by Stephen King
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.”
“No,” Cuthbert said, lapsing back into the low speech. “I know that part of you really believes that, but it’s not so. The truth is, you’ve lost your compass. You’ve called your carelessness love and made a virtue of irresponsibility. I—”
“For gods’ sake, come!” Alain nearly snarled, and yanked him out the door.
9
With Roland out of sight, Cuthbert felt his rage veering toward Alain in spite of himself; it turned like a weathervane when the wind shifts. The two of them stood facing each other in the sunshiny dooryard, Alain looking unhappy and distracted, Cuthbert with his hands knotted into fists so tight they trembled at his sides.
“Why do you always excuse him? Why?”
“Out on the Drop, he asked if I trusted him. I said I did. And I do.”
“Then you’re a fool.”
“And he’s a gunslinger. If he says we must wait longer, we must.”
“He’s a gunslinger by accident! A freak! A mutie!”
Alain stared at him in silent shock.
“Come with me, Alain. It’s time to end this mad game. We’ll find Jonas and kill him. Our ka-tet is broken. We’ll make a new one, you and I.”
“It’s not broken. If it does break, it’ll be you responsible. And for that I’ll never forgive you.”
Now it was Cuthbert’s turn to be silent.
“Go for a ride, why don’t you? A long one. Give yourself time to cool off. So much depends on our fellowship—”
“Tell him that!”
“No, I’m telling you. Jonas wrote a foul word about my mother. Don’t you think I’d go with you just to avenge that, if I didn’t think that Roland was right? That it’s what Jonas wants? For us to lose our wits and come charging blindly around our Hillock?”
“That’s right, but it’s wrong, too,” Cuthbert said. Yet his hands were slowly unrolling, fists becoming fingers again. “You don’t see and I don’t have the words to explain. If I say that Susan has poisoned the well of our ka-tet, you would call me jealous. Yet I think she has, all unknowing and unmeaning. She’s poisoned his mind, and the door to hell has opened. Roland feels the heat from that open door and thinks it’s only his feeling for her . . . but we must do better, Al. We must think better. For him as well as for ourselves and our fathers.”
“Are you calling her our enemy?”
“No! It would be easier if she was.” He took a deep breath, let it out, took another, let it out, took a third and let it out. With each one he felt a little saner, a little more himself. “Never mind. There’s no more to say on’t for now. Your advice is good—I think I will take a ride. A long one.”
Bert started toward his horse, then turned back.
“Tell him he’s wrong. Tell him that even if he’s right about waiting, he’s right for the wrong reasons, and that makes him all the way wrong.” He hesitated. “Tell him what I said about the door to hell. Say that’s my piece of the touch. Will you tell him?”
“Yes. Stay away from Jonas, Bert.”
Cuthbert mounted up. “I promise nothing.”
“You’re not a man.” Alain sounded sorrowful; on the point of tears, in fact. “None of us are men.”
“You better be wrong about that,” Cuthbert said, “because men’s work is coming.”
He turned his mount and rode away at a gallop.
10
He went far up the Seacoast Road, to begin with trying not to think at all. He’d found that sometimes unexpected things wandered into your head if you left the door open for them. Useful things, often.
This afternoon that didn’t happen. Confused, miserable, and without a fresh idea in his head (or even the hope of one), Bert at last turned back to Hambry. He rode the High Street from end to end, waving or speaking to people who hiled him. The three of them had met a lot of good people here. Some he counted as friends, and he rather felt the common folk of Hambrytown had adopted them—young fellows who were far from their own homes and families. And the more Bert knew and saw of these common folk, the less he suspected that they were a part of Rimer’s and Jonas’s nasty little game. Why else had the Good Man chosen Hambry in the first place, if not because it provided such excellent cover?
There were plenty of folk out today. The farmers’ market was booming, the street-stalls were crowded, children were laughing at a Pinch and Jilly show (Jilly was currently chasing Pinch back and forth and bashing the poor old longsuffering fellow with her broom), and the Reaping Fair decorations were going forward at speed. Yet Cuthbert felt only a little joy and anticipation at the thought of the Fair. Because it wasn’t his own, wasn’t Gilead Reaping? Perhaps . . . but mostly just because his mind and heart were so heavy. If this was what growing up was like, he thought he could have skipped the experience.
