23.05 Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King

Author:Stephen King
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9781416516934
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2006-01-23T10:00:00+00:00

“There, you bastard!” Jamie screams, and begins to scoop dust over the thing. He is weeping. “There, you bastard! There! There!” At last it’s gone, buried under a heap of white dust that buzzes and shakes and at last becomes still.

Without rising—he doesn’t have the strength to find his feet again, not yet, can still hardly believe he is alive—Jamie Jaffords knee-walks toward the monster Molly has killed…and it is dead now, or at least lying still. He wants to pull off its mask, see it plain. First he kicks at it with both feet, like a child doing a tantrum. The Wolf’s body rocks from side to side, then lies still again. A pungent, reeky smell is coming from it. A rotten-smelling smoke is rising from the mask, which appears to be melting.

Dead, thinks the boy who will eventually become Gran-pere, the oldest living human in the Calla. Dead, aye, never doubt it. So garn, ye gutless! Garn and unmask it!

He does. Under the burning autumn sun he takes hold of the rotting mask, which feels like some sort of metal mesh, and he pulls it off, and he sees…

Eight

For a moment Eddie wasn’t even aware that the old guy had stopped talking. He was still lost in the story, mesmerized. He saw everything so clearly it could have been him out there on the East Road, kneeling in the dust with the bah cocked to his shoulder like a baseball bat, ready to knock the oncoming sneetch out of the air.

Then Susannah rolled past the porch toward the barn with a bowl of chickenfeed in her lap. She gave them a curious look on her way by. Eddie woke up. He hadn’t come here to be entertained. He supposed the fact that he could be entertained by such a story said something about him.

“And?” Eddie asked the old man when Susannah had gone into the barn. “What did you see?”

“Eh?” Gran-pere gave him a look of such perfect vacuity that Eddie despaired.

“What did you see? When you took off the mask?”

For a moment that look of emptiness—the lights are on but no one’s home—held. And then (by pure force of will, it seemed to Eddie) the old man came back. He looked behind him, at the house. He looked toward the black maw of the barn, and the lick of phosphor-light deep inside. He looked around the yard itself.

Frightened, Eddie thought. Scared to death.

Eddie tried to tell himself this was only an old man’s paranoia, but he felt a chill, all the same.

“Lean close,” Gran-pere muttered, and when Eddie did: “The only one Ah ever told was my boy Luke…Tian’s Da’, do’ee ken. Years and years later, this was. He told me never to speak of it to anyone else. Ah said, ‘But Lukey, what if it could help? What if it could help t’next time they come?’ ”

Gran-pere’s lips barely moved, but his thick accent had almost entirely departed, and Eddie could understand him perfectly.

“And he said

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