woman sitting on a bench about twenty yards away from me, just an old lady with a kerchief on her head
feeding the squirrels from a paper bag filled with nuts.
Only that blue light was crawling all over her cheeks and brow, going into and out of her mouth when she
breathed. She was one of them. A mosquito. The walking dead were gone, but I could still see the Type
Threes.
"Getting drunk again seemed like a logical response to this, but I had one small problem: no money.
Someone had apparendy rolled me while I was sleeping it off under my newspaper blanket, and there goes
your ballgame." Callahan smiled. There was nothing pleasant about it.
"That day I did find ManPower. I found it the next day, too, and the day after that. Then I got drunk. That
became my habit during the Summer of the Tall Ships: work three days sober, usually shoving a wheelbarrow
on some construction site or lugging big boxes for some company moving floors, then spend one night
getting enormously drunk and the next day recovering. Then start all over again. Take Sundays off. That was
my life in New York that summer. And everywhere I went, it seemed that I heard that Elton John song,
'Someone Saved My Life Tonight' I don't know if that was the summer it was popular or not. I only know I
heard it everywhere. Once I worked five days straight for Covay Movers. The Brother Outfit, they called
themselves. For sobriety, that was my personal best that July. The guy in charge came up to me on the fifth
day and asked me how I'd like to hire on full-time.
" 'I can't,' I said. 'The day-labor contracts specifically forbid their guys from taking a steady job with any
outside company for a month.'
" 'Ah, fuck that,' he says, 'everyone winks at that bullshit. What do you say, Donnie? You're a good man. And
I got an idea you could do a little more than buck furniture up on the truck. You want to think about it
tonight?'
"I thought about it, and thinking led back to drinking, as it always did that summer. As it always does for
those of the alcoholic persuasion. Back to me sitting in some little bar across from the Empire State Building,
listening to Elton John on the juke-box. 'Almost had your hooks in me, din'tcha, dear?' And when I went back
to work, I checked in with a different day-labor company, one that had never heard of the fucking Brother
Outfit."
Callahan spat out the word fucking in a kind of desperate snarl, as men do when vulgarity has become for
them a kind of linguistic court of last resort.
"You drank, you drifted, you worked," Roland said. "But you had at least one other piece of business that
summer, did you not?"
"Yes. It took me a little while to get going. I saw several of them—the woman feeding the squirrels in the
park was only the first—but they weren't doing anything. I mean, I knew what they were, but it was still hard
to kill them in cold blood. Then, one night in Battery Park, I saw another one feeding. I had a fold-out knife
in my pocket by then, carried it everywhere. I walked up behind him while he was eating and stabbed him
four times: once in the kidneys, once between the ribs, once high up in the back, once in the neck. I put all
my strength into the last one. The knife came out the other side with the thing's Adam's apple skewered on it
like a piece of steak on a shish kebab. Made a kind of ripping sound."
Callahan spoke matter-of-factly, but his face had grown very pale.
"What had happened in the alley behind Home happened again—the guy disappeared right out of his clothes.
I'd expected it, but of course I couldn't be sure until it actually happened."
"One swallow does not make a summer," Susannah said.
Callahan nodded. "The victim was this kid of about fifteen, looked Puerto Rican or maybe Dominican. He
had a boombox between his feet. I don't remember what it was playing, so it probably wasn't 'Someone
Saved My Life Tonight' Five minutes went by. I was about to start snapping my fingers under his nose or
maybe patting his cheeks, when he blinked, staggered, shook his head, and came around. He saw me standing
there in front of him and the first thing he did was grab his boombox. He held it to his chest, like it was a
baby. Then he said, 'What joo want, man?' I said I didn't want anything, not a single thing, no harm and no
foul, but I was curious about those clothes lying beside him. The kid looked, then knelt down and started
going through the pockets. I thought he'd find enough to keep him occupied—more than enough—and so I
just walked away. And that was the second one. The third one was easier. The fourth one, easier still. By the
end of August, I'd gotten half a dozen. The sixth was the woman I'd seen in the Marine Midland Bank. Small
world, isn't it?"
