by Stephen King
“Musty! Yoo-hoo, Musty, where are ye?”
The cat came oiling out of the woodpile, eyes glowing in the dirty dimness of the hut (when the weather turned fine again, Rhea had pulled her shutters to), forked tail waving. He jumped into her lap.
“I’ve an errand for ye,” she said, bending over to lick the cat. The entrancing taste of Musty’s fur filled her mouth and throat.
Musty purred and arched his back against her lips. For a six-legged mutie cat, life was good.
5
Jonas got rid of Cordelia as soon as he could—although not as soon as he would have liked, because he had to keep the scrawny bint sweetened up. She might come in handy another time. In the end he had kissed her on the corner of her mouth (which caused her to turn so violently red he feared she might have a brain-storm) and told her that he would check into the matter which so concerned her.
“But discreetly!” she said, alarmed.
Yes, he said, walking her home, he would be discreet; discretion was his middle name. He knew Cordelia wouldn’t—couldn’t—be eased until she knew for sure, but he guessed it would turn out to be nothing but vapor. Teenagers loved to dramatize, didn’t they? And if the young lass saw that her aunt was afraid of something, she might well feed auntie’s fears instead of allaying them.
Cordelia had stopped by the white picket fence that divided her garden-plot from the road, an expression of sublime relief coming over her face. Jonas thought she looked like a mule having its back scratched with a stiff brush.
“Why, I never thought of that . . . yet it’s likely, isn’t it?”
“Likely enough,” Jonas had said, “but I’ll still check into it most carefully. Better safe than sorry.” He kissed the corner of her mouth again. “And not a word to the fellows at Seafront. Not a hint.”
“Thank’ee, Eldred! Oh, thank’ee!” And she had hugged him before hurrying in, her tiny breasts pressing like stones against the front of his shirt. “Mayhap I’ll sleep tonight, after all!”
She might, but Jonas wondered if he would.
He walked toward Hookey’s stable, where he kept his horse, with his head down and his hands locked behind his back. A gaggle of boys came racing up the other side of the street; two of them were waving severed dog’s tails with blood clotted at the ends.
“Coffin Hunters! We’re Big Coffin Hunters just like you!” one called impudently across to him.
Jonas drew his gun and pointed it at them—it was done in a flash, and for a moment the terrified boys saw him as he really was: with his eyes blazing and his lips peeled back from his teeth, Jonas looked like a white-haired wolf in man’s clothes.
“Get on, you little bastards!” he snarled. “Get on before I blow you loose of your shoes and give your fathers cause to celebrate!”
For a moment they were frozen, and then they fled in a howling pack. One had left his trophy behind; the dog’s tail lay on the board sidewalk like a grisly fan. Jonas grimaced at the sight of it, holstered his gun, locked his hands behind him again, and walked on, looking like a parson meditating on the nature of the gods. And what in gods’ name was he doing, pulling iron on a bunch of young hellions like that?
Being upset, he thought. Being worried.
He was worried, all right. The titless old biddy’s suspicions had upset him greatly. Not on Thorin’s account—as far as Jonas was concerned, Dearborn could fuck the girl in the town square at high noon of Reaping Fair Day—but because it suggested that Dearborn might have fooled him about other things.
Crept up behind you once, he did, and you swore it’d never happen again. But if he’s been diddling that girl, it has happened again. Hasn’t it?
Aye, as they said in these parts. If the boy had had the impertinence to begin an affair with the Mayor’s gilly-in-waiting, and the incredible slyness to get away with it, what did that do to Jonas’s picture of three In-World brats who could barely find their own behinds with both hands and a candle?
We underestimated em once and they made us look like monkeys, Clay had said. I don’t want it to happen again.
Had it happened again? How much, really, did Dearborn and his friends know? How much had they found out? And who had they told? If Dearborn had been able to get away with pronging the Mayor’s chosen . . . to put something that large over on Eldred Jonas . . . on everyone . . .
