Wolves of the Calla

The world has moved on, but in the borderland town of Calla Bryn Sturgis, some things move in a terrible, repeating circle. For generations, the Wolves have come from the dark land of Thunderclap to steal one of every pair of twins. The children are always returned, but they come back *roont* - empty-headed, doomed to grow to gigantic size and die early. Now, the robotic messenger Andy has brought the news again: the Wolves are coming in one month's time. For Tian Jaffords, a farmer who plows his most stubborn field with his own roont sister in the traces, the news is a death sentence for two of his own four twins. A feeling deeper than anger begins to stir in him, a rage that finally boils over in the Town Gathering Hall. “They's children!” he cries to his neighbors. “Our children!”

The men of the Calla are torn between the shame of their surrender and the terror of resistance. Some, like the wealthy farmer Wayne Overholser, counsel patience, arguing that children are like any other crop and God always sends more. Others, like the strange Manni folk, suggest a horror beyond imagining: that they kill the children themselves to break the cycle. The gathering might have ended in bitter, fearful acceptance, as it always has before. But this time, a voice of authority rises from the back of the hall. It belongs to Pere Callahan, the town's outcast priest, a man with a cross-shaped scar on his forehead and the ghosts of another world in his eyes. He calls their acquiescence chickenshit. “You must fight,” he tells them. “You're the men of the Calla, are you not? Then act like men.” When they ask how farmers can stand against the Wolves' terrible weapons, Callahan reveals a secret. “By hiring armed killers of our own,” he says. “Not six days' ride nor'west of us…come three gunslingers and one 'prentice.”

Roland Deschain and his ka-tet feel the world has grown soft, becalmed in a strange, timeless drift along the Path of the Beam. The number nineteen appears to them in the shapes of clouds and branches, in the cadence of their own jokes, a constant, mysterious hum beneath the surface of their days. The quiet is broken when they realize they are being followed. That same night, something new happens. Without warning, Eddie, Jake, and Oy are pulled from their sleep into a place between worlds. It is not a dream. It is *todash*. They find themselves walking the sun-drenched, noisy streets of New York City in the year 1977, invisible ghosts in a world that was once their own. They follow a younger, innocent version of Jake to a bookstore owned by a man named Calvin Tower, then onward toward a vacant lot on the corner of Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street. For in that lot, surrounded by weeds and shattered bricks, grows a single, perfect rose that sings a song of transcendent beauty - a song that is the antithesis of the deep, encroaching darkness they feel behind the city's bright facade.

Their journey into the past is not just a vision; it is a revelation. In the bookstore, they witness a meeting between Calvin Tower and men from Eddie's own history: Enrico Balazar and his thugs, Jack Andolini and George Biondi. These are the men Roland and Eddie will kill ten years from now. They are here on behalf of the Sombra Corporation, pressuring Tower to sell them the vacant lot. The gunslingers now understand: the lot is the earthly home of the Rose, a twin to the Dark Tower itself, and the forces of the Crimson King are moving to destroy it. Their quest is not just in Mid-World anymore; it has found its echo in the heart of New York City, and time is running out on both levels of the Tower.

While her companions travel between worlds, Susannah Dean travels into a world of her own. At night, a new woman named Mia slips into the driver's seat of her mind. Mia finds herself in a vast, torchlit castle, drawn by the scent of a magnificent feast. She is ravenous, for she is eating for two. In her belly grows a “chap,” a child conceived not with Eddie, but with the demon she mated with in the speaking circle. In this grand, illusory banquet hall, she gorges on phantom meats and ghostly delicacies, all to feed the unnatural life within her. Roland follows her on these nightly hunts, watching in silence as she wades naked into a murky swamp, catching and eating frogs, leeches, and rats, her mind lost in the dream of a great feast while her body consumes raw flesh to satisfy a creature that is not human.

Callahan leads Roland's tet into the Calla, where a feast of welcome awaits. There, Roland dances the *commala* - the wild, stamping rice-dance of the region - and in so doing, wins the hearts of the folken. The next morning, Callahan tells them his own tale: of his fall from grace in a town called Jerusalem's Lot, of the vampire who forced him to drink his infected blood, of his years wandering the secret “highways in hiding” that connect the different versions of America, and of how he was finally cast into Mid-World through a mysterious door. He reveals that he carries a terrible burden from that passage: Black Thirteen, the most dangerous of the Wizard's Glasses, a seeing-sphere that is the very eye of the Crimson King. It was this dark object that pulled Eddie and Jake *todash*, and it sleeps now beneath the floor of his church, waiting.

“First comes smiles, then lies. Last is gunfire,” Roland tells his friends. At a final town meeting, he lays out a false plan for the townsfolk and for the Calla's traitor, Ben Slightman, to hear - a plan to hide the children in an old mine. The real plan is an ambush. On the morning the Wolves are due, Roland's seven chosen fighters - the gunslingers and four of the Calla's “Sisters of Oriza,” women who fight with lethally sharpened plates - hide themselves in a ditch beside the East Road. When the Wolves arrive, they are a terrifying sight: sixty riders on gray horses, their faces hidden by snarling masks, their green cloaks billowing. They are armed with futuristic light-sabers and humming silver discs - sneetches - that can cut a man to pieces.

The Wolves ride into the trap. The gunslingers and the Sisters rise from their hiding place, and the air fills with the crack of revolvers and the vicious shriek of the flying plates. The secret of the Wolves is revealed in blood and fire: they are not men, but robots, their green hoods concealing the spinning antennae that are their only vulnerability. The battle is short and savage. The gunslingers' ambush is nearly perfect, but not without cost. Margaret Eisenhart is decapitated by a light-saber. Benny Slightman, Jake's new friend, is blown apart by a sneetch meant for another. But in the end, the Wolves are destroyed to the last rider.

The people of the Calla pour from their hiding places, singing and cheering, their children saved. But as the town celebrates its first victory in generations, Roland realizes Susannah is gone. In the chaotic aftermath of the battle, Mia has finally taken full control. They find Susannah's wrecked wheelchair a mile up the arroyo path, and beyond it, an abandoned three-wheeled vehicle. They follow her tracks to the Doorway Cave. The unfound door stands dull and lifeless. The pink bag that held Black Thirteen is gone.

As Eddie pounds his fists on the inert wood, Roland turns to the bookcase Calvin Tower sent through. He pulls out a book, its cover showing a small country church against a sunset, and hands it to Callahan. The title is *'Salem's Lot*. The author is Stephen King. As the Pere stares at the book in numb disbelief, realizing he is a character in a story, Roland looks at the door. He knows Mia has used the dark power of the glass to escape to another where and when, a place she can have her chap in secret. He knows she has taken their only key. But as he looks at the book in Callahan's hands, he thinks there may be another way. A more dangerous way. For if their lives are a story, then there must be a storyteller.