The Wind Through the Keyhole

  "Come slow," I said, "and give this boy a good look at you."

  They came. As each one passed, Bill Streeter looked anxiously into his face.

  "G'd eve'n to'ee, boy," Luka said as he went by. Bobby Frane tipped an invisible cap. One of the younger ones--Jake Marsh, according to the list--stuck out a tongue yellow from bingo-weed tobacco. The others just shuffled past. A couple kept their heads lowered until Wegg barked at them to raise up and look the kiddo in the eye.

  There was no dawning recognition on Bill Streeter's face, only a mixture of fright and perplexity. I kept my own face blank, but I was losing hope. Why, after all, would the skin-man break? He had nothing to lose by playing out his string, and he must know it.

  Now there were only four left . . . then two . . . then only the kid who in the Busted Luck had spoken of being afraid. I saw change on Billy's face as that one went by, and for a moment I thought we had something, then realized it was nothing more than the recognition of one young person for another.

  Last came Wegg, who had put away his headknocker and donned brass knuckledusters on each hand. He gave Billy Streeter a not very pleasant smile. "Don't see no merchandise you want to buy, younker? Well, I'm sorry, but I can't say I'm surpri--"

  "Gunslinger!" Billy said to me. "Sai Deschain!"

  "Yes, Billy." I shouldered Wegg aside and stood in front of the cell.

  Billy touched his tongue to his upper lip. "Walk them by again, if it please you. Only this time have them hold up their pants. I can't see the rings."

  "Billy, the rings are all the same."

  "No," he said. "They ain't."

  The wind was in a lull, and Sheriff Peavy heard him. "Turn around, my cullies, and back you march. Only this time hike up your trousers."

  "Ain't enough enough?" the man with the old wrist-clock grumbled. The list called him Ollie Ang. "We was promised shots. Long ones."

  "What's it to you, honey?" Wegg asked. "Ain't you got to go back that way anyro'? Did yer marmar drop'ee on your head?"

  They grumbled about it, but started back down the corridor toward the office, this time from youngest to oldest, and holding up their pants. All the tattoos looked about the same to me. I at first thought they must to the boy, as well. Then I saw his eyes widen, and he took another step away from the bars. Yet he said nothing.

  "Sheriff, hold them right there for a moment, if you will," I said.

  Peavy moved in front of the door to the office. I stepped to the cell and spoke low. "Billy? See something?"

  "The mark," he said. "I seen the mark. It's the man with the broken ring."

  I didn't understand . . . then I did. I thought of all the times Cort had called me a slowkins from the eyebrows up. He called the others those things and worse--of course he did, it was his job--but standing in the corridor of that Debaria jail with the simoom blowing outside, I thought he had been right about me. I was a slowkins. Only minutes ago I'd thought that if there had been more than the memory of the tattoo, I'd have gotten it from Billy when he was hypnotized. Now, I realized, I had gotten it.

  Is there anything else? I'd asked him, already sure that there wasn't, only wanting to raise him from the trance that was so obviously upsetting him. And when he'd said the white mark--but dubiously, as if asking himself--foolish Roland had let it pass.

  The salties were getting restless. Ollie Ang, the one with the rusty wrist-clock, was saying they'd done as asked and he wanted to go back to the Busted to get his drink and his damn boots.

  "Which one?" I asked Billy.

  He leaned forward and whispered.

  I nodded, then turned to the knot of men at the end of the corridor. Jamie was watching them closely, hands resting on the butts of his revolvers. The men must have seen something in my face, because they ceased their grumbling and just stared. The only sound was the wind and the constant gritty slosh of dust against the building.

  As to what happened next, I've thought it over many times since, and I don't think we could have prevented it. We didn't know how fast the change happened, you see; I don't think Vannay did, either, or he would have warned us. Even my father said as much when I finished making my report and stood, with all those books frowning down upon me, waiting for him to pass judgment on my actions in Debaria--not as my father, but as my dinh.

  For one thing I was and am grateful. I almost told Peavy to bring forward the man Billy had named, but then I changed my mind. Not because Peavy had helped my father once upon a bye, but because Little Debaria and the salt-houses were not his fill.

  "Wegg," I said. "Ollie Ang to me, do it please ya."

  "Which?"