“Good day, sai Jonas,” Brian Hookey said. He was grinning widely, all but kowtowing before Jonas with his sombrero crushed against his broad blacksmith’s chest. “Would ye care for fresh graf, sai? I’ve just gotten the new pressing, and—”
“All I want is my horse,” Jonas said curtly. “Bring it quick and stop your quacking.”
“Aye, so I will, happy to oblige, thankee-sai.” He hurried off on the errand, taking one nervous, grinning look back over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t going to be shot out of hand.
Ten minutes later Jonas was headed west on the Great Road. He felt a ridiculous but nevertheless strong desire to simply kick his horse into a gallop and leave all this foolishness behind him: Thorin the graying goat-boy, Roland and Susan with their no-doubt mawkish teenage love, Roy and Clay with their fast hands and slow wits, Rimer with his ambitions, Cordelia Delgado with her ghastly visions of the two of them in some bosky dell, him likely reciting poetry while she wove a garland of flowers for his brow.
He had ridden away from things before, when intuition whispered; plenty of things. But there would be no riding away this time. He had vowed vengeance on the brats, and while he had broken a bushel of promises made to others, he’d never broken one made to himself.
And there was John Farson to consider. Jonas had never spoken to the Good Man himself (and never wanted to; Farson was reputed to be whimsically, dangerously insane), but he had had dealings with George Latigo, who would probably be leading the troop of Farson’s men that would arrive any day now. It was Latigo who had hired the Big Coffin Hunters in the first place, paying a huge cash advance (which Jonas hadn’t yet shared with Reynolds and Depape) and promising an even larger piece of war-spoil if the Affiliation’s major forces were wiped out in or around the Shavéd Mountains.
Latigo was a good-sized bug, all right, but nothing to the size of the bug trundling along behind him. And besides, no large reward was ever achieved without risk. If they delivered the horses, oxen, wagons of fresh vegetables, the tack, the oil, the glass—most of all the wizard’s glass—all would be well. If they failed, it was very likely that their heads would end up being whacked about by Farson and his aides in their nightly polo games. It could happen, and Jonas knew it. No doubt someday it would happen. But when his head finally parted company from his shoulders, the divorce wouldn’t be caused by any such smarms as Dearborn and his friends, no matter whose bloodline they had descended from.
But if he’s been having an affair with Thorin’s autumn treat . . . if he’s been able to keep such a secret as that, what others has he been keeping? Perhaps he is playing Castles with you.
If so, he wouldn’t play for long. The first time young Mr. Dearborn poked his nose around his Hillock, Jonas would be there to shoot it off for him.
The question for the present was where to go first. Out to the Bar K, to take a long overdue look at the boys’ living quarters? He could; they would be counting Barony horses on the Drop, all three of them. But it wasn’t over horses that he might lose his head, was it? No, the horses were just a small added attraction, as far as the Good Man was concerned.
Jonas rode for Citgo instead.
6
First he checked the tankers. They were just as had been and should be—lined up in a neat row with their new wheels ready to roll when the time came, and hidden behind their new camouflage. Some of the screening pine branches were turning yellow at the tips, but the recent spell of rain had kept most admirably fresh. There had been no tampering that Jonas could see.
Next he climbed the hill, walking beside the pipeline and pausing more and more frequently to rest;
by the time he reached the rotting gate between the slope and the oilpatch, his bad leg was paining him severely. He studied the gate, frowning over the smudges he saw on the top rung. They might mean nothing, but Jonas thought someone might have climbed over the gate rather than risk opening it and having it fall off its hinges.
He spent the next hour strolling around the derricks, paying especially close attention to those that still worked, looking for sign. He found plenty of tracks, but it was impossible (especially after a week of wet weather) to read them with any degree of accuracy. The In-World boys might have been out here; that ugly little band of brats from town might have been out here; Arthur Eld and the whole company of his knights might have been out here. The ambiguity put Jonas in a foul temper, as ambiguity (other than on a Castles board) always did.
