Wolves of the Calla (8 page)

And on the day Jake brought the muffin-balls, it did.

They had stopped for lunch (more uninteresting vegetarian burritos, the deermeat now gone and the Keebler cookies little more than a sweet memory) when Eddie noticed that Jake was gone and asked the gunslinger if he knew where the kid had gotten off to.

“Peeled off about half a wheel back,” Roland said, and pointed along the road with the two remaining fingers of his right hand. “He’s all right. If he wasn’t, we’d all feel it.” Roland looked at his burrito, then took an unenthusiastic bite.

Eddie opened his mouth to say something else, but Susannah got there first. “Here he is now. Hi there, sugar, what you got?”

Jake’s arms were full of round things the size of tennis balls. Only these balls would never bounce true; they had little horns sticking up from them. When the kid got closer, Eddie could smell them, and the smell was wonderful—like fresh-baked bread.

“I think these might be good to eat,” Jake said. “They smell like the fresh sourdough bread my mother and Mrs. Shaw—the housekeeper—got at
Zabar’s.” He looked at Susannah and Eddie, smiling a little. “Do you guys know Zabar’s?”

“
I
sure do,” Susannah said. “Best of everything, mmm-
hmmm
. And they
do
smell fine. You didn’t eat any yet, did you?”

“No way.” He looked questioningly at Roland.

The gunslinger ended the suspense by taking one, plucking off the horns, and biting into what was left. “Muffin-balls,” he said. “I haven’t seen any in gods know how long. They’re wonderful.” His blue eyes were gleaming. “Don’t want to eat the horns; they’re not poison but they’re sour. We can fry them, if there’s a little deerfat left. That way they taste almost like meat.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Eddie said. “Knock yourself out. As for me, I think I’ll skip the mushroom muff-divers, or whatever they are.”

“They’re not mushrooms at all,” Roland said. “More like a kind of ground berry.”

Susannah took one, nibbled, then helped herself to a bigger bite. “You don’t want to skip these, sweetheart,” she said. “My Daddy’s friend, Pop Mose, would have said ‘These are
prime.
’ ” She took another of the muffin-balls from Jake and ran a thumb over its silky surface.

“Maybe,” he said, “but there was this book I read for a report back in high school—I think it was called
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
—where this nutty chick poisoned her whole family with things like that.” He bent toward Jake, raising his eyebrows and stretching the corners of his mouth in what he hoped was a creepy smile. “Poisoned her whole family and they died in
AG-o-ny
!”

Eddie fell off the log on which he had been sitting
and began to roll around on the needles and fallen leaves, making horrible faces and choking sounds. Oy ran around him, yipping Eddie’s name in a series of high-pitched barks.

“Quit it,” Roland said. “Where did you find these, Jake?”

“Back there,” he said. “In a clearing I spotted from the path. It’s
full
of these things. Also, if you guys are hungry for meat . . . I know I am . . . there’s all kinds of sign. A lot of the scat’s fresh.” His eyes searched Roland’s face. “Very . . . fresh . . . scat.” He spoke slowly, as if to someone who wasn’t fluent in the language.

A little smile played at the corners of Roland’s mouth. “Speak quiet but speak plain,” he said. “What worries you, Jake?”

When Jake replied, his lips barely made the shapes of the words. “Men watching me while I picked the muffin-balls.” He paused, then added: “They’re watching us now.”

Susannah took one of the muffin-balls, admired it, then dipped her face as if to smell it like a flower. “Back the way we came? To the right of the road?”

“Yes,” Jake said.

Eddie raised a curled fist to his mouth as if to stifle a cough, and said: “How many?”

“I think four.”

“Five,” Roland said. “Possibly as many as six. One’s a woman. Another a boy not much older than Jake.”

Jake looked at him, startled. Eddie said, “How long have they been there?”

“Since yesterday,” Roland said. “Cut in behind us from almost dead east.”

“And you didn’t tell us?” Susannah asked. She
spoke rather sternly, not bothering to cover her mouth and obscure the shapes of the words.

Roland looked at her with the barest twinkle in his eye. “I was curious as to which of you would smell them out first. Actually, I had my money on you, Susannah.”

