"What kind of shop was Home?" Roland asked.
"Not a shop at all. A shelter. A wet shelter. I can't say for sure that it was the only one in Manhattan, but I bet
it was one of the very few. I didn't know much about shelters then—just a little bit from my first parish—but
as time went by, I learned a great deal. I saw the system from both sides. There were times when I was the
guy who ladled out the soup at six p.m. and passed out the blankets at nine; at other times I was the guy who
drank the soup and slept under the blankets. After a head-check for lice, of course.
"There are shelters that won't let you in if they smell booze on your breath. And there are ones where they'll
let you in if you claim you're at least two hours downstream from your last drink. There are places—a few—
that'll let you in pissyassed drunk, as long as they can search you at the door and get rid of all your hooch.
Once that's taken care of, they put you in a special locked room with the rest of the low-bottom guys. You
can't slip out to get another drink if you change your mind, and you can't scare the folks who are less soaked
than you are if you get the dt's and start seeing bugs come out of the walls. No women allowed in the lockup;
they're too apt to get raped. It's just one of the reasons more homeless women die in the streets than homeless
men. That's what Lupe used to say."
"Lupe?" Eddie asked.
"I'll get to him, but for now, suffice it to say that he was the architect of Home's alcohol policy. At Home,
they kept the booze in lockup, not the drunks. You could get a shot if you needed one, and if you promised to
be quiet. Plus a sedative chaser. This isn't recommended medical procedure—I'm not even sure it was legal,
since neither Lupe nor Rowan Magruder were doctors—but it seemed to work. I came in sober on a busy
night, and Lupe put me to work. I worked free for the first couple of days, and then Rowan called me into his
office, which was roughly the size of a broom closet. He asked me if I was an alcoholic. I said no. He asked
me if I was wanted by the police. I said no. He asked if I was on the run from anything. I said yes, from
myself. He asked me if I wanted to work, and I started to cry. He took that as a yes.
"I spent the next nine months—until June of 1976—working at Home. I made the beds, I cooked in the
kitchen, I went on fund-raising calls with Lupe or sometimes Rowan, I took drunks to AA meetings in the
Home van, I gave shots of booze to guys that were shaking too badly to hold the glasses themselves. I took
over the books because I was better at it than Magruder or Lupe or any of the other guys who worked there.
Those weren't the happiest days of my life, I'd never go that far, and the taste of Barlow's blood never left my
mouth, but they were days of grace. I didn't think a lot. I just kept my head down and did whatever I was
asked to do. I started to heal.
"Sometime during that winter, I realized that I'd started to change. It was as if I'd developed a kind of sixth
sense. Sometimes I heard chiming bells. Horrible, yet at the same time sweet. Sometimes, when I was on the
street, things would start to look dark even if the sun was shining. I can remember looking down to see if my
shadow was still there. I'd be positive it wouldn't be, but it always was."
Roland's ka-tet exchanged a glance.
"Sometimes there was an olfactory element to these fugues. It was a bitter smell, like strong onions all mixed
with hot metal. I began to suspect that I had developed a form of epilepsy."
"Did you see a doctor?" Susannah asked.
"I did not. I was afraid of what else he might find. A brain tumor seemed most likely. What I did was keep
my head down and keep working. And then one night I went to a movie in Times Square. It was a revival of
two Clint Eastwood Westerns. What they used to call Spaghetti Westerns?"
"Yeah," Eddie said.
"I started hearing the bells. The chimes. And smelling that smell, stronger than ever. All this was coming
from in front of me, and to the left. I looked there and saw two men, one rather elderly, the other younger.
They were easy enough to pick out, because the place was three-quarters empty. The younger man leaned
close to the older man. The older man never took his eyes off the screen, but he put his arm around the
younger man's shoulders. If I'd seen that on any other night, I would have been pretty positive what was
going on, but not that night. I watched. And I started to see a kind of dark blue light, first just around the
younger man, then around both of them. It was like no other light I'd ever seen. It was like the darkness I felt
sometimes on the street, when the chimes started to play in my head. Like the smell. You knew those things
weren't there, and yet they were. And I understood. I didn't accept it—that came later—but I understood. The
younger man was a vampire."
