“There, you bastard!” Jamie screams, and begins to scoop dust over the thing. He is weeping. “There, you bastard! There! There!” At last it’s gone, buried under a heap of white dust that buzzes and shakes and at last becomes still.
Without rising— he doesn’t have the strength to find his feet again, not yet, can still hardly believe he is alive
— Jamie Jaffords knee-walks toward the monster Molly has killed… and it is dead now, or at least lying still.
He wants to pull off its mask, see it plain. First he kicks at it with both feet, like a child doing a tantrum. The Wolfs body rocks from side to side, then lies still again. A pungent, reeky smell is coming from it. A rotten-smelling smoke is rising from the mask, which appears to be melting.
Dead, thinks the boy who will eventually become Gran-fere, the oldest living human in the Calla. Dead, aye, never doubt it. So gam, ye gutless! Garn and unmask it!
He does. Under the burning autumn sun he takes hold of the rotting mask, which feels like some sort of metal
mesh, and he pulls it off, and he sees…
EIGHT
For a moment Eddie wasn’t even aware that the old guy had stopped talking. He was still lost in the story, mesmerized. He saw everything so clearly it could have been him out there on the East Road, kneeling in the dust with the bah cocked to his shoulder like a baseball bat, ready to knock the oncoming sneetch out of the air.
Then Susannah rolled past the porch toward the barn with a bowl of chickenfeed in her lap. She gave them a curious look on her way by. Eddie woke up. He hadn’t come here to be entertained. He supposed the fact that he could be entertained by such a story said something about him.
“And?” Eddie asked the old man when Susannah had gone into the barn. “What did you see?”
“Eh?” Gran-pere gave him a look of such perfect vacuity that Eddie despaired.
“What did you see! When you took off the mask?”
For a moment that look of emptiness—the lights are on but no one’s home—held. And then (by pure force of will, it seemed to Eddie) the old man came back. He looked behind him, at the house. He looked toward the black maw of the barn, and the lick of phosphor-light deep inside. He looked around the yard itself.
Frightened, Eddie thought. Scared to death.
Eddie tried to tell himself this was only an old man’s paranoia, but he felt a chill, all the same.
“Lean close,” Gran-pere muttered, and when Eddie did: “The only one Ah ever told was my boy Luke…
Tian’s Da’, do’ee ken. Years and years later, this was. He told me never to speak of it to anyone else. Ah said,
‘But Lukey, what if it could help? What if it could help’t’next time they come?’ ”
Gran-pere’s lips barely moved, but his thick accent had almost entirely departed, and Eddie could understand him perfectly.
“And he said to me, ‘Da’, if’ee really b’lieved knowin c’d help, why have’ee not told afore now?’ And Ah couldn’t answer him, young fella, cos ’twas nothing but intuition kep’ my gob shut. Besides, what good could it do? What do it change?”
“I don’t know,” Eddie said. Their faces were close. Eddie could smell beef and gravy on old Jamie’s breath.
“How can I, when you haven’t told me what you saw?”
” ‘The Red King always finds ‘is henchmen,’ my boy said. ‘It’d be good if no one ever knew ye were out there, better still if no one ever heard what ye saw out there, lest it get back to em, aye, even in Thunderclap.’ And Ah seen a sad thing, young fella.”
Although he was almost wild with impatience, Eddie thought it best to let the old guy unwind it in his own way. “What was that, Gran-pere?”
“Ah seen Luke didn’t entirely believe me. Thought his own Da’ might just be a-storyin, tellin a wild tale about bein a Wolf-killer’t’look tall. Although ye’d think even a halfwit would see that if Ah was goingter make a tale, Ah’d make it me that killed the Wolf, and not Eamon Doolin’s wife.”
That made sense, Eddie thought, and then remembered Gran-pere at least hinting that he had taken credit more than once-upon-a, as Roland sometimes said. He smiled in spite of himself.
“Lukey were afraid someone else might hear my story and believe it. That it’d get on to the Wolves and Ah might end up dead fer no more than tellin a make-believe story. Not that it were.” His rheumy old eyes begged at Eddie’s face in the growing dark. ” You believe me, don’tya?”
Eddie nodded. “I know you say true, Gran-pere. But who…” Eddie paused. Who would rat you out? was how the question came to mind, but Gran-pere might not understand. “But who would tell? Who did you suspect?”
Gran-pere looked around the darkening yard, seemed about to speak, then said nothing.
“Tell me,” Eddie said. “Tell me what you—”
A large dry hand, a-tremor with age but still amazingly strong, gripped his neck and pulled him close. Bristly whiskers rasped against the shell of Eddie’s ear, making him shudder all over and break out in gooseflesh.
Gran-pere whispered nineteen words as the last light died out of the day and night came to the Calla.
Eddie Dean’s eyes widened. His first thought was that he now understood about the horses—all the gray horses. His second was Of course. It makes perfect sense. We should have known.
The nineteenth word was spoken and Gran-pere’s whisper ceased. The hand gripping Eddie’s neck dropped back into Gran-pere’s lap. Eddie turned to face him. “Say true?”
“Aye, gunslinger,” said the old man. “True as ever was. Ah canna’ say for all of em, for many sim’lