The Wind Through The Keyhole (7 page)

“I turned to flee . . . it caught me . . . and I remember no more.”

“I do,” Everlynne said grimly. “I heard the screams and came running out with our gun. It’s a great long thing with a bell at the end of the barrel. It’s been loaded since time out of mind, but none of us has ever fired it. For all I knew, it could have blown up in my hands. But I saw it tearing at poor Fortie’s face, and then something else, too. When I did, I never thought of the risk. I never even thought that I might kill her, poor thing, as well as it, should the gun fire.”

“I wish you had killed me,” Fortuna said. “Oh, I wish you had.” She sat in one of the chairs that had been brought to the table, put her face in her hands, and began to weep. Her one remaining eye did, at least.

“Never say so,” Everlynne told her, and stroked her hair on the side of her head not covered by the bandagement. “For ’tis blasphemy.”

“Did you hit it?” I asked.

“A little. Our old gun fires shot, and one of the pellets—or p’raps more than one—tore away some of the knobs and scales on its head. Black tarry stuff flew up. We saw it later on the cobbles, and sanded it over without touching it, for fear it might poison us right through our skin. The chary thing dropped her, and I think it had almost made up its mind to come for me. So I pointed the gun at it, though a gun like that can only be fired once, then must be recharged down its throat with powder and shot. I told it to come on. Told it I’d wait until it was good and close, so the shot wouldn’t spread.” She hawked back and spat into the dust. “It must have a brain of some sort even when it’s out of its human shape, because it heard me and ran. But before I lost sight of it round the wall, it turned and looked back at me. As if marking me. Well, let it. I have no more shot for the gun, and won’t unless a trader happens to have some, but I have this.”

She lifted her skirts to her knee, and we saw a butcher’s knife in a rawhide scabbard strapped to the outside of her calf.

“So let it come for Everlynne, daughter of Roseanna.”

“You said you saw something else,” I said.

She considered me with her bright black eyes, then turned to the women. “Clemmie, Brianna, serve out. Fortuna, you will say grace, and be sure to ask God forgiveness for your blasphemy and thank Him that your heart still beats.”

Everlynne grasped me above the elbow, drew me through the gate, and walked me to the well where the unfortunate Fortuna had been attacked. There we were alone.

“I saw its prick,” she said in a low voice. “Long and curved like a scimitar, twitching and full of the black stuff that serves it for blood . . . serves it for blood in
that
shape, any-ro’. It meant to kill her as it had Dolores, aye, right enough, but it meant to fuck her, too. It meant to fuck her as she died.”

* * *

Jamie and I ate with them—Fortuna even ate a little—and then we mounted up for town. But before we left, Everlynne stood by my horse and spoke to me again.

“When your business here is done, come and see me again. I have something for you.”

“What might that be, sai?”

She shook her head. “Now is not the time. But when the filthy thing is dead, come here.” She took my hand, raised it to her lips, and kissed it. “I know who you are, for does your mother not live in your face? Come to me, Roland, son of Gabrielle. Fail not.”

Then she stepped away before I could say another word, and glided in through the gate.

* * *

The Debaria high street was wide and paved, although the pavement was crumbling away to the hardpan beneath in many places and would be entirely gone before too many years passed. There was a good deal of commerce, and judging from the sound coming from the saloons, they were doing a fine business. We only saw a few horses and mules tied to the hitching-posts, though; in that part of the world, livestock was for trading and eating, not for riding.

A woman coming out of the mercantile with a basket over her arm saw us and stared. She ran back in, and several more people came out. By the time we reached the High Sheriff’s office—a little wooden building attached to the much larger stone-built town jail—the streets were lined with spectators on both sides.

“Have ye come to kill the skin-man?” the lady with the basket called.

“Those two don’t look old enough to kill a bottle of rye,” a man standing in front of the Cheery Fellows Saloon & Café called back. There was general laughter and murmurs of agreement at this sally.

“Town looks busy enough now,” Jamie said, dismounting and looking back at the forty or fifty men and women who’d come away from their business (and their pleasure) to have a gleep at us.

“It’ll be different after sundown,” I said. “That’s when such creatures as this skin-man do their marauding. Or so Vannay says.”

