Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [128]
“The others…I saw a couple in restaurants, both of them eating alone. That glow was all over their hands and their faces—smeared across their lips like…like electric blueberry juice—and the burned-onion smell hung around them like some kind of perfume.” Callahan smiled briefly. “It strikes me how every description I try to make has some kind of simile buried in it. Because I’m not just trying to describe them, you know, I’m trying to understand them. Still trying to understand them. To figure out how there could have been this other world, this secret world, there all the time, right beside the one I’d always known.”
Roland’s right, Eddie thought. It’s todash. Got to be. He doesn’t know it, but it is. Does that make him one of us? Part of our ka-tet?
“I saw one in line at Marine Midland Bank, where Home did its business,” Callahan said. “Middle of the day. I was in the Deposit line, this woman was in Withdrawals. That light was all around her. She saw me looking at her and smiled. Fearless eye contact. Flirty.” He paused. “Sexy.”
“You knew them, because of the vampire-demon’s blood in you,” Roland said. “Did they know you?”
“No,” Callahan said promptly. “If they’d been able to see me—to isolate me—my life wouldn’t have been worth a dime. Although they came to know about me. That was later, though.
“My point is, I saw them. I knew they were there. And when I saw what had happened to Lupe, I knew what had been at him. They see it, too. Smell it. Probably hear the chimes, as well. Their victims are marked, and after that more are apt to come, like bugs to a light. Or dogs, all determined to piss on the same telephone pole.
“I’m sure that night in March was the first time Lupe was bitten, because I never saw that glow around him before…or the marks on the side of his throat, which looked like no more than a couple of shaving nicks. But he was bitten repeatedly after that. It had something to do with the nature of the business we were in, working with transients. Maybe drinking alcohol-laced blood is a cheap high for them. Who knows?
“In any case, it was because of Lupe that I made my first kill. The first of many. This was in April…”
Ten
This is April and the air has finally begun to feel and smell like spring. Callahan has been at Home since five, first writing checks to cover end-of-the-month bills, then working on his culinary specialty, which he calls Toads n Dumplins Stew. The meat is actually stewing beef, but the colorful name amuses him.
He has been washing the big steel pots as he goes along, not because he needs to (one of the few things there’s no shortage of at Home is cooking gear) but because that’s the way his mother taught him to operate in the kitchen: clean as you go.
He takes a pot to the back door, holds it against his hip with one hand, turns the knob with his other hand. He goes out into the alley, meaning to toss the soapy water into the sewer grating out there, and then he stops. Here is something he has seen before, down in the Village, but then the two men—the one standing against the wall, the one in front of him, leaning forward with his hands propped against the bricks—were only shadows. These two he can see clearly in the light from the kitchen, and the one leaning back against the wall, seemingly asleep with his head turned to the side, exposing his neck, is someone Callahan knows.
It is Lupe.
Although the open door has lit up this part of the alley, and Callahan has made no effort to be quiet—has, in fact, been singing Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”—neither of them notices him. They are entranced. The man in front of Lupe looks to be about fifty, well dressed in a suit and a tie. Beside him, an expensive Mark Cross