by Stephen King
“When you were up there, did you see the ones who call themselves the Big Coffin Hunters?”
“I saw Jonas and the one with the cloak, standing together in the courtyard and talking,” she said.
“Not Depape? The redhead?”
She shook her head.
“Do you know the game Castles, Susan?”
“Aye. My father showed me when I was small.”
“Then you know how the red pieces stand at one end of the board and the white at the other. How they come around the Hillocks and creep toward each other, setting screens for cover. What’s going on here in Hambry is very like that. And, as in the game, it has now become a question of who will break cover first. Do you understand?”
She nodded at once. “In the game, the first one around his Hillock is vulnerable.”
“In life, too. Always. But sometimes even staying in cover is difficult. My friends and I have counted nearly everything we dare count. To count the rest—”
“The horses on the Drop, for instance.”
“Aye, just so. To count them would be to break cover. Or the oxen we know about—”
Her eyebrows shot up. “There are no oxen in Hambry. Ye must be mistaken about that.”
“No mistake.”
“Where?”
“The Rocking H.”
Now her eyebrows drew back down, and knitted in a thoughtful frown. “That’s Laslo Rimer’s place.”
“Aye—Kimba’s brother. Nor are those the only treasures hidden away in Hambry these days. There are extra wagons, extra tack hidden in barns belonging to members of the Horsemen’s Association, extra caches of feed—”
“Will, no!”
“Yes. All that and more. But to count them—to be seen counting them—is to break cover. To risk being Castled. Our recent days have been pretty nightmarish—we try to look profitably busy without moving over to the Drop side of Hambry, where most of the danger lies. It’s harder and harder to do. Then we received a message—”
“A message? How? From whom?”
“Best you not know those things, I think. But it’s led us to believe that some of the answers we’re looking for may be at Citgo.”
“Will, d’ye think that what’s out here may help me to know more about what happened to my da?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible, I suppose, but not likely. All I know for sure is that I finally have a chance to count something that matters and not be seen doing it.” His blood had cooled enough for him to hold out his hand to her; Susan’s had cooled enough for her to take it in good confidence. She had put her glove back on again, however. Better safe than sorry.
“Come on,” she said. “I know a path.”
12
In the moon’s pale half-light, Susan led him out of the orange grove and toward the thump and squeak of the oilpatch. Those sounds made Roland’s back prickle; made him wish for one of the guns hidden under the bunkhouse floorboards back at the Bar K.
“Ye can trust me, Will, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be much help to ye,” she said in a voice just a notch above a whisper. “I’ve been within hearing distance of Citgo my whole life, but I could count the number of times I’ve actually been in it on the fingers of both hands, so I could. The first two or three were on dares from my friends.”
“And then?”
“With my da. He were always interested in the Old People, and my Aunt Cord always said he’d come to a bad end, meddling in their leavings.” She swallowed hard. “And he did come to a bad end, although I doubt it were the Old People responsible. Poor Da.”
They had reached a smoothwire fence. Beyond it, the gantries of the oil wells stood against the sky like sentinels the size of Lord Perth. How many had she said were still working? Nineteen, he thought. The sound of them was ghastly—the sound of monsters being choked to death. Of course it was the kind of place that kids dared each other to go into; a kind of open-air haunted house.
He held two of the wires apart so she could slip between them, and she did the same for him. As he passed through, he saw a line of white porcelain cylinders marching down the post closest to him. A fencewire went through each.
“You understand what these are? Were?” he asked Susan, tapping one of the cylinders.
“Aye. When there was electricity, some went through here.” She paused, then added shyly: “It’s how I feel when you touch me.”
He kissed her cheek just below her ear. She shivered and pressed a hand briefly against his cheek before drawing away.
“I hope your friends will watch well.”
“They will.”
“Is there a signal?”
“The whistle of the nighthawk. Let’s hope we don’t hear it.”
“Aye, be it so.” She took his hand and drew him into the oilpatch.
13
The first time the gas-jet flared ahead of them, Will spat a curse under his breath (an obscenely energetic one she hadn’t heard since her father died) and dropped the hand not holding hers to his belt.
“Be easy! It’s only the candle! The gas-pipe!”
He relaxed slowly. “That they use, don’t they?”
“Aye. To run a few machines—little more than toys, they are. To make ice, mostly.”
“I had some the day we met the Sheriff.”
When the flare licked out again—bright yellow with a bluish core—he didn’t jump. He glanced at the three gas-storage tanks behind what Hambry-folk called “the candle” without much interest. Nearby was a stack of rusty canisters in which the gas could be bottled and carried.
“You’ve seen such before?” she asked.
He nodded.
“The Inner Baronies must be very strange and wonderful,” Susan said.
“I’m beginning to think they’re no stranger than those of the Outer Arc,” he said, turning slowly. He pointed. “What’s yon building down there? Left over from the Old People?”
“Aye.”
To the east of Citgo, the ground dropped sharply down a thickly wooded slope with a lane cut through the middle of it—this lane was as clear in the moonlight as a part in hair. Not far from the bottom of the slope was a crumbling building surrounded by rubble. The tumble-and-strew was the detritus of many fallen smokestacks—that much could be extrapolated from the one which still stood. Whatever else the Old People had done, they had made lots of smoke.