"Quite often I'd go down to First and Forty-seventh and stand across from Home. Sometimes I'd find myself
there in the late afternoon, watching the drunks and the homeless people showing up for dinner. Sometimes
Rowan would come out and talk to them. He didn't smoke, but he always kept cigarettes in his pockets, a
couple of packs, and he'd pass them out until they were gone. I never made any particular effort to hide from
him, but if he ever pegged me, I never saw any sign of it."
"You'd probably changed by then," Eddie said.
Callahan nodded. "Hair down to my shoulders, and coming in gray. A beard. And of course I no longer took
any pains about my clothes. Half of what I was wearing by then came from the vampires I'd killed. One of
them was a bicycle messenger guy, and he had a great pair of motorcycle boots. Not Bally loafers, but almost
new, and my size. Those things last forever. I've still got them." He nodded toward the house. "But I don't
think any of that was why he didn't recognize me. In Rowan Magruder's business, dealing with drunks and
hypes and homeless people who've got one foot in reality and the other in the Twilight Zone, you get used to
seeing big changes in people, and usually not changes for the better. You teach yourself to see who's under
the new bruises and the fresh coats of dirt. I think it was more like I'd become one of what you call the
vagrant dead, Roland. Invisible to the world. But I think those people— those former people—must be tied to
New York—"
"They never go far," Roland agreed. His cigarette was done; the dry paper and crumbles of tobacco had
disappeared up to his fingernails in two puffs. "Ghosts always haunt the same house."
"Of course they do, poor things. And I wanted to leave. Every day the sun would set a little earlier, and every
day I'd feel the call of those roads, those highways in hiding, a little more strongly. Some of it might have
been the fabled geographic cure, to which I believe I have already alluded. It's a wholly illogical but
nonetheless powerful belief that things will change for the better in a new place; that the urge to self-destruct
will magically disappear. Some of it was undoubtedly the hope that in another place, a wider place, there
would be no more vampires or walking dead people to cope with. But mostly it was other things. Well… one
very big thing." Callahan smiled, but it was no more than a stretch of the lips exposing the gums. "Someone
had begun hunting me."
"The vampires," Eddie said.
"Ye-ess…" Callahan bit at his lip, then repeated it with a little more conviction. "Yes. But not just the
vampires. Even when that had to be the most logical idea, it didn't seem entirely right. I knew it wasn't the
dead, at least; they could see me, but didn't care about me one way or another, except maybe for the hope that
I might be able to fix them or put them out of their misery. But the Type Threes couldn't see me, as I've told
you—not as the thing hunting them, anyway. And their attention spans are short, as if they're infected to some
degree by the same amnesia they pass on to their victims.
"I first became aware that I was in trouble one night in Washington Square Park, not long after I killed the
woman from the bank. That park had become a regular haunt of mine, almough God knows I wasn't the only
one. In the summer it was a regular open-air dormitory. I even had my own favorite bench, although I didn't
get it every night… didn't even go there every night.
"On this particular evening—thundery and sultry and close—I got there around eight o'clock. I had a bottle in
a brown bag and a book of Ezra Pound's Cantos. I approached the bench, and there, spray-painted across the
back of another bench near mine, I saw a graffito that said HE COMES HERE. HE HAS A BURNED
HAND."
"Oh my Lord God," Susannah said, and put a hand to her throat.
"I left the park at once and slept in an alley twenty blocks away. There was no doubt in my mind that I was
the subject of that graffito. Two nights later I saw one on the sidewalk outside a bar on Lex where I liked to
drink and sometimes have a sandwich if I was, as they say, in funds. It had been done in chalk and the foot-
traffic had rubbed it to a ghost, but I could still read it. It said the same thing: he comes here, he has a burned
hand. There were comets and stars around the message, as if whoever wrote it had actually tried to dress it
up. A block down, spray-painted on a No Parking sign: his hair is mostly white now. The next morning, on
the side of a cross-town bus: his name might be collingwood. Two or three days after that, I started to see
lost-pet posters around a lot of the places that had come to be my places—Needle Park, the Central Park West
side of The Ramble, the City Lights bar on Lex, a couple of folk music and poetry clubs down in the
Village."
