by Stephen King
“We have to go back,” Alain said. “Something’s wrong. It’s the touch. I’ve never felt it so clear.”
“Your count?” Roland asked again. There were times, such as now, when he found Alain’s ability to use the touch more annoying than helpful.
“Forty. Or forty-one, I forget. And what does it matter? They’ve moved what they don’t want us to count. Roland, didn’t you hear me? We have to go back! Something’s wrong! Something’s wrong at our place /”
Roland glanced toward Bert, riding peaceably some five hundred yards away. Then he looked back at Alain, his eyebrows raised in a silent question.
“Bert? He’s numb to the touch and always has been-you know it. I’m not. You know I’m not! Roland, please! Whoever it is will see the pigeons! Maybe find our guns!” The normally phlegmatic Alain was nearly crying in his excitement and dismay. “If you won’t go back with me, give me leave to go back by myself! Give me leave, Roland, for your father’s sake!”
“For your father’s sake, I give you none,” Roland said. “My count is thirty-one. Yours is forty. Yes, we’ll say forty. Forty’s a good number- good as any, I wot. Now we’ll change sides and count again.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Alain almost whispered. He was looking at Roland as if Roland had gone mad.
“Nothing.”
“You knew! You knew when we left this morning!”
“Oh, I might have seen something,” Roland said. “A reflection, perhaps, but… do you trust me, Al? That’s what matters, I think. Do you trust me, or do you think I lost my wits when I lost my heart? As he does?” He jerked his head in Cuthbert’s direction. Roland was looking at Alain with a faint smile on his lips, but his eyes were ruthless and distant it was Roland’s over-the-horizon look. Alain wondered if Susan Delgado had seen that expression yet, and if she had, what she made of it.
“I trust you.” By now Alain was so confused that he didn’t know for Mire if that was a lie or the truth.
“Good. Then switch sides with me. My count is thirty-one, mind.”
“Thirty-one,” Alain agreed. He raised his hands, then dropped them hack to his thighs with a slap so sharp his normally stolid mount laid his cars back and jigged a bit under him. “Thirty-one.”
“I think we may go back early today, if that’s any satisfaction to you,” Roland said, and rode away. Alain watched him. He’d always wondered what went on in Roland’s head, but never more than now.
5
Creak. Creak-creak.
Here was what he’d been listening for, and just as Jonas was about to give up the hunt. He had expected to find their hidey-hole a little closer to their beds, but they were trig, all right.
He went to one knee and used the blade of his knife to pry up the board which had creaked. Under it were three bundles, each swaddled in dark strips of cotton cloth. These strips were damp to the touch and smelled fragrantly of gun-oil. Jonas took the bundles out and unwrapped each, curious to see what sort of calibers the youngsters had brought. The answer turned out to be serviceable but undistinguished. Two of the bundles contained single five-shot revolvers of a type then called (for no reason I know) “carvers.” The third contained two guns, six-shooters of higher quality than the carvers. In fact, for one heart-stopping moment, Jonas thought he had found the big revolvers of a gunslinger-true-blue steel barrels, sandalwood grips, bores like mineshafts. Such guns he could not have left, no matter what the cost to his plans. Seeing the plain grips was thus something of a relief. Disappointment was never a thing you looked for, but it had a wonderful way of clearing the mind.
He rewrapped the guns and put them back, put the board back as well. A gang of ne'er-do-well clots from town might possibly come out here, and might possibly vandalize the unguarded bunkhouse, scattering what they didn’t tear up, but find a hiding place such as this? No, my son. Not likely.
Do you really think they’ll believe it was hooligans from town that did this?
They might; just because he had underestimated them to start with didn’t mean he should turn about-face and begin overestimating them now. And he had the luxury of not needing to care. Either way, it would make them angry. Angry enough to rush full-tilt around their Hillock, perhaps. To throw caution to the wind… and reap the whirlwind.
Jonas poked the end of the severed dog’s tail into one of the pigeon-cages, so it stuck up like a huge, mocking feather. He used the paint to write such charmingly boyish slogans as
and
on the walls. Then he left, standing on the porch for a moment to verify he still had the Bar K to himself. Of course he did. Yet for a blink or two, there at the end, he’d felt uneasy-almost as though he’d been scented. By some sort of In-World telepathy, mayhap.
