"Roland?" Eddie tried to keep the irritation out of his voice, or at least add a little spark of humor to it, and
failed at both. "Are we boring you, here?"
"No," Roland said.
"Then I wish you'd stop looking at those books and help me think of a way to open this d—"
"I know how to open it," Roland said. "The first question is where will it take us now that the ball is gone?
The second question is where do we want to go? After Mia, or to the place where Tower and his friend are
hiding from Balazar and his friends?"
"We go after Susannah!" Eddie shouted. "Have you been listening to any of the shit those voices are saying?
They're saying it's a cannibal! My wife could be giving birth to some kind of a cannibal monster right now,
and if you think anything's more important than that—"
"The Tower's more important," Roland said. "And somewhere on the other side of this door there's a man
whose name is Tower. A man who owns a certain vacant lot and a certain rose growing there."
Eddie looked at him uncertainly. So did Jake and Callahan. Roland turned again to the little bookcase. It
looked strange indeed, here in this rocky darkness.
"And he owns these books," Roland mused. "He risked all things to save them."
"Yeah, because he's one obsessed motherfucker."
"Yet all things serve ka and follow the Beam," Roland said, and selected a volume from the upper shelf of the
bookcase. Eddie saw it had been placed in there upside down, which struck him as a very un-Calvin Tower
thing to do.
Roland held the book in his seamed, weather-chapped hands, seeming to debate which one to give it to. He
looked at Eddie… looked at Callahan… and then gave the book to Jake.
"Read me what it says on the front," he said. "The words of your world make my head hurt. They swim to my
eye easily enough, but when I reach my mind toward them, most swim away again."
Jake was paying little attention; his eyes were riveted on the book jacket with its picture of a little country
church at sunset. Callahan, meanwhile, had stepped past him in order to get a closer look at the door standing
here in the gloomy cave. At last the boy looked up. "But… Roland, isn't this the town Pere Callahan told us
about? The one where the vampire broke his cross and made him drink his blood?"
Callahan whirled away from the door. "What?"
Jake held the book out wordlessly. Callahan took it. Almost snatched it.
" 'Salem's Lot" he read. "A novel by Stephen King." He looked up at Eddie, then at Jake. "Heard of him?
Either of you? He's not from my time, I don't think."
Jake shook his head. Eddie began to shake his, as well, and then he saw something. "That church," he said.
"It looks like the Calla Gathering Hall. Close enough to be its twin, almost."
"It also looks like the East Stoneham Methodist Meeting Hall, built in 1819," Callahan said, "so I guess this
time we've got a case of triplets." But his voice sounded faraway to his own ears, as hollow as the false
voices which floated up from the bottom of the cave. All at once he felt false to himself, not real. He felt
nineteen.
SIX
It's a joke, part of his mind assured him. It must be a joke, the cover of this book says it's a novel, so—
Then an idea struck him, and he felt a surge of relief. It was conditional relief, but surely better than none at
all. The idea was that sometimes people wrote make-believe stories about real places. That was it, surely. Had
to be.
"Look at page one hundred and nineteen," Roland said. "I could make out a little of it, but not all. Not nearly
enough."
Callahan found the page, and read this:
" 'In the early days at the seminary, a friend of Father…' " He trailed off, eyes racing ahead over the words on
the page.
"Go on," Eddie said. "You read it, Father, or I will."
Slowly, Callahan resumed.
" '… a friend of Father Callahan's had given him a blasphemous crewelwork sampler which had sent him into
gales of horrified laughter at the time, but which seemed more true and less blasphemous as the years passed:
God grant me the SERENITY to accept what I cannot change, the TENACITY to change what I may, and the
GOOD LUCK not to fuck up too often. This in Old English script with a rising sun in the background.
" 'Now, standing before Danny Glick's… Danny Glick's mourners, that old credo… that old credo returned.' "
The hand holding the book sagged. If Jake hadn't caught it, it probably would have tumbled to the floor of the
cave.
"You had it, didn't you?" Eddie said. "You actually had a sampler saying that."
"Frankie Foyle gave it to me," Callahan said. His voice was hardly more than a whisper. "Back in seminary.
And Danny Glick… I officiated at his funeral, I think I told you that. That was when everything seemed to
change, somehow. But this is a novel! A novel is fiction! How… how can it…" His voice suddenly rose to a
damned howl. To Roland it sounded eerily like the false voices that rose up from below. "Damn it, I'm a
REAL PERSON!"
"Here's the part where the vampire broke your cross," Jake reported. " ' "Together at last!" Barlow said,
smiling. His face was strong and intelligent and handsome in a sharp, forbidding sort of way—yet, as the
light shifted, it seemed—' "
"Stop," Callahan said dully. "It makes my head hurt."
"It says his face reminded you of the bogeyman who lived in your closet when you were a kid. Mr. Flip."
Callahan's face was now so pale he might have been a vampire's victim himself. "I never told anyone about
Mr. Flip, not even my mother. That can't be in that book. It just can't be."
"It is," Jake said simply.
"Let's get this straight," Eddie said. "When you were a kid, there was a Mr. Flip, and you did think of him
when you faced this particular Type One vampire, Barlow. Correct?"
"Yes, but—"
Eddie turned to the gunslinger. "Is this getting us any closer to Susannah, do you think?"
"Yes. We've reached the heart of a great mystery. Perhaps the great mystery. I believe the Dark Tower is
almost close enough to touch. And if the Tower is close, Susannah is, too."
Ignoring him, Callahan was flipping through the book. Jake was looking over his shoulder.
"And you know how to open that door?" Eddie pointed at
"Yes," Roland said. "I'd need help, but I think the people of Calla Bryn Sturgis owe us a little help, don't
you?"