She gave him a cool look and said nothing. Eddie thought there was more than a little Detta Walker in that look, and was glad not to be on the receiving end.

“What do we do about them?” Jake asked.

“For now, nothing,” the gunslinger said.

Jake clearly didn’t like this. “What if they’re like Tick-Tock’s ka-tet? Gasher and Hoots and those guys?”

“They’re not.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they would have set on us already and they’d be fly-food.”

There seemed no good reply to that, and they took to the road again. It wound through deep shadows, finding its way among trees that were centuries old. Before they had been walking twenty minutes, Eddie heard the sound of their pursuers (or shadowers): snapping twigs, rustling underbrush, once even a low voice. Slewfeet, in Roland’s terminology. Eddie was disgusted with himself for remaining unaware of them for so long. He also wondered what yon cullies did for a living. If it was tracking and trapping, they weren’t very good at it.

Eddie Dean had become a part of Mid-World in many ways, some so subtle he wasn’t consciously aware of them, but he still thought of distances in miles instead of wheels. He guessed they’d come
about fifteen from the spot where Jake rejoined them with his muffin-balls and his news when Roland called it a day. They stopped in the middle of the road, as they always did since entering the forest; that way the embers of their campfire stood little chance of setting the woods on fire.

Eddie and Susannah gathered a nice selection of fallen branches while Roland and Jake made a little camp and set about cutting up Jake’s trove of muffin-balls. Susannah rolled her wheelchair effortlessly over the duff under the ancient trees, piling her selections in her lap. Eddie walked nearby, humming under his breath.

“Lookit over to your left, sugar,” Susannah said.

He did, and saw a distant orange blink. A fire.

“Not very good, are they?” he asked.

“No. Truth is, I feel a little sorry for em.”

“Any idea what they’re up to?”

“Unh-unh, but I think Roland’s right—they’ll tell us when they’re ready. Either that or decide we’re not what they want and just sort of fade away. Come on, let’s go back.”

“Just a second.” He picked up one more branch, hesitated, then took yet another. Then it was right. “Okay,” he said.

As they headed back, he counted the sticks he’d picked up, then the ones in Susannah’s lap. The total came to nineteen in each case.

“Suze,” he said, and when she glanced over at him: “Time’s started up again.”

She didn’t ask him what he meant, only nodded.

Eddie’s resolution about not eating the muffin-balls didn’t last long; they just smelled too damned good sizzling in the lump of deerfat Roland (thrifty, murderous soul that he was) had saved away in his scuffed old purse. Eddie took his share on one of the ancient plates they’d found in Shardik’s woods and gobbled them.

“These are as good as lobster,” he said, then remembered the monsters on the beach that had eaten Roland’s fingers. “As good as Nathan’s hotdogs is what I meant to say. And I’m sorry for teasing you, Jake.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jake said, smiling. “You never tease hard.”

“One thing you should be aware of,” Roland said. He was smiling—he smiled more these days, quite a lot more—but his eyes were serious. “All of you. Muffin-balls sometimes bring very lively dreams.”

“You mean they make you stoned?” Jake asked, rather uneasily. He was thinking of his father. Elmer Chambers had enjoyed many of the weirder things in life.

“Stoned? I’m not sure I—”

“Buzzed. High. Seeing things. Like when you took the mescaline and went into the stone circle where that thing almost . . . you know, almost hurt me.”

Roland paused for a moment, remembering. There had been a kind of succubus imprisoned in that ring of stones. Left to its own devices, she undoubtedly would have initiated Jake Chambers sexually, then fucked him to death. As matters turned out, Roland had made it speak. To punish
him, it had sent him a vision of Susan Delgado.

“Roland?” Jake was looking at him anxiously.

“Don’t concern yourself, Jake. There are mushrooms that do what you’re thinking of—change consciousness, heighten it—but not muffin-balls. These are berries, just good to eat. If your dreams are particularly vivid, just remind yourself you
are
dreaming.”

Eddie thought this a very odd little speech. For one thing, it wasn’t like Roland to be so tenderly solicitous of their mental health. Not like him to waste words, either.