He rode on out of town, the ocean now at his back, the sun full in his face, his shadow growing ever longer behind him. He thought he’d soon veer off the Great Road and ride across the Drop to the Bar K. But before he could, here came his old friend, Sheemie, leading a mule. Sheemie’s head was down, his shoulders slumped, his pink ’brera askew, his boots dusty. To Cuthbert he looked as though he had walked all the way from the tip of the earth.
“Sheemie!” Cuthbert cried, already anticipating the boy’s cheery grin and loony patter. “Long days and pleasant nights! How are y—”
Sheemie lifted his head, and as the brim of his sombrera came up, Cuthbert fell silent. He saw the dreadful fear on the boy’s face—the pale cheeks, the haunted eyes, the trembling mouth.
11
Sheemie could have been at the Delgado place two hours ago, if he’d wanted, but he had trudged along at a turtle’s pace, the letter inside his shirt seeming to drag at his every step. It was awful, so awful. He couldn’t even think about it, because his thinker was mostly broken, so it was.
Cuthbert was off his horse in a flash, and hurrying to Sheemie. He put his hands on the boy’s shoulders. “What’s wrong? Tell your old pal. He won’t laugh, not a bit.”
At the sound of “Arthur Heath’s” kind voice and the sight of his concerned face, Sheemie began to weep. Rhea’s strict command that he should tell no one flew out of his head. Still sobbing, he recounted everything that had happened since that morning. Twice Cuthbert had to ask him to slow down, and when Bert led the boy to a tree in whose shade the two of them sat together, Sheemie was finally able to do so. Cuthbert listened with growing unease. At the end of his tale, Sheemie produced an envelope from inside his shirt.
Cuthbert broke the seal and read what was inside, his eyes growing large.
12
Roy Depape was waiting for him at the Travellers’ Rest when Jonas returned in good spirits from his trip to the Bar K. An outrider had finally shown up, Depape announced, and Jonas’s spirits rose another notch. Only Roy didn’t look as happy about it as Jonas would have expected. Not happy at all.
“Fellow’s gone on to Seafront, where I guess he’s expected,” Depape said. “He wants you right away. I wouldn’t linger here to eat, not even a popkin, if I were you. I wouldn’t take a drink, either. You’ll want a clear head to deal with this one.”
“Free with your advice today, ain’t you, Roy?” Jonas said. He spoke in a heavily sarcastic tone, but when Pettie brought him a tot of whiskey, he sent it back and asked for water instead. Roy had a bit of a look to him, Jonas decided. Too pale by half, was good old Roy. And when Sheb sat down at his piano-bench and struck a chord, Depape jerked in that direction, one hand dropping to the butt of his gun. Interesting. And a little disquieting.
“Spil
l it, son—what’s got your back hair up?”
Roy shook his head sullenly. “Don’t rightly know.”
“What’s this fellow’s name?”
“I didn’t ask, he didn’t say. He showed me Farson’s sigul, though. You know.” Depape lowered his voice a little. “The eye.”
Jonas knew, all right. He hated that wide-open staring eye, couldn’t imagine what had possessed Farson to pick it in the first place. Why not a mailed fist? Crossed swords? Or a bird? A falcon, for instance—a falcon would have made a fine sigul. But that eye—
“All right,” he said, finishing the glass of water. It went down better than whiskey would have done, anyway—dry as a bone, he’d been. “I’ll find out the rest for myself, shall I?”
As he reached the batwing doors and pushed them open, Depape called his name. Jonas turned back.
“He looks like other people,” Depape said.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t hardly know.” Depape looked embarrassed and bewildered . . . but dogged, too. Sticking to his guns. “We only talked five minutes in all, but once I looked at him and thought it was the old bastard from Ritzy—the one I shot. Little bit later I th’ow him a glance and think, ‘Hellfire, it’s my old pa standin there.’ Then that went by, too, and he looked like himself again.”
“And how’s that?”
