The Wind Through the Keyhole

  "Where's Sheriff Peavy?"

  "At home with his wife. It isn't yet five o' the clock, I reckon. Now tell me who you are, where you're speaking from, and what's happened."

  "It's Canfield of the Jefferson. I--"

  "Of the Jefferson what?" I heard footsteps behind me and turned, half-raising my revolver. But it was only Jamie, with his hair standing up in sleep-spikes all over his head. He was holding his own gun, and had gotten into his jeans, although his feet were yet bare.

  "The Jefferson Ranch, ye great grotting idiot! You need to get the sheriff out here, and jin-jin. Everyone's dead. Jefferson, his fambly, the cookie, all the proddies. Blood from one end t'other."

  "How many?" I asked.

  "Maybe fifteen. Maybe twenty. Who can tell?" Canfield of the Jefferson began to sob. "They're all in pieces. Whatever it was did for em left the two dogs, Rosie and Mozie. They was in there. We had to shoot em. They was lapping up the blood and eating the brains."

  *

  It was a ten-wheel ride, straight north toward the Salt Hills. We went with Sheriff Peavy, Kellin Frye--the good deputy--and Frye's son, Vikka. The enjie, whose name turned out to be Travis, also came along, for he'd spent the night at the Fryes' place. We pushed our mounts hard, but it was still full daylight by the time we got to the Jefferson spread. At least the wind, which was still strengthening, was at our backs.

  Peavy thought Canfield was a pokie--which is to say a wandering cowboy not signed to any particular ranch. Some such turned outlaw, but most were honest enough, just men who couldn't settle down in one place. When we rode through the wide stock gate with JEFFERSON posted over it in white birch letters, two other cowboys--his mates--were with him. The three of them were bunched together by the shakepole fence of the horse corral, which stood near to the big house. A half a mile or so north, standing atop a little hill, was the bunkhouse. From this distance, only two things looked out of place: the door at the south end of the bunkie was unlatched, swinging back and forth in the alkali-wind, and the bodies of two large black dogs lay stretched on the dirt.

  We dismounted and Sheriff Peavy shook with the men, who looked mightily glad to see us. "Aye, Bill Canfield, see you very well, pokie-fella."

  The tallest of them took off his hat and held it against his shirt. "I ain't no pokie nummore. Or maybe I am, I dunno. For a while here I was Canfield of the Jefferson, like I told whoever answered the goddam speakie, because I signed on just last month. Old man Jefferson himself oversaw my mark on the wall, but now he's dead like the rest of em."

  He swallowed hard. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down. The stubble on his face looked very black, because his skin was very white. There was drying vomit on the front of his shirt.

  "His wife and daughters've gone into the clearing, too. You can tell em by their long hair and their . . . their . . . ay, ay, Man Jesus, you see a thing like that and it makes you wish you were born blind." He raised his hat to his face to hide it and began to weep.

  One of Canfield's mates said, "Is those gunslingers, Sheriff? Mighty young to be hauling iron, ain't they?"

  "Never mind them," said Peavy. "Tell me what brought you here."

  Canfield lowered his hat. His eyes were red and streaming. "The three of us was camped out on the Pure. Roundin strays, we were, and camped for the night. Then we heard screamin start from the east. Woke us from a sound sleep, because we was that tired. Then gunshots, two or three of em. They quit and there was more screamin. And somethin--somethin big--roarin and snarlin."

  One of the others said, "It sounded like a bear."

  "No, it didn't," said the third. "Never at all."

  Canfield said, "Knew it was comin from the ranch, whatever it was. Had to've been four wheels from where we were, maybe six, but sound carries on the Pure, as ye know. We mounted up, but I got here way ahead of these two, because I was signed and they're yet pokies."

  "I don't understand," I said.

  Canfield turned to me. "I had a ranch horse, didn't I? A good 'un. Snip and Arn there had nothing but mules. Put em in there, with the others." He pointed into the corral. A big gust of wind blew through just then, driving dust before it, and all the livestock galloped away like a wave.

  "They're still spooked," Kellin Frye said.

  Looking toward the bunkhouse, the enjie--Travis--said, "They en't the only ones."

