by Stephen King
“Very well, Susan,” Alain said. “What else do you see?”
“Rhea. She looks like a skull in the moonlight. A skull with hair.”
“Gods,” Cuthbert muttered, and crossed his arms over his chest.
“She says I should listen. I say I will listen. She says I should obey. I say I will obey. She says ‘Aye, lovely, just so, it’s a good girl y’are.’ She’s stroking my hair. All the time. My braid.” Susan raised a dreaming, drowning hand, pale in the shadows of the crypt, to her blonde hair. “And then she says there’s something I’m to do when my virginity’s over. ‘Wait,’ she says, ‘until he’s asleep beside ye, then cut yer hair off yer head. Every strand. Right down to yer very skull.’ ”
The boys looked at her in mounting horror as her voice became Rhea’s—the growling, whining cadences of the old woman of the Cöos. Even the face—except for the coldly dreaming eyes—had become a hag’s face.
“ ‘Cut it all, girl, every whore’s strand of it, aye, and go back to him as bald as ye came from yer mother! See how he likes ye then!’ ”
She fell silent. Alain turned his pallid face to Roland. His lips were trembling, but still he held her hands.
“Why is the moon pink?” Roland asked. “Why is the moon pink when you try to remember?”
“It’s her glam.” Susan seemed almost surprised, almost gay. Confiding. “She keeps it under her bed, so she does. She doesn’t know I saw it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Aye,” Susan said, then added simply: “She would have killed me if she knew.” She giggled, shocking them all. “Rhea has the moon in a box under her bed.” She lilted this in the singsong voice of a small child.
“A pink moon,” Roland said.
“Aye.”
“Under her bed.”
“Aye.” This time she did pull her hands free of Alain’s. She made a circle with them in the air, and as she looked up at it, a dreadful expression of greed passed over her face like a cramp. “I should like to have it, Roland. So I should. Lovely moon! I saw it when she sent me for the wood. Through her window. She looked . . . young.” Then, once again: “I sh’d like to have such a thing.”
“No—you wouldn’t. But it’s under her bed?”
“Aye, in a magic place she makes with passes.”
“She has a piece of Maerlyn’s Rainbow,” Cuthbert said in a wondering voice. “The old bitch has what your da told us about—no wonder she knows all she does!”
“Is there more we need?” Alain asked. “Her hands have gotten very cold. I don’t like having her this deep. She’s done well, but . . .”
“I think we’re done.”
“Shall I tell her to forget?”
Roland shook his head at once—they were ka-tet, for good or ill. He took hold of her fingers, and yes, they were cold.
“Susan?”
“Aye, dear.”
“I’m going to say a rhyme. When I finish, you’ll remember everything, as you did before. All right?”
She smiled and closed her eyes again. “Bird and bear and hare and fish . . .”
Smiling, Roland finished, “Give my love her fondest wish.”
Her eyes opened. She smiled. “You,” she said again, and kissed him. “Still you, Roland. Still you, my love.”
Unable to help himself, Roland put his arms around her.
Cuthbert looked away. Alain looked down at his boots and cleared his throat.
9
As they rode back toward Seafront, Susan with her arms around Roland’s waist, she asked: “Will you take the glass from her?”
“Best leave it where it is for now. It was left in her safekeeping by Jonas, on behalf of Farson, I have no doubt. It’s to be sent west with the rest of the plunder; I’ve no doubt of that, either. We’ll deal with it when we deal with the tankers and Farson’s men.”
“Ye’d take it with us?”
“Take it or break it. I suppose I’d rather take it back to my father, but that has its own risks. We’ll have to be careful. It’s a powerful glam.”
“Suppose she sees our plans? Suppose she warns Jonas or Kimba Rimer?”
“If she doesn’t see us coming to take away her precious toy, I don’t think she’ll mind our plans one way or the other. I think we’ve put a scare into her, and if the ball has really gotten a hold on her, watching in it’s what she’ll mostly want to do with her time now.”
“And hold onto it. She’ll want to do that, too.”
“Aye.”