“You’ll see for yourself, I reckon. I don’t know if you’ll like it much, though.”
Jonas stood with one batwing pushed open, thinking. “Roy, ’twasn’t Farson himself, was it? The Good Man in some sort of disguise?”
Depape hesitated, frowning, and then shook his head. “No.”
“Are you sure? We only saw him the once, remember, and not close-to.” Latigo had pointed him out. Sixteen months ago that had been, give or take.
“I’m sure. You remember how big he was?”
Jonas nodded. Farson was no Lord Perth, but he was six feet or more, and broad across at both brace and basket.
“This man’s Clay’s height, or less. And he stays the same height no matter who he looks like.” Depape hesitated a moment and said: “He laughs like a dead person. I could barely stand to hear him do it.”
“What do you mean, like a dead person?”
Roy Depape shook his head. “Can’t rightly say.”
13
Twenty minutes later, Eldred Jonas was riding beneath COME IN PEACE and into the courtyard of Seafront, uneasy because he had expected Latigo . . . and unless Roy was very much mistaken, it wasn’t Latigo he was getting.
Miguel shuffled forward, grinning his gummy old grin, and took the reins of Jonas’s horse.
“Reconocimiento.”
“Por nada, jefe.”
Jonas went in, saw Olive Thorin sitting in the front parlor like a forlorn ghost, and nodded to her. She nodded back, and managed a wan smile.
“Sai Jonas, how well you look. If you see Hart—”
“Cry your pardon, lady, but it’s the Chancellor I’ve come to see,” Jonas said. He went on quickly upstairs toward the Chancellor’s suite of rooms, then down a narrow stone hall lit (and not too well) with gas-jets.
When he reached the end of the corridor, he rapped on the door waiting there—a massive thing of oak and brass set in its own arch. Rimer didn’t care for such as Susan Delgado, but he loved the trappings of power; that was what took the curve out of his noodle and made it straight. Jonas rapped.
“Come in, my friend,” a voice—not Rimer’s—called. It was followed by a tittery laugh that made Jonas’s flesh creep. He laughs like a dead person, Roy had said.
Jonas pushed open the door and stepped in. Rimer cared for incense no more than he cared for the hips and lips of women, but there was incense burning in here now—a woody smell that made Jonas think of court at Gilead, and functions of state in the Great Hall. The gas-jets were turned high. The draperies—purple velvet, the color of royalty, Rimer’s absolute favorite—trembled minutely in the breath of sea breeze coming in through the open windows. Of Rimer there was no sign. Or of anyone else, come to that. There was a little balcony, but the doors giving on it were open, and no one was out there.
Jonas stepped a little farther into the room, glancing into a gilt-framed mirror on the far side to check behind him without turning his head. No one there, either. Ahead and to the left was a table with places set for two and a cold supper in place, but no one in either chair. Yet someone had spoken to him. Someone who’d been directly on the other side of the door, from the sound. Jonas drew his gun.
“Come, now,” said the voice which had bid him enter. It came from directly behind Jonas’s left shoulder. “No need for that, we’re all friends here. All on the same side, you know.”
Jonas whirled on his heels, suddenly feeling old and slow. Standing there was a man of medium height, powerfully built from the look of him, with bright blue eyes and the rosy cheeks of either good health or good wine. His parted, smiling lips revealed cunning little teeth which must have been filed to points—surely such points couldn’t be natural. He wore a black robe, like the robe of a holy man, with the hood pushed back. Jonas’s first thought, that the fellow was bald, had been wrong, he saw. The hair was simply cropped so stringently that it was nothing but fuzz.
“Put the beanshooter away,” the man in black said. “We’re friends here, I tell you—absolutely palsy-walsy. We’ll break bread and speak of many things—oxen and oil-tankers and whether or not Frank Sinatra really was a better crooner than Der Bingle.”
“Who? A better what?”
“No one you know; nothing that matters.” The man in black tittered again. It was, Jonas thought, the sort of sound one might expect to hear drifting through the barred windows of a lunatic asylum.
He turned. Looked into the mirror again. This time he saw the man in black standing there and smiling at him, big as life. Gods, had he been there all along?
