by Stephen King
Susan kept remembering the look of her father’s eyes on the few occasions when he had caught her in a fib. That look of half-curious disappointment. The sense that her fibs, innocuous as they might be, had hurt him like the scratch of a thorn.
“I will swear to nothing,” she said. “Ye’ve no right to ask it of me.”
“Swear!” Cordelia cried shrilly. She groped out for the table again and grasped it, as if for balance. “Swear it! Swear it! This is no game of jacks or tag or Johnny-jump-my-pony! Thee’s not a child any longer! Swear to me! Swear that thee’re still pure!”
“No,” Susan said, and turned to leave. Her heart was beating madly, but still that awful clarity informed the world. Roland would have known it for what it was: she was seeing with gunslinger’s eyes. There was a glass window in the kitchen, looking out toward the Drop, and in it she saw the ghostly reflection of Aunt Cord coming toward her, one arm raised, the hand at the end of it knotted into a fist. Without turning, Susan put up her own hand in a halting gesture. “Raise that not to me,” she said. “Raise it not, ye bitch.”
She saw the reflection’s ghost-eyes widen in shock and dismay. She saw the ghost-fist relax, become a hand again, fall to the ghost-woman’s side.
“Susan,” Cordelia said in a small, hurt voice. “How can ye call me so? What’s so coarsened your tongue and your regard for me?”
Susan went out without replying. She crossed the yard and entered the barn. Here the smells she had known since childhood—horses, lumber, hay—filled her head and drove the awful clarity away. She was tumbled back into childhood, lost in the shadows of her confusion again. Pylon turned to look at her and whickered. Susan put her head against his neck and cried.
7
“There!” Sheriff Avery said when sais Dearborn and Heath were gone. “It’s as ye said—just slow is all they are; just creeping careful.” He held the meticulously printed list up, studied it a moment, then cackled happily. “And look at this! What a beauty! Har! We can move anything we don’t want em to see days in advance, so we can.”
“They’re fools,” Reynolds said . . . but he pined for another chance at them, just the same. If Dearborn really thought bygones were bygones over that little business in the Travellers’ Rest, he was way past foolishness and dwelling in the land of idiocy.
Deputy Dave said nothing. He was looking disconsolately through his monocle at the Castles board, where his white army had been laid waste in six quick moves. Jonas’s forces had poured around Red Hillock like water, and Dave’s hopes had been swept away in the flood.
“I’m tempted to wrap myself up dry and go over to Seafront with this,” Avery said. He was still gloating over the paper, with its neat list of farms and ranches and proposed dates of inspection. Up to Year’s End and beyond it ran. Gods!
“Why don’t ye do that?” Jonas said, and got to his feet. Pain ran up his leg like bitter lightning.
“Another game, sai Jonas?” Dave asked, beginning to reset the pieces.
“I’d rather play a weed-eating dog,” Jonas said, and took malicious pleasure at the flush that crept up Dave’s neck and stained his guileless fool’s face. He limped across to the door, opened it, and went out on the porch. The drizzle had become a soft, steady rain. Hill Street was deserted, the cobbles gleaming wetly.
Reynolds had followed him out. “Eldred—”
“Get away,” Jonas said without turning.
Clay hesitated a moment, then went back inside and closed the door.
What the hell’s wrong with you? Jonas asked himself.
He should have been pleased at the two young pups and their list—as pleased as Avery was, as pleased as Rimer would be when he heard about this morning’s visit. After all, hadn’t he told Rimer not three days ago that the boys would soon be over on the Drop, counting their little hearts out? Yes. So why did he feel so unsettled? So fucking jittery? Because there still hadn’t been any contact from Farson’s man, Latigo? Because Reynolds came back empty from Hanging Rock on one day and Depape came back empty the next? Surely not. Latigo would come, along with a goodly troop of men, but it was still too soon for them, and Jonas knew it. Reaping was still almost a month away.
So is it just the bad weather working on your leg, stirring up that old wound and making you ugly?
No. The pain was bad, but it had been worse before. The trouble was his head. Jonas leaned against a post beneath the overhang, listened to the rain plinking on the tiles, and thought how, sometimes in a game of Castles, a clever player would peek around his Hillock for just a moment, then duck back. That was what this felt like—it was so right it smelled wrong. Crazy idea, but somehow not crazy at all.
