Wolves of the Calla dt-5 Read online

  The ones who came back were at best biddable idiots. A five-year-old would return with all his hard-won talk gone, reduced to nothing but babble and reaching for the things he wanted. Diapers which had been left forgotten two or three years before would go back on and might stay on until such a roont child was ten or even twelve.

  "Yer-bugger, Tia still pisses herself one day out of every six, and can be counted on to shit herself once a moon, as well," Jaffords said.

  "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's…"

  She covered her face with her hands and said no more.

  FOUR

  Once the growth-spurt was finished, Overholser said, some of them could be put to work. Others-the majority-weren't able to manage even such rudimentary tasks as pulling stumps or digging postholes. You saw these sitting on the steps of look's General Store or sometimes walking across the countryside in gangling groups, young men and women of enormous height, weight, and stupidity, sometimes grinning at each other and babbling, sometimes only goggling up at the sky.

  They didn't mate, there was that to be grateful for. While not all of them grew to prodigious size and their mental skills and physical abilities might vary somewhat, there seemed to be one universal: they came back sexually dead. "Beggin your pardon for the crudity," Overholser said, "but I don't b'lieve my brother Welland had so much as a piss-hardon after they brought him back. Zalia? Have you ever seen your brother with a… you know…"

  Zalia shook her head.

  "How old were you when they came, sai Overholser?" Roland asked.

  "First time, ye mean. Welland and I were nine." Overholser now spoke rapidly. It gave what he said the air of a rehearsed speech, but Eddie didn't think that was it. Overholser was a force in Calla Bryn Sturgis; he was, God save us and stone the crows, the big farmer. It was hard for him to go back in his mind to a time when he'd been a child, small and powerless and terrified. "Our Ma and Pa tried to hide us away in the cellar. So I've been told, anyway. I remember none of it, m'self, to be sure. Taught myself not to, I's'pose. Yar, quite likely. Some remember better'n others, Roland, but all the tales come to the same: one is took, one is left behind. The one took comes back roont, maybe able to work a little but dead in the b'low the waist. Then… when they get in their thirties…"

  When they reached their thirties, the roont twins grew abruptly, shockingly old. Their hair turned white and often fell completely out. Their eyes dimmed. Muscles that had been prodigious (as Tia Jaffords's and Zalman Hoonik's were now) went slack and wasted away. Sometimes they died peacefully, in their sleep. More often, their endings weren't peaceful at all. The sores came, sometimes out on the skin but more often in the stomach or the head. In the brain. All died long before their natural span would have been up, had it not been for the Wolves, and many died as they had grown from the size of normal children to that of giants: screaming in pain. Eddie wondered how many of these idiots, dying of what sounded to him like terminal cancer, were simply smothered or perhaps fed some strong sedative that would take them far beyond pain, far beyond sleep. It wasn't the sort of question you asked, but he guessed the answer would have been many. Roland sometimes used the word delah, always spoken with a light toss of the hand toward the horizon.

  Many.

  The visitors from the Calla, their tongues and memories untied by distress, might have gone on for some time, piling one sorry anecdote on another, but Roland didn't allow them to. "Now speak of the Wolves, I beg. How many come to you?"

  "Forty," Tian Jaffords said.

  "Spread across the whole Calla?" Slightman the Elder asked. "Nay, more than forty." And to Tian, slightly apologetic: "You were no more'n nine y'self last time they came, Tian. I were in my young twenties. Forty in town, maybe, but more came to the outlying farms and ranches. I'd say sixty in all, Roland-sai, maybe eighty."

  Roland looked at Overholser, eyebrows raised.

  "It's been twenty-three years, ye mind," Overholser said, "but I'd call sixty about right."

  "You call them Wolves, but what are they really? Are they men? Or something else?"

  Overholser, Slightman, Tian, Zalia: for a moment Eddie could feel them sharing khef, could almost hear them. It made him feel lonely and left-out,
the way you did when you saw a couple kissing on a streetcorner, wrapped in each other's arms or looking into each other's eyes, totally lost in each other's regard. Well, he didn't have to feel that way anymore, did he? He had his own ka-tet, his own khef. Not to mention his own woman.

  Meanwhile, Roland was making the impatient little finger-twirling gesture with which Eddie had become so familiar. Come on, folks, it said, day's wasting.

  "No telling for sure what they are," Overholser said. "They look like men, but they wear masks."

  "Wolf-masks," Susannah said.

  "Aye, lady, wolf-masks, gray as their horses."

