Wolves of the Calla

SEVEN

They reached the rectory door just as Callahan was ushering the two young people out. They were, Roland thought, very likely the most gorgeous children he had ever seen. Their hair was black as coal, the boy's shoulder-length, the girl's bound by a white ribbon and falling all the way to her bottom. Their eyes were dark, perfect blue. Their skin was creamy-pale, their lips a startling, sensuous red. There were faint spatters of freckles on their cheeks. So far as Roland could tell, the spatters were also identical. They looked from him to Eddie and then back to Susa

"Roland, Eddie, I'd like you to meet the Tavery twins, Frank and Francine. Rosalita fetched them-the Taverys live not half a mile away, do ya. You'll have your map by this afternoon, and I doubt if you'll ever have seen a finer one in all your life. It's but one of the talents they have."

The Tavery twins made their ma

"You do us well and we say thankya," Roland told them.

An identical blush suffused their astoundingly creamy complexions; they muttered their thanks and prepared to slip away. Before they could, Roland put an arm around each narrow but well-made pair of shoulders and led the twins a little way down the walk. He was taken less by their perfect child's beauty than by the piercing intelligence he saw in their blue eyes. He had no doubt they would make his map; he also had no doubt that Callahan had had Rosalita fetch them as a kind of object lesson, were one still needed: with no interference, one of these beautiful children would be a grizzling idiot a month from now.

"Sai?" Frank asked. Now there was a touch of worry in his voice.

"Fear me not," Roland said, "but hear me well."

EIGHT

Callahan and Eddie watched Roland walk the Tavery twins slowly along the rectory's flagstoned path and toward the dirt drive. Both men shared the same thought: Roland looked like a benevolent gran-pere.

Susa

He followed her into the kitchen. Rosalita was gone and they had it to themselves. Susa

"What is it?" he asked her.

"Pick me up."

He did.

"Now kiss me quick, while you have the chance."

"Is that all you want?"

"Isn't it enough? It better be, Mister Dean."

He kissed her, and willingly, but couldn't help marking how much larger her breasts were as they pressed against him. When he drew his face away from hers, he found himself looking for traces of the other one in her face. The one who called herself Mother in the High Speech, He saw only Susa

"Is that better?" he asked.

"Much." She smiled a little, and then the smile faded. "Eddie? Is something wrong?"

He gri

Had he lied to her before? He couldn't remember, but he didn't think so. And even if he had, he had never done so with such baldness. With such calculation.

This was bad.

NINE

Ten minutes later, rearmed with fresh mugs of coffee (and a bowl of pokeberries), they went out into the rectory's small back yard. The gunslinger lifted his face into the sun for a moment, relishing its weight and heat. Then he turned to Callahan. "We three would hear your story now, Pere, if you'd tell it. And then mayhap stroll up to your church and see what's there."

"I want you to take it," Callahan said. "It hasn't desecrated the church, how could it when Our Lady was never consecrated to begin with? But it's changed it for the worse. Even when the church was still a building, I felt the spirit of God inside it. No more. That thing has driven it out. I want you to take it."

Roland opened his mouth to say something noncommittal, but Susa

He turned to her. "Why, yes. Why would I not be?"

"You keep rubbing your hip."

Had he been? Yes, he saw, he had. The pain was creeping back already, in spite of the warm sun, in spite of Rosalita's cat-oil. The dry twist.

"It's nothing," he told her. "Just a touch of the rheumatiz."

She looked at him doubtfully, then seemed to accept. This is a hell of a way to start, Roland thought, with at least two of us keeping secrets. We can't go on so. Not for long.

He turned to Callahan. "Tell us your tale. How you came by your scars, how you came here, and how you came by Black Thirteen. We would hear every word."

"Yes," Eddie murmured.

"Every word," Susa

All three of them looked at Callahan-the Old Fella, the religious who would allow himself to be called Pere but not priest. His twisted right hand went to the scar on his forehead and rubbed at it. At last he said: " 'Twas the drink. That's what I believe now. Not God, not devils, not predestination, not the company of saints. 'Twas the drink." He paused, thinking, then smiled at them. Roland remembered Nort, the weed-eater in Tull who had been brought back from the dead by the man in black. Nort had smiled like that. "But if God made the world, then God made the drink. And that is also His will."

Ka, Roland thought.

Callahan sat quiet, rubbing the scarred crucifix on his forehead, gathering his thoughts. And then he began to tell his story.

Chapter III:

The Priest's Tale (New York)

ONE

It was the drink, that was what he came to believe when he finally stopped it and clarity came. Not God, not Satan, not some deep psychosexual battle between his blessed mither and his blessed Da'. Just the drink. And was it surprising that whiskey should have taken him by the ears? He was Irish, he was a priest, one more strike and you're out.

From seminary in Boston he'd gone to a city parish in Lowell, Massachusetts. His parishioners had loved him (he wouldn't refer to them as his flock, flocks were what you called seagulls on their way to the town dump), but after seven years in Lowell, Callahan had grown uneasy. When talking to Bishop Dugan in the Diocese office, he had used all the correct buzzwords of the time to express this unease: anomie, urban malaise, an increasing lack of empathy, a sense of disco