Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [98]
As they rode into Calla Bryn Sturgis, Eddie kept expecting that man, those lamb-slaughterer’s eyes, and the handful of cornshucks. Because this town felt bad to him. Not evil—evil as Mejis had likely been on the night of Susan Delgado’s death—but bad in a simpler way. Bad as in bad luck, bad choices, bad omens. Bad ka, maybe.
He leaned toward Slightman the Elder. “Where in the heck is everyone, Ben?”
“Yonder,” Slightman said, and pointed to the flare of the torches.
“Why are they so quiet?” Jake asked.
“They don’t know what to expect,” Callahan said. “We’re cut off here. The outsiders we do see from time to time are the occasional peddler, harrier, gambler…oh, and the lake-boat marts sometimes stop in high summer.”
“What’s a lake-boat mart?” Susannah asked.
Callahan described a wide flatboat, paddlewheel-driven and gaily painted, covered with small shops. These made their slow way down the Devar-Tete Whye, stopping to trade at the Callas of the Middle Crescent until their goods were gone. Shoddy stuff for the most part, Callahan said, but Eddie wasn’t sure he trusted him entirely, at least on the subject of the lake-boat marts; he spoke with the almost unconscious distaste of the longtime religious.
“And the other outsiders come to steal their children,” Callahan concluded. He pointed to the left, where a long wooden building seemed to take up almost half the high street. Eddie counted not two hitching rails or four, but eight. Long ones. “Took’s General Store, may it do ya fine,” Callahan said, with what might have been sarcasm.
They reached the Pavilion. Eddie later put the number present at seven or eight hundred, but when he first saw them—a mass of hats and bonnets and boots and work-roughened hands beneath the long red light of that day’s evening sun—the crowd seemed enormous, untellable.
They will throw shit at us, he thought. Throw shit at us and yell “Charyou tree.” The idea was ridiculous but also strong.
The Calla-folk moved back on two sides, creating an aisle of green grass which led to a raised wooden platform. Ringing the Pavilion were torches caught in iron cages. At that point, they still all flared a quite ordinary yellow. Eddie’s nose caught the strong reek of oil.
Overholser dismounted. So did the others of his party. Eddie, Susannah, and Jake looked at Roland. Roland sat as he was for a moment, leaning slightly forward, one arm cast across the pommel of his saddle, seeming lost in his own thoughts. Then he took off his hat and held it out to the crowd. He tapped his throat three times. The crowd murmured. In appreciation or surprise? Eddie couldn’t tell. Not anger, though, definitely not anger, and that was good. The gunslinger lifted one booted foot across the saddle and lightly dismounted. Eddie left his horse more carefully, aware of all the eyes on him. He’d put on Susannah’s harness earlier, and now he stood next to her mount, back-to. She slipped into the harness with the ease of long practice. The crowd murmured again when they saw her legs were missing from just above the knees.
Overholser started briskly up the path, shaking a few hands along the way. Callahan walked directly behind him, occasionally sketching the sign of the cross in the air. Other hands reached out of the crowd to secure the horses. Roland, Eddie, and Jake walked three abreast. Oy was still in the wide front pocket of the poncho Benny had loaned Jake, looking about with interest.
Eddie realized he could actually smell the crowd—sweat and hair and sunburned skin and the occasional splash of what the characters in the Western