  "The one with the clock on his wrist."

  "Here, now!" Ollie Ang squawked as Constable Wegg laid hold of him. He was slight for a miner, almost bookish, but his arms were slabbed with muscle and I could see more muscle lifting the shoulders of his chambray workshirt. "Here, now, I ain't done nothing! It ain't fair to single me out just because this here kid wants to show off!"

  "Shut your hole," Wegg said, and pulled him through the little clot of miners.

  "Huck up your pants again," I told him.

  "Fuck you, brat! And the horse you rode in on!"

  "Huck up or I'll do it for you."

  He raised his hands and balled them into fists. "Try! Just you t--"

  Jamie strolled up behind him, drew one of his guns, tossed it lightly into the air, caught it by the barrel, and brought the butt down on Ang's head. A smartly calculated blow: it didn't knock the man out, but he dropped his fists, and Wegg caught him under the armpit when his knees loosened. I pulled up the right leg of his overalls, and there it was: a blue Beelie Stockade tattoo that had been cut--broken, to use Billy Streeter's word--by a thick white scar that ran all the way to his knee.

  "That's what I saw," Billy breathed. "That's what I saw when I was a-layin under that pile of tack."

  "He's making it up," Ang said. He looked dazed and his words were muzzy. A thin rill of blood ran down the side of his face from where Jamie's blow had opened his scalp a little.

  I knew better. Billy had mentioned the white mark long before he'd set eyes on Ollie Ang in the jail. I opened my mouth, meaning to tell Wegg to throw him in a cell, but that was when the Old Man of the crew burst forward. In his eyes was a look of belated realization. Nor was that all. He was furious.

  Before I or Jamie or Wegg could stop him, Steg Luka grabbed Ang by the shoulders and bore him back against the bars across the aisle from the drunk-and-disorderly cell. "I should have known!" he shouted. "I should have known weeks ago, ye great growit shifty asshole! Ye murderin trullock!" He seized the arm bearing the old watch. "Where'd ye get this, if not in the crack the green light comes from? Where else? Oh, ye murderin skin-changin bastard!"

  Luka spit into Ang's dazed face, then turned to Jamie and me, still holding up the miner's arm. "Said he found it in a hole outside one of the old foothill plugs! Said it was probably leftover outlaw booty from the Crow Gang, and like fools we believed him! Even went diggin around for more on our days off, didn't we!"

  He turned back to the dazed Ollie Ang. Dazed was how he looked to us, anyway, but who knows what was going on behind those eyes?

  "And you laughin up your fuckin sleeve at us while we did it, I've no doubt. You found it in a hole, all right, but it wasn't in one of the old plugs. You went into the crack! Into the green light! It was you! It was you! It was--"

  Ang twisted from the chin up. I don't mean he grimaced; his entire head twisted. It was like watching a cloth being wrung by invisible hands. His eyes rose up until one was almost above the other, and they turned from blue to jet-black. His skin paled first to white, then to green. It rose as if pushed by fists from beneath, and cracked into scales. His clothes dropped from his body, because his body was no longer that of a man. Nor was it a bear, or a wolf, or a lion. Those things we might have been prepared for. We might even have been prepared for an ally-gator, such as the thing that had assaulted the unfortuna
te Fortuna at Serenity. Although it was closer to an ally-gator than anything else.

  In a space of three seconds, Ollie Ang turned into a man-high snake. A pooky.

  Luka, still holding onto an arm that was shrinking toward that fat green body, gave out a yell that was muffled when the snake--still with a flopping tonsure of human hair around its elongating head--jammed itself into the old man's mouth. There was a wet popping sound as Luka's lower jaw was torn from the joints and tendons holding it to the upper. I saw his wattled neck swell and grow smooth as that thing--still changing, still standing on the dwindling remnants of human legs--bored into his throat like a drill.

  There were yells and screams of horror from the head of the aisle as the other salties stampeded. I paid them no notice. I saw Jamie wrap his arms around the snake's growing, swelling body in a fruitless attempt to pull it out of the dying Steg Luka's throat, and I saw the enormous reptilian head when it tore its way through the nape of Luka's neck, its red tongue flicking, its scaly head painted with beads of blood and bits of flesh.

