“Henchick, tell me, I beg: how long will the magic stay?”

The old man stroked his beard in a distracted fashion. “Gunslinger-Roland-I can’t say. The magic of the door in that cave is beyond me. As thee must know.”

“Tell me what you think. Based on what you do know.”

Eddie raised his hands. They were dirty, there was blood under the nails, and they trembled. “Tell, Henchick,” he said, speaking in a voice, humble and lost, that Roland had never heard before. “Tell, I beg.”

Rosalita, Pere Callahan’s woman of all work, came in with a tray. There were cups on it, and a carafe of steaming coffee. She, at least, had found time to change out of her bloody, dusty jeans and shirt and into a housedress, but her eyes were still shocked. They peered from her face like small animals from their burrows. She poured the coffee and passed the cups without speaking. Nor had she gotten all the blood, Roland saw as he took one of the cups. There was a streak of it on the back of her right hand. Margaret’s or Benny’s? He didn’t know. Or much care. The Wolves had been defeated. They might or might not come again to

Calla Bryn Sturgis. That was ka’s business. Theirs was Susannah Dean, who had disappeared in the aftermath, taking Black Thirteen with her.

Henchick said: “Ye ask of kaven?”

“Aye, father,” Roland agreed. “The persistence of magic.”

Father Callahan took a cup of coffee with a nod and a distracted smile, but no word of thanks. He had spoken little since they’d come back from the cave. In his lap was a book called ’salem’s Lot, by a man of whom he had never heard. It purported to be a work of fiction, but he, Donald Callahan, was in it. He had lived in the town of which it told, had taken part in the events it recounted. He had looked on the back and on the rear flap for the author’s photograph, queerly certain that he would see a version of his own face looking back at him (the way he’d looked in 1975, when these events had taken place, most likely), but there had been no picture, just a note about the book’s writer that told very little. He lived in the state of Maine. He was married. He’d written one previous book, quite well reviewed, if you believed the quotations on the back.