There is such; you know it. The touch, it’s called.
Aye, but that was the tool of gunslingers, artists, and lunatics. Not of boys, be they lords or just lads.
Jonas went back to his horse at a near-trot nevertheless, mounted, and rode toward town. Things were reaching the boil, and there would be a lot to do before Demon Moon rose full in the sky.
6
Rhea’s hut, its stone walls and the cracked guijarros of its roof slimed with moss, huddled on the last hill of the Coos. Beyond it was a magnificent view northwest-the Bad Grass, the desert, Hanging Rock, Eyebolt Canyon-but scenic vistas were the last thing on Sheemie’s mind as he led Capriccioso cautiously into Rhea’s yard not long after noon. He’d been hungry for the last hour or so, but now the pangs were gone. He hated this place worse than any other in Barony, even more than Citgo with its big towers always going creakedy-creak and clangety-clang.
“Sai?” he called, leading the mule into the yard. Capi balked as they neared the hut, planting his feet and lowering his neck, but when Sheemie tugged the halter, he came on again. Sheemie was almost sorry.
“Ma’am? Nice old lady that wouldn’t hurt a fly? You therey-air? It’s good old Sheemie with your graf.” He smiled and held out his free hand, palm up, to demonstrate his exquisite harmlessness, but from the hut there was still no response. Sheemie felt his guts first coil, then cramp. For a moment he thought he was going to shit in his pants just like a babby; then he passed wind and felt a little better. In his bowels, at least.
He walked on, liking this less at every step. The yard was rocky and the straggling weeds yellowish, as if the hut’s resident had blighted the very earth with her touch. There was a garden, and Sheemie saw that the vegetables still in it-pumpkins and sharproot, mostly-were muties. Then he noticed the garden’s stuffy-guy. It was also a mutie, a nasty thing with two straw heads instead of one and what appeared to be a stuffed hand in a woman’s satin glove poking out of the chest area.
Sai Thorin’ll never talk me up here again, he thought. Not for all the pennies in the world.
The hut’s door stood open. To Sheemie it looked like a gaping mouth. A sickish dank smell drifted out.
Sheemie stopped about fifteen paces from the house, and when Capi nuzzled his bottom (as if to ask what was keeping them), the boy uttered a brief screech. The sound of it almost set him running, and it was only by exercising all his willpower that he was able to stand his ground. The day was bright, but up here on this hill, the sun seemed meaningless. This wasn’t his first trip up here, and Rhea’s hill had never been pleasant, but it was somehow worse now. It made him feel the way the sound of the thinny made him feel when he woke and heard it in the middle of the night. As if something awful was sliding toward him-something that was all insane eyes and red, reaching claws.
“S-S-Sai? Is anyone here? Is-”
“Come closer.” The voice drifted out of the open door. “Come to where I can see you, idiot boy.”
Trying not to moan or cry, Sheemie did as the voice said. He had an idea that he was never going back down the hill again. Capriccioso, perhaps, but not him. Poor old Sheemie was going to end up in the cookpot-hot dinner tonight, soup tomorrow, cold snacks until Year’s End. That’s what he would
be.
He made his reluctant way to Rhea’s stoop on rubbery legs-if his knees had been closer together, they would have knocked like castanets. She didn’t even sound the same.
“S-Sai? I’m afraid. So I a-a-am.”
“So ye should be,” the voice said. It drifted and drifted, slipping out into the sunlight like a sick puff of smoke. “Never mind, though-just do as I say. Come closer, Sheemie, son of Stanley.”
Sheemie did so, although terror dragged at every step he took. The mule followed, head down. Capi had honked like a goose all the way up here-honked ceaselessly-but now he had fallen silent.
“So here ye be,” the voice buried in those shadows whispered. “Here ye be, indeed.”
She stepped into the sunlight falling through the open door, wincing for a moment as it dazzled her eyes. Clasped in her arms was the empty graf barrel. Coiled around her throat like a necklace was Ermot.