He stopped, thinking about how to tell his tale. How to lay it out.
"I believe there are at least three types of vampires at work in our world. I call them Types One, Two, and
Three. Type Ones are rare. Barlow was a Type One. They live very long lives, and may spend extended
periods—fifty years, a hundred, maybe two hundred—in deep hibernation. When they're active, they're
capable of making new vampires, what we call the undead. These undead are Type Twos. They are also
capable of making new vampires, but they aren't cunning." He looked at Eddie and Susannah. "Have you
seen Night of the Living Dead?"
Susannah shook her head. Eddie nodded.
"The undead in that movie were zombies, utterly brain-dead. Type Two vampires are more intelligent than
that, but not much. They can't go out during the daylight hours. If they try, they are blinded, badly burned, or
killed. Although I can't say for sure, I believe their life-spans are usually short. Not because the change from
living and human to undead and vampire shortens life, but because the existences of Type Two vampires are
extremely perilous.
"In most cases—this is what I believe, not what I know—Type Two vampires create other Type Two
vampires, in a relatively small area. By this phase of the disease—and it is a disease—the Type One vampire,
the king vampire, has usually moved on. In 'Salem's Lot, they actually killed the son of a bitch, one of what
might have been only a dozen in the entire world.
"In other cases, Type Twos create Type Threes. Type Threes are like mosquitoes. They can't create more
vampires, but they can feed. And feed. And feed."
"Do they catch AIDS?" Eddie asked. "I mean, you know what that is, right?"
"I know, although I never heard the term until the spring of 1983, when I was working at the Lighthouse
Shelter in Detroit and my time in America had grown short. Of course we'd known for almost ten years that
there was something. Some of the literature called it GRID—Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. In 1982 there
started to be newspaper articles about a new disease called 'Gay Cancer,' and speculations that it might be
catching. On the street some of the men called it Fucksore Disease, after the blemishes it left. I don't believe
that vampires die of it, or even get sick from it. But they can have it. And they can pass it on. Oh, yes. And I
have reason to think that." Callahan's lips quivered, then firmed.
"When this vampire-demon made you drink his blood, he gave you the ability to see these things," Roland
said.
"Yes."
"All of them, or just the Threes? The little ones?"
"The little ones," Callahan mused, then voiced a brief and humorless laugh. "Yes. I like that. In any case,
Threes are all I've ever seen, at least since leaving Jerusalem's Lot. But of course Type Ones like Barlow are
very rare, and Type Twos don't last long. Their very hunger undoes them. They're always ravenous. Type
Threes, however, can go out in daylight. And they take their principal sustenance from food, just as we do."
"What did you do that night?" Susannah asked. "In the theater?"
"Nothing," Callahan said. "My whole time in New York— my first time in New York—I did nothing until
April. I wasn't sure, you see. I mean, my heart was sure, but my head refused to go along. And all the time,
there was interference from the most simple thing of all: I was a dry alcoholic. An alcoholic is also a
vampire, and that part of me was getting thirstier and thirstier, while the rest of me was trying to deny my
essential nature. So I told myself I'd seen a couple of homosexuals canoodling in the movies, nothing more
than that. As for the rest of it—the chimes, the smell, the dark-blue light around the young one—I convinced
myself it was epilepsy, or a holdover from what Barlow had done to me, or both. And of course about Barlow
I was right His blood was awake inside me. It saw."
"It was more than that," Roland said.
Callahan turned to him.
"You went todash, Pere. Something was calling you from this world. The thing in your church, I suspect,
although it would not have been in your church when you first knew of it."
"No," Callahan said. He was regarding Roland with wary respect. "It was not. How do you know? Tell me, I
beg."
