Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [68]
“Hear him,” Overholser agreed gloomily. “My own brother, Welland, was much the same until he died. And of course they have to be watched more or less constant, for if they get something they like, they’ll eat it until they bust. Who’s watching yours, Tian?”
“My cuz,” Zalia said before Tian could speak. “Heddon n Hedda can help a little now, as well; they’ve come to a likely enough age—” She stopped and seemed to realize what she was saying. Her mouth twisted and she fell silent. Eddie guessed he understood. Heddon and Hedda could help now, yes. Next year, one of them would still be able to help. The other one, though…
A child taken at the age of ten might come back with a few rudiments of language left, but would never get much beyond that. The ones who were taken oldest were somehow the worst, for they seemed to come back with some vague understanding of what had been done to them. What had been stolen from them. These had a tendency to cry a great deal, or to simply creep off by themselves and peer into the east, like lost things. As if they might see their poor brains out there, circling like birds in the dark sky. Half a dozen such had even committed suicide over the years. (At this, Callahan once more crossed himself.)
The roont ones remained childlike in stature as well as in speech and behavior until about the age of sixteen. Then, quite suddenly, most of them sprouted to the size of young giants.
“Ye can have no idea what it’s like if ye haven’t seen it and been through it,” Tian said. He was looking into the ashes of the fire. “Ye can have no idea of the pain it causes them. When a babby cuts his teeth, ye ken how they cry?”
“Yes,” Susannah said.
Tian nodded. “It’s as if their whole bodies are teething, kennit.”
“Hear him,” Overholser said. “For sixteen or eighteen months, all my brother did was sleep and eat and cry and grow. I can remember him crying even in his sleep. I’d get out of my bed and go across to him and there’d be a whispering sound from inside his chest and legs and head. ’Twere the sound of his bones growing in the night, hear me.”
Eddie contemplated the horror of it. You heard stories about giants—fee-fi-fo-fum, and all that—but until now he’d never considered what it might be like to become a giant. As if their whole bodies are teething, Eddie thought, and shivered.
“A year and a half, no longer than that and it were done, but I wonder how long it must seem to them, who’re brought back with no more sense of time than birds or bugs.”
“Endless,” Susannah said. Her face was very pale and she sounded ill. “It must seem endless.”
“The whispering in the nights as their bones grow,” Overholser said. “The headaches as their skulls grow.”
“Zalman screamed one time for nine days without stopping,” Zalia said. Her voice was expressionless, but Eddie could see the horror in her eyes; he could see it very well. “His cheekbones pushed up. You could see it happening. His forehead curved out and out, and if you held an ear close to it you could hear the skull creaking as it spread. It sounded like a tree-branch under a weight of ice.
“Nine days he screamed. Nine. Morning, noon, and in the dead of night. Screaming and screaming. Eyes gushing water. We prayed to all the gods there were that he’d go hoarse—that he’d be stricken dumb, even—but none such happened, say thankee. If we’d had a gun, I believe we would have slew him as he lay on his pallet just to end his pain. As it was, my good old da’ was ready to slit ’een’s thr’ut when it stopped. His bones went on yet awhile—his skellington, do ya—but his head was the worst of it and it finally stopped, tell gods thankya, and Man Jesus too.”
She nodded toward Callahan. He nodded back and raised his hand toward her, outstretched in the air for a moment. Zalia turned back to Roland and his friends.
“Now I have five of my own,” she said. “Aaron’s safe, and say thankee, but Heddon and Hedda’s ten, a prime age. Lyman and Lia’s only five, but five’s old enough. Five