“There were useful things in there when my da was a child,” she said. “Paper and such—even a few ink-writers that would still work . . . for a little while, at least. If you shook them hard.” She pointed to the left of the building, where there was a vast square of crumbled paving, and a few rusting hulks that had been the Old People’s weird, horseless mode of travel. “Once there were things over there that looked like the gas-storage tanks, only much, much larger. Like huge silver cans, they were. They didn’t rust like those that are left. I can’t think what became of them, unless someone hauled them off for water storage. I never would. ’Twould be unlucky, even if they weren’t contaminated.”
She turned her face up to his, and he kissed her mouth in the moonlight.
“Oh, Will. What a pity this is for you.”
“What a pity for both of us,” he said, and then passed between them one of those long and aching looks of which only teenagers are capable. They looked away at last and walked on again, hand-in-hand.
She couldn’t decide which frightened her more—the few derricks that were still pumping or those dozens which had fallen silent. One thing she knew for sure was that no power on the face of the earth could have gotten her within the fence of this place without a friend close beside her. The pumps wheezed; every now and then a cylinder screamed like someone being stabbed; at periodic intervals “the candle” would fire off with a sound like dragon’s breath, throwing their shadows out long in front of them. Susan kept her ears pitched for the nighthawk’s piercing two-note whistle, and heard nothing.
They came to a wide lane—what had once
undoubtedly been a maintenance road—that split the oilpatch in two. Running down the center was a steel pipe with rusting joints. It lay in a deep concrete trough, with the upper arc of its rusty circumference protruding above ground level.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“The pipe that took the oil to yon building, I reckon. It means nothing, ’tis been dry for years.”
He dropped to one knee, slid his hand carefully into the space between the concrete sleeve and the pipe’s rusty side. She watched him nervously, biting her lip to keep herself from saying something which would surely come out sounding weak or womanish: What if there were biting spiders down there in the forgotten dark? Or what if his hand got stuck? What would they do then?
Of that latter there had been no chance, she saw when he pulled his hand free. It was slick and black with oil.
“Dry for years?” he asked with a little smile.
She could only shake her head, bewildered.
14
They followed the pipe toward a place where a rotten gate barred the road. The pipe (she could now see oil bleeding out of its old joints, even in the weak moonlight) ducked under the gate; they went over it. She thought his hands rather too intimate for polite company in their helping, and rejoiced at each touch. If he doesn’t stop, the top of my head will explode like “the candle,” she thought, and laughed.
“Susan?”
“ ’Tis nothing, Will, only nerves.”
Another of those long glances passed between them as they stood on the far side of the gate, and then they went down the hill together. As they walked, she noticed an odd thing: many of the pines had been stripped of their lower branches. The hatchet marks and scabs of pine resin were clear in the moonlight, and looked new. She pointed this out to Will, who nodded but said nothing.
At the bottom of the hill, the pipe rose out of the ground and, supported on a series of rusty steel cradles, ran about seventy yards toward the abandoned building before stopping with the ragged suddenness of a battlefield amputation. Below this stopping point was what looked like a shallow lake of drying, tacky oil. That it had been there for awhile Susan could tell from the numerous corpses of birds she could see scattered across it—they had come down to investigate, become stuck, and stayed to die in what must have been an unpleasantly leisurely fashion.
She stared at this with wide, uncomprehending eyes until Will tapped her on the leg. He had hunkered down. She joined him knee-to-knee and followed the sweeping movement of his finger with growing disbelief and confusion. There were tracks here. Very big ones. Only one thing could have made them.
“Oxen,” she said.
“Aye. They came from there.” He pointed at the place where the pipe ended. “And they go—” He turned on the soles of his boots, still hunkered, and pointed back toward the slope where the woods started. Now that he pointed them out, she easily saw what she should have seen at once, horseman’s daughter that she was. A perfunctory effort had been made to hide the tracks and the churned-up ground where something heavy had been dragged or rolled. Time had smoothed away more of the mess, but the marks were still clear. She even thought she knew what the oxen had been dragging, and she could see that Will knew, as well.
The tracks split off from the end of the pipe in two arcs. Susan and “Will Dearborn” followed the right-hand one. She wasn’t surprised to see ruts mingled in with the tracks of the oxen. They were shallow—it had been a dry summer, by and large, and the ground was nearly as hard as concrete—but they were there. To still be able to see them at all meant that some goodly amount of weight had been moved. And aye, of course; why else would oxen be needed?
“Look,” Will said as they neared the hem of forest at the foot of the slope. She finally saw what had caught his attention, but she had to get down on her hands and knees to do it—how sharp his eyes were! Almost supernaturally so. There were boot-tracks here. Not fresh, but they were a lot newer than the tracks of the oxen and the wheelruts.
“This was the one with the cape,” he said, indicating a clear pair of tracks. “Reynolds.”
“Will! Thee can’t know it!”
He looked surprised, then laughed. “Sure I can. He walks with one foot turned in a little—the left foot. And here it is.” He stirred the air over the tracks with the tip of his finger, then laughed again at the way she was looking at him. “ ’Tisn’t sorcery, Susan daughter of Patrick; only trailcraft.”
