Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [39]
Roland stayed where he was for a moment, torn. But in the end, his course was clear enough. He couldn’t wake them up while they were in the todash state; to do so would be a horrible risk. All he could do was follow Susannah, as he had on other nights, and hope she didn’t get herself into trouble.
You might also do some thinking about what happens next. That was Vannay’s dry, lecturely voice. Now that his old tutor was back, he apparently meant to stay for awhile. Reason was never your strong point, but you must do it, nevertheless. You’ll want to wait until your visitors make themselves known, of course—until you can be sure of what they want—but eventually, Roland, you must act. Think first, however. Sooner would be better than later.
Yes, sooner was always better than later.
There was another loud, buzzing crackle. Eddie and Jake were back, Jake lying with his arm curled around Oy, and then they were gone again, nothing left where they had been but a faint ectoplasmic shimmer. Well, never mind. His job was to follow Susannah. As for Eddie and Jake, there would be water if God willed it.
Suppose you come back here and they’re gone? It happens, Vannay said so. What will you tell her if she wakes and finds them both gone, her husband and her adopted son?
It was nothing he could worry about now. Right now there was Susannah to worry about, Susannah to keep safe.
Seven
On the north side of the road, old trees with enormous trunks stood at considerable distances from each other. Their branches might entwine and create a solid canopy overhead, but at ground level there was plenty of room for Susannah’s wheelchair, and she moved along at a good pace, weaving between the vast ironwoods and pines, rolling downhill over a fragrant duff of mulch and needles.
Not Susannah. Not Detta or Odetta, either. This one calls herself Mia.
Roland didn’t care if she called herself Queen o’ Green Days, as long as she came back safe, and the other two were still there when she did.
He began to smell a brighter, fresher green: reeds and water-weeds. With it came the smell of mud, the thump of frogs, the sarcastic hool! hool! salute of an owl, the splash of water as something jumped. This was followed by a thin shriek as something died, maybe the jumper, maybe the jumped-upon. Underbrush began to spring up in the duff, first dotting it and then crowding it out. The tree-cover thinned. Mosquitoes and chiggers whined. Binnie-bugs stitched the air. The bog-smells grew stronger.
The wheels of the chair had passed over the duff without leaving any trace. As duff gave way to straggling low growth, Roland began to see broken twigs and torn-off leaves marking her passage. Then, as she reached the more or less level low ground, the wheels began to sink into the increasingly soft earth. Twenty paces farther on, he began to see liquid seeping into the tracks. She was too wise to get stuck, though—too crafty. Twenty paces beyond the first signs of seepage, he came to the wheelchair itself, abandoned. Lying on the seat were her pants and shirt. She had gone on into the bog naked save for the leather caps that covered her stumps.
Down here there were ribbons of mist hanging over puddles of standing water. Grassy hummocks rose; on one, wired to a dead log that had been planted upright, was what Roland at first took for an ancient stuffy-guy. When he got closer, he saw it was a human skeleton. The skull’s forehead had been smashed inward, leaving a triangle of darkness between the staring sockets. Some sort of primitive war-club had made that wound, no doubt, and the corpse (or its lingering spirit) had been left to mark this as the edge of some tribe’s territory. They were probably long dead or moved on, but caution