The Dark Tower

Oy lunged forward, a growl coming through his clamped teeth. It was a decidedly un-Oylike sound, reminding Callahan of a comic-strip balloon: Arrrrrr!

“No!” Jake shouted, alarmed. “No, Oy!”

At the sound of the boy’s shout, the yells and laughter from behind the tapestry abruptly ceased, as if the folken back there had suddenly become aware that something had changed in the front room.

Oy took no notice of Jake’s cry. He crunched three of the bugs in rapid succession, the crackle of their breaking carapaces gruesomely clear in the new stillness. He made no attempt to eat them but simply tossed the corpses, each the size of a mouse, into the air with a snap of the neck and a grinning release of the jaws.

And the others retreated back under the tables.

He was made for this, Callahan thought. Perhaps once in the long-ago all bumblers were. Made for it the way some breeds of terrier are made to—

A hoarse shout from behind the tapestry interrupted these thoughts: “Humes!” one voice cried, and then a second: “Ka-humes!”

Callahan had an absurd impulse to yell Gesundheit!

Before he could yell that or anything else, Roland’s voice suddenly filled his head.

Six

“Jake, go.”

The boy turned toward Pere Callahan, bewildered. He was walking with his arms crossed, ready to fling the ’Rizas at the first low man or woman who moved. Oy had returned to his heel, although he was swinging his head ceaselessly from side to side and his eyes were bright with the prospect of more prey.

“We go together,” Jake said. “They’re buffaloed, Pere! And we’re close! They took her through here…this room…and then through the kitchen—”

Callahan paid no attention. Still holding the turtle high (as one might hold a lantern in a deep cave), he had turned toward the tapestry. The silence from behind it was far more terrible than the shouts and feverish, gargling laughter. It was silence like a pointed weapon. And the boy had stopped.

“Go while you can,” Callahan said, striving for calmness. “Catch up to her if you can. This is the command of your dinh. This is also the will of the White.”

“But you can’t—”

“Go, Jake!”

The low men and women in the Dixie Pig, whether in thrall to the sköldpadda or not, murmured uneasily at the sound of that shout, and well they might have, for it was not Callahan’s voice coming from Callahan’s mouth.

“You have this one chance and must take it! Find her! As dinh I command you!”

Jake’s eyes flew wide at the sound of Roland’s voice issuing from Callahan’s throat. His mouth dropped open. He looked around, dazed.

In the second before the tapestry to their left was torn aside, Callahan saw its black joke, what the careless eye would first surely overlook: the roast that was the banquet’s main entrée had a human form; the knights and their ladies were eating human flesh and drinking human blood. What the tapestry showed was a cannibals’ communion.

Then the ancient ones who had been at their own sup tore aside the obscene tapestry and burst out, shrieking through the great fangs that propped their deformed mouths forever open. Their eyes were as black as blindness, the skin of their cheeks and brows — even the backs of their hands — tumorous with wild teeth. Like the vampires in the dining room, they were surrounded with auras, but these were of a poisoned violet so dark it was almost black. Some sort of ichor dribbled from the corners of their eyes and mouths. They were gibbering and several were laughing: seeming not to create the sounds but rather to snatch them out of the air like something that could be rent alive.

And Callahan knew them. Of course he did. Had he not been sent hence by one of their number? Here were the true vampires, the Type Ones, kept like a secret and now loosed on the intruders.

The turtle he held up did not slow them in the slightest.

Callahan saw Jake staring, pale, eyes shiny with horror and bulging from their sockets, all purpose forgotten at the sight of these freaks.

Without knowing what was going to come out of his mouth until he heard it, Callahan shouted: “They’ll kill Oy first! They’ll kill him in front of you and drink his blood!”

Oy barked at the sound of his name. Jake’s eyes seemed to clear at the sound, but Callahan had no time to follow the boy’s fortunes further.

Turtle won’t stop them, but at least it’s holding the others back. Bullets won’t stop them, but—