We went into the office. Hugh Peavy was a big-bellied man with long white hair and a droopy mustache. His face was deeply lined and careworn. He saw our guns and looked relieved. He noted our beardless faces and looked less so. He wiped off the nib of the pen he had been writing with, stood up, and held out his hand. No forehead-knocking for this fellow.

After we’d shaken with him and introduced ourselves, he said: “I don’t mean to belittle you, young fellows, but I was hoping to see Steven Deschain himself. And perhaps Peter McVries.”

“McVries died three years ago,” I said.

Peavy looked shocked. “Do you say so? For he was a trig hand with a gun. Very trig.”

“He died of a fever.” Very likely induced by poison, but this was nothing the High Sheriff of the Debaria Outers needed to know. “As for Steven, he’s otherwise occupied, and so he sent me. I am his son.”

“Yar, yar, I’ve heard your name and a bit of your exploits in Mejis, for we get some news even out here. There’s the dit-dah wire, and even a jing-jang.” He pointed to a contraption on the wall. Written on the brick beneath it was a sign reading DO NOT TOUCH WITHOUT PERMIZION. “It used to go all the way to Gilead, but these days only to Sallywood in the south, the Jefferson spread to the north, and the village in the foothills—Little Debaria, it’s called. We even have a few streetlamps that still work—not gas or kerosene but real sparklights, don’tcha see. Townfolk think such’ll keep the creature away.” He sighed. “I am less confident. This is a bad business, young fellows. Sometimes I feel the world has come loose of its moorings.”

“It has,” I said. “But what comes loose can be tied tight again, Sheriff.”

“If you say so.” He cleared his throat. “Now, don’t take this as disrespect, I know ye are who ye say ye are, but I was promised a sigul. If you’ve brought it, I’d have it, for it means special to me.”

I opened my swag-bag and brought out what I’d been given: a small wooden box with my father’s mark—the
D
with the
S
inside of it—stamped on the hinged lid. Peavy took it with the smallest of smiles dimpling the corners of his mouth beneath his mustache. To me it looked like a remembering smile, and it took years off his face.

“Do’ee know what’s inside?”

“No.” I had not been asked to look.

Peavy opened the box, looked within, then returned his gaze to Jamie and me. “Once, when I was still only a deputy, Steven Deschain led me, and the High Sheriff that was, and a posse of seven against the Crow Gang. Has your father ever spoken to you of the Crows?”

I shook my head.

“Not skin-men, no, but a nasty lot of work, all the same. They robbed what there was to rob, not just in Debaria but all along the ranchlands out this way. Trains, too, if they got word one was worth stopping. But their main business was kidnapping for ransom. A coward’s crime, sure—I’m told Farson favors it—but it paid well.

“Your da’ showed up in town only a day after they stole a rancher’s wife—Belinda Doolin. Her husband called on the jing-jang as soon as they left and he was able to get himself untied. The Crows didn’t know about the jing-jang, and that was their undoing. Accourse it helped that there was a gunslinger doing his rounds in this part of the world; in those days, they had a knack of turning up when and where they were needed.”

He eyed us. “P’raps they still do. Any-ro’, we got out t’ranch while the crime was still fresh. There were places where any of us would have lost the trail—it’s mostly hardpan out north of here, don’tcha see—but your father had eyes like you wouldn’t believe. Hawks ain’t even in it, dear, or eagles, either.”

I knew of my father’s sharp eyes and gift for trailing. I also knew that this story probably had nothing to do with our business, and I should have told him to move along. But my father never talked about his younger days, and I wanted to hear this tale. I was
hungry
to hear it. And it turned out to have a little more to do with our business in Debaria than I at first thought.

“The trail led in the direction of the mines—what Debaria folk call the salt-houses. The workings had been abandoned in those days; it was before the new plug was found twenty year ago.”

“Plug?” Jamie asked.

“Deposit,” I said. “He means a fresh deposit.”

“Aye, as you say. But all that were abandoned then, and made a fine hideout for such as those beastly Crows. Once the trail left the flats, it went through a place of high rocks before coming out on the Low Pure, which is to say the foothill meadows below the salt-houses. The Low is where a sheepherder was killed just recent, by something that looked like a—”

“Like a wolf,” I said. “This we know. Go on.”

