Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [198]
“Of course,” Susannah said. “Because the pieces fit together. The pieces always fit together. We’ve seen it again and again and again. We just don’t know what the picture is.”
“Or can’t grasp it,” Eddie said.
Callahan nodded. “It was like looking at Rowan, only with long blond hair and breasts. His twin sister. And she laughed. She asked me if I thought I’d seen a ghost. I felt…surreal. As if I’d slipped into another of those other worlds, like the real one—if there is such a thing—but not quite the same. I felt this mad urge to drag out my wallet and see who was on the bills. It wasn’t just the resemblance; it was her laughing. Sitting there beside a man who had her face, assuming he had any face left at all under the bandages, and laughing.”
“Welcome to Room 19 of the Todash Hospital,” Eddie said.
“Beg pardon?”
“I only meant I know the feeling, Don. We all do. Go on.”
“I introduced myself and asked if I could come in. And when I asked it, I was thinking back to Barlow, the vampire. Thinking, You have to invite them in the first time. After that, they can come and go as they please. She told me of course I could come in. She said she’d come from Chicago to be with him in what she called ‘his closing hours.’ Then, in that same pleasant voice, she said, ‘I knew who you were right away. It’s the scar on your hand. In his letters, Rowan said he was quite sure you were a religious man in your other life. He used to talk about people’s other lives all the time, meaning before they started drinking or taking drugs or went insane or all three. This one was a carpenter in his other life. That one was a model in her other life. Was he right about you?’ All in that pleasant voice. Like a woman making conversation at a cocktail party. And Rowan lying there with his head covered in bandages. If he’d been wearing sunglasses, he would have looked like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man.
“I came in. I said I’d once been a religious man, yes, but that was all in the past. She put out her hand. I put out mine. Because, you see, I thought…”
Six
He puts out his hand because he has made the assumption that she wants to shake with him. The pleasant voice has fooled him. He doesn’t realize that what Rowena Magruder Rawlings is actually doing is raising her hand, not putting it out. At first he doesn’t even realize he has been slapped, and hard enough to make his left ear ring and his left eye water; he has a confused idea that the sudden warmth rising in his left cheek must be some sort of cockamamie allergy thing, perhaps a stress reaction. Then she is advancing on him with tears streaming down her weirdly Rowan-like face.
“Go on and look at him,” she says. “Because guess what? This is my brother’s other life! The only one he has left! Get right up close and get a good look at it. They poked out his eyes, they took off one of his cheeks—you can see the teeth in there, peekaboo! The police showed me photographs. They didn’t want to, but I made them. They poked a hole in his heart, but I guess the doctors plugged that. It’s his liver that’s killing him. They poked a hole in that, too, and it’s dying.”
“Miss Magruder, I—”
“It’s Mrs. Rawlings,” she tells him, “not that it’s anything to you, one way or the other. Go on. Get a good look. See what you’ve done to him.”
“I was in California…I saw it in the paper…”
“Oh, I’m sure,” she says. “I’m sure. But you’re the only one I can get hold of, don’t you see? The only one who was close to him. His other pal died of the Queer’s Disease, and the rest aren’t here. They’re eating free food down at his flophouse, I suppose, or talking about what happened at their meetings. How it makes them feel. Well, Reverend Callahan—or is it Father? I saw you cross yourself—let me tell you how this makes me feel. It…makes…me… FURIOUS.” She is still speaking in the pleasant voice, but when he opens his mouth to speak again she puts a finger across his lips and there is so much force pressing back against his teeth in that single finger that he gives up. Let her talk,