Wolves of the Calla (38 page)

No,
he thinks, walking under a sign reading
TO STREET.
Not dead, that’s wrong.
Un
dead.

“Man,” Eddie said. “You been to the wars, haven’t you? Greek, Roman, and Vietnam.”

When the Old Fella began, Eddie had been hoping he’d gallop through his story so they could go into the church and look at whatever was stashed there. He hadn’t expected to be touched, let alone shaken, but he had been. Callahan knew stuff Eddie thought no one else could possibly know: the sadness of Dixie cups rolling across the pavement, the rusty hopelessness of that sign on the gas pumps, the look of the human eye in the hour before dawn.

Most of all about how sometimes you had to have it.

“The wars? I don’t know,” Callahan said. Then he sighed and nodded. “Yes, I suppose so. I spent that first day in movie theaters and that first night in Washington Square Park. I saw that the other homeless people covered themselves up with newspapers, so that’s what I did. And here’s an example of how
life—the quality of life and the texture of life—seemed to have changed for me, beginning on the day of Danny Glick’s burial. You won’t understand right away, but bear with me.” He looked at Eddie and smiled. “And don’t worry, son, I’m not going to talk the day away. Or even the morning.”

“You go on and tell it any old way it does ya fine,” Eddie said.

Callahan burst out laughing. “Say thankya! Aye, say thankya big! What I was going to tell you is that I’d covered my top half with the
Daily News
and the headline said
HITLER BROTHERS STRIKE IN QUEENS.
”

“Oh my God, the Hitler Brothers,” Eddie said. “I remember them. Couple of morons. They beat up . . . what? Jews? Blacks?”

“Both,” Callahan said. “And carved swastikas on their foreheads. They didn’t have a chance to finish mine. Which is good, because what they had in mind after the cutting was a lot more than a simple beating. And that was years later, when I came back to New York.”

“Swastika,” Roland said. “The sigul on the plane we found near River Crossing? The one with David Quick inside it?”

“Uh-huh,” Eddie said, and drew one in the grass with the toe of his boot. The grass sprang up almost immediately, but not before Roland saw that yes, the mark on Callahan’s forehead could have been meant to be one of those. If it had been finished.

“On that day in late October of 1975,” Callahan said, “the Hitler Brothers were just a headline I slept under. I spent most of that second day in New York walking around and fighting the urge to score a bottle. There was part of me that wanted to fight
instead of drink. To try and atone. At the same time, I could feel Barlow’s blood working into me, getting in deeper and deeper. The world smelled different, and not better. Things
looked
different, and not better. And the taste of him came creeping back into my mouth, a taste like dead fish or rotten wine.

“I had no hope of salvation. Never think it. But atonement isn’t about salvation, anyway. Not about heaven. It’s about clearing your conscience here on earth. And you can’t do it drunk. I didn’t think of myself as an alcoholic, not even then, but I
did
wonder if he’d turned me into a vampire. If the sun would start to burn my skin, and I’d start looking at ladies’ necks.” He shrugged, laughed. “Or maybe gentlemen’s. You know what they say about the priesthood; we’re just a bunch of closet queers running around and shaking the cross in people’s faces.”

“But you weren’t a vampire,” Eddie said.

“Not even a Type Three. Nothing but unclean. On the outside of everything. Cast away. Always smelling his stink and always seeing the world the way things like him must see it, in shades of gray and red. Red was the only bright color I was allowed to see for years. Everything else was just a whisper.

“I guess I was looking for a Manpower office—you know, the day-labor company? I was still pretty rugged in those days, and of course I was a lot younger, as well.

“I didn’t find Manpower. What I
did
find was a place called Home. This was on First Avenue and Forty-seventh Street, not far from the U.N.”

Roland, Eddie, and Susannah exchanged a look.
Whatever Home was, it had existed only two blocks from the vacant lot.
Only it wouldn’t have been vacant back then,
Eddie thought.
Not back in 1975. In ’75 it would still have been Tom and Jerry’s Artistic Deli, Party Platters Our Specialty
. He suddenly wished Jake were here. Eddie thought that by now the kid would have been jumping up and down with excitement.

