Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [291]
The clerk raised an eyebrow and smiled. “You sound like you’re from these parts.”
“Do you say so, then?” Callahan asked, also smiling.
“Ayuh. Anyway, post office is easy. Ain’t but a mile down this road, on your left.” He pronounced road rud, exactly as Jamie Jaffords might have done.
“Good enough. And do you sell salami by the slice?”
“I’ll sell it just about any old way you want to buy it,” the clerk said amiably. “Summer visitor, are you?” It came out summah visitah, and Callahan almost expected him to add Tell me, I beg.
“You could call me that, I guess,” Callahan said.
Four
In the cave, Eddie fought against the faint but maddening jangle of the chimes and peered through the half-open door. Callahan was walking down a country road. Goody gumdrops for him. Meantime, maybe Mrs. Dean’s little boy would try having himself a bit of a read. With a cold (and slightly trembling) hand, he reached into the bookcase and pulled out a volume two down from one that had been turned upside down, one that would certainly have changed his day had he happened to grab it. What he came up with instead was Four Short Novels of Sherlock Holmes. Ah, Holmes, another great sage and eminent junkie. Eddie opened to A Study in Scarlet and began to read. Every now and then he found himself looking down at the box, where Black Thirteen pulsed out its weird force. He could just see a curve of glass. After a little bit he gave up trying to read, only looking at the curve of glass, growing more and more fascinated. But the chimes were fading, and that was good, wasn’t it? After a little while he could hardly hear them at all. A little while after that, a voice crept past the bullets in his ears and began to speak to him.
Eddie listened.
Five
“Pardon me, ma’am.”
“Ayuh?” The postmistress was a woman in her late fifties or early sixties, dressed to meet the public with hair of a perfect beauty-shop blue-white.
“I’d like to leave a letter for some friends of mine,” Callahan said. “They’re from New York, and they’d likely be General Delivery customers.” He had argued with Eddie that Calvin Tower, on the run from a bunch of dangerous hoods who would almost certainly still want his head on a stick, wouldn’t do anything so dumb as sign up for mail. Eddie had reminded him of how Tower had been about his fucking precious first editions, and Callahan had finally agreed to at least try this.
“Summer folk?”
“Do ya,” Callahan agreed, but that wasn’t quite right. “I mean ayuh. Their names are Calvin Tower and Aaron Deepneau. I guess that isn’t information you’re supposed to give someone just in off the street, but—”
“Oh, we don’t bother much about such things out in these parts,” she said. Parts came out pahts. “Just let me check the list…we have so many between Memorial Day and Labor Day…”
She picked up a clipboard with three or four tattered sheets of paper on it from her side of the counter. Lots of handwritten names. She flicked over the first sheet to the second, then from the second to the third.
“Deepneau!” she said. “Ayuh, there’s that one. Now…just let me see if I can find t’other ’un…”
“Never mind,” Callahan said. All at once he felt uneasy, as though something had gone wrong back on the other side. He glanced over his shoulder and saw nothing but the door, and the cave, and Eddie sitting there cross-legged with a book in his lap.
“Got somebody chasin ya?” the postlady asked, smiling.
Callahan laughed. It sounded forced and stupid to his own ears, but the postlady seemed to sense nothing wrong. “If I were to write Aaron a note and put it in a stamped envelope, would you see that he gets it when he comes in? Or when Mr. Tower comes in?”
“Oh, no need to buy a stamp,” said she, comfortably. “Glad to do it.”
Yes, it was like the Calla. Suddenly he liked this woman very much. Liked her big-big.
Callahan went to the counter by the window (the door doing a neat do-si-do around him when he turned) and jotted a note, first introducing himself