Rusher was walking along a path through the seacliff woods. Through the thinning branches they could glimpse the ivied gray wall surrounding Mayor’s House and hear the rhythmic roar of waves breaking on the shingle below.
“You can get in safe, Susan?”
“No fear.”
“And you know what you and Sheemie are to do?”
“Aye. I feel better than I have in ages. It’s as if my mind is finally clear of some old shadow.”
“If so, it’s Alain you have to thank. I couldn’t have done it on my own.”
“There’s magic in his hands.”
“Yes.” They had reached the servants’ door. Susan dismounted with fluid ease. He stepped down himself and stood beside her with an arm around her waist. She was looking up at the moon.
“Look, it’s fattened enough so you can see the beginning of the Demon’s face. Does thee see it?”
A blade of nose, a bone of grin. No eye yet, but yes, he saw it.
“It used to terrify me when I was little.” Susan was whispering now, mindful of the house behind the wall. “I’d pull the blind when the Demon was full. I was afraid that if he could see me, he’d reach down and take me up to where he was and eat me.” Her lips were trembling. “Children are silly, aren’t they?”
“Sometimes.” He hadn’t been afraid of Demon Moon himself as a small child, but he was afraid of this one. The future seemed so dark, and the way through to the light so slim. “I love thee, Susan. With all my heart, I do.”
“I know. And I love thee.” She kissed his mouth with gentle open lips. Put his hand on her breast for a moment, then kissed the warm palm. He held her, and she looked past him at the ripening moon.
“A week until the Reap,” she said. “Fin de año is what the vaqueros and labradoros call it. Do they call it so in your land?”
“Near enough,” Roland said. “It’s called closing the year. Women go about giving preserves and kisses.”
She laughed softly against his shoulder. “Perhaps I’ll not find things so different, after all.”
“You must save all your best kisses for me.”
“I will.”
“Whatever comes, we’ll be together,” he said, but above them, Demon Moon grinned into the starry dark above the Clean Sea, as if he knew a different future.
CHAPTER VI
CLOSING THE YEAR
1
So now comes to Mejis fin de año, known in toward the center of Mid-World as closing the year. It comes as it has a thousand times before . . . or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand. No one can tell for sure; the world has moved on and time has grown strange. In Mejis their saying is “Time is a face on the water.”
In the fields, the last of the potatoes are being picked by men and women who wear gloves and their heaviest serapes, for now the wind has turned firmly, blowing east to west, blowing hard, and always there’s the smell of salt in the chilly air—a smell like tears. Los campesinos harvest the final rows cheerfully enough, talking of the things they’ll do and the capers they’ll cut at Reaping Fair, but they feel all of autumn’s old sadness in the wind; the going of the year. It runs away from them like water in a stream, and although none speak of it, all know it very well.
In the orchards, the last and highest of the apples are picked by laughing young men (in these not-quite-gales, the final days of picking belong only to them) who bob up and down like crow’s nest lookouts. Above them, in skies which hold a brilliant, cloudless blue, s
quadrons of geese fly south, calling their rusty adieux.
The small fishing boats are pulled from the water; their hulls are scraped and painted by singing owners who mostly work stripped to the waist in spite of the chill in the air. They sing the old songs as they work—
I am a man of the bright blue sea,
All I see, all I see,
I am a man of the Barony,
All I see is mine-o!
I am a man of the bright blue bay,
All I say, all I say,
Until my nets are full I stay
All I say is fine-o!
—and sometimes a little cask of graf is tossed from dock to dock. On the bay itself only the large boats now remain, pacing about the big circles which mark their dropped nets as a working dog may pace around a flock of sheep. At noon the bay is a rippling sheet of autumn fire and the men on the boats sit cross-legged, eating their lunches, and know that all they see is theirs-o . . . at least until the gray gales of autumn come swarming over the horizon, coughing out their gusts of sleet and snow.
Closing, closing the year.
Along the streets of Hambry, the Reap-lights now burn at night, and the hands of the stuffy-guys are painted red. Reap-charms hang everywhere, and although women often kiss and are kissed in the streets and in both marketplaces—often by men they do not know—sexual intercourse has come to an almost complete halt. It will resume (with a bang, you might say) on Reap-Night. There will be the usual crop of Full Earth babies the following year as a result.