“What kind of shop was Home?” Roland asked.

“Not a shop at all. A shelter. A
wet
shelter. I can’t say for sure that it was the only one in Manhattan, but I bet it was one of the very few. I didn’t know much about shelters then—just a little bit from my first parish—but as time went by, I learned a great deal. I saw the system from both sides. There were times when I was the guy who ladled out the soup at six
P.M.
and passed out the blankets at nine; at other times I was the guy who drank the soup and slept under the blankets. After a head-check for lice, of course.

“There are shelters that won’t let you in if they smell booze on your breath. And there are ones where they’ll let you in if you claim you’re at least two hours downstream from your last drink. There are places—a few—that’ll let you in pissyassed drunk, as long as they can search you at the door and get rid of all your hooch. Once that’s taken care of, they put you in a special locked room with the rest of the low-bottom guys. You can’t slip out to get another drink if you change your mind, and you can’t scare the folks who are less soaked than you are if you get the dt’s and start seeing bugs come out of the walls. No women allowed in the lockup; they’re too apt to get raped. It’s just one of the reasons more homeless women die in the streets than homeless men. That’s what Lupe used to say.”

“Lupe?” Eddie asked.

“I’ll get to him, but for now, suffice it to say that he was the architect of Home’s alcohol policy. At Home, they kept the
booze
in lockup, not the drunks. You could get a shot if you needed one, and if you promised to be quiet. Plus a sedative chaser. This isn’t recommended medical procedure—I’m not even sure it was legal, since neither Lupe nor Rowan Magruder were doctors—but it seemed to work. I came in sober on a busy night, and Lupe put me to work. I worked free for the first couple of days, and then Rowan called me into his office, which was roughly the size of a broom closet. He asked me if I was an alcoholic. I said no. He asked me if I was wanted by the police. I said no. He asked if I was on the run from anything. I said yes, from myself. He asked me if I wanted to work, and I started to cry. He took that as a yes.

“I spent the next nine months—until June of 1976—working at Home. I made the beds, I cooked in the kitchen, I went on fund-raising calls with Lupe or sometimes Rowan, I took drunks to AA meetings in the Home van, I gave shots of booze to guys that were shaking too badly to hold the glasses themselves. I took over the books because I was better at it than Magruder or Lupe or any of the other guys who worked there. 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.

“Sometime during that winter, I realized that I’d started to change. It was as if I’d developed a kind
of sixth sense. Sometimes I heard chiming bells. Horrible, yet at the same time sweet. Sometimes, when I was on the street, things would start to look dark even if the sun was shining. I can remember looking down to see if my shadow was still there. I’d be positive it wouldn’t be, but it always was.”

Roland’s ka-tet exchanged a glance.

“Sometimes there was an olfactory element to these fugues. It was a bitter smell, like strong onions all mixed with hot metal. I began to suspect that I had developed a form of epilepsy.”

“Did you see a doctor?” Susannah asked.

“I did not. I was afraid of what else he might find. A brain tumor seemed most likely. What I did was keep my head down and keep working. And then one night I went to a movie in Times Square. It was a revival of two Clint Eastwood Westerns. What they used to call Spaghetti Westerns?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said.

“I started hearing the bells. The chimes. And smelling that smell, stronger than ever. All this was coming from in front of me, and to the left. I looked there and saw two men, one rather elderly, the other younger. They were easy enough to pick out, because the place was three-quarters empty. The younger man leaned close to the older man. The older man never took his eyes off the screen, but he put his arm around the younger man’s shoulders. If I’d seen that on any other night, I would have been pretty positive what was going on, but not that night. I watched. And I started to see a kind of dark blue light, first just around the younger man, then around both of them. It was like no other light I’d ever seen. It was like the darkness I felt sometimes
on the street, when the chimes started to play in my head. Like the smell. You knew those things weren’t there, and yet they were. And I understood. I didn’t accept it—that came later—but I understood. The younger man was a vampire.”

He stopped, thinking about how to tell his tale. How to lay it out.

