Stephen King - The wind through the keyhole

“The Barony thanks you,” the Covenant Man said, touching one gloved finger to the side of his wide-brimmed hat. Then he wheeled his black horse around and was gone into the rain. The last thing Tim saw was passing odd: when the heavy black cloak belled out, he spied a large metal object tied to the top of the Covenant Man’s gunna. It looked like a washbasin.

Big Kells came striding down the steps, seized Tim by the shoulders, and commenced shaking him. Rain matted Kells’s thinning hair to the sides of his face and streamed from his beard. Black when he had slipped into the silk rope with Nell, that beard was now heavily streaked with gray.

“What did he tell’ee? Was it about me? What lies did’ee speak? Tell! ”

Tim could tell him nothing. His head snapped back and forth hard enough to make his teeth clack together.

Nell rushed down the steps. “Stop it! Let him alone! You promised you’d never-”

“Get out of what don’t concern you, woman,” he said, and struck her with the side of his fist. Tim’s mama fell into the mud, where the teeming rain was now filling the tracks left by the Covenant Man’s horse.

“You bastard!” Tim screamed. “You can’t hit my mama, you can’t ever!”

He felt no immediate pain when Kells dealt him a similar sidehand blow, but white light sheared across his vision. When it lifted, he found himself lying in the mud next to his mother. He was dazed, his ears were ringing, and still the key burned in his pocket like a live coal.

“Nis take both of you,” Kells said, and strode away into the rain. Beyond the gate he turned right, in the direction of Tree’s little length of high street. Headed for Gitty’s, Tim had no doubt. He had stayed away from drink all of that Wide Earth-as far as Tim knew, anyway-but he would not stay away from it this night. Tim saw from his mother’s sorrowful face-wet with rain, her hair hanging limp against her reddening muck-splattered cheek-that she knew it, too.

Tim put his arm around her waist, she put hers about his shoulders. They made their way slowly up the steps and into the house.

She didn’t so much sit in her chair at the kitchen table as collapse into it. Tim poured water from the jug into the basin, wetted a cloth, and put it gently on the side of her face, which had begun to swell. She held it there for a bit, then extended it wordlessly to him. To please her, he took it and put it on his own face. It was cool and good against the throbbing heat.

“This is a pretty business, wouldn’t you say?” she asked, with an attempt at brightness. “Woman beaten, boy slugged, new husband off t’boozer.”

Tim had no idea what to say to this, so said nothing.

Nell lowered her head to the heel of her hand and stared at the table. “I’ve made such a mess of things. I was frightened and at my wits’ end, but that’s no excuse. We would have been better on the land, I think.”

Turned off the place? Away from the plot? Wasn’t it enough that his da’s ax and lucky coin were gone? She was right about one thing, though; it was a mess.

But I have a key, Tim thought, and his fingers stole down to his pants to feel the shape of it.

“Where has he gone?” Nell asked, and Tim knew it wasn’t Bern Kells she was speaking of.

A wheel or two down the Ironwood. Where he’ll wait for me.

“I don’t know, Mama.” So far as he could remember, it was the first time he had ever lied to her.

“But we know where Bern’s gone, don’t we?” She laughed, then winced because it hurt her face. “He promised Milly Redhouse he was done with the drink, and he promised me, but he’s weak. Or… is it me? Did I drive him to it, do you think?”

“No, Mama.” But Tim wondered if it might not be true. Not in the way she meant-by being a nag, or keeping a dirty house, or refusing him what men and women did in bed after dark-but in some other way. There was a mystery here, and he wondered if the key in his pocket might solve it. To keep from touching it again, he got up and went to the pantry. “What would you like to eat? Eggs? I’ll scramble them, if you do.”

She smiled wanly. “Thankee, son, but I’m not hungry. I think I’ll lie down.” She rose a bit shakily.

Tim helped her into the bedroom. There he pretended to look at interesting things out the window while she took off her mud-stained day dress and put on her nightgown. When Tim turned around again, she was under the covers. She patted the place beside her, as she had sometimes done when he was sma’. In those days his da’ might have been in bed beside her, wearing his long woodsman’s underwear and smoking one of his roll-ups.

“I can’t turn him out,” she said. “I would if I could, but now that the rope’s slipped, the place is more his than mine. The law can be cruel to a woman. I never had cause to think about that before, but now… now…” Her eyes had gone glassy and distant. She would sleep soon, and that was probably a good thing.

He kissed her unbruised cheek and made to get up, but she stayed him. “What did the Covenant Man say to thee?”

“Asked me how I liked my new step-da’. I can’t remember how I answered him. I was scared.”

“When he covered thee with his cloak, I was, too. I thought he meant to ride away with thee, like the Red King in the old story.” She closed her eyes, then opened them again, very slowly. There was something in them now that could have been horror. “I remember him coming to my da’s when I was but a wee girl not long out of clouts-the black horse, the black gloves and cape, the saddle with the silver siguls on it. His white face gave me nightmares-it’s so long. And do you know what, Tim?”

He shook his head slowly from side to side.

“He even carries the same silver basin roped on behind, for I saw it then, too. That’s twenty years a-gone-aye, twenty and a doubleton-deucy more-but he looks the same. He hasn’t aged a day. ”

Her eyes closed again. This time they didn’t reopen, and Tim stole from the room.

When he was sure his mother was asleep, Tim went down the little bit of back hall to where Big Kells’s trunk, a squarish shape under an old remnant of blanket, stood just outside the mudroom. When he’d told the Covenant Man he knew of only two locks in Tree, the Covenant Man had replied, Oh, I think thee knows of another.

He stripped off the blanket and looked at his step-da’s trunk. The trunk he sometimes caressed like a well-loved pet and often sat upon at night, puffing at his pipe with the back door cracked open to let out the smoke.

Tim hurried back to the front of the house-in his stocking feet, so as not to risk waking his mother-and peered out the front window. The yard was empty, and there was no sign of Big Kells on the rainy road. Tim had expected nothing else. Kells would be at Gitty’s by now, getting through as much of what he had left as he could before falling down unconscious.

I hope somebody beats him up and gives him a taste of his own medicine. I’d do it myself, were I big enough.

He went back to the trunk, padding noiselessly in his stockings, knelt in front of it, and took the key from his pocket. It was a tiny silver thing the size of half a knuck, and strangely warm in his fingers, as if it were alive. The keyhole in the brass facing on the front of the trunk was much bigger. The key he gave me will never work in that, Tim thought. Then he remembered the Covenant Man saying ’Tis a magic key. It will open anything, but only a single time.

Tim put the key in the lock, where it clicked smoothly home, as if it had been meant for just that place all along. When he applied pressure, it turned smoothly, but the warmth left it as soon as it did. Now there was nothing between his fingers but cold dead metal.