  Wegg threw one of his brass-knuckle-decorated fists at it. The snake dodged easily, then struck forward, exposing enormous, still-growing fangs: two on top, two on bottom, all dripping with clear liquid. It battened on Wegg's arm and he shrieked.

  "Burns! Dear gods, it BURNS!"

  Luka, impaled at the head, seemed to dance as the snake dug its fangs into the struggling constable. Blood and gobbets of flesh spattered everywhere.

  Jamie looked at me wildly. His guns were drawn, but where to shoot? The pooky was writhing between two dying men. Its lower body, now legless, flipped free of the heaped clothes, wound itself around Luka's waist in fat coils, drew tight. The part behind the head was slithering out through the widening hole at the nape of Luka's neck.

  I stepped forward, seized Wegg, and dragged him backward by the scruff of his vest. His bitten arm had already turned black and swelled to twice its normal size. His eyes were bulging from their sockets as he stared at me, and white foam began to drizzle from his lips.

  Somewhere, Billy Streeter was screaming.

  The fangs tore free. "Burns," Wegg said in a low voice, and then he could say no more. His throat swelled, and his tongue shot out of his mouth. He collapsed, shuddering in his death-throes. The snake stared at me, its forked tongue licking in and out. They were black snake-eyes, but they were filled with human understanding. I lifted the revolver holding the special load. I had only one silver shell and the head was weaving erratically from side to side, but I never doubted I could make the shot; it's what such as I was made for. It lunged, fangs flashing, and I pulled the trigger. The shot was true, and the silver bullet went right into that yawning mouth. The head blew away in a splatter of red that had begun to turn white even before it hit the bars and the floor of the corridor. I'd seen such mealy white flesh before. It was brains. Human brains.

  Suddenly it was Ollie Ang's ruined face peering at me from the ragged hole in the back of Luka's neck--peering from atop a snake's body. Shaggy black fur sprang from between the scales on its body as whatever force dying inside lost all control of the shapes it made. In the moment before it collapsed, the remaining blue eye turned yellow and became a wolf's eye. Then it went down, bearing the unfortunate Steg Luka with it. In the corridor, the dying body of the skin-man shimmered and burned, wavered and changed. I heard the pop of muscles and the grind of shifting bones. A naked foot shot out, turned into a furry paw, then became a man's foot again. The remains of Ollie Ang shuddered all over, then grew still.

  The boy was still screaming.

  "Go to yon pallet and lie down," I said to him. My voice was not quite steady. "Close your eyes and tell yourself it's over, for now it is."

  "I want you," Billy sobbed as he went to the pallet. His cheeks were speckled with blood. I was drenched with it, but this he didn't see. His eyes were already closed. "I want you with me! Please, sai, please!"

  "I'll come to you as soon as I can," I said. And I did.

  *

  Three of us spent the night on pushed-together pallets in the drunk-and-disorderly cell: Jamie on the left, me on the right, Young Bill Streeter in the middle. The simoom had begun to die, and until late, we heard the sound of revels on the high street as Debaria celebrated the death of the skin-man.

  "What will happen to me, sai?" Billy asked just before he finally fell asleep.

  "Good things," I said, and hoped Everlynne of Serenity would not prove me wrong about that.

  "Is it dead? Really dead, sai Deschain?"

  "Really."

  But on that score I meant to take no chance. After midnight, when the wind was down to a bare breeze and Bill Streeter lay in an exhausted sleep so deep even bad dreams couldn't reach him, Jamie and I joined Sheriff Peavy on the waste ground behind the jail. There we doused the body of Ollie Ang with coal oil. Before setting match to it, I asked if either of them wanted the wrist-clock as a souvenir. Somehow it hadn't been broken in the struggle, and the cunning little second hand still turned.

  Jamie shook his head.

  "Not I," said Peavy, "for it might be haunted. Go on, Roland. If I may call ye so."

  "And welcome," I said. I struck the sulphur and dropped it. We stood watching until the remains of Debaria's skin-man were nothing but black bones. The wrist-clock was a charred lump in the ash.

  *

  The following morning, Jamie and I rounded up a crew of men--more than willing, they were--to go out to the rail line. Once they were there, it was a matter of two hours to put Sma' Toot back on the double-steel. Travis, the enjie, directed the operation, and I made many friends by telling them I'd arranged for everyone in the crew to eat free at Racey's at top o' day and drink free at the Busted Luck that afternoon.