“I believe there are at least three types of vampires at work in our world. I call them Types One, Two, and Three. Type Ones are rare. Barlow was a Type One. They live very long lives, and may spend extended periods—fifty years, a hundred, maybe two hundred—in deep hibernation. When they’re active, they’re capable of making new vampires, what we call the undead. These undead are Type Twos. They are also capable of making new vampires, but they aren’t cunning.” He looked at Eddie and Susannah. “Have you seen
Night of the Living Dead
?”

Susannah shook her head. Eddie nodded.

“The undead in that movie were zombies, utterly brain-dead. Type Two vampires are more intelligent than that, but not much. They can’t go out during the daylight hours. If they try, they are blinded, badly burned, or killed. Although I can’t say for sure, I believe their life-spans are usually short. Not because the change from living and human to undead and vampire shortens life, but because the existences of Type Two vampires are extremely perilous.

“In most cases—this is what I believe, not what I know—Type Two vampires create other Type Two vampires, in a relatively small area. By this phase of the disease—and it
is
a disease—the Type One vampire,
the king vampire, has usually moved on. In ’Salem’s Lot, they actually killed the son of a bitch, one of what might have been only a dozen in the entire world.

“In other cases, Type Twos create Type Threes. Type Threes are like mosquitoes. They can’t create more vampires, but they can feed. And feed. And feed.”

“Do they catch AIDS?” Eddie asked. “I mean, you know what that is, right?”

“I know, although I never heard the term until the spring of 1983, when I was working at the Lighthouse Shelter in Detroit and my time in America had grown short. Of course we’d known for almost ten years that there was
something
. Some of the literature called it GRID—Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. In 1982 there started to be newspaper articles about a new disease called ‘Gay Cancer,’ and speculations that it might be catching. On the street some of the men called it Fucksore Disease, after the blemishes it left. I don’t believe that vampires die of it, or even get sick from it. But they can have it. And they can pass it on. Oh, yes. And I have
reason
to think that.” Callahan’s lips quivered, then firmed.

“When this vampire-demon made you drink his blood, he gave you the ability to see these things,” Roland said.

“Yes.”

“All of them, or just the Threes? The little ones?”

“The little ones,” Callahan mused, then voiced a brief and humorless laugh. “Yes. I like that. In any case, Threes are all I’ve ever seen, at least since leaving Jerusalem’s Lot. But of course Type Ones like Barlow are very rare, and Type Twos don’t last long.
Their very hunger undoes them. They’re always ravenous. Type Threes, however, can go out in daylight. And they take their principal sustenance from food, just as we do.”

“What did you do that night?” Susannah asked. “In the theater?”

“Nothing,” Callahan said. “My whole time in New York—my
first
time in New York—I did nothing until April. I wasn’t sure, you see. I mean, my
heart
was sure, but my head refused to go along. And all the time, there was interference from the most simple thing of all: I was a dry alcoholic. An alcoholic is also a vampire, and that part of me was getting thirstier and thirstier, while the rest of me was trying to deny my essential nature. So I told myself I’d seen a couple of homosexuals canoodling in the movies, nothing more than that. As for the rest of it—the chimes, the smell, the dark-blue light around the young one—I convinced myself it was epilepsy, or a holdover from what Barlow had done to me, or both. And of course about Barlow I was right. His blood was awake inside me. It
saw
.”

“It was more than that,” Roland said.

Callahan turned to him.

“You went todash, Pere. Something was calling you from this world. The thing in your church, I suspect, although it would not have been in your church when you first knew of it.”

“No,” Callahan said. He was regarding Roland with wary respect. “It was not. How do you know? Tell me, I beg.”

Roland did not. “Go on,” he said. “What happened to you next?”

“Lupe happened next,” Callahan said.

His last name was Delgado.

Roland registered only a moment of surprise at this—a widening of the eyes—but Eddie and Susannah knew the gunslinger well enough to understand that even this was extraordinary. At the same time they had become almost used to these coincidences that could not possibly be coincidences, to the feeling that each one was the click of some great turning cog.