Ten minutes later, rearmed with fresh mugs of coffee (and a bowl of pokeberries), they went out into the rectory’s small back yard. The gunslinger lifted his face into the sun for a moment, relishing its weight and heat. Then he turned to Callahan. “We three would hear your story now, Pere, if you’d tell it. And then mayhap stroll up to your church and see what’s there.”

“I want you to take it,” Callahan said. “It hasn’t desecrated the church, how could it when Our Lady was never consecrated to begin with? But it’s changed it for the worse. Even when the church was still a-building, I felt the spirit of God inside it. No more. That thing has driven it out. I want you to take it.”

Roland opened his mouth to say something noncommittal, but Susannah spoke before he could. “Roland? You all right?”

He turned to her. “Why, yes. Why would I not be?”

“You keep rubbing your hip.”

Had he been? Yes, he saw, he had. The pain was creeping back already, in spite of the warm sun, in spite of Rosalita’s cat-oil. The dry twist.

“It’s nothing,” he told her. “Just a touch of the rheumatiz.”

She looked at him doubtfully, then seemed to accept. This is a hell of a way to start, Roland thought, with at least two of us keeping secrets. We can’t go on so. Not for long.

He turned to Callahan. “Tell us your tale. How you came by your scars, how you came here, and how you came by Black Thirteen. We would hear every word.”

“Yes,” Eddie murmured.

“Every word,” Susannah echoed.

All three of them looked at Callahan—the Old Fella, the religious who would allow himself to be called Pere but not priest. His twisted right hand went to the scar on his forehead and rubbed at it. At last he said: “ ’Twas the drink. That’s what I believe now. Not God, not devils, not predestination, not the company of saints. ’Twas the drink.” He paused, thinking, then smiled at them. Roland remembered Nort, the weed-eater in Tull who had been brought back from the dead by the man in black. Nort had smiled like that. “But if God made the world, then God made the drink. And that is also His will.”

Ka,Roland thought.

Callahan sat quiet, rubbing the scarred crucifix on his forehead, gathering his thoughts. And then he began to tell his story.

Chapter III

The Priest’s Tale (New York)

One

It was the drink, that was what he came to believe when he finally stopped it and clarity came. Not God, not Satan, not some deep psychosexual battle between his blessed mither and his blessed Da’. Just the drink. And was it surprising that whiskey should have taken him by the ears? He was Irish, he was a priest, one more strike and you’re out.