“Well-informed, are ye? Well, that’s all to the good. Where was I, now? Ah, I know—those rocks that are now known in these parts as Ambush Arroyo. It’s not an arroyo, but I suppose people like the sound. That’s where the tracks went, but Deschain wanted to go around and come in from the east. From the High Pure. The sheriff, Pea Anderson it was back then, didn’t want none o’ that. Eager as a bird with its eye on a worm he was, mad to press on. Said it would take em three days, and by then the woman might be dead and the Crows anywhere. He said he was going the straight way, and he’d go alone if no one wanted to go with him. ‘Or unless you order me in the name of Gilead to do different,’ he says to your da’.

“‘Never think it,’ Deschain says, ‘for Debaria is your fill; I have my own.’

“The posse went. I stayed with your da’, lad. Sheriff Anderson turned to me in the saddle and said, ‘I hope they’re hiring at one of the ranches, Hughie, because your days of wearing tin on your vest are over. I’m done with’ee.’

“Those were the last words he ever said to me. They rode off. Steven of Gilead squatted on his hunkers and I hunkered with him. After half an hour of quiet—might have been longer—I says to him, ‘I thought we were going to hook around . . . unless you’re done with me, too.’

“‘No,’ he says. ‘Your hire is not my business, Deputy.’

“‘Then what are we waitin for?’

“‘Gunfire,’ says he, and not five minutes later we heard it. Gunfire and screams. It didn’t last long. The Crows had seen us coming—probably nummore’n a glint of sun on a bootcap or bit o’ saddle brightwork was enough to attract their attention, for Pa Crow was powerful trig—and doubled back. They got up in those high rocks and poured down lead on Anderson and his possemen. There were more guns in those days, and the Crows had a good share. Even a speed-shooter or two.

“So we went around, all right? Took us only two days, because Steven Deschain pushed hard. On the third day, we camped downslope and rose before dawn. Now, if ye don’t know, and no reason ye should, salt-houses are just caverns in the cliff faces up there. Whole families lived in em, not just the miners themselves. The tunnels go down into the earth from the backs of em. But as I say, in those days all were deserted. Yet we saw smoke coming from the vent on top of one, and that was as good as a kinkman standing out in front of a carnival tent and pointing at the show inside, don’tcha see it.

“‘This is the time,’ Steven says, ‘because they will have spent the last nights, once they were sure they were safe, deep in drink. They’ll still be sleeping it off. Will you stand with me?’

“‘Aye, gunslinger, that I will,’ I tells him.”

When Peavy said this, he unconsciously straightened his back. He looked younger.

“We snuck the last fifty or sixty yards, yer da’ with his gun drawn in case they’d posted a guard. They had, but he was only a lad, and fast asleep. The Deschain holstered his gun, swotted him with a rock, and laid him out. I later saw that young fellow standing on a trapdoor with tears running out of his eyes, a mess in his pants, and a rope around his neck. He wasn’t but fourteen, yet he’d taken his turn at sai Doolin—the kidnapped woman, don’tcha know, and old enough to be his grandmother—just like the rest of them, and I shed no tears when the rope shut off his cries for mercy. The salt ye take is the salt ye must pay for, as anyone from these parts will tell you.

“The gunslinger crep’ inside, and I right after him. They was all lying around, snoring like dogs. Hell, boys, they
were
dogs. Belinda Doolin was tied to a post. She saw us, and her eyes widened. Steven Deschain pointed to her, then to himself, then cupped his hands together, then pointed to her again.
You’re safe,
he meant. I never forgot the look of gratitude in her face as she nodded to him that she understood.
You’re safe
—that’s the world we grew up in, young men, the one that’s almost gone now.

“Then the Deschain says, ‘Wake up, Allan Crow, unless you’d go into the clearing at the end of the path with your eyes shut. Wake up, all.’

“They did. He never meant to try and bring them all in alive—’twould have been madness, that I’m sure you must see—but he wouldn’t shoot them as they slept, either. They woke up to varying degrees, but not for long. Steven drew his guns so fast I never saw his hands move. Lightning ain’t in it, dear. At one moment those revolvers with their big sandalwood grips were by his sides; at the next he was blazing away, the noise like thunder in that closed-in space. But that didn’t keep me from drawing my own gun. It was just an old barrel-shooter I had from my granda’, but I put two of them down with it. The first two men I ever killed. There have been plenty since, sad to say.