"At 4:19, a young man in a striped shirt and tie that looked just oh so Hugo Boss came out and got us. We were whisked down a corridor past some very upscale offices--with an upscale executive beavering away in every one, so far as I could see--and to double doors at the end of the hall. This was marked CONFERENCE ROOM. Our escort opened the doors. He said, 'God luck, gentlemen.' I remember that very clearly. Not good luck, but god luck. That was when my perimeter alarms started to go off, and by then it was far too late. It happened fast, you see. They didn't . . . "
SIXTEEN
It happens fast. They have been after Callahan for a long time now, but they waste little time gloating. The doors slam shut behind them, much too loudly and hard enough to shiver in their frames. Executive assistants who drag down eighteen thousand a year to start with close doors a certain way--with respect for money and power--and this isn't it. This is the way angry drunks and addicts on the jones close doors. Also crazy people, of course. Crazy people are ace doorslammers.
Callahan's alarm systems are fully engaged now, not pinging but howling, and when he looks around the executive conference room, dominated at the far end by a large window giving a terrific view of Lake Michigan, he sees there's good reason for this and has time to think Dear Christ--Mary, mother of God--how could I have been so foolish? He can see thirteen people in the room. Three are low men, and this is his first good look at their heavy, unhealthy-looking faces, red-glinting eyes, and full, womanish lips. All three are smoking. Nine are Type Three vampires. The thirteenth person in the conference room is wearing a loud shirt and clashing tie, low-men attire for certain, but his face has a lean and foxy look, full of intelligence and dark humor. On his brow is a red circle of blood that seems neither to ooze nor to clot.
There is a bitter crackling sound. Callahan wheels and sees Al and Ward drop to the floor. Standing to either side of the door through which they entered are numbers fourteen and fifteen, a low man and a low woman, both of them holding electrical stunners.
"Your friends will be all right, Father Callahan."
He whirls around again. It's the man with the blood-spot on his forehead. He looks about sixty, but it's hard to tell. He's wearing a garish yellow shirt and a red tie. When his thin lips part in a smile, they reveal teeth that come to points. It's Sayre, Callahan thinks. Sayre, or whoever signed that letter. Whoever thought this little sting up.
"You, however, won't," he continues.
The low men look at him with a kind of dull avidity: here he is, finally, their lost pooch with the burned paw and the scarred forehead. The vampires are more interested. They almost thrum within their blue auras. And all at once Callahan can hear the chimes. They're faint, somehow damped down, but they're there. Calling him.
Sayre--if that's his name--turns to the vampires. "He's the one," he says in a matter-of-fact tone. "He's killed hundreds of you in a dozen versions of America. My friends"--he gestures to the low men--"were unable to track him down, but of course they seek other, less suspecting prey in the ordinary course of things. In any case, he's here now. Go on, have at him. But don't kill him!"
He turns to Callahan. The hole in his forehead fills and gleams but never drips. It's an eye, Callahan thinks, a bloody eye. What is looking out of it? What is watching, and from where?
Sayre says, "These particular friends of the King all carry the AIDS virus. You surely know what I mean, don't you? We'll let that kill you. It will take you out of the game forever, in this world and all the others. This is no game for a fellow like you, anyway. A false priest like you."
Callahan doesn't hesitate. If he hesitates, he will be lost. It's not AIDS he's afraid of, but of letting them put their filthy lips on him in the first place, to kiss him as the one was kissing Lupe Delgado in the alley. They don't get to win. After all the way he's come, after all the jobs, all the jail cells, after finally getting sober in Kansas, they don't get to win.
He doesn't try to reason with them. There is no palaver. He just sprints down the right side of the conference room's extravagant mahogany table. The man in the yellow shirt, suddenly alarmed, shouts "Get him! Get him!" Hands slap at his jacket--specially bought at Grand River Menswear for this auspicious occasion--but slip off. He has time to think The window won't break, it's made of some tough glass, anti-suicide glass, and it won't break . . . and he has just time enough to call on God for the first time since Barlow forced him to take of his poisoned blood.
