by Stephen King
“As many as that? Gods! It’s a wonder the barrel of your revolver don’t bust when’ee pull the trigger!”
The shells in my father’s guns—the ones I might someday carry—blew seventy-six, but I didn’t say so. He’d likely not have believed it. “Can you do what I ask, sai?”
“I think so.” He considered, then nodded. “Aye. But not today. I don’t like to run my smithhold hot in the wind. One loose ember and the whole town might catch ablaze. We’ve had no fire department since my da’ was a boy.”
I took out my bag of gold knuckles and shook two into the palm of my hand. I considered, then added a third. The smith stared at them with wonder. He was looking at two years’ wages.
“It has to be today,” I said.
He grinned, showing teeth of amazing whiteness within the forest of his ginger beard. “Tempting devil, get not aside! For what you’re showin me, I’d risk burning Gilead herself to her foundations. You’ll have it by sundown.”
“I’ll have it by three.”
“Aye, three’s what I meant. To the shaved point of the minute.”
“Good. Now tell me, which restaurant cooks the best chow in town?”
“There’s only two, and neither of em’ll make you remember your mother’s bird puddin, but neither’ll poison’ee. Racey’s Café is probably the better.”
That was good enough for me; I thought a growing boy like Bill Streeter would take quantity over quality any day. I headed for the café, now working against the wind. It’ll be a full-going simoom by dark, the boy had told me, and I thought he was right. He had been through a lot, and needed time to rest. Now that I knew about the ankle tattoo, I might not need him at all . . . but the skin-man wouldn’t know that. And in the jail, Young Bill was safe. At least I hoped so.
* * *
It was stew, and I could have sworn it had been seasoned with alkali grit instead of salt, but the kid ate all of his and finished mine as well when I put it aside. One of the not-so-good deputies had made coffee, and we drank that from tin cups. We made our meal right there in the cell, sitting cross-legged on the floor. I listened for the jing-jang, but it stayed quiet. I wasn’t surprised. Even if Jamie and the High Sheriff came near one at their end, the wind had probably taken the wires down.
“I guess you know all about these storms you call simooms,” I said to Young Bill.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “This is the season for em. The proddies hate em and the pokies hate em even more, because if they’re out on the range, they have to sleep rough. And they can’t have a fire at night, accourse, because of—”
“Because of the embers,” I said, remembering the blacksmith.
“Just as you say. Stew all gone, is it?”
“So it is, but there’s one more thing.”
I handed over a little sack. He looked inside it and lit up. “Candy! Rollers and chocker-twists!” He extended the bag. “Here, you have the first.”
I took one of the little chocolate twists, then pushed the bag back to him. “You have the rest. If it won’t make your belly sick, that is.”
“It won’t!” And he dived in. It did me good to see him. After the third roller went into his gob, he cheeked it—which made him look like a squirrel with a nut—and said, “What’ll happen to me, sai? Now that my da’s gone?”
“I don’t know, but there’ll be water if God wills it.” I already had an idea where that water might be. If we could put paid to the skin-man, a certain large lady named Everlynne would owe us a good turn, and I doubt if Bill Streeter would be the first stray she’d taken in.
I returned to the subject of the simoom. “How much will it strengthen?”
“It’ll blow a gale tonight. Probably after midnight. And by noon tomorrow, it’ll be gone.”
“Does thee know where the salties live?”
“Aye, I’ve even been there. Once with my da’, to see the races they sometimes have up there, and once with some proddies looking for strays. The salties take em in, and we pay with hard biscuit for the ones that have the Jefferson brand.”
“My trailmate’s gone there with Sheriff Peavy and a couple of others. Think they have any chance of getting back before nightfall?”
I felt sure he would say no, but he surprised me. “Being as it’s all downhill from Salt Village—which is on this side of Little Debaria—I’d say they could. If they rode hard.”
That made me glad I’d told the blacksmith to hurry, although I knew better than to trust the reckoning of a mere boy.