On the Drop, the horses gallop wildly, as if understanding (very likely they do) that their time of freedom is coming to an end. They swoop and then stand with their faces pointing west when the wind gusts, showing their asses to winter. On the ranches, porch-nets are taken down and shutters rehung. In the huge ranch kitchens and smaller farmhouse kitchens, no one is stealing Reap-kisses, and no one is even thinking about sex. This is the time of putting up and laying by, and the kitchens fume with steam and pulse with heat from before dawn until long after dark. There is the smell of apples and beets and beans and sharproot and curing strips of meat. Women work ceaselessly all day and then sleepwalk to bed, where they lie like corpses until the next dark morning calls them back to their kitchens.
Leaves are burned in town yards, and as the week goes on and Old Demon’s face shows ever more clearly, red-handed stuffy-guys are thrown on the pyres more and more frequently. In the fields, cornshocks flare like torches, and often stuffies burn with them, their red hands and white-cross eyes rippling in the heat. Men stand around these fires, not speaking, their faces solemn. No one will say what terrible old ways and unspeakable old gods are being propitiated by the burning of the stuffy-guys, but they all know well enough. From time to time one of these men will whisper two words under his breath: charyou tree.
They are closing, closing, closing the year.
The streets rattle with firecrackers—and sometimes with a heftier “big-bang” that makes even placid carthorses rear in their traces—and echo with the laughter of children. On the porch of the mercantile and across the street at the Travellers’ Rest, kisses—sometimes humidly open and with much sweet lashing of tongues—are exchanged, but Coral Thorin’s whores (“cotton-gillies” is what the airy-fairy ones like Gert Moggins like to call themselves) are bored. They will have little custom this week.
This is not Year’s End, when the winterlogs will burn and Mejis will be barn-dances from one end to the other . . . and yet it is. This is the real year’s end, charyou tree, and everyone, from Stanley Ruiz standing at the bar beneath The Romp to the farthest of Fran Lengyll’s vaqueros out on the edge of the Bad Grass, knows it. There is a kind of echo in the bright air, a yearning for other places in the blood, a loneliness in the heart that sings like the wind.
But this year there’s something else, as well: a sense of wrongness that no one can quite voice. Folks who never had a nightmare in their lives will awake screaming with them during the week of fin de año; men who consider themselves peaceful will find themselves not only in fistfights but instigating them; discontented boys who would only have dreamed of running away in other years will this year actually do it, and most will not come back after the first night spent sleeping raw.
There is a sense—inarticulate but very much there—that things have gone amiss this season. It is the closing of the year; it is also the closing of the peace. For it is here, in the sleepy Out-World Barony of Mejis, that Mid-World’s last great conflict will shortly begin; it is from here that the blood will begin to flow. In two years, no more, the world as it has been will be swept away. It starts here. From its field of roses, the Dark Tower cries out in its beast’s voice. Time is a face on the water.
2
Coral Thorin was coming down the High Street from the Bayview Hotel when she spied Sheemie, leading Caprichoso and heading in the opposite direction. The boy was singing “Careless Love” in a voice both high and sweet. His progress was slow; the barrels slung over Capi’s back were half again as large as the ones he had carried up to the Cöos not long before.
Coral hailed her boy-of-all-work cheerily enough. She had reason to be cheery; Eldred Jonas had no use for fin de año abstinence. And for a man with a bad leg, he could be very inventive.
“Sheemie!” she called. “Where go ye? Seafront?”
“Aye,” Sheemie said. “I’ve got the graf them asked for. All parties come Reaping Fair, aye, tons of em. Dance a lot, get hot a lot, drink graf to cool off a lot! How pretty you look, sai Thorin, cheeks all pinky-pink, so they are.”
“Oh, law! How kind of you to say, Sheemie!” She favored him with a dazzling smile. “Go on, now, you flatterer—don’t linger.”
“Noey-no, off I go.”
Coral stood watching after him and smiling. Dance a lot, get hot a lot, Sheemie had said. About the dancing Coral didn’t know, but she was sure this year’s Reaping would be hot, all right. Very hot indeed.