"Pet posters," Eddie mused. "You know, in a way that's brilliant."
"They were all the same," Callahan said, "HAVE YOU SEEN OUR IRISH SETTER? HE IS A STUPID
OLD THING BUT WE LOVE HIM. BURNED RIGHT FOREPAW. ANSWERS TO THE NAME OF
KELLY, COLLINS, OR COLLINGWOOD. WE WILL PAY A VERY LARGE REWARD. And then a row of
dollar signs."
"Who would posters like that be aimed at?" Susannah asked.
Callahan shrugged. "Don't know, exacdy. The vampires, perhaps."
Eddie was rubbing his face wearily. "All right, let's see. We've got the Type Three vampires… and the
vagrant dead… and now this third group. The ones that went around putting up lost-pet posters that weren't
about pets and writing stuff on buildings and sidewalks. Who were they?"
"The low men," Callahan said. "They call themselves that, sometimes, although there are women among
them. Sometimes they call themselves regulators. A lot of them wear long yellow coats… but not all. A lot of
them have blue coffins tattooed on their hands… but not all."
"Big Coffin Hunters, Roland," Eddie murmured.
Roland nodded but never took his eyes from Callahan. "Let the man talk, Eddie."
"What they are—what they really are—is soldiers of the Crimson King," Callahan said. And he crossed
himself.
TWELVE
Eddie started. Susannah's hand went back to her belly and began to rub. Roland found himself remembering
their walk through Gage Park after they had finally escaped Blaine. The dead animals in the zoo. The run-toriot
rose garden. The carousel and the toy train. Then the metal road leading up to the even larger metal road
which Eddie, Susannah, and Jake called a turnpike. There, on one sign, someone had slashed WATCH FOR
THE WALKIN DUDE. And on another sign, decorated with the crude drawing of an eye, this message: ALL
HAIL THE CRIMSON KING!
"You've heard of the gentleman, I see," Callahan said dryly.
"Let's say he's left his mark where we could see it, too," Susannah said.
Callahan nodded his head in the direction of Thunderclap. "If your quest takes you there," he said, "you're
going to see a hell of a lot more than a few signs spray-painted on a few walls."
"What about you?" Eddie asked. "What did you do?"
"First, I sat down and considered the situation. And decided that, no matter how fantastic or paranoid it might
sound to an outsider, I really was being stalked, and not necessarily by Type Three vampires. Although of
course I did realize that the people leaving the graffiti around and putting up the lost-pet posters wouldn't
scruple to use the vampires against me.
"At this point, remember, I had no idea who this mysterious group could be. Back in Jerusalem's Lot, Barlow
moved into a house that had seen terrible violence and was reputed to be haunted. The writer, Mears, said
that an evil house had drawn an evil man. My best thinking in New York took me back to that idea. I began to
think I'd drawn another king vampire, another Type One, the way the Marsten House had drawn Barlow.
Right idea or wrong one (it turned out to be wrong), I found it comforting to know my brain, booze-soaked or
not, was still capable of some logic.
"The first thing I had to decide was whether to stay in New York or run away. I knew if I didn't run, they'd
catch up to me, and probably sooner rather than later. They had a description, with this as an especially good
marker." Callahan raised his burned hand. "They almost had my name; would have it for sure in another
week or two. They'd stake out all my regular stops, places where my scent had collected. They'd find people
I'd talked to, hung out with, played checkers and cribbage with. People I'd worked with on my ManPower
and Brawny Man jobs, too."
"This led me to a place I should have gotten to much sooner, even after a month of binge drinking. I realized
they'd find Rowan Magruder and Home and all sorts of other people who knew me there. Part-time workers,