  *

  By the time Canfield, the Jefferson Ranch's newest proddie--which is to say hired hand--reached the home place, the screaming had stopped. So had the roaring of the beast, although there was still a good deal of snarling going on. That was the two dogs, fighting over the leavings. Knowing which side of the biscuit his honey went on, Canfield bypassed the bunkhouse--and the dogs snarling within--for the big house. The front door was wide open and there were lit 'seners in both the hall and the kitchen, but no one answered his hail.

  He found Jefferson's lady-sai in the kitchen with her body under the table and her half-eaten head rolled up against the pantry door. There were tracks going out the stoop door, which was banging in the wind. Some were human; some were the tracks of a monstrous great bear. The bear tracks were bloody.

  "I took the 'sener off o' sink-side where it'd been left and followed the tracks outside. The two girls was a-layin in the dirt between the house and the barn. One had gotten three or four dozen running steps ahead of her sissa, but they were both just as dead, with their nightdresses tore off em and their backs carved open right down to the spines." Canfield shook his head slowly from side to side, his large eyes--swimming with tears, they were--never leaving High Sheriff Peavy's face. "I never want to see the claws that could do a thing like that. Never, never, never in my life. I seen what they done, and that's enough."

  "The bunkhouse?" Peavy asked.

  "Aye, there I went next. You can see what's inside for yourself. The womenfolk too, for they're still where I found em. I won't take ye. Snip and Arn might--"

  "Not me," said Snip.

  "Me, neither," said Arn. "I'll see 'un all in my dreams, and that'll do me fine."

  "I don't think we need a guide," Peavy said. "You three boys stay right here."

  Sheriff Peavy, closely followed by the Fryes and Travis the enjie, started toward the big house. Jamie put a hand on Peavy's shoulder, and spoke almost apologetically when the High Sheriff turned to look at him. "Mind the tracks. They'll be important."

  Peavy nodded. "Yar. We'll mind em very well. Especially those headed off to wherever the thing went."

  *

  The women were as sai Canfield had told us. I had seen bloodshed before--aye, plenty of it, both in Mejis and in Gilead--but I had never seen anything like this, and neither had Jamie. He was as pale as Canfield, and I could only hope he would not discredit his father by passing out. I needn't have worried; soon he was down on his knees in the kitchen, examining several enormous blood-rimmed animal tracks.

  "These really are bear tracks," he said, "but there was never one so big, Roland. Not even in the Endless Forest."

  "There was one here last night, cully," Travis said. He looked toward the body of the rancher's wife and shivered, even though she, like her unfortunate daughters, had been covered with blankets from upstairs. "I'll be glad to get back to Gilead, where such things are just legends."

  "What do the tracks tell otherwise?" I asked Jamie. "Anything?"

  "Yes. It went to the bunkhouse first, where the most . . . the most food was. The rumpus would have wakened the four of them here in the house . . . were there only four, Sheriff?"

  "Aye," Peavy said. "There are two sons, but Jefferson would have sent em to the auctions in Gilead, I expect. They'll find a sack of woe when they return."

  "The rancher left his womenfolk and went running for the bunkhouse. The gun Canfield and his mates heard must have been his."

  "Much good it did him," Vikka Frye said. His father hit him on the shoulder and told him to hush.

  "Then the thing came up here," Jamie went on. "The lady-sai Jef
ferson and the two girls were in the kitchen by then, I think. And I think the sai must have told her daughters to run."

  "Aye," Peavy said. "And she'd try to keep it from coming after them long enough for them to get away. That's how it reads. Only it didn't work. If they'd been at the front of the house--if they'd seen how big it was--she'd have known better, and we would have found all three of em out there in the dirt." He fetched a deep sigh. "Come on, boys, let's see what's in the bunkhouse. Waiting won't make it any prettier."

  "I think I might just stay out by the corral with those saddletramps," Travis said. "I've seen enough."

  Vikka Frye blurted: "Can I do that too, Pa?"

  Kellin looked at his son's haunted face and said he could. Before he let the boy go, he put a kiss on his cheek.

  *

  Ten feet or so in front of the bunkhouse, the bare earth had been scuffed into a bloody churn of bootprints and clawed animal tracks. Nearby, in a clump of jugweed, was an old short-arm four-shot with its barrel bent to one side. Jamie pointed from the confusion of tracks, to the gun, to the open bunkhouse door. Then he raised his eyebrows, silently asking me if I saw it. I saw it very well.

