Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [275]
“Don’t kill him!” This time his voice was hoarse and wavering and close to tears. “Don’t kill Benny’s Da’. Please.”
Eddie reached out and cupped the nape of the boy’s neck gently. “Jake, Benny Slightman’s Da’ is willing to send a hundred kids off into Thunderclap with the Wolves, just to spare his own. And you know how they’d come back.”
“Yeah, but in his eyes he doesn’t have any choice because—”
“His choice could have been to stand with us,” Roland said. His voice was dull and dreadful. Almost dead.
“But—”
But what? Jake didn’t know. He had been over this and over this and he still didn’t know. Sudden tears spilled from his eyes and ran down his cheeks. Callahan reached out to touch him. Jake pushed his hand away.
Roland sighed. “We’ll do what we can to spare him. That much I promise you. I don’t know if it will be a mercy or not—the Slightmans are going to be through in this town, if there’s a town left after the end of next week—but perhaps they’ll go north or south along the Crescent and start some sort of new life. And Jake, listen: there’s no need for Ben Slightman to ever know you overheard Andy and his father last night.”
Jake was looking at him with an expression that didn’t quite dare to be hope. He didn’t care a hill of beans about Slightman the Elder, but he didn’t want Benny to know it was him. He supposed that made him a coward, but he didn’t want Benny to know. “Really? For sure?”
“Nothing about this is for sure, but—”
Before he could finish, the singing children swept around the corner. Leading them, silver limbs and golden body gleaming mellowly in the day’s subdued light, was Andy the Messenger Robot. He was walking backward. In one hand was a bah-bolt wrapped in banners of bright silk. To Susannah he looked like a parade-marshal on the Fourth of July. He waved his baton extravagantly from side to side, leading the children in their song while a reedy bagpipe accompaniment issued from the speakers in his chest and head.
“Holy shit,” Eddie said. “It’s the Pied Piper of Hamelin.”
Three
“Commala-come-one!
Mamma had a son!
Dass-a time ’at Daddy
Had d’mos’ fun!”
Andy sang this part alone, then pointed his baton at the crowd of children. They joined in boisterously.
“Commala-come-come!
Daddy had one!
Dass-a time ’at Mommy
Had d’mos’ fun!”
Gleeful laughter. There weren’t as many kids as Susannah would have thought, given the amount of noise they were putting out. Seeing Andy there at their head, after hearing Jake’s story, chilled her heart. At the same time, she felt an angry pulse begin to beat in her throat and her left temple. That he should lead them down the street like this! Like the Pied Piper, Eddie was right—like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
Now he pointed his makeshift baton at a pretty girl who looked thirteen or fourteen. Susannah thought she was one of the Anselm kids, from the smallhold just south of Tian Jaffords’s place. She sang out the next verse bright and clear to that same heavily rhythmic beat, which was almost (but not quite) a skip-rope chant:
“Commala-come-two!
You know what to do!
Plant the rice commala,
Don’t ye be…no…foo’!”
Then, as the others joined in again, Susannah realized that the group of children was bigger than she’d thought when they came around the corner, quite a bit bigger. Her ears had told her truer than her eyes, and there was a perfectly good reason for that.
“Commala-come-two! [they sang]
Daddy no foo’!
Mommy plant commala
cause she know jus’ what to do!”
The group looked smaller at first glance because so many of the faces were the same—the face of the Anselm girl, for instance, was nearly the face of the boy next to her. Her twin brother. Almost all the kids in Andy’s group were twins. Susannah suddenly realized how eerie this was, like all the strange doublings they’d encountered caught in a bottle. Her stomach turned over. And she felt the first twinge of pain above her left eye. Her hand began to rise toward the tender spot.
No, she told herself,