Eddie nodded. "All right, then, let me tell you this much: I'm pretty sure I have seen the name Stephen King
before, at least once."
"On the Specials board," Jake said without looking up from the book. "Yeah, I remember. It was on the
Specials board the first time we went todash."
"Specials board?" Roland asked, frowning.
"Tower's Specials board," Eddie said. "It was in the window, remember? Part of his whole Restaurant-of-the-
Mind thing."
Roland nodded.
"But I'll tell you guys something," Jake said, and now he did look up from the book. "The name was there
when Eddie and I went todash, but it wasn't on the board the first time I went in there. The time Mr.
Deepneau told me the river riddle, it was someone else's name. It changed, just like the name of the writer on
Charlie the Choo-Choo."
"I can't be in a book," Callahan was saying. "I am not a fiction… am I?"
"Roland." It was Eddie. The gunslinger turned to him. "I need to find her. I don't care who's real and who's
not. I don't care about Calvin Tower, Stephen King, or the Pope of Rome. As far as reality goes, she's all of it
I want. I need to find my wife.'" His voice dropped. "Help me, Roland."
Roland reached out and took the book in his left hand. With his right he touched the door. If she's still alive,
he thought. If we can find her, and if she's come back to herself. If and if and if.
Eddie took Roland's arm. "Please," he said. "Please don't make me try to do it on my own. I love her so
much. Help me find her."
Roland smiled. It made him younger. It seemed to fill the cave with its own light. All of Eld's ancient power
was in that smile: the power of the White.
"Yes," he said. "We go."
And then he said again, all the affirmation necessary in this dark place.
"Yes."
Bangor, Maine December 15, 2002
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Author's Note
The debt I owe to the American Western in the composition of the Dark Tower novels should be clear without
my belaboring the point; certainly the Calla did not come by the final part of its (slightly misspelled) name
accidentally. Yet it should be pointed out that at least two sources for some of this material aren't American at
all. Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, etc.)
was Italian. And Akira Kurosawa (The Seven Samurai) was, of course, Japanese. Would these books have
been written without the cinematic legacy of Kurosawa, Leone, Peckinpah, Howard Hawkes, and John
Sturgis? Probably not without Leone. But without the others, I would argue there could be no Leone.
I also owe a debt of thanks to Robin Furth, who managed to be there with the right bit of information every
time I needed it, and of course to my wife, Tabitha, who is still patiently giving me the time and light and
space I need to do this job to the best of my abilities.
S.K
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Author's Afterword
Before you read this short afterword, I ask that you take a moment (may it do ya fine) to look again at the
dedication page at the front of this story. I'll wait.
Thank you. I want you to know that Frank Muller has read a number of my books for the audio market,
beginning with Different Seasons. I met him at Recorded Books in New York at that time and we liked each
other immediately. It's a friendship that has lasted longer than some of my readers have been alive. In the
course of our association, Frank recorded the first four Dark Tower novels, and I listened to them—all sixty
or so cassettes— while preparing to finish the gunslinger's story. Audio is the perfect medium for such
exhaustive preparation, because audio insists you absorb everything; your hurrying eye (or occasionally tired
mind) cannot skip so much as a single word. That was what I wanted, complete immersion in Roland's world,
and that was what Frank gave me. He gave me something more, as well, something wonderful and
unexpected. It was a sense of newness and freshness that I had lost somewhere along the way; a sense of
Roland and Roland's friends as actual people, with their own vital inner lives. When I say in the dedication
that Frank heard the voices in my head, I am speaking the literal truth as I understand it. And, like a rather
more benign version of the Doorway Cave, he brought them fully back to life. The remaining books are
finished (this one in final draft, the last two in rough), and in large part I owe that to Frank Muller and his
inspired readings.
I had hoped to have Frank on board to do the audio readings of the final three Dark Tower books (unabridged
readings; I do not allow abridgments of my work and don't approve of them, as a rule), and he was eager to
do them. We discussed the possibility at a dinner in Bangor during October of 2001, and in the course of the
conversation, he called the Tower stories his absolute favorites. As he had read over five hundred novels for
the audio market, I was extremely flattered.
Less than a month after that dinner and that optimistic, forward-looking discussion, Frank suffered a terrible
motorcycle accident on a highway in California. It happened only days after discovering that he was to
become a father for the second time. He was wearing his brain-bucket and that probably saved his life—
motorcyclists please take note—but he suffered serious injuries nevertheless, many of them neurological. He
won't be recording the final Dark Tower novel on tape, after all. Frank's final work will almost certainly be
his inspired reading of Clive Barker's Coldheart Canyon, which was completed in September of 2001, just
before his accident.
Barring a miracle, Frank Muller's working life is over. His work of rehabilitation, which is almost sure to be
lifelong, has only begun. He'll need a lot of care and a lot of professional help. Such things cost money, and
money's not a thing which, as a rule, freelance artists have a great deal of. I and some friends have formed a
foundation to help Frank—and, hopefully, other freelance artists of various types who suffer similar
cataclysms. All the income I receive from the audio version of Wolves of the Calla will go into this
foundation's account. It won't be enough, but the work of funding The Wavedancer Foundation (Wavedancer
was the name of Frank's sailboat), like Frank's rehabilitative work, is only beginning. If you've got a few
bucks that aren't working and want to help insure the future of The Wavedancer Foundation, don't send them
to me; send them to
The Wavedancer Foundation
c/o Mr. Arthur Greene
101 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10001
Frank's wife, Erika, says thankya. So do I.
And Frank would, if he could.
Bangor, Maine December 15, 2002
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Copyright
Do not quote for publication until verified with
finished book. This advance uncorrected reader's
proof is the property of Simon & Schuster. It is being