  "This is where the thing--the skin-man wearing the shape of a bear--met the rancher," I said. "He got off a few rounds, then dropped the gun--"

  "No," Jamie said. "The thing took it from him. That's why the barrel's bent. Maybe Jefferson turned to run. Maybe he stood his ground. Either way, it did no good. His tracks stop here, so the thing picked him up and threw him through that door and into the bunkhouse. It went to the big house next."

  "So we're backtracking it," Peavy said.

  Jamie nodded. "We'll front-track it soon enough," he said.

  *

  The thing had turned the bunkhouse into an abattoir. In the end, the butcher's bill came to eighteen: sixteen proddies, the cook--who had died beside his stove with his rent and bloodstained apron thrown over his face like a shroud--and Jefferson himself, who had been torn limbless. His severed head stared up at the rafters with a fearful grin that showed only his top teeth. The skin-man had ripped the rancher's lower jaw right out of his mouth. Kellin Frye found it under a bunk. One of the men had tried to defend himself with a saddle, using it as a shield, but it had done him no good; the thing had torn it in half with its claws. The unfortunate cowboy was still holding onto the pommel with one hand. He had no face; the thing had eaten it off his skull.

  "Roland," Jamie said. His voice was strangled, as if his throat had closed up to no more than a straw. "We have to find this thing. We have to."

  "Let's see what the outward tracks say before the wind wipes them out," I replied.

  We left Peavy and the others outside the bunkhouse and circled the big house to where the covered bodies of the two girls lay. The tracks beyond them had begun to blur at the edges and around the claw-points, but they would have been hard to miss even for someone not fortunate enough to have had Cort of Gilead as a teacher. The thing that made them must have weighed upwards of eight hundred pounds.

  "Look here," Jamie said, kneeling beside one. "See how it's deeper at the front? It was running."

  "And on its hind legs," I said. "Like a man."

  The tracks went past the pump house, which was in shambles, as if the thing had given it a swipe out of pure malice as it went by. They led us onto an uphill lane that headed north, toward a long unpainted outbuilding that was either a tack shed or a smithy. Beyond this, perhaps twenty wheels farther north, were the rocky badlands below the salt hills. We could see the holes that led to the worked-out mines; they gaped like empty eyesockets.

  "We may as well give this up," I said. "We know where the tracks go--up to where the salties live."

  "Not yet," Jamie said. "Look here, Roland. You've never seen anything like this."

  The tracks began to change, the claws merging into the curved shapes of large unshod hooves.

  "It lost its bear-shape," I said, "and became . . . what? A bull?"

  "I think so," Jamie said. "Let's go a little further. I have an idea."

  As we approached the long outbuilding, the hoofprints became pawprints. The bull had become some kind of monstrous cat. These tracks were large at first, then started to grow smaller, as if the thing were shrinking from the size of a lion to that of a cougar even as it ran. When they veered off the lane and onto the dirt path leading to the tack shed, we found a large patch of jugweed grass that had been beaten down. The broken stalks were bloody.

  "It fell," Jamie said. "I think it fell . . . and then thrashed." He looked up from the bed of matted weed. His face was thoughtful. "I think it was in pain."

  "Good," I said. "Now look there." I pointed to the path, which was imprinted with the hooves of many horses. And other signs, as well.

  Bare feet, going to the doors of the building, which were run back on rusty metal tracks.

  Jamie turned to me, wide-eyed. I put my finger to my lips, and drew one of my revolvers. Jamie did likewise, and we moved toward the shed. I waved him around to the far side. He nodded and split off to the left.

  I stood outside the open doors, gun held up, giving Jamie time to get to the other end of the building. I heard nothing. When I judged my pard must be in place, I bent down, picked up a good-size stone with my free hand, and tossed it inside. It thumped, then rolled across wood. There was still nothing else to hear. I swung inside, crouched low, gun at the ready.