  "Do you say all come on gray horses?" Roland asked.

  The silence was briefer this time, but Eddie still felt that sense of khef and ka-tet, minds consulting via something so elemental it couldn't even rightly be called telepathy; it was more elemental than telepathy.

  "Yer-bugger!" Overholser said, a slang term that seemed to mean You bet your ass, don't insult me by asking again. "All on gray horses. They wear gray pants that look like skin. Black boots with cruel big steel spurs. Green cloaks and hoods. And the masks. We know they're masks because they've been found left behind. They look like steel but rot in the sun like flesh, buggerdly things."

  "Ah."

  Overholser gave him a rather insulting head-cocked-to-one side look, the sort that asked Are you foolish or just slow? Then Slightman said: "Their horses ride like the wind. Some have ta'en one babby before the saddle and another behind."

  "Do you say so?" Roland asked.

  Slightman nodded emphatically. "Tell gods thankee." He saw Callahan again make the sign of the cross in the air and sighed. "Beg pardon, Old Fella."

  Callahan shrugged. "You were here before I was. Call on all the gods you like, so long as you know I think they're false."

  "And they come out of Thunderclap," Roland said, ignoring this last.

  "Aye," Overholser said. "You can see where it lies over that way about a hundred wheels." He pointed southeast. "For we come out of the woods on the last height of land before the Crescent. Ye can see all the Eastern Plain from there, and beyond it a great darkness, like a rain cloud on the horizon. 'Tis said, Roland, that in the far long ago, you could see mountains over there."

  "Like the Rockies from Nebraska," Jake breathed.

  Overholser glanced at him. "Beg pardon, Jake-soh?"

  "Nothing," Jake said, and gave the big farmer a small, embarrassed smile. Eddie, meanwhile, filed away what Overholser had called him. Not sai but soh. Just something else that was interesting.

  "We've heard of Thunderclap," Roland said. His voice was somehow terrifying in its lack of emotion, and when Eddie felt Susannah's hand creep into his, he was glad of it.

  " 'Tis a land of vampires, boggarts, and taheen, so the stories say," Zalia told them. Her voice was thin, on the verge of trembling. "Of course the stories are old-"

  "The stories are true," Callahan said. His own voice was harsh, but Eddie heard the fear in it. Heard it very well. "There are vampires-other things as well, very likely-and Thunderclap's their nest. We might speak more of this another time, gunslinger, if it does ya. For now, only hear me, I beg: of vampires I know a good deal. I don't know if the Wolves take the Calla's children to them-I rather think not-but yes, there are vampires."

  "Why do you speak as if I doubt?" Roland asked.

  Callahan's eyes dropped. "Because many do. I did myself. I doubted much and…" His voice cracked. He cleared his throat, and when he finished, it was almost in a whisper. "… and it was my undoing."

  Roland sat quiet for several moments, hunkered on the soles of his ancient boots with his arms wrapped around his bony knees, rocking back and forth a litde. Then, to Overholser: "What o' the clock do they come?"

  "When they took Welland, my brother, it was morning," the farmer said. "Breakfast not far past. I remember, because Welland asked our Ma if he could take his cup of coffee into the cellar with him. But last time… the time they come and took Tian's sister and Zalia's brother and so many others…"

  "I lost two nieces and a nephew," Slightman the Elder said.

  "That time wasn't long after the noon-bell from the Gathering Hall. We know the day because Andy knows the day, and that much he tells us. Then we hear the thunder of their hooves as they come out of the east and see the rooster-tail of dust they raise-"

  "So you know when they're coming," Roland said. "In fact, you know three ways: Andy, the sound of their hoofbeats, the rise of their dust."

  Overholser, taking Roland's implication, had flushed a dull brick color up the slopes of his plump cheeks and down his neck. "They come armed, Roland, do ya. With guns-rifles as well as the revolvers yer own tet carries, grenados, too-and other weapons, as well. Fearsome weapons of the Old People. Light-sticks that kill at a touch, flying metal buzz-balls called drones or sneetches. The sticks burn the skin black and stop the heart-electrical, maybe, or maybe-"

  Eddie heard Overholser's next word as ant-NOMIC. At first he thought die man was trying to say anatomy. A moment later he realized it was probably "atomic."

  "Once the drones smell you, they follow no matter how fast you run," Slightman's boy said eagerly, "or how much you twist and turn. Right, Da'?"

  "Yer-bugger," Slightman the Elder said. "Then sprout blades that whirl around so fast you can't see em and they cut you apart."