"Help me! Please help me!" Father Callahan cries, and runs shoulder-first into the window. One more hand slaps at his head, tries to tangle itself in his hair, and then it is gone. The window shatters all around him and suddenly he is standing in cold air, surrounded by flurries of snow. He looks down between black shoes which were also specially purchased for this auspicious occasion, and he sees Michigan Avenue, with cars like toys and people like ants.
He has a sense of them--Sayre and the low men and the vampires who were supposed to infect him and take him out of the game forever--clustered at the broken window, staring with disbelief.
He thinks, This does take me out of it forever . . . doesn't it?
And he thinks, with the wonder of a child: This is the last thought I'll ever have. This is goodbye.
Then he is falling.
SEVENTEEN
Callahan stopped and looked at Jake, almost shyly. "Do you remember it?" he asked. "The actual . . . " He cleared his throat. "The dying?"
Jake nodded gravely. "You don't?"
"I remember looking at Michigan Avenue from between my new shoes. I remember the sensation of standing there--seeming to, anyway--in the middle of a snow flurry. I remember Sayre behind me, yelling in some other language. Cursing. Words that guttural just about had to be curses. And I remember thinking, He's frightened. That was actually my last thought, that Sayre was frightened. Then there was an interval of darkness. I floated. I could hear the chimes, but they were distant. Then they came closer. As if they were mounted on some engine that was rushing toward me at terrible speed.
"There was light. I saw light in the darkness. I thought I was having the Kubler-Ross death experience, and I went toward it. I didn't care where I came out, as long as it wasn't on Michigan Avenue, all smashed and bleeding, with a crowd standing around me. But I didn't see how that could happen. You don't fall thirty-three stories, then regain consciousness.
"And I wanted to get away from the chimes. They kept getting louder. My eyes started to water. My ears hurt. I was glad I still had eyes and ears, but the chimes made any gratitude I might have felt pretty academic.
"I thought, I have to get into the light, and I lunged for it. I . . . "
EIGHTEEN
He opens his eyes, but even before he does, he is aware of a smell. It's the smell of hay, but very faint, almost exhausted. A ghost of its former self, you might say. And he? Is he a ghost?
He sits up and looks around. If this is the afterlife, then all the holy books of the world, including the one from which he himself used to preach, are wrong. Because he's not in heaven or hell; he's in a stable. There are white wisps of ancient straw on the floor. There are cracks in the board walls through which brilliant light streams. It's the light he followed out of the darkness, he thinks. And he thinks, It's desert light. Is there any concrete reason to think so? Perhaps. The air is dry when he pulls it into his nostrils. It's like drawing the air of a different planet.
Maybe it is, he thinks. Maybe this is the Planet Afterlife.
The chimes are still there, both sweet and horrible, but now fading . . . fading . . . and gone. He hears the faint snuffle of hot wind. Some of it finds its way through the gaps between the boards, and a few bits of straw lift off from the floor, do a tired little dance, then settle back.
Now there is another noise. An arrhythmic thudding noise. Some machine, and not in the best of shape, from the sound. He stands up. It's hot in here, and sweat breaks immediately on his face and hands. He looks down at himself and sees his fine new Grand Rive
r Menswear clothes are gone. He is now wearing jeans and a blue chambray shirt, faded thin from many washings. On his feet is a pair of battered boots with rundown heels. They look like they have walked many a thirsty mile. He bends and feels his legs for breaks. There appear to be none. Then his arms. None. He tries snapping his fingers. They do the job easily, making little dry sounds like breaking twigs.
He thinks: Was my whole life a dream? Is this the reality? If so, who am I and what am I doing here?
And from the deeper shadows behind him comes that weary cycling sound: thud-THUD-thud-THUD-thud-THUD.
He turns in that direction, and gasps at what he sees. Standing behind him in the middle of the abandoned stable is a door. It's set into no wall, only stands free. It has hinges, but as far as he can see they connect the door to nothing but air. Hieroglyphs are etched upon it halfway up. He cannot read them. He steps closer, as if that would aid understanding. And in a way it does. Because he sees that the doorknob is made of crystal, and etched upon it is a rose. He has read his Thomas Wolfe: a stone, a rose, an unfound door; a stone, a rose, a door. There's no stone, but perhaps that is the meaning of the hieroglyph.