Yes, but you couldn’t see him until he was ready to be seen. I don’t know if he’s a wizard, but he’s a glamor-man, all right. Mayhap even Farson’s sorcerer.
He turned back. The man in the priest’s robe was still smiling. No pointed teeth now. But they had been pointed. Jonas would lay his watch and warrant on it.
“Where’s Rimer?”
“I sent him away to work with young sai Delgado on her Reaping Day catechisms,” the man in black said. He slung a chummy arm around Jonas’s shoulders and began leading him toward the table. “Best we palaver alone, I think.”
Jonas didn’t want to offend Farson’s man, but he couldn’t bear the touch of that arm. He couldn’t say why, but it was unbearable. Pestilential. He shrugged it off and went on to one of the chairs, trying not to shiver. No wonder Depape had come back from Hanging Rock looking pale. No damned wonder.
Instead of being offended, the man in black tittered again (Yes, Jonas thought, he does laugh like the dead, very like, so he does). For one moment Jonas thought it was Fardo, Cort’s father, in this room with him—that it was the man who had sent him west all those years ago—and he reached for his gun again. Then it was just the man in black, smiling at him in an unpleasantly knowing way, those blue eyes dancing like the flame from the gas-jets.
“See something interesting, sai Jonas?”
“Aye,” Jonas said, sitting down. “Eats.” He took a piece of bread and popped it into his mouth. The bread stuck to his dry tongue, but he chewed determinedly all the same.
“Good boy.” The other also sat, and poured wine, filling Jonas’s glass first. “Now, my friend, tell me everything you’ve done since the three troublesome boys arrived, and everything you know, and everything you have planned. I would not have you leave out a single jot.”
“First show me your sigul.”
“Of course. How prudent you are.”
The man in black reached inside his robe and brought out a square of metal—silver, Jonas guessed. He tossed it onto the table, and it clattered across to Jonas’s plate. Engraved on it was
what he had expected—that hideous staring eye.
“Satisfied?”
Jonas nodded.
“Slide it back to me.”
Jonas reached for it, but for once his normally steady hand resembled his reedy, unstable voice. He watched the fingers tremble for a moment, then lowered the hand quickly to the table.
“I . . . I don’t want to.”
No. He didn’t want to. Suddenly he knew that if he touched it, the engraved silver eye would roll . . . and look directly at him.
The man in black tittered and made a come-along gesture with the fingers of his right hand. The silver buckle (that was what it looked like to Jonas) slid back to him . . . and up the sleeve of his homespun robe.
“Abracadabra! Bool! The end! Now,” the man in black went on, sipping his wine delicately, “if we have finished the tiresome formalities . . .”
“One more,” Jonas said. “You know my name; I would know yours.”
“Call me Walter,” the man in black said, and the smile suddenly fell off his lips. “Good old Walter, that’s me. Now let us see where we are, and where we’re going. Let us, in short, palaver.”
14
When Cuthbert came back into the bunkhouse, night had fallen. Roland and Alain were playing cards. They had cleaned the place up so that it looked almost as it had (thanks to turpentine found in a closet of the old foreman’s office, even the slogans written on the walls were just pink ghosts of their former selves), and now were deeply involved in a game of Casa Fuerte, or Hotpatch, as it was known in their own part of the world. Either way, it was basically a two-man version of Watch Me, the card-game which had been played in barrooms and bunkhouses and around campfires since the world was young.
Roland looked up at once, trying to read Bert’s emotional weather. Outwardly, Roland was as impassive as ever, had even played Alain to a draw across four difficult hands, but inwardly he was in a turmoil of pain and indecision. Alain had told him what Cuthbert had said while the two of them stood talking in the yard, and they were terrible things to hear from a friend, even when they came at second hand. Yet what haunted him more was what Bert had said just before leaving: You’ve called your carelessness love and made a virtue of irresponsibility. Was there even a chance he had done such a thing? Over and over he told himself no—that the course he had ordered them to follow was hard but sensible, the only course that made sense. Cuthbert’s shouting was just so much angry wind, brought on by nerves . . . and his fury at having their private place defiled so outrageously. Still . . .