3
Miguel met Sheemie at Seafront’s archway, gave him the look of lofty contempt he reserved for the lower orders, then pulled the cork from first one barrel and then the other. With the first, he only sniffed from the bung; at the second, he stuck his thumb in and then sucked it thoughtfully. With his wrinkled cheeks hollowed inward and his toothless old mouth working, he looked like an ancient bearded baby.
“Tasty, ain’t it?” Sheemie asked. “Tasty as a pasty, ain’t it, good old Miguel, been here a thousand years?”
Miguel, still sucking his thumb, favored Sheemie with a sour look. “Andale. Andale, simplon.”
Sheemie led his mule around the house to the kitchen. Here the breeze off the ocean was sharp and shiversome. He waved to the women in the kitchen, but not a one waved back; likely they didn’t even see him. A pot boiled on every trink of the enormous stove, and the women—working in loose long-sleeved cotton garments like shifts and wearing their hair tied up in brightly colored clouts—moved about like phantoms glimpsed in fog.
Sheemie took first one barrel from Capi’s back, then the other. Grunting, he carried them to the huge oak tank by the back door. He opened the tank’s lid, bent over it, and then backed away from the eye-wateringly strong smell of elderly graf.
“Whew!” he said, hoisting the first barrel. “Ye could get drunk just on the smell o’ that lot!”
He emptied in the fresh graf, careful not to spill. When he was finished, the tank was pretty well topped up. That was good, for on Reaping Night, apple-beer would flow out of the kitchen taps like water.
He slipped the empty barrels into their carriers, looked into the kitchen once more to be sure he wasn’t being observed (he wasn’t; Coral’s simple-minded tavern-boy was the last thing on anyone’s minds that morning), and then led Capi not back the way they’d come but along a path which led to Seafront’s storage sheds.
There were three of them in a row, each with its own red-handed stuffy-guy sitting in front. The guys appeared to be watching Sheemie, and that gave him
the shivers. Then he remembered his trip to crazy old bitch-lady Rhea’s house. She had been scary. These were just old duds stuffed full of straw.
“Susan?” he called, low. “Are ye here?”
The door of the center shed was ajar. Now it trundled open a little. “Come in!” she called, also low. “Bring the mule! Hurry!”
He led Capi into a shed which smelled of straw and beans and tack . . . and something else. Something sharper. Fireworks, he thought. Shooting-powder, too.
Susan, who had spent the morning enduring final fittings, was dressed in a thin silk wrapper and large leather boots. Her hair was done up in curling papers of bright blue and red.
Sheemie tittered. “You look quite amusing, Susan, daughter of Pat. Quite a chuckle for me, I think.”
“Yes, I’m a picture for an artist to paint, all right,” Susan said, looking distracted. “We have to hurry. I have twenty minutes before I’m missed. I’ll be missed before, if that randy old goat is looking for me . . . let’s be quick!”
They lifted the barrels from Capi’s back. Susan took a broken horse-bit from the pocket of her wrapper and used the sharp end to pry off one of the tops. She tossed the bit to Sheemie, who pried off the other. The apple-tart smell of graf filled the shed.
“Here!” She tossed Sheemie a soft cloth. “Dry it out as well as you can. Doesn’t have to be perfect, they’re wrapped, but it’s best to be safe.”
They wiped the insides of the barrels, Susan stealing nervous glances at the door every few seconds. “All right,” she said. “Good. Now . . . there’s two kinds. I’m sure they won’t be missed; there’s enough stuff back there to blow up half the world.” She hurried back into the dimness of the shed, holding the hem of her wrapper up with one hand, her boots clomping. When she came back, her arms were full of wrapped packages.
“These are the bigger ones,” she said.
He stored them in one of the casks. There were a dozen packages in all, and Sheemie could feel round things inside, each about the size of a child’s fist. Big-bangers. By the time he had finished packing and putting the top back on the barrel, she had returned with an armload of smaller packages. These he stored in the other barrel. They were the little ’uns, from the feel, the ones that not only banged but flashed colored fire.