No, he thinks. No, the word is UNFOUND. Maybe I'm the stone.
He reaches out and touches the crystal knob. As though it were a signal
(a sigul, he thinks)
the thudding machinery ceases. Very faint, very distant--far and wee--he hears the chimes. He tries the knob. It moves in neither direction. There's not even the slightest give. It might as well be set in concrete. When he takes his hand away, the sound of the chimes ceases.
He walks around the door and the door is gone. Walks the rest of the way around and it's back. He makes three slow circles, noting the exact point at which the thickness of the door disappears on one side and reappears on the other. He reverses his course, now going widdershins. Same deal. What the hell?
He looks at the door for several moments, pondering, then walks deeper into the stable, curious about the machine he heard. There's no pain when he walks, if he just took a long fall his body hasn't yet got the news, but Kee-rist is it ever hot in here!
There are horse stalls, long abandoned. There's a pile of ancient hay, and beside it a neatly folded blanket and what looks like a breadboard. On the board is a single scrap of dried meat. He picks it up, sniffs it, smells salt. Jerky, he thinks, and pops it into his mouth. He's not very worried about being poisoned. How can you poison a man who's already dead?
Chewing, he continues his explorations. At the rear of the stable is a small room like an afterthought. There are a few chinks in the walls of this room, too, enough for him to see a machine squatting on a concrete pad. Everything in the stable whispers of long years and abandonment, but this gadget, which looks sort of like a milking machine, appears brand new. No rust, no dust. He goes closer. There's a chrome pipe jutting from one side. Beneath it is a drain. The steel collar around it looks damp. On top of the machine is a small metal plate. Next to the plate is a red button. Stamped on the plate is this:
LaMERK INDUSTRIES
834789-AA-45-776019
DO NOT REMOVE SLUG
ASK FOR ASSISTANCE
The red button is stamped with the word ON. Callahan pushes it. The weary thudding sound resumes, and after a moment water gushes from the chrome pipe. He puts his hands under it. The water is numbingly cold, shocking his overheated skin. He drinks. The water is neither sweet nor sour and he thinks, Such things as taste must be for gotten at great depths. This--
"Hello, Faddah."
Callahan screams in surprise. His hands fly up and for a moment jewels of water sparkle in a dusty sunray falling between two shrunken boards. He wheels around on the eroded heels of his boots. Standing just outside the door of the pump-room is a man in a hooded robe.
Sayre, he thinks. It's Sayre, he's followed me, he came through that damn door--
"Calm down," says the man in the robe. "'Cool your jets,' as the gunslinger's new friend might say." Confidingly: "His name is Jake, but the housekeeper calls him 'Bama." And then, in the bright tone of one just struck by a fine idea, he says, "I would show him to you! Both of them! Perhaps it's not too late! Come!" He holds out a hand. The fingers emerging from the robe's sleeve are long and white, somehow unpleasant. Like wax. When Callahan makes no move to come forward, the man in the robe speaks reasonably. "Come. You can't stay here, you know. This is only a way station, and nobody stays here for long. Come."
"Who are you?"
The man in the robe makes an impatient tsking sound. "No time for all that, Faddah. Name, name, what's in a name, as someone or other said. Shakespeare? Virginia Woolf? Who can remember? Come, and I'll show you a wonder. And I won't touch you; I'll walk ahead of you. See?"
He turns. His robe swirls like the skirt of an evening dress. He walks back into the stable, and after a moment Callahan follows. The pump-room is no good to him, after all; the pump-room is a dead end. Outside the stable, he might be able to run.
Run where?
Well, that's to see, isn't it?
The man in the robe raps on the free-standing door as he passes it. "Knock on wood, Donnie be good!" he says merrily, and as he steps into the brilliant rectangle of light falling through the stable door, Callahan sees he's carrying something in his left hand. It's a box, perhaps a foot long and wide and deep. It looks like it might be made of the same wood as the door. Or perhaps it's a heavier version of that wood. Certainly it's darker, and even closer-grained.