He started back the way he’d come, meaning to descend the slope to his horse and ride back to town. His leg was aching like fury, and he wanted a stiff drink to quiet it down. The bunkhouse at the Bar K could wait another day.
He got halfway to the gate, saw the weedy spur track tying Citgo to the Great Road, and sighed. There would be nothing on that little strip of road to see, but now that he’d come all the way out here, he supposed he should finish the job.
Bugger finishing the job, I want a damned drink.
But Roland wasn’t the only one who sometimes found his wishes overruled by training. Jonas sighed, rubbed at his leg, then walked back to the weedy twin ruts. Where, it seemed, there was something to find after all.
It lay in the grassy ditch less than a dozen paces from the place where the old road joined the Great Road. At first he saw only a smooth white shape in the weeds and thought it was a stone. Then he saw a black roundness that could only be an eyehole. Not a stone, then; a skull.
Grunting, Jonas knelt and fished it out while the few living derricks continued to squeal and thump behind him. A rook’s skull. He had seen it before. Hell, he suspected most of the town had. It belonged to the showoff, Arthur Heath . . . who, like all showoffs, needed his little props.
“He called it the lookout,” Jonas murmured. “Put it on the horn of his saddle sometimes, didn’t he? And sometimes wore it around his neck like a pendant.” Yes. The youngster had been wearing it so that night in the Travellers’ Rest, when—
Jonas turned the bird’s skull. Something rattled inside like a last lonely thought. Jonas tilted it, shook it over his open palm, and a fragment of gold chain dropped out. That was how the boy had been wearing it. At some point the chain had broken, the skull had fallen in the ditch, and sai Heath had never troubled to go looking for it. The thought that someone might find it had probably never crossed his mind. Boys were careless. It was a wonder any ever grew up to be men.
Jonas’s face remained calm as he knelt there examining the bird’s skull, but behind the unlined brow he was as furious as he had ever been in his life. They had been out here, all right—it was another thing he would have scoffed at just yesterday. He had to assume they had seen the tankers, camouflage or no camouflage, and if not for the chance of finding this skull, he never would have known for sure, one way or the other.
“When I finish with em, their eyesockets’ll be as empty as yours, Sir Rook. I’ll gouge em clean myself.”
He started to throw the skull away, then changed his mind. It might come in handy. Carrying it in one hand, he started back to where he’d left his horse.
7
Coral Thorin walked down High Street toward the Travellers’ Rest, her head thumping rustily and her heart sour in her breast. She had been up only an hour, but her hangover was so miserable it felt like a day already. She was drinking too much of late and she knew it—almost every night now—but she was very careful not to take more than one or two (and always light ones) where folks could see. So far, she thought no one suspected. And as long as no one suspected, she supposed she would keep on. How else to bear her idiotic brother? This idiotic town? And, of course, the knowledge that all of the ranchers in the Horsemen’s Association and at least half of the large landowners were traitors? “Fuck the Affiliation,” she whispered. “Better a bird in the hand.”
But did she really have a bird in the hand? Did any of them? Would Farson keep his promises—promises made by a man named Latigo and passed on by their own inimitable Kimba Rimer? Coral had her doubts; despots had such a convenient way of forgetting their promises, and birds in the hand such an irritating way of pecking your fingers, shitting in your palm, and then flying away. Not that it mattered now; she had made her bed. Besides, folks would always want to drink and gamble and rut, regardless of who they bowed their knees to or in whose name their taxes were collected.
Still, when the voice of old demon conscience whispered, a few drinks helped to still its lips.
She paused outside Craven’s Undertaking Parlor, looking upstreet at the laughing boys on their ladders, hanging paper lanterns from high poles and building eaves. These gay lamps would be lit on the night of the Reap Fair, filling Hambry’s main street with a hundred shades of soft, conflicting light.
For a moment Coral remembered the child she had been, looking at the colored paper lanterns with wonder, listening to the shouts and the rattle of fireworks, listening to the dance-music coming from Green Heart as her father held her hand . . . and, on his other side, her big brother Hart’s hand. In this memory, Hart was proudly wearing his first pair of long trousers.