  There was to be a town celebration that night, at which Jamie and I would be guests of honor. It was the sort of thing I could happily do without--I was anxious to get home, and as a rule, company doesn't suit me--but such events are often part of the job. One good thing: there would be women, some of them no doubt pretty. That part I wouldn't mind, and suspected Jamie wouldn't, either. He had much to learn about women, and Debaria was as good a place to begin his studies as any.

  He and I watched Sma' Toot puff slowly up to the roundway and then make its way toward us again, pointed in the right direction: toward Gilead.

  "Will we stop at Serenity on the way back to town?" Jamie asked. "To ask if they'll take the boy in?"

  "Aye. And the prioress said she had something for me."

  "Do you know what?"

  I shook my head.

  *

  Everlynne, that mountain of a woman, swept toward us across the courtyard of Serenity, her arms spread wide. I was almost tempted to run; it was like standing in the path of one of the vast trucks that used to run at the oil-fields near Kuna.

  Instead of running us down, she swept us into a vast and bosomy double hug. Her aroma was sweet: a mixture of cinnamon and thyme and baked goods. She kissed Jamie on the cheek--he blushed. Then she kissed me full on the lips. For a moment we were enveloped by her complicated and billowing garments and shaded by her winged silk hood. Then she drew back, her face shining.

  "What a service you have done this town! And how we say thankya!"

  I smiled. "Sai Everlynne, you are too kind."

  "Not kind enough! You'll have noonies with us, yes? And meadow wine, although only a little. Ye'll have more to drink tonight, I have no doubt." She gave Jamie a roguish side-glance. "But ye'll want to be careful when the toasts go around; too much drink can make a man less a man later on, and blur memories he might otherwise want to keep." She paused, then broke into a knowing grin that went oddly with her robes. "Or . . . p'raps not."

  Jamie blushed harder than ever, but said nothing.

  "We saw you coming," Everlynne said, "and there's someone else who'd like to give you her thanks."

  She moved aside and there stood the tiny Sister of Serenity named Fortuna. She was still swath
ed in bandagement, but she looked less wraithlike today, and the side of the face we could see was shining with happiness and relief. She stepped forward shyly.

  "I can sleep again. And in time, I may even be able to sleep wi'out nightmares."

  She twitched up the skirt of her gray robe, and--to my deep discomfort--fell on her knees before us. "Sister Fortuna, Annie Clay that was, says thank you. So do we all, but this comes from my own heart."

  I took her gently by the shoulders. "Rise, bondswoman. Kneel not before such as us."

  She looked at me with shining eyes, and kissed me on the cheek with the side of her mouth that could still kiss. Then she fled back across the courtyard toward what I assumed was their kitchen. Wonderful smells were already arising from that part of the haci.

  Everlynne watched her go with a fond smile, then turned back to me.

  "There's a boy--" I began.

  She nodded. "Bill Streeter. I know his name and his story. We don't go to town, but sometimes the town comes to us. Friendly birds twitter news in our ears, if you take my meaning."

  "I take it well," I said.

  "Bring him tomorrow, after your heads have shrunk back to their normal size," said she. "We're a company of women, but we're happy to take an orphan boy . . . at least until he grows enough hair on his upper lip to shave. After that, women trouble a boy, and it might not be so well for him to stay here. In the meantime, we can set him about his letters and numbers . . . if he's trig enough to learn, that is. Would you say he's trig enough, Roland, son of Gabrielle?"

  It was odd to be called from my mother's side rather than my father's, but strangely pleasant. "I'd say he's very trig."

  "That's well, then. And we'll find a place for him when it's time for him to go."

  "A plot and a place," I said.

  Everlynne laughed. "Aye, just so, like in the story of Tim Stoutheart. And now we'll break bread together, shall we? And with meadow wine we'll toast the prowess of young men."

  *

  We ate, we drank, and all in all, it was a very merry meeting. When the sisters began to clear the trestle tables, Prioress Everlynne took me to her private quarters, which consisted of a bedroom and a much larger office where a cat slept in a bar of sun on a huge oaken desk heaped high with papers.