  The place seemed empty, but there were so many shadows it was at first hard to tell for sure. It was already warm, and by noonday would be an oven. I saw a pair of empty stalls on either side, a little smithy-stove next to drawers full of rusty shoes and equally rusty shoe-nails, dust-covered jugs of liniment and stinkum, branding irons in a tin sleeve, and a large pile of old tack that needed either to be mended or thrown out. Above a couple of benches hung a fair assortment of tools on pegs. Most were as rusty as the shoes and nails. There were a few wooden hitching hooks and a pedestal pump over a cement trough. The water in the trough hadn't been changed for a while; as my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I could see bits of straw floating on the surface. I kenned that this had once been more than a tack shed. It had also been a kind of hostelry where the ranch's working stock was seen to. Likely a jackleg veterinary, as well. Horses could be led in at one end, dealt with, and led out the other. But it looked in disrepair, abandoned.

  The tracks of the thing that had by then been human led up the center aisle to other doors, also open, at the far end. I followed them. "Jamie? It's me. Don't shoot me, for your father's sake."

  I stepped outside. Jamie had holstered his gun, and now pointed at a large heap of horseapples. "He knows what he is, Roland."

  "You know this from a pile of horseshit?"

  "As happens, I do."

  He didn't tell me how, but after a few seconds I saw it for myself. The hostelry had been abandoned, probably in favor of one built closer in to the main house, but the horseapples were fresh. "If he came a-horseback, he came as a man."

  "Aye. And left as one."

  I squatted on my hunkers and thought about this. Jamie rolled a smoke and let me. When I looked up, he was smiling a little.

  "Do you see what it means, Roland?"

  "Two hundred salties, give or take," I said. I've ever been slow, but in the end I usually get there.

  "Aye."

  "Salties, mind, not pokies or proddies. Diggers, not riders. As a rule."

  "As you say."

  "How many of em up there have horses, do you suppose? How many even know how to ride?"

  His smile broadened. "There might be twenty or thirty, I suppose."

  "It's better than two hundred," I said. "Better by a long stride. We'll go up as soon as--"

  I never finished what I was going to say, because that's when the moaning started. It was coming from the tack shed I'd dismissed as empty. How glad I was at that moment Cort wasn't there. He would have cuffed my ear and sent me sprawling. At least in his prime, he would
have.

  Jamie and I looked into each other's startled eyes, then ran back inside. The moaning continued, but the place looked as empty as before. Then that big heap of old tack--busted hames, bridles, cinch straps and reins--started to heave up and down, as if it were breathing. The tangled bunches of leather began to tumble away to either side and from them a boy was born. His white-blond hair was sticking up in all directions. He wore jeans and an old shirt that hung open and unbuttoned. He didn't look hurt, but in the shadows it was hard to tell.

  "Is it gone?" he asked in a trembling voice. "Please, sais, say it is. Say it's gone."

  "It is," I said.

  He started to wade his way out of the pile, but a strip of leather had gotten wound around one of his legs and he fell forward. I caught him and saw a pair of eyes, bright blue and utterly terrified, looking up into my face.

  Then he passed out.

  *

  I carried him to the trough. Jamie pulled off his bandanna, dipped it in the water, and began to wipe the boy's dirt-streaked face with it. He might have been eleven; he might have been a year or two younger. He was so thin it was hard to tell. After a bit his eyes fluttered open. He looked from me to Jamie and then back to me again. "Who are you?" he asked. "You don't b'long to the ranch."

  "We're friends of the ranch," I said. "Who are you?"

  "Bill Streeter," he said. "The proddies call me Young Bill."

  "Aye, do they? And is your father Old Bill?"

  He sat up, took Jamie's bandanna, dipped it in the trough, and squeezed it out so the water ran down his thin chest. "No, Old Bill's my granther, went into the clearing two years ago. My da', he's just plain Bill." Something about speaking his father's name made his eyes widen. He grasped my arm. "He ain't dead, is he? Say he ain't, sai!"

  Jamie and I exchanged another look, and that scared him worse than ever.

  "Say he ain't! Please say my daddy ain't dead!" He started to cry.

  "Hush and go easy now," I said. "What is he, your da'? A proddie?"

  "Nay, no, he's the cook. Say he ain't dead!"

  But the boy knew he was. I saw it in his eyes as clearly I'd seen the bunkhouse cook with his bloodstained apron thrown over his face.

  *

  There was a willa-tree on one side of the big house, and that was where we questioned Young Bill Streeter--just me, Jamie, and Sheriff Peavy. The others we sent back to wait in the shade of the bunkhouse, thinking that to have too many folks around him would only upset the boy more. As it happened, he could tell us very little of what we needed to know.