Things have started again and he knows it, too,
Eddie thought.
There was a little time-out there, but now the clock’s running again. Game on, as they say.

“We going to set a watch, Roland?” Eddie asked.

“Not by my warrant,” the gunslinger said comfortably, and began rolling himself a smoke.

“You really don’t think they’re dangerous, do you?” Susannah said, and raised her eyes to the woods, where the individual trees were now losing themselves in the general gloom of evening. The little spark of campfire they’d noticed earlier was now gone, but the people following them were still there. Susannah felt them. When she looked down at Oy and saw him gazing in the same direction, she wasn’t surprised.

“I think that may be their problem,” Roland said.

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?” Eddie asked, but Roland would say no more. He simply lay in the road with a rolled-up piece of deerskin beneath his neck, looking up at the dark sky and smoking.

Later, Roland’s ka-tet slept. They posted no watch and were undisturbed.

The dreams, when they came, were not dreams at all. They all knew this except perhaps for Susannah, who in a very real sense was not there at all that night.

My God, I’m back in New York,
Eddie thought. And, on the heels of this: Really
back in New York. This is really happening
.

It was. He was in New York. On Second Avenue.

That was when Jake and Oy came around the corner from Fifty-fourth Street. “Hey, Eddie,” Jake said, grinning. “Welcome home.”

Game on,
Eddie thought.
Game on.

Jake fell asleep looking into pure darkness—no stars in that cloudy night sky, no moon. As he drifted off, he had a sensation of falling that he recognized with dismay: in his previous life as a so-called normal child he’d often had dreams of falling, especially around exam time, but these had ceased since his violent rebirth into Mid-World.

Then the falling feeling was gone. He heard a brief chiming melody that was somehow
too
beautiful: three notes and you wanted it to stop, a dozen and you thought it would kill you if it didn’t. Each chime seemed to make his bones vibrate.
Sounds Hawaiian, doesn’t it?
he thought, for although the chiming melody was nothing like the sinister warble of the thinny, somehow it was.

It was.

Then, just when he truly believed he could bear it no longer, the terrible, gorgeous tune stopped. The darkness behind his closed eyes suddenly lit up a brilliant dark red.

He opened them cautiously on strong sunlight.

And gaped.

At New York.

Taxis bustled past, gleaming bright yellow in the sunshine. A young black man wearing Walkman
earphones strolled by Jake, bopping his sandaled feet a little bit to the music and going “Cha-da-ba, cha-da-
bow
!” under his breath. A jackhammer battered Jake’s eardrums. Chunks of cement dropped into a dumptruck with a crash that echoed from one cliff-face of buildings to another. The world was a-din with racket. He had gotten used to the deep silences of Mid-World without even realizing it. No, more. Had come to love them. Still, this noise and bustle had its attractions, and Jake couldn’t deny it. Back in the New York groove. He felt a little grin stretch his lips.

“Ake! Ake!” cried a low, rather distressed voice.

Jake looked down and saw Oy sitting on the sidewalk with his tail curled neatly around him. The billy-bumbler wasn’t wearing little red booties and Jake wasn’t wearing the red Oxfords (thank God), but this was still very like their visit to Roland’s Gilead, which they had reached by traveling in the pink Wizard’s Glass. The glass ball that had caused so much trouble and woe.

No glass this time . . . he’d just gone to sleep. But this was no dream. It was more intense than any dream he’d ever had, and more textured. Also . . .

Also, people kept detouring around him and Oy as they stood to the left of a midtown saloon called Kansas City Blues. While Jake was making this observation, a woman actually stepped
over
Oy, hitching up her straight black skirt a bit at the knee in order to do so. Her preoccupied face (
I’m just one more New Yorker minding my business, so don’t screw with me
was what that face said to Jake) never changed.

They don’t see us, but somehow they sense us. And if they can sense us, we must really be here
.

The first logical question was Why? Jake considered this for a moment, then decided to table it. He had an idea the answer would come. Meantime, why not enjoy New York while he had it?

“Come on, Oy,” he said, and walked around the corner. The billy-bumbler, clearly no city boy, walked so close to him that Jake could feel his breath feathering against his ankle.