“I wandered for an hour or more, through a town that was less and less there. There aren’t many Type One vampires, and that’s a blessing because a Type One can cause one hell of a lot of mayhem in an extremely short period of time. The town was already half-infected, but I was too blind—too shocked —to realize it. And none of the new vampires approached me. Barlow had set his mark on me as surely as God set his mark on Cain before sending him off to dwell in the land of Nod. His watch and his warrant, as you’d say, Roland.

“There was a drinking fountain in the alley beside Spencer’s Drugs, the sort of thing no Public Health Office would have sanctioned a few years later, but back then there was one or two in every small town. I washed Barlow’s blood off my face and neck there. Tried to wash it out of my hair, too. And then I went to St. Andrews, my church. I’d made up my mind to pray for a second chance. Not to the God of the theologians who believe that everything holy and unholy ultimately comes from inside us, but to the old God. The one who proclaimed to Moses that he should not suffer a witch to live and gave unto his own son the power to raise from the dead. A second chance is all I wanted. My life for that.

“By the time I got to St. Andrews, I was almost running. There were three doors going inside. I reached for the middle one. Somewhere a car backfired, and someone laughed. I remember those sounds very clearly. It’s as if they mark the border of my life as a priest of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.”

“What happened to you, sugar?” Susannah asked.

“The door rejected me,” Callahan said. “It had an iron handle, and when I touched it, fire came out of it like a reverse stroke of lightning. It knocked me all the way down the steps and onto the cement path. It did this.” He raised his scarred right hand.

“And that?” Eddie asked, and pointed to his forehead.

“No,” Callahan said. “That came later. I picked myself up. Walked some more. Wound up at Spencer’s again. Only this time I went in. Bought a bandage for my hand. And then, while I was paying, I saw the sign. Ride The Big Grey Dog.”

“He means Greyhound, sugar,” Susannah told Roland. “It’s a nationwide bus company.”

Roland nodded and twirled a finger in his go-on gesture.