Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [257]
As if to congratulate him on his intuition, a baleful flare of pain settled into his right hip and began to throb there. To Roland it felt like a bag filled with warm liquid lead. He began to massage it with his right hand…as if that would do any good.
“Roland!” The voice was bubbly and distant—like the things he could see beyond the door, it seemed to be underwater—but it was unmistakably Eddie’s. Roland looked up from his hip and saw that Eddie and Tower had carried some sort of case over to the unfound door. It appeared to be filled with books. “Roland, can you help us?”
The pain had settled so deeply into his hips and knees that Roland wasn’t even sure he could get up…but he did it, and fluidly. He didn’t know how much of his condition Eddie’s sharp eyes might have already seen, but Roland didn’t want them to see any more. Not, at least, until their adventures in Calla Bryn Sturgis were over.
“When we push it, you pull!”
Roland nodded his understanding, and the bookcase slid forward. There was one strange and vertiginous moment when the half in the cave was firm and clear and the half still back in The Manhattan Bookstore of the Mind shimmered unsteadily. Then Roland took hold of it and pulled it through. It juddered and squalled across the floor of the cave, pushing aside little piles of pebbles and bones.
As soon as it was out of the doorway, the lid of the ghostwood box began to close. So did the door itself.
“No, you don’t,” Roland murmured. “No, you don’t, you bastard.” He slipped the remaining two fingers of his right hand into the narrowing space beneath the lid of the box. The door stopped moving and remained ajar when he did. And enough was enough. Now even his teeth were buzzing. Eddie was having some last little bit of palaver with Tower, but Roland no longer cared if they were the secrets of the universe.
“Eddie!” he roared. “Eddie, to me!”
And, thankfully, Eddie grabbed his swag-bag and came. The moment he was through the door, Roland closed the box. The unfound door shut a second later with a flat and undramatic clap. The chimes ceased. So did the jumble of poison pain pouring into Roland’s joints. The relief was so tremendous that he cried out. Then, for the next ten seconds or so, all he could do was lower his chin to his chest, close his eyes, and struggle not to sob.
“Say thankya,” he managed at last. “Eddie, say thankya.”
“Don’t mention it. Let’s get out of this cave, what do you think?”
“I think yes,” Roland said. “Gods, yes.”
Sixteen
“Didn’t like him much, did you?” Roland asked.
Ten minutes had passed since Eddie’s return. They had moved a little distance down from the cave, then stopped where the path twisted through a small rocky inlet. The roaring gale that had tossed back their hair and plastered their clothes against their bodies was here reduced to occasional prankish gusts. Roland was grateful for them. He hoped they would excuse the slow and clumsy way he was building his smoke. Yet he felt Eddie’s eyes upon him, and the young man from Brooklyn—who had once been almost as dull and unaware as Andolini and Biondi—now saw much.
“Tower, you mean.”
Roland tipped him a sardonic glance. “Of whom else would I speak? The cat?”
Eddie gave a brief grunt of acknowledgment, almost a laugh. He kept pulling in long breaths of the clean air. It was good to be back. Going to New York in the flesh had been better than going todash in one way—that sense of lurking darkness had been gone, and the accompanying sense of thinness—but God, the place stank. Mostly it was cars and exhaust (the oily clouds of diesel were the worst), but there were a thousand other bad smells, too. Not the least of them was the aroma of too many human bodies, their essential polecat odor not hidden at all by the perfumes and sprays the folken put on themselves. Were they unconscious of how bad they smelled, all huddled up together as they were? Eddie supposed they must be. Had been himself, once upon a time. Once upon a time he couldn’t wait