Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [79]
Susannah surprised them all by starting to sing. Only to Roland, it sounded more like a galley-chorus—a thing made to be shouted out verse by verse—than an actual song. Yet even without a real tune to carry, her voice was melodious enough: “Children, when ye hear the music of the clarinet…Children, when ye hear the music of the flute! Children, when ye hear the music of the tam-bou-rine…Ye must bow down and wor-ship the iyyy-DOL!”
“What is it?”
“A field-chant,” she said. “The sort of thing my grandparents and great-grandparents might have sung while they were picking ole massa’s cotton. But times change.” She smiled. “I first heard it in a Greenwich Village coffee-house, back in 1962. And the man who sang it was a white blues-shouter named Dave Van Ronk.”
“I bet Aaron Deepneau was there, too,” Jake breathed. “Hell, I bet he was sitting at the next damn table.”
Susannah turned to him, surprised and considering. “Why do you say so, sugar?”
Eddie said, “Because he overheard Calvin Tower saying this guy Deepneau had been hanging around the Village since…what’d he say, Jake?”
“Not the Village, Bleecker Street,” Jake said, laughing a little. “Mr. Tower said Mr. Deepneau was hanging around Bleecker Street back before Bob Dylan knew how to blow more than open G on his Hohner. That must be a harmonica.”
“It is,” Eddie said, “and while I might not bet the farm on what Jake’s saying, I’d go a lot more than pocket-change. Sure, Deepneau was there. It wouldn’t even surprise me to find out that Jack Andolini was tending the bar. Because that’s just how things work in the Land of Nineteen.”
“In any case,” Roland said, “those of us who cross should stay together. And I mean within a hand’s reach, all the time.”
“I don’t think I’ll be there,” Jake said.
“Why do you say so, Jake?” the gunslinger asked, surprised.
“Because I’ll never fall asleep,” Jake said. “I’m too excited.”
But eventually they all slept.
Four
He knows it’s a dream, something brought on by no more than Slightman’s chance remark, and yet he can’t escape it. Always look for the back door, Cort used to tell them, but if there’s a back door in this dream, Roland cannot find it. I heard of Jericho Hill and such blood-and-thunder tales of pretend, that was what Eisenhart’s foreman had said, only Jericho Hill had seemed real enough to Roland. Why would it not? He had been there. It had been the end of them. The end of a whole world.
The day is suffocatingly hot; the sun reaches its roofpeak and then seems to stay there, as if the hours have been suspended. Below them is a long sloping field filled with great gray-black stone faces, eroded statues left by people who are long gone, and Grissom’s men advance relentlessly among them as Roland and his final few companions withdraw ever upward, shooting as they go. The gunfire is constant, unending, the sound of bullets whining off the stone faces a shrill counterpoint that sinks into their heads like the bloodthirsty whine of mosquitoes. Jamie DeCurry has been killed by a sniper, perhaps Grissom’s eagle-eyed son or Grissom himself. With Alain the end was far worse; he was shot in the dark the night before the final battle by his two best friends, a stupid error, a horrible death. There was no help. DeMullet’s column was ambushed and slaughtered at Rimrocks and when Alain rode back after midnight to tell them, Roland and Cuthbert…the sound of their guns…and oh, when Alain cried out their names—
And now they’re at the top and there’s nowhere left to run. Behind them to the east is a shale-crumbly drop to the Salt—what five hundred miles south of here is called the Clean Sea. To the west is the hill of the stone faces, and Grissom’s screaming, advancing men. Roland and his own men have killed hundreds, but there are still two thousand left, and that’s a conservative estimate. Two thousand men, their howling faces painted blue, some armed with guns and even a few with Bolts—against a dozen. That’s all that’s left of them now, here at the top of Jericho Hill, under the burning sky. Jamie dead, Alain dead under the