Nostalgia swept her, sweet at first, then bitter. The child had grown into a sallow woman who owned a saloon and whorehouse (not to mention a great deal of land along the Drop), a woman whose only sexual partner of late was her brother’s Chancellor, a woman whose chief goal upon arising these days was getting to the hair of the dog that bit her as soon as possible. How, exactly, had things turned out so? This woman whose eyes she used was the last woman the child she had been would have expected to become.
“Where did I go wrong?” she asked herself, and laughed. “Oh dear Man Jesus, where did this straying sinner-child go wrong? Can you say hallelujah.” She sounded so much like the wandering preacher-woman that had come through town the year before—Pittston, her name had been, Sylvia Pittston—that she laughed again, this time almost naturally. She walked on toward the Rest with a better will.
Sheemie was outside, tending to the remains of his silkflowers. He waved to her and called a greeting. She waved back and called something in return. A good enough lad, Sheemie, and although she could have found another easily enough, she supposed she was glad Depape hadn’t killed him.
The bar was almost empty but brilliantly lit, all the gas-jets flaring. It was clean, as well. Sheemie would have emptied the spittoons, but Coral guessed it was the plump woman behind the bar who had done all the rest. The makeup couldn’t hide the sallowness of that woman’s cheeks, the hollowness of her eyes, or the way her neck had started to go all crepey (seeing that sort of lizardy skin on a woman’s neck always made Coral shiver inside).
It was Pettie the Trotter tending bar beneath The Romp’s stern glass gaze, and if allowed to do so, she would continue until Stanley appeared and banished her. Pettie had said nothing out loud to Coral—she knew better—but had made her wants clear enough just the same. Her whoring days were almost at an end. She desperately desired to go to work tending bar. There was precedent for it, Coral knew—a female bartender at Forest Trees in Pass o’ the River, and there had been another at Glencove, up the coast in Tavares, until she had died of the pox. What Pettie refused to see was that Stanley Ruiz was younger by fifteen years and in far better health. He would be pouring drinks under The Romp long after Pettie was rotting (instead of Trotting) in a pauper’s grave.
“Good even, sai Thorin,” Pettie said. And before Coral could so much as open her mouth, the whore had put a shot glass on the bar and filled it full of whiskey. Coral looked at it with dismay. Did they all know, then?
“I don’t want that,” she snapped. “Why in Eld’s name would I? Sun isn’t even dow
n! Pour it back into the bottle, for yer father’s sake, and then get the hell out of here. Who d’ye think yer serving at five o’ the clock, anyway? Ghosts?”
Pettie’s face fell a foot; the heavy coat of her makeup actually seemed to crack apart. She took the funnel from under the bar, stuck it in the neck of the bottle, and poured the shot of whiskey back in. Some went onto the bar in spite of the funnel; her plump hands (now ringless; her rings had been traded for food at the mercantile across the street long since) were shaking. “I’m sorry, sai. So I am. I was only—”
“I don’t care what ye was only,” Coral said, then turned a bloodshot eye on Sheb, who had been sitting on his piano-bench and leafing through old sheet-music. Now he was staring toward the bar with his mouth hung open. “And what are you looking at, ye frog?”
“Nothing, sai Thorin. I—”
“Then go look at it somewhere else. Take this pig with’ee. Give her a bounce, why don’t ye? It’ll be good for her skin. It might even be good for yer own.”
“I—”
“Get out! Are ye deaf? Both of ye!”
Pettie and Sheb went away toward the kitchen instead of the cribs upstairs, but it was all the same to Coral. They could go to hell as far as she was concerned. Anywhere, as long as they were out of her aching face.
She went behind the bar and looked around. Two men playing cards over in the far corner. That hardcase Reynolds was watching them and sipping a beer. There was another man at the far end of the bar, but he was staring off into space, lost in his own world. No one was paying any especial attention to sai Coral Thorin, and what did it matter if they were? If Pettie knew, they all knew.