Sheemie had seen the snake before, and on previous occasions had never failed to wonder what sort of agonies he might suffer before he died if he happened to be bitten by such. Today he had no such thoughts. Compared to Rhea, Ermot looked normal. The old woman’s face had sunken at the cheeks, giving the rest of her head the look of a skull. Brown spots swarmed out of her thin hair and over her bulging brow like an army of invading insects. Below her left eye was an open sore, and her grin showed only a few remaining teeth.
“Don’t like the way I look, do’ee?” she asked. “Makes yer heart cold, don’t it?”
“N-No,” Sheemie said, and then, because that didn’t sound right: “I mean yes!” But gods, that sounded even worse. “You’re beautiful, sai!” he blurted.
She chuffed nearly soundless laughter and thrust the empty tun into his arms almost hard enough to knock him on his ass. The touch of her fingers was brief, but long enough to make his flesh crawl.
“Well-a-day. They say handsome is as handsome does, don’t they?
And that suits me. Aye, right down to the ground. Bring me my graf, idiot child.”
“Y-yes, sai! Right away, sai!” He took the empty tun back to the mule, set it down, then fumbled loose the cordage holding the little barrel of graf. He was very aware of her watching him, and it made him clumsy, hut finally he got the barrel loose. It almost slid through his grasp, and there was a nightmarish moment when he thought it would fall to the stony ground and smash, but he caught his grip again at the last second. He took it to her, had just a second to realize she was no longer wearing the snake, then felt it crawling on his boots. Ermot looked up at him, hissing and baring a double set of fangs in an eerie grin.
“Don’t move too fast, my boy. 'Twouldn’t be wise-Ermot’s grumpy today. Set the barrel just inside the door, here. It’s too heavy for me. Missed a few meals of late, I have.”
Sheemie bent from the waist (bow yer best bow, Sai Thorin had said, and here he was, doing just that), grimacing, not daring to ease the pressure on his back by moving his feet because the snake was still on them. When he straightened, Rhea was holding out an old and stained envelope. The flap had been sealed with a blob of red wax. Sheemie dreaded to think what might have been rendered down to make wax such as that.
“Take this and give it to Cordelia Delgado. Do ye know her?”
“A-Aye,” Sheemie managed. “Susan-sai’s auntie.”
“That’s right.” Sheemie reached tentatively for the envelope, but she held it back a moment. “Can’t read, can ye, idiot boy?”
“Nay. Words ’ letters go right out of my head.”
“Good. Mind ye show this to no one who can, or some night ye’ll find Ermot waiting under yer pillow. I see far, Sheemie, d'ye mark me? I see far”
It was just an envelope, but it felt heavy and somehow dreadful in Sheemie’s fingers, as if it were made out of human skin instead of paper. And what sort of letter could Rhea be sending Cordelia Delgado, anyway? Sheemie thought back to the day he’d seen sai Delgado’s face all covered with cobwebbies, and shivered. The horrid creature lurking before him in the doorway of her hut could have been the very creature who’d spun those webs.
“Lose it and I’ll know,” Rhea whispered. “Show my business to another, and I’ll know. Remember, son of Stanley, I see far.”
“I’ll be careful, sai.” It might be better if he did lose the envelope, but he wouldn’t. Sheemie was dim in the head, everyone said so, but not so dim that he didn’t understand why he had been called up here: not to deliver a barrel of graf, but to receive this letter and pass it on.
“Would ye care to come in for a bit?” she whispered, and then pointed a ringer at his crotch. “If I give ye a little bit of mushroom to eat-special to me, it is-I can look like anyone ye fancy.”
“Oh, I can’t,” he said, clutching his trousers and smiling a huge broad smile that felt like a scream trying to get out of his skin. “That pesky thing fell off last week, that did.”
For a moment Rhea only gawped at him, genuinely surprised for one of the few times in her life, and then she once more broke out in chuffing bursts of laughter. She held her stomach in her waxy hands and rocked back and forth with glee. Ermot, startled, streaked into the house on his lengthy green belly. From somewhere in its depths, her cat hissed at it.
