Stephen King - The wind through the keyhole

“Who’ll go with me? Cuthbert or Alain?”

“Neither. I have work for Laughing Boy and Thudfoot right here. You go with Jamie DeCurry.”

I considered this and thought I would be glad to ride with Jamie Red-Hand. Although I would have preferred either Cuthbert or Alain. As my father surely knew.

“Will you go without argument, or will you annoy me further on a day when I have much to do?”

“I’ll go,” I said. In truth, it would be good to escape the palace-its shadowy rooms, its whispers of intrigue, its pervasive sense that darkness and anarchy were coming and nothing could stop them. The world would move on, but Gilead would not move on with it. That glittering, beautiful bubble would soon burst.

“Good. You’re a fine son, Roland. I may never have told you that, but it’s true. I hold nothing against you. Nothing.”

I lowered my head. When this meeting was finally over, I would go somewhere and let my heart free, but not just then. Not as I stood before him.

“Ten or twelve wheels beyond the hall of the women-Serenity, or whatever they call it-is the town of Debaria itself, on the edge of the alkali flats. Nothing serene about Debaria. It’s a dusty, hide-smelling railhead town where cattle and block salt are shipped south, east, and north-in every direction except the one where that bastard Farson’s laying his plans. There are fewer traildrive herds these days, and I expect Debaria will dry up and blow away like so many other places in Mid-World before long, but now it’s still a busy place, full of saloons, whoredens, gamblers, and confidence men. Hard as it might be to believe, there are even a few good people there. One is the High Sheriff, Hugh Peavy. It’s him that you and DeCurry will report to. Let him see your guns and a sigul which I will give to you. Do you ken everything I’ve told you so far?”

“Yes, Father,” I said. “What’s so bad there that it warrants the attention of gunslingers?” I smiled a little, a thing I had done seldom in the wake of my mother’s death. “Even baby gunslingers such as us?”

“According to the reports I have”-he lifted some of the papers and shook them at me-“there’s a skin-man at work. I have my doubts about that, but there’s no doubt the folk are terrified.”

“I don’t know what that is,” I said.

“Some sort of shape-changer, or so the old tales say. Go to Vannay when you leave me. He’s been collecting reports.”

“All right.”

“Do the job, find this lunatic who goes around wearing animal skins-that’s probably what it amounts to-but be not long about it. Matters far graver than this have begun to teeter. I’d have you back-you and all your ka-mates-before they fall.”

Two days later, Jamie and I led our horses onto the stable-car of a special two-car train that had been laid on for us. Once the Western Line ran a thousand wheels or more, all the way to the Mohaine Desert, but in the years before Gilead fell, it went to Debaria and no farther. Beyond there, many tracklines had been destroyed by washouts and ground-shakers. Others had been taken up by harriers and roving bands of outlaws who called themselves land-pirates, for that part of the world had fallen into bloody confusion. We called those far western lands Out-World, and they served John Farson’s purposes well. He was, after all, just a land-pirate himself. One with pretensions.

The train was little more than a steam-driven toy; Gilead folk called it Sma’ Toot and laughed to see it puffing over the bridge to the west of the palace. We could have ridden faster a-horseback, but the train saved the mounts. And the dusty velveteen seats of our car folded out into beds, which we felt was a fine thing. Until we tried to sleep in them, that was. At one particularly hard jounce, Jamie was thrown right off his makeshift bed and onto the floor. Cuthbert would have laughed and Alain would have cursed, but Jamie Red-Hand only picked himself up, stretched out again, and went back to sleep.

We spoke little that first day, only looked out the wavery isinglass windows, watching as Gilead’s green and forested land gave way to dirty scrub, a few struggling ranches, and herders’ huts. There were a few towns where folk-many of them muties-gaped at us as Sma’ Toot wheezed slowly past. A few pointed at the centers of their foreheads, as if at an invisible eye. It meant they stood for Farson, the Good Man. In Gilead, such folk would have been imprisoned for their disloyalty, but Gilead was now behind us. I was dismayed by how quickly the allegiance of these people, once taken for granted, had thinned.

On the first day of our journey, outside Beesford-on-Arten, where a few of my mother’s people still lived, a fat man threw a rock at the train. It bounced off the closed stable-car door, and I heard our horses whinny in surprise. The fat man saw us looking at him. He grinned, grabbed his crotch with both hands, and waddled away.

“Someone has eaten well in a poor land,” Jamie remarked as we watched his butters jounce in the seat of his old patched pants.

The following morning, after the servant had put a cold breakfast of porridge and milk before us, Jamie said, “I suppose you’d better tell me what it’s about.”

“Will you tell me something, first? If you know, that is?”

“Of course.”

“My father said that the women at the retreat in Debaria prefer the longstick to a man. Do you know what he meant?”

Jamie regarded me in silence for a bit-as if to make sure I wasn’t shaking his knee-and then his lips twitched at the corners. For Jamie this was the equivalent of holding his belly, rolling around the floor, and howling with glee. Which Cuthbert Allgood certainly would have done. “It must be what the whores in the low town call a diddlestick. Does that help?”

“Truly? And they… what? Use it on each other?”

“So ’tis said, but much talk is just la-la-la. You know more of women than I do, Roland; I’ve never lain with one. But never mind. Given time, I suppose I will. Tell me what we’re about in Debaria.”

“A skin-man is supposedly terrorizing the good folk. Probably the bad folk, as well.”

“A man who becomes some sort of animal?”

It was actually a little more complicated in this case, but he had the nub of it. The wind was blowing hard, flinging handfuls of alkali at the side of the car. After one particularly vicious gust, the little train lurched. Our empty porridge bowls slid. We caught them before they could fall. If we hadn’t been able to do such things, and without even thinking of them, we would not have been fit to carry the guns we wore. Not that Jamie preferred the gun. Given a choice (and the time to make it), he would reach for either his bow or his bah.

“My father doesn’t believe it,” I said. “But Vannay does. He-”

At that moment, we were thrown forward into the seats ahead of us. The old servant, who was coming down the center aisle to retrieve our bowls and cups, was flung all the way back to the door between the car and his little kitchen. His front teeth flew out of his mouth and into his lap, which gave me a start.

Jamie ran up the aisle, which was now severely tilted, and knelt by him. As I joined him, Jamie plucked up the teeth and I saw they were made of painted wood and held together by a cunning clip almost too small to see.

“Are you all right, sai?” Jamie asked.

The old fellow got slowly to his feet, took his teeth, and filled the hole behind his upper lip with them. “I’m fine, but this dirty bitch has derailed again. No more Debaria runs for me, I have a wife. She’s an old nag, and I’m determined to outlive her. You young men had better check your horses. With luck, neither of them will have broken a leg.”

Neither had, but they were nervous and stamping, anxious to get out of confinement. We lowered the ramp and tethered them to the connecting bar between the two cars, where they stood with their heads lowered and their ears flattened against the hot and gritty wind blowing out of the west. Then we clambered back inside the passenger car and collected our gunna. The engineer, a broad-shouldered, bowlegged plug of a man, came down the side of his listing train with the old servant in tow. When he reached us, he pointed to what we could see very well.