtsy in Mejis, when he and his friends Alain and Cuthbert had been sent there by their fathers.

She worked her way back to the edge of the

(hall)

pond, glistening and wet. She stayed there without moving for five minutes, then ten. The owl uttered its derisive salute again—
hool!
—and as if in response, the moon came out of the clouds for a brief look around. When it did, some small animal’s bit of shady concealment disappeared. It tried to dart past the woman. She snared it faultlessly and plunged her face into its writhing belly. There was a wet crunching noise, followed by several smacking bites. She held the remains up in the moonlight, her dark hands and wrists darker with its blood. Then she tore it in half and bolted down the remains. She gave a resounding belch and rolled herself back into the water. This time she made a great splash, and Roland knew
tonight’s banqueting was done. She had even eaten some of the binnie-bugs, snatching them effortlessly out of the air. He could only hope nothing she’d taken in would sicken her. So far, nothing had.

While she made her rough toilet, washing off the mud and blood, Roland retreated back the way he’d come, ignoring the more frequent pains in his hip and moving with all his guile. He had watched her go through this three times before, and once had been enough to see how gruesomely sharp her senses were while in this state.

He paused at her wheelchair, looking around to make sure he’d left no trace of himself. He saw a bootprint, smoothed it away, then tossed a few leaves over it for good measure. Not too many; too many might be worse than none at all. With that done, he headed back toward the road and their camp, not hurrying anymore. She would pause for a little housekeeping of her own before going on. What would Mia see as she was cleaning Susannah’s wheelchair, he wondered? Some sort of small, motorized cart? It didn’t matter. What did was how clever she was. If he hadn’t awakened with a need to make water just as she left on one of her earlier expeditions, he quite likely still wouldn’t know about her hunting trips, and he was supposed to be clever about such things.