“Go on,” Rhea said, still laughing. She leaned forward and dropped three or four pennies into his shirt pocket. “Get out of here, ye great galoophus! Don’t ye linger, either, looking at flowers!”
“No, sai-”
Before he could say more, the door clapped to so hard that dust puffed out of the cracks between the boards.
7
Roland surprised Cuthbert by suggesting at two o’ the clock that they go back to the Bar K. When Bert asked why, Roland only shrugged and would say nothing more. Bert looked at Alain and saw a queer, musing expression on the boy’s face.
As they drew closer to the bunkhouse, a sense of foreboding filled Cuthbert. They topped a rise, and looked down at the Bar K. The bunk-house door stood open.
“Roland!” Alain cried. He was pointing to the cottonwood grove where the ranch’s spring was. Their clothes, neatly hung to dry when they left, were now scattered hell-to-breakfast.
Cuthbert dismounted and ran to them. Picked up a shirt, sniffed it, flung it away. “Pissed on!” he cried indignantly.
“Come on,” Roland said. “Let’s look at the damage.”
8
There was a lot of damage to look at. As you expected, Cuthbert thought, gazing at Roland. Then he turned to Alain, who appeared gloomy but not really surprised. As you both expected.
Roland bent toward one of the dead pigeons, and plucked at something so fine Cuthbert at first couldn’t see what it was. Then he straightened up and held it out to his friends. A single hair. Very long, very white. He opened the pinch of his thumb and forefinger and let it waft to the floor. There it lay amid the shredded remains of Cuthbert Allgood’s mother and father.
“If you knew that old corbie was here, why didn’t we come back and end his breath?” Cuthbert heard himself ask.
“Because the time was wrong,” Roland said mildly.
“He would have done it, had it been one of us in his place, destroying his things.”
“We’re not like him,” Roland said mildly.
“I’m going to find him and blow his teeth out the back of his head.”
“Not at all,” Roland said mildly.
If Bert had to listen to one more mild word from Roland’s mouth, he would run mad. All thoughts of fellowship and ka-tet left his mind, which sank back into his body and was at once obliterated by simple red fury. Jonas had been here. Jonas had pissed on their clothes, called Alain’s mother a cunt, torn up their most treasured pictures, painted childish obscenities on their walls, killed their pigeons. Roland had known… done nothing… intended to continue doing nothing. Except fuck his gilly-girl. He would do plenty of that, aye, because now that was all he cared about.
But she won’t like the look of your face the next time you cl
imb into the saddle, Cuthbert thought. I’ll see to that.
He drew back his fist. Alain caught his wrist. Roland turned away and began picking up scattered blankets, as if Cuthbert’s furious face and cocked fist were simply of no account to him.
Cuthbert balled up his other fist, meaning to make Alain let go of him, one way or the other, but the sight of his friend’s round and honest face, so guileless and dismayed, quieted his rage a little. His argument wasn’t with Alain. Cuthbert was sure the other boy had known something bad was happening here, but he was also sure that Roland had insisted Alain do nothing until Jonas was gone.
“Come with me,” Alain muttered, slinging an arm around Bert’s shoulders. “Outside. For your father’s sake, come. You have to cool off. This is no time to be fighting among ourselves.”
“It’s no time for our leader’s brains to drain down into his prick, either,” Cuthbert said, making no effort to lower his voice. But the second time Alain tugged him, Bert allowed himself to be led toward the door.
I’ll stay my rage at him this one last time, he thought, but I think-I know-that is all I can manage. I’ll have Alain tell him so.
The idea of using Alain as a go-between to his best friend-of knowing that things had come to such a pass-filled Cuthbert with an angry, despairing rage, and at the door to the porch he turned back to Roland. “She has made you a coward,” he said in the High Speech. Beside him, Alain drew in his breath sharply.
Roland stopped as if suddenly turned to stone, his back to them, his arms full of blankets. In that moment Cuthbert was sure Roland would turn and rush toward him. They would fight, likely until one of them was dead or blind or unconscious. Likely that one would be him, but he no longer cared.
But Roland never turned. Instead, in the same speech, he said: “He came to steal our guile and our caution. With you, he has succeeded.”