  "All on gray horses," Roland mused. "Every one of em the same color. What else?"

  Nothing, it seemed. It was all told. They came out of the east on the day Andy foretold, and for a terrible hour-perhaps longer-the Calla was filled with the thunderous hoofbeats of those gray horses and the screams of desolated parents. Green cloaks swirled. Wolf-masks that looked like metal and rotted in the sun like skin snarled. The children were taken. Sometimes a few pair were overlooked and left whole, suggesting that the Wolves' prescience wasn't perfect. Still, it must have been pretty goddam good, Eddie thought, because if the kids were moved (as they often were) or hidden at home (as they almost always were), the Wolves found them anyway, and in short order. Even at the bottom of sharproot piles or haystacks they were found. Those of the Calla who tried to stand against them were shot, fried by the light-sticks-lasers of some kind?-or cut to pieces by the flying drones. When trying to imagine these latter, he kept recalling a bloody little film Henry had dragged him to. Phantasm, it had been called. Down at the old Majestic. Corner of Brooklyn and Markey Avenue. Like too much of his old life, the Majestic had smelled of piss and popcorn and the kind of wine that came in brown bags. Sometimes there were needles in the aisles. Not good, maybe, and yet sometimes-usually at night, when sleep was long in coming-a deep part of him still cried for the old life of which the Majestic had been a part. Cried for it as a stolen child might cry for his mother.

  The children were taken, the hoofbeats receded the way they had come, and that was the end of it.

  "No, can't be," Jake said. "They must bring them back, don't they?"

  "No," Overholser said. "The roont ones come back on the train, hear me, there's a great junkpile of em I could show'ee, and-What? What's wrong?" Jake's mouth had fallen open, and he'd lost most of his color.

  "We had a bad experience on a train not so very long ago," Susannah said. "The trains that bring your children back, are they monos?"

  They weren't. Overholser, the Jaffords, and the Slightmans had no idea what a mono was, in fact. (Callahan, who had been to Disneyland as a teenager, did.) The trains which brought the children back were hauled by plain old locomotives (hopefully none of them named Charlie, Eddie thought), driverless and attached to one or perhaps two open flatcars. The children were huddled on these. When they arrived they were usually crying with fear (from sunburns as well, if the weather west of Thunderclap was hot and clear), covered with food and their own drying shit, and dehydrated into the bargain. There was no station at the railhead, although Overholser opined there might have been, centuries before. Once the children had been offloaded, team
s of horses were used to pull the short trains from the rusty railhead. It occurred to Eddie that they could figure out the number of times the Wolves had come by counting the number of junked engines, sort of like figuring out the age of a tree by counting the rings on the stump.

  "How long a trip for them, would you guess?" Roland asked. "Judging from their condition when they arrive?"

  Overholser looked at Slightman, then at Tian and Zalia. "Two days? Three?"

  They shrugged and nodded.

  "Two or three days," Overholser said to Roland, speaking with more confidence than was perhaps warranted, judging from the looks of the others. "Long enough for sunburns, and to eat most of the rations they're left-"

  "Or paint themselves with em," Slightman grunted.

  "-but not long enough to die of exposure," Overholser finished. "If ye'd judge from that how far they were taken from the Calla, all I can say is I wish'eejoy of the riddle, for no one knows what speed the train draws when it's crossing the plains. It comes slow and stately enough to the far side of the river, but that means little."

  "No," Roland agreed, "it doesn't." He considered. "Twenty-seven days left?"

  "Twenty-six now," Callahan said quietly.

  "One thing, Roland," Overholser said. He spoke apologetically, but his jaw was jutting. Eddie thought he'd backslid to the kind of guy you could dislike on sight. If you had a problem with authority figures, that was, and Eddie always had.

  Roland raised his eyebrows in silent question.

  "We haven't said yes." Overholser glanced at Slightman the Elder, as if for support, and Slightman nodded agreement.

  "Ye must ken we have no way of knowing y'are who you say y'are," Slightman said, rather apologetically. "My family had no books growing up, and there's none out at the ranch-I'm foreman of Eisenhart's Rocking B-except for the stockline books, but growing up I heard as many tales of Gilead and gunslingers and Arthur Eld as any other boy… heard of Jericho Hill and such blood-and-thunder tales of pretend… but I never heard of a gunslinger missing two of his fingers, or a brown-skinned woman gunslinger, or one who won't be old enough to shave for years yet."