“Are you trying to play Castles with me, sprat?” Jonas murmured. “If so, you’ll soon wish you’d stayed home with your mommy. So you will.”
8
Roland and Cuthbert headed back to the Bar K along the Drop—there would be no counting done today. At first, in spite of the rain and the gray skies, Cuthbert’s good humor was almost entirely restored.
“Did you see them?” he asked with a laugh. “Did you see them, Roland . . . Will, I mean? They bought it, didn’t they? Swallowed that honey whole, they did!”
“Yes.”
“What do we do next? What’s our next move?”
Roland looked at him blankly for a moment, as if startled out of a doze. “The next move is theirs. We count. And we wait.”
Cuthbert’s good cheer collapsed in a puff, and he once more found himself having to restrain a flood of recrimination, all whirling around two basic ideas: that Roland was shirking his duty so he could continue to wallow in the undeniable charms of a certain young lady, and—more important—that Roland had lost his wits when all of Mid-World needed them the most.
Except what duty was Roland shirking? And what made him so sure Roland was wrong? Logic? Intuition? Or just shitty old catbox jealousy? Cuthbert found himself thinking of the effortless way Jonas had ripped up Deputy Dave’s army when Deputy Dave had moved too soon. But life was not like Castles . . . was it? He didn’t know. But he thought he had at least one valid intuition: Roland was heading for disaster. And so they all were.
Wake up, Cuthbert thought. Please, Roland, wake up before it’s too late.
CHAPTER III
PLAYING CASTLES
1
There followed a week of the sort of weather that makes folk apt to crawl back into bed after lunch, take long naps, and wake feeling stupid and disoriented. It was far from flood-weather, but it made the final phase of the apple-picking dangerous (there were several broken legs, and in Seven-Mile Orchard a young woman fell from the top of her ladder, breaking her back), and the potato-fields became difficult to work; almost as much time was spent freeing wagons stuck in the gluey rows as was spent actually picking. In Green Heart, what decorations had been done for the Reaping Fair grew sodden and had to be pulled down. The work volunteers waited with increasing nervousness for the weather to break so they could begin again.
It was bad weather for young men whose job it was to take inventory, although they were at least able to begin visiting barns and counting stock. It was good weather for a young man and young woman who had discovered the joys of physical love, you would have said, but Roland and Susan met only twice during the run of gray weather. The danger of what they were doing was now almost palpable.
The first time was in an abandoned boathouse on the Seacoast Road. The second was in the far end of the crumbling building below and to the east of Citgo—they made love with furious intensity on one of Roland’s saddle-blankets, which was spread on the floor of what had once been the oil refinery’s cafeteria. As Susan climaxed, she shrieked his name over and over. Startled pigeons filled the old, shadowy rooms and crumbling hallways with their soft thunder.
2
Just as it seemed that the drizzle would never end and the grinding sound of the thinny in the still air would drive everyone in Hambry insane, a strong wind—almo
st a gale—blew in off the ocean and puffed the clouds away. The town awoke one day to a sky as bright as blue steel and a sun that turned the bay to gold in the morning and white fire in the afternoon. That sense of lethargy was gone. In the potato-fields the carts rolled with new vigor. In Green Heart an army of women began once more to bedeck with flowers the podium where Jamie McCann and Susan Delgado would be acclaimed this year’s Reaping Lad and Girl.
Out on the part of the Drop closest to Mayor’s House, Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain rode with renewed purpose, counting the horses which ran with the Barony brand on their flanks. The bright skies and brisk winds filled them with energy and good cheer, and for a course of days—three, or perhaps four—they galloped together in a whooping, shouting, laughing line, their old good fellowship restored.