“Listen to me, Young Bill. When they come back, I expect they’ll have some of the salties with em. Maybe a dozen, maybe as many as twenty. Jamie and I may have to walk em through the jail for you to look at, but you needn’t be afraid, because the door of this cell will be locked. And you don’t have to say anything, just look.”
“If you’re thinking I can tell which one killed my da’, I can’t. I don’t even remember if I saw him.”
“You probably won’t have to see them at all,” I said. This I truly believed. We’d have them into the sheriff’s office by threes, and have them hike their pants. When we found the one with the blue ring tattooed around his ankle, we’d have our man. Not that he was a man. Not anymore. Not really.
“Wouldn’t you like another chocker, sai? There’s three left, and I can’t eat nummore.”
“Save them for later,” I said, and got up.
His face clouded. “Will you come back? I don’t want to be in here on my own.”
“Aye, I’ll come back.” I stepped out, locked the cell door, then tossed the keys to him through the bars. “Let me in when I do.”
* * *
The fat deputy with the black hat was Strother. The one with the undershot jaw was Pickens. They looked at me with care and mistrust, which I thought a good combination, coming from the likes of them. I could work with care and mistrust.
“If I asked you fellows about a man with a blue ring tattooed on his ankle, would it mean anything to you?”
They exchanged a glance and then Black Hat—Strother—said, “The stockade.”
“What stockade would that be?” Already I didn’t like the sound of it.
“Beelie Stockade,” Pickens said, looking at me as if I were the utterest of utter idiots. “Does thee not know of it? And thee a gunslinger?”
“Beelie Town’s west of here, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Was,” Strother said. “It’s Beelie Ghost Town now. Harriers tore through it five year ago. Some say John Farson’s men, but I don’t believe that. Never in life. ’Twas plain old garden-variety outlaws. Once there was a militia outpost—back in the days when there was a militia—and Beelie Stockade was their place o’ business. It was where the circuit judge sent thieves and murderers and card cheats.”
“Witches n warlocks, too,” Pickens volunteered. He wore the face of a man remembering the good old days, when the railroad trains ran on time and the jing-jang no doubt rang more often, with calls from more places. “Practicers of the dark arts.”
“Once they took a cannibal,” Strother said. “He ate his wife.” This caused him to give out with a foolish giggle, although whether it was the eating or the relationship that struck him funny I couldn’t say.
“He was hung, that fellow,” Pickens said. He bit off a chunk of chew and worked it with his peculiar jaw. He still looked like a man remembering a better, rosier past. “There was lots of hangings at Beelie Stockade in those days. I went several times wi’ my da’ and my marmar to see em. Marmar allus packed a lunch.” He nodded slowly and thoughtfully. “Aye, many and many-a. Lots o’ folks came. There was booths and clever people doing clever things such as juggling. Sometimes there was dogfights in a pit, but accourse it was the hangins that was the real show.” He chuckled. “I remember this one fella who kicked a regular commala when the drop didn’t break ’is—”
“What’s this to do with blue ankle tattoos?”
“Oh,” Strother said, recalled to the initial
subject. “Anyone who ever did time in Beelie had one of those put on, y’see. Although I disremember if it was for punishment or just identification in case they ran off from one o’ the work gangs. All that stopped ten year ago, when the stockade closed. That’s why the harriers was able to have their way with the town, you know—because the militia left and the stockade closed. Now we have to deal with all the bad element and riffraff ourselves.” He eyed me up and down in the most insolent way. “We don’t get much help from Gilead these days. Nawp. Apt to get more from John Farson, and there’s some that’d send a parlay-party west to ask him.” Perhaps he saw something in my eyes, because he sat up a little straighter in his chair and said, “Not me, accourse. Never. I believe in the straight law and the Line of Eld.”
“So do we all,” Pickens said, nodding vigorously.
“Would you want to guess if some of the salt-miners did time in Beelie Stockade before it was decommissioned?” I asked.
Strother appeared to consider, then said: “Oh, probably a few. Nummore’n four in every ten, I should say.”