Watching the robed man carefully, meaning to stop if he stops, Callahan follows into the sun. The heat is even stronger once he's in the light, the sort of heat he's felt in Death Valley. And yes, as they step out of the stable he sees that they are in a desert. Off to one side is a ramshackle building that rises from a foundation of crumbling sandstone blocks. It might once have been an inn, he supposes. Or an abandoned set from a Western movie. On the other side is a corral where most of the posts and rails have fallen. Beyond it he sees miles of rocky, stony sand. Nothing else but--
Yes! Yes, there is something! Two somethings! Two tiny moving dots at the far horizon!
"You see them! How excellent your eyes must be, Faddah!"
The man in the robe--it's black, his face within the hood nothing but a pallid suggestion--stands about twenty paces from him. He titters. Callahan cares for the sound no more than for the waxy look of his fingers. It's like the sound of mice scampering over bones. That makes no actual sense, but--
"Who are they?" Callahan asks in a dry voice. "Who are you? Where is this place?"
The man in black sighs theatrically. "So much back-story, so little time," he says. "Call me Walter, if you like. As for this place, it's a way station, just as I told you. A little rest stop between the hoot of your world and the holler of the next. Oh, you thought you were quite the far wanderer, didn't you? Following all those hidden highways of yours? But now, Faddah, you're on a real journey."
"Stop calling me that!" Callahan shouts. His throat is already dry. The sunny heat seems to be accumulating on top of his head like actual weight.
"Faddah, Faddah, Faddah!" the man in black says. He sounds petulant, but Callahan knows he's laughing inside. He has an idea this man--if he is a man--spends a great deal of time laughing on the inside. "Oh well, no need to be pissy about it, I suppose. I'll call you Don. Do you like that better?"
The black specks in the distance are wavering now; the rising thermals cause them to levitate, disappear, then reappear again. Soon they'll be gone for good.
"Who are they?" he asks the man in black.
"Folks you'll almost certainly never meet," the man in black says dreamily. The hood shifts; for a moment Callahan can see the waxy blade of a nose and the curve of an eye, a small cup filled with dark fluid. "They'll die under the mountains. If they don't die under the mountains, there are things in the Western Sea that will eat them alive. Dod-a-chock!" He laughs again. But--
But all at once you don't sound complet
ely sure of yourself, my friend, Callahan thinks.
"If all else fails," Walter says, "this will kill them." He raises the box. Again, faintly, Callahan hears the unpleasant ripple of the chimes. "And who will bring it to them? Ka, of course, yet even ka needs a friend, a kai-mai. That would be you."
"I don't understand."
"No," the man in black agrees sadly, "and I don't have time to explain. Like the White Rabbit in Alice, I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date. They're following me, you see, but I needed to double back and talk to you. Busy-busy-busy! Now I must get ahead of them again--how else will I draw them on? You and I, Don, must be done with our palaver, regrettably short though it has been. Back into the stable with you, amigo. Quick as a bunny!"
"What if I don't want to?" Only there's really no what-if about it. He's never wanted to go anyplace less. Suppose he asks this fellow to let him go and try to catch up with those wavering specks? What if he tells the man in black, "That's where I'm supposed to be, where what you call ka wants me to be"? He guesses he knows. Might as well spit in the ocean.
As if to confirm this, Walter says, "What you want hardly matters. You'll go where the King decrees, and there you will wait. If yon two die on their course--as they almost certainly must--you will live a life of rural serenity in the place to which I send you, and there you too will die, full of years and possibly with a false but undoubtedly pleasing sense of redemption. You'll live on your level of the Tower long after I'm bone-dust on mine. This I promise you, Faddah, for I have seen it in the glass, say true! And if they keep coming? If they reach you in the place to which you are going? Why, in that unlikely case you'll aid them in every way you can and kill them by doing so. It's a mind-blower, isn't it? Wouldn't you say it's a mind-blower?"
He begins to walk toward Callahan. Callahan backs toward the stable where the unfound door awaits. He doesn't want to go there, but there's nowhere else. "Get away from me," he says.