Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [218]
Yes! Yes, there is something! Two somethings! Two tiny moving dots at the far horizon!
“You see them! How excellent your eyes must be, Faddah!”
The man in the robe—it’s black, his face within the hood nothing but a pallid suggestion—stands about twenty paces from him. He titters. Callahan cares for the sound no more than for the waxy look of his fingers. It’s like the sound of mice scampering over bones. That makes no actual sense, but—
“Who are they?” Callahan asks in a dry voice. “Who are you? Where is this place?”
The man in black sighs theatrically. “So much backstory, so little time,” he says. “Call me Walter, if you like. As for this place, it’s a way station, just as I told you. A little rest stop between the hoot of your world and the holler of the next. Oh, you thought you were quite the far wanderer, didn’t you? Following all those hidden highways of yours? But now, Faddah, you’re on a real journey.”
“Stop calling me that!” Callahan shouts. His throat is already dry. The sunny heat seems to be accumulating on top of his head like actual weight.
“Faddah, Faddah, Faddah!” the man in black says. He sounds petulant, but Callahan knows he’s laughing inside. He has an idea this man—if he is a man—spends a great deal of time laughing on the inside. “Oh well, no need to be pissy about it, I suppose. I’ll call you Don. Do you like that better?”
The black specks in the distance are wavering now; the rising thermals cause them to levitate, disappear, then reappear again. Soon they’ll be gone for good.
“Who are they?” he asks the man in black.
“Folks you’ll almost certainly never meet,” the man in black says dreamily. The hood shifts; for a moment Callahan can see the waxy blade of a nose and the curve of an eye, a small cup filled with dark fluid. “They’ll die under the mountains. If they don’t die under the mountains, there are things in the Western Sea that will eat them alive. Dod-a-chock!” He laughs again. But—
But all at once you don’t sound completely sure of yourself, my friend, Callahan thinks.
“If all else fails,” Walter says, “this will kill them.” He raises the box. Again, faintly, Callahan hears the unpleasant ripple of the chimes. “And who will bring it to them? Ka, of course, yet even ka needs a friend, a kai-mai. That would be you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No,” the man in black agrees sadly, “and I don’t have time to explain. Like the White Rabbit in Alice, I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date. They’re following me, you see, but I needed to double back and talk to you. Busy-busy-busy! Now I must get ahead of them again—how else will I draw them on? You and I, Don, must be done with our palaver, regrettably short though it has been. Back into the stable with you, amigo. Quick as a bunny!”
“What if I don’t want to?” Only there’s really no what-if about it. He’s never wanted to go anyplace less. Suppose he asks this fellow to let him go and try to catch up with those wavering specks? What if he tells the man in black, “That’s where I’m supposed to be, where what you call ka wants me to be”? He guesses he knows. Might as well spit in the ocean.
As if to confirm this, Walter says, “What you want hardly matters. You’ll go where the King decrees, and there you will wait. If yon two die on their course—as they almost certainly must—you will live a life of rural serenity in the place to which I send you, and there you too will die, full of years and possibly with a false but undoubtedly pleasing sense of redemption. You’ll live on your level of the Tower long after I’m bone-dust on mine. This I promise you, faddah, for I have seen it in the glass, say true! And if they keep coming? If they reach you in the place to which you are going? Why, in that unlikely case you’ll aid them in every way you can and kill them by doing so. It’s a mind-blower, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you say it’s a mind-blower?”
He begins to walk toward Callahan. Callahan backs toward the stable where the unfound door awaits. He doesn’t want to go there, but there’s nowhere