In later years I learned to control my face, but those were early times, and he must have seen my dismay. It made him smile. I doubt if he knew how close that smile brought him to suffering. I’d had a difficult two days, and the boy weighed heavily on my mind.
“Who did’ee think would take a job digging salt blocks out of a miserable hole in the ground for penny wages?” Strother asked. “Model citizens?”
It seemed that Young Bill would have to look at a few of the salties, after all. We’d just have to hope the fellow we wanted didn’t know the ring tattoo was the only part of him the kid had seen.
* * *
When I went back to the cell, Young Bill was lying on the pallets, and I thought he’d gone to sleep, but at the sound of my bootheels he sat up. His eyes were red, his cheeks wet. Not sleeping, then, but mourning. I let myself in, sat down beside him, and put an arm around his shoulders. This didn’t come naturally to me—I know what comfort and sympathy are, but I’ve never been much good at giving such. I knew what it was to lose a parent, though. Young Bill and Young Roland had that much in common.
“Did you finish your candy?” I asked.
“Don’t want the rest,” he said, and sighed.
Outside the wind boomed hard enough to shake the building, then subsided.
“I hate that sound,” he said—just what Jamie DeCurry had said. It made me smile a little. “And I hate being in here. It’s like I did something wrong.”
“You didn’t,” I said.
“Maybe not, but it already seems like I’ve been here forever. Cooped up. And if they don’t get back before nightfall, I’ll have to stay longer. Won’t I?”
“I’ll keep you company,” I said. “If those deputies have a deck of cards, we can play Jacks Pop Up.”
“For babies,” said he, morosely.
“Then Watch Me or poker. Can thee play those?”
He shook his head, then brushed at his cheeks. The tears were flowing again.
“I’ll teach thee. We’ll play for matchsticks.”
“I’d rather hear the story you talked about when we stopped in the sheppie’s lay-by. I don’t remember the name.”
“‘The Wind Through the Keyhole,’” I said. “But it’s a long one, Bill.”
“We have time, don’t we?”
I couldn’t argue that. “There are scary bits in it, too. Those things are all right for a boy such as I was—sitting up in his bed with his mother beside him—but after what you’ve been through . . .”
“Don’t care,” he said. “Stories take a person away. If they’re good ones, that is. It is a good one?”
“Yes. I always thought so, anyway.”
“Then tell it.” He smiled a little. “I’ll even let you have two of the last three chockers.”
“Those are yours, but I might roll a smoke.” I thought about how to begin. “Do you know stories that start, ‘Once upon a bye, before your grandfather’s grandfather was born’?”
“They all start that way. At least, the ones my da’ told me. Before he said I was too old for stories.”
“A person’s never too old for stories, Bill. Man and boy, girl and woman, never too old. We live for them.”
“Do you say so?”
“I do.”
I took out my tobacco and papers. I rolled slowly, for in those days it was a skill yet new to me. When I had a smoke just to my liking—one with the draw end tapered to a pinhole—I struck a match on the wall. Bill sat cross-legged on the straw pallets. He took one of the chockers, rolled it between his fingers much as I’d rolled my smoke, then tucked it into his cheek.
I started slowly and awkwardly, because storytelling was another thing that didn’t come naturally to me in those days . . . although it was a thing I learned to do well in time. I had to. All gunslingers have to. And as I went along, I began to speak more naturally and easily. Because I began hearing my mother’s voice. It began to speak through my own mouth: every rise, dip, and pause.
I could see him fall into the tale, and that pleased me—it was like hypnotizing him again, but in a better way. A more honest way. The best part, though, was hearing my mother’s voice. It was like having her again, coming out from far inside me. It hurt, of course, but more often than not the best things do, I’ve found. You wouldn’t think it could be so, but—as the oldtimers used to say—the world’s tilted, and there’s an end to it.
“Once upon a bye, before your grandfather’s grandfather was born, on the edge of an unexplored wilderness called the Endless Forest, there lived a boy named Tim with his mother, Nell, and his father, Big Ross. For a time, the three of them lived happily enough, although they owned little. . . .”
THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE
Once upon a bye, long before your grandfather’s grandfather was born, on the edge of an unexplored wilderness called the Endless Forest, there lived a boy named Tim with his mother, Nell, and his father, Big Ross. For a time the three of them lived happily enough, although they owned little.
“I have only four things to pass on to you,” Big Ross told his son, “but four’s enough. Can you say them to me, young boy?”
Tim had said them to him many and many-a, but never tired of it. “Thy ax, thy lucky coin, thy plot, and thy place, which is as good as the place of any king or gunslinger in Mid-World.” He would then pause and add, “My mama, too. That makes five.”
Big Ross would laugh and kiss the boy’s brow as he lay in his bed, for this catechism usually came at the end of the day. Behind them, in the doorway, Nell waited to put her kiss on top of her husband’s. “Aye,” Big Ross would say, “we must never forget Mama, for wi’out her, all’s for naught.”
So Tim would go off to sleep, knowing he was loved, and knowing he had a place in the world, and listening to the night wind slip its strange breath over the cottage: sweet with the scent of the blossiewood at the edge of the Endless Forest, and faintly sour—but still pleasant—with the smell of the ironwood trees deeper in, where only brave men dared go.
Those were good years, but as we know—from stories and from life—the good years never last long.
One day, when Tim was eleven, Big Ross and his partner, Big Kells, drove their wagons down Main Road to where the Ironwood Trail entered the forest, as they did every morning save the seventh, when all in the village of Tree rested. On this day, however, only Big Kells came back. His skin was sooty and his jerkin charred. There was a hole in the left leg of his homespun pants. Red and blistered flesh peeped through it. He slumped on the seat of his wagon, as if too weary to sit up straight.
Nell Ross came to the door of her house and cried, “Where is Big Ross? Where is my husband?”
Big Kells shook his head slowly from side to side. Ash sifted out of his hair and onto his shoulders. He spoke only a single word, but one was enough to turn Tim’s knees to water. His mother began to shriek.
The word was dragon.
>
No one living today has ever seen the like of the Endless Forest, for the world has moved on. It was dark and full of dangers. The woodsmen of Tree Village knew it better than anyone in Mid-World, and even they knew nothing of what might live or grow ten wheels beyond the place where the blossie groves ended and the ironwood trees—those tall, brooding sentinels—began. The great depths were a mystery filled with strange plants, stranger animals, stinking weirdmarshes, and—so ’twas said—leavings of the Old People that were often deadly.
The folken of Tree feared the Endless Forest, and rightly so; Big Ross wasn’t the first woodsman who went down Ironwood Trail and did not come back. Yet they loved it, too, for ’twas ironwood fed and clothed their families. They understood (though none would have said so aloud) that the forest was alive. And, like all living things, it needed to eat.
Imagine that you were a bird flying above that great tract of wildland. From up there it might look like a giant dress of a green so dark it was almost black. Along the bottom of the dress was a hem of lighter green. These were the blossiewood groves. Just below the blossies, at the farthest edge of North’rd Barony, was the village of Tree. It was the last town in what was then a civilized country. Once Tim asked his father what civilized meant.
“Taxes,” Big Ross said, and laughed—but not in a funny way.
Most of the woodsmen went no farther than the blossie groves. Even there, sudden dangers could arise. Snakes were the worst, but there were also poisonous rodents called wervels that were the size of dogs. Many men had been lost in the blossies over the years, but on the whole, blossie was worth the risk. It was a lovely fine-grained wood, golden in color and almost light enough to float on air. It made fine lake and rivercraft, but was no good for sea travel; even a moderate gale would tear apart a boat made of blossie.
For sea travel ironwood was wanted, and ironwood brought a high price from Hodiak, the barony buyer who came twice a year to the Tree sawmill. It was ironwood that gave the Endless Forest its green-black hue, and only the bravest woodsmen dared go after it, for there were dangers along the Ironwood Trail—which barely pierced the skin of the Endless Forest, remember—that made the snakes, wervels, and mutie bees of the blossie groves seem mild by comparison.