On one of these brisk and sunny days, Eldred Jonas stepped out of the Sheriff’s office and walked up Hill Street toward Green Heart. He was free of both Depape and Reynolds this morning—they had ridden out to Hanging Rock together, looking for Latigo’s outriders, who must come soon, now—and Jonas’s plan was simple: to have a glass of beer in the pavillion, and watch the preparations that were going on there: the digging of the roasting-pits, the laying of faggots for the bonfire, the arguments over how to set the mortars that would shoot off the fireworks, the ladies flowering the stage where this year’s Lad and Girl would be offered for the town’s adulation. Perhaps, Jonas thought, he might take a likely-looking flower-girl off for an hour or two of recreation. The maintenance of the saloon whores he left strictly to Roy and Clay, but a fresh young flower-girl of seventeen or so was a different matter.
The pain in his hip had faded with the damp weather; the painful, lurching stride with which he had moved for the last week or so had become a mere limp again. Perhaps just a beer or two in the open air would be enough, but the thought of a girl wouldn’t quite leave his head. Young, clear-skinned, high-breasted. Fresh, sweet breath. Fresh, sweet lips—
“Mr. Jonas? Eldred?”
He turned, smiling, to the owner of the voice. No dewy-complexioned flower-girl with wide eyes and moist, parted lips stood there, but a skinny woman edging into late middle age—flat chest, flat bum, tight pale lips, hair scrooped so tight against her skull that it fair screamed. Only the wide eyes corresponded with his daydream. I believe I’ve made a conquest, Jonas thought sardonically.
“Why, Cordelia!” he said, reaching out and taking one of her hands in both of his. “How lovely you look this morning!”
Thin color came up in her cheeks and she laughed a little. For a moment she looked forty-five instead of sixty. And she’s not sixty, Jonas thought. The lines around her mouth and the shadows under her eyes . . . those are new.
“You’re very kind,” she said, “but I know better. I haven’t been sleeping, and when women my age don’t sleep, they grow old rapidly.”
“I’m sorry to hear you’re sleeping badly,” he said. “But now that the weather’s changed, perhaps—”
“It’s not the weather. Might I speak to you, Eldred? I’ve thought and thought, and you’re the only one I dare turn to for advice.”
His smile widened. He placed her hand through his arm, then covered it with his own. Now her blush was like fire. With all that blood in her head, she might talk for hours. And Jonas had an idea that every word would be interesting.
3
With women of a certain age and temperament, tea was more effective than wine when it came to loosening the tongue. Jonas gave up his plans for a lager (and, perhaps, a flower-girl) without so much as a second thought. He seated sai Delgado in a sunny corner of the Green Heart pavillion (it was not far from a red rock Roland and Susan knew well), and ordered a large pot of tea; cakes, too. They watched the Reaping Fair preparations go forward as they waited for the food and drink. The sunswept park was full of hammering and sawing and shouts and bursts of laughter.
“All Fair-Days are pleasant, but Reaping turns us all into children again, don’t you find?” Cordelia asked.
“Yes, indeed,” said Jonas, who hadn’t felt like a child even when he had been one.
“What I still like best is the bonfire,” she said, looking toward the great pile of sticks and boards that was being constructed at the far end of the park, cater-corner from the stage. It looked like a large wooden tepee. “I love it when the townsfolk bring their stuffy-guys and throw them on. Barbaric, but it always gives me such a pleasant shiver.”
“Aye,” Jonas said, and wondered if it would give her a pleasant shiver to know that three of the stuffy-guys thrown onto the Reap Night bonfire this year were apt to smell like pork and scream like harpies as they burned. If his luck was in, the one that screamed the longest would be the one with the pale blue eyes.
The tea and cakes came, and Jonas didn’t so much as glance at the girl’s full bosom when she bent to serve. He had eyes only for the fascinating sai Delgado, with her nervous little shifting movements and odd, desperate look.
When the girl was gone, he poured out, put the teapot back on its trivet, then covered her hand with his. “Now, Cordelia,” he said in his warmest tone. “I can see something troubles you. Out with it. Confide in your friend Eldred.”
Her lips pressed so tightly together that they almost disappeared, but not even that effort could stop their trembling. Her eyes filled with tears; swam with them; overspilled. He took his napkin and, leaning across the table, wiped the tears away.
“Tell me,” he said tenderly.
“I will. I must tell somebody or go mad. But you must make one promise, Eldred.”
“Of course, molly.” He saw her blush more furiously than ever at this harmless endearment, and squeezed her hand. “Anything.”