“How do ye know so much, so young?” she asked. “Who are ye, Will?”
He stood up and looked down into her eyes. He didn’t have to look far; she was tall for a girl. “My name’s not Will but Roland,” he said. “And now I’ve put my life in your hands. That I don’t mind, but mayhap I’ve put your own life at risk, as well. You must keep it a dead secret.”
“Roland,” she said wonderingly. Tasting it.
“Aye. Which do you like better?”
“Your real one,” she said at once. “ ’Tis a noble name, so it is.”
He grinned, relieved, and this was the grin that made him look young again.
She raised herself on her toes and put her lips on his. The kiss, which was chaste and close-mouthed to begin with, bloomed like a flower: became open and slow and humid. She felt his tongue touch her lower lip and met it, shyly at first, with her own. His hands covered her back, then slipped around to her front. He touched her breasts, also shy to begin with, then slid his palms up their lower slopes to their tips. He uttered a small, moaning sigh directly into her mouth. And as he drew her closer and began to trail kisses down her neck, she felt the stone hardness of him below the buckle of his belt, a slim, warm length which exactly matched the melting she felt in the same place; those two places were meant for each other, as she was for him and he for her. It was ka, after all—ka like the wind, and she would go with it willingly, leaving all honor and promises behind.
She opened her mouth to tell him so, and then a queer but utterly persuasive sensation enfolded her: they were being watched. It was ridiculous, but it was there; she even felt she knew who was watching. She stepped back from Roland, her booted heels rocking unsteadily on the half-eroded oxen tracks. “Get out, ye old bitch,” she breathed. “If ye be spying on us in some way, I know not how, get thee gone!”
15
On the hill of the Cöos, Rhea drew back from the glass, spitting curses in a voice so low and harsh that she sounded like her own snake. She didn’t know what Susan had said—no sound came through the glass, only sight—but she knew that the girl had sensed her. And when she did, all sight had been wiped out. The glass had flashed a brilliant pink, then had gone dark, and none of the passes she made over it would serve to brighten it again.
“Aye, fine, let it be so,” she said at last, giving up. She remembered the wretched, prissy girl (not so prissy with the young man, though, was she?) standing hypnotized in her doorway, remembered what she had told the girl to do after she had lost her maidenhead, and began to grin, all her good humor restored. For if she lost her maidenhead to this wandering boy instead of to Hart Thorin, Lord High Mayor of Mejis, the comedy would be even greater, would it not?
Rhea sat in the shadows of her stinking hut and began to cackle.
16
Roland stared at her, wide-eyed, and as Susan explained about Rhea a little more fully (she left out the humiliating final examinations which lay at the heart of “proving honesty”), his desire cooled just enough for him to reassert control. It had nothing to do with jeopardizing the position he and his friends were trying to maintain in Hambry (or so he told himself) and everything to do with maintaining Susan’s—her position was important, her honor even more so.
“I imagine it was your imagination,” he said when she had finished.
“I think not.” With a touch of coolness.
“Or conscience, even?”
At that she lowered her eyes and said nothing.
“Susan, I would not hurt you for the world.”
“An
d ye love me?” Still without looking up.
“Aye, I do.”
“Then it’s best you kiss and touch me no more—not tonight. I can’t stand it if ye do.”
He nodded without speaking and held out his hand. She took it, and they walked on in the direction they had been going when they had been so sweetly distracted.
While they were still ten yards from the hem of the forest, both saw the glimmer of metal despite the dense foliage—too dense, she thought. Too dense by far.
It was the pine-boughs, of course; the ones which had been whacked from the trees on the slope. What they had been interlaced to camouflage were the big silver cans now missing from the paved area. The silver storage containers had been dragged over here—by the oxen, presumably—and then concealed. But why?
Roland inspected along the line of tangled pine branches, then stopped and plucked several aside. This created an opening like a doorway, and he gestured her to go through. “Be sharp in your looks,” he said. “I doubt if they’ve bothered to set traps or tripwires, but ’tis always best to be careful.”
Behind the camouflaging boughs, the tankers had been as neatly lined up as toy soldiers at the end of the day, and Susan at once saw one reason why they had been hidden: they had been re-equipped with wheels, well-made ones of solid oak which came as high as her chest. Each had been rimmed with a thin iron strip. The wheels were new, so were the strips, and the hubs had been custom-made. Susan knew only one blacksmith in Barony capable of such fine work: Brian Hookey, to whom she had gone for Felicia’s new shoes. Brian Hookey, who had smiled and clapped her on the shoulder like a compadre when she had come in with her da’s shoebag hanging on her hip. Brian Hookey, who had been one of Pat Delgado’s best friends.
She recalled looking around and thinking that times had been good for sai Hookey, and of course she had been right. Work in the blacksmithing line had been plentiful. Hookey had been making lots of wheels and rims, for one thing, and someone must have been paying him to do it. Eldred Jonas was one possibility; Kimba Rimer an even better one. Hart? She simply couldn’t believe that. Hart had his mind—what little there was of it—fixed on other matters this summer.