Roland did not. "Go on," he said. "What happened to you next?"
"Lupe happened next," Callahan said.
NINE
His last name was Delgado.
Roland registered only a moment of surprise at this—a widening of the eyes—but Eddie and Susannah knew
the gunslinger well enough to understand that even this was extraordinary. At the same time they had become
almost used to these coincidences that could not possibly be coincidences, to the feeling that each one was
the click of some great turning cog.
Lupe Delgado was thirty-two, an alcoholic almost five one-day-at-a-time years from his last drink, and had
been working at Home since 1974. Magruder had founded the place, but it was Lupe Delgado who invested it
with real life and purpose. During his days, he was part of the maintenance crew at the Plaza Hotel, on Fifth
Avenue. Nights, he worked at the shelter. He had helped to craft Home's "wet" policy, and had been the first
person to greet Callahan when he walked in.
"I was in New York a little over a year that first time," Callahan said, "but by March of 1976, I had…" He
paused, struggling to say what all three of them understood from the look on his face. His skin had flushed
rosy except for where the scar lay; that seemed to glow an almost preternatural white by comparison.
"Oh, okay, I suppose you'd say that by March I'd fallen in love with him. Does that make me a queer? A
faggot? I don't know. They say we all are, don't they? Some do, anyway. And why not? Every month or two
there seemed to be another story in the paper about a priest with a penchant for sticking his hand up the altar
boys' skirts. As for myself, I had no reason to think of myself as queer. God knows I wasn't immune to the
turn of a pretty female leg, priest or not, and molesting the altar boys never crossed my mind. Nor was there
ever anything physical between Lupe and me. But I loved him, and I'm not just talking about his mind or his
dedication or his ambitions for Home. Not just because he'd chosen to do his real work among the poor, like
Christ, either. There was a physical attraction."
Callahan paused, struggled, then burst out: "God, he was beautiful. Beautiful!"
"What happened to him?" Roland asked.
"He came in one snowy night in late March. The place was full, and the natives were restless. There had
already been one fistfight, and we were still picking up from that. There was a guy with a full-blown fit of the
dt's, and Rowan Magruder had him in back, in his office, feeding him coffee laced with whiskey. As I think I
told you, we had no lockup room at Home. It was dinnertime, half an hour past, actually, and three of the
volunteers hadn't come in because of the weather. The radio was on and a couple of women were dancing.
'Feeding time in the zoo,' Lupe used to say.
"I was taking off my coat, heading for the kitchen… this fellow named Frank Spinelli collared me… wanted
to know about a letter of recommendation I'd promised to write him… there was a woman, Lisa somebody,
who wanted help with one of the AA steps, 'Made a list of those we had harmed'… there was a young guy
who wanted help with a job application, he could read a little but not write… something starting to burn on
the stove… complete confusion. And I liked it. It had a way of sweeping you up and carrying you along. But
in the middle of it all, I stopped. There were no bells and the only aromas were drunk's b.o. and burning
food… but that light was around Lupe's neck like a collar. And I could see marks there. Just little ones. No
more than nips, really.
"I stopped, and I must have reeled, because Lupe came hurrying over. And then I could smell it, just faintly:
strong onions and hot metal. I must have lost a few seconds, too, because all at once the two of us were in the
corner by the filing cabinet where we keep the AA stuff and he was asking me when I last ate. He knew I
sometimes forgot to do that.
"The smell was gone. The blue glow around his neck was gone. And those little nips, where something had
bitten him, they were gone, too. Unless the vampire's a real guzzler, the marks go in a hurry. But I knew. It
was no good asking him who he'd been with, or when, or where. Vampires, even Type Threes—especially
Type Threes, maybe—have their protective devices. Pond-leeches secrete an enzyme in their saliva that
keeps the blood flowing while they're feeding. It also numbs the skin, so unless you actually see the thing on