“You mustn’t tell Hart. That disgusting spider of a Chancellor, either, but especially not the Mayor. If I’m right in what I suspect and he found out, he could send her west!” She almost moaned this, as if comprehending it as a real fact for the first time. “He could send us both west!”
Maintaining his sympathetic smile, he said: “Not a word to Mayor Thorin, not a word to Kimba Rimer. Promise.”
For a moment he thought that she wouldn’t take the plunge . . . or perhaps couldn’t. Then, in a low, gaspy voice that sounded like ripping cloth, she said a single word. “Dearborn.”
He felt his heart take a bump as the name that had been so much in his mind now passed her lips, and although he continued to smile, he could not forbear a single hard squeeze of her fingers that made her wince.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that you startled me a little. Dearborn . . . a well-spoken enough lad, but I wonder if he’s entirely trustworthy.”
“I fear he’s been with my Susan.” Now it was her turn to squeeze, but Jonas didn’t mind. He hardly felt it, in fact. He continued to smile, hoping he did not look as flabbergasted as he felt. “I fear he’s been with her . . . as a man is with a woman. Oh, how horrible this is!”
She wept with a silent bitterness, taking little pecking peeks around as she did to make sure they were not being observed. Jonas had seen coyotes and wild dogs look around from their stinking dinners in just that fashion. He let her get as much of it out of her system as he could—he wanted her calm; incoherencies wouldn’t help him—and when he saw her tears slackening, he held out a cup of tea. “Drink this.”
“Yes. Thank you.” The tea was still hot enough to steam, but she drank it down greedily. Her old throat must be lined with slate, Jonas thought. She set the cup down, and while he poured out fresh, she used her frilly pañuelo to scrub the tears almost viciously from her face.
“I don’t like him,” she said. “Don’t like him, don’t trust him, none of those three with their fancy In-World bows and insolent eyes and strange ways of talking, but him in particular. Yet if anything’s gone on betwixt the two of em (and I’m so afraid it has), it comes back to her, doesn’t it? It’s the woman, after all, who must refuse the bestial impulses.”
He leaned o
ver the table, looking at her with warm sympathy. “Tell me everything, Cordelia.”
She did.
4
Rhea loved everything about the glass ball, but what she especially loved was the way it unfailingly showed her people at their vilest. Never in its pink reaches did she see one child comforting another after a fall at play, or a tired husband with his head in his wife’s lap, or old people supping peacefully together at the end of the day; these things held no more interest for the glass, it seemed, than they did for her.
Instead she had seen acts of incest, mothers beating children, husbands beating wives. She had seen a gang of boys out west’rds of town (it would have amused Rhea to know these swaggering eight-year-olds called themselves the Big Coffin Hunters) go about enticing stray dogs with a bone and then cutting off their tails for a lark. She had seen robberies, and at least one murder: a wandering man who had stabbed his companion with a pitchfork after some sort of trivial argument. That had been on the first drizzly night. The body still lay mouldering in a ditch beside the Great Road West, covered with a layer of straw and weeds. It might be discovered before the autumn storms came to drown another year; it might not.
She also glimpsed Cordelia Delgado and that hard gun, Jonas, sitting in Green Heart at one of the outside tables and talking about . . . well, of course she didn’t know, did she? But she could see the look in the spinster bitch’s eyes. Infatuated with him, she was, all pink in the face. Gone all hot and sweet over a backshooter and failed gunslinger. It was comical, aye, and Rhea thought she would keep an eye on them, from time to time. Wery entertaining, it would likely be.
After showing her Cordelia and Jonas, the glass veiled itself once more. Rhea put it back in the box with the eye on the lock. Seeing Cordelia in the glass had reminded the old woman that she had unfinished business regarding Cordelia’s sluttish niece. That Rhea still hadn’t done that business was ironic but understandable—as soon as she had seen how to fix the young sai’s wagon, Rhea’s mind and emotions had settled again, the images in the ball had reappeared, and in her fascination with them Rhea had temporarily forgotten that Susan Delgado was alive. Now, however, she remembered her plan. Set the cat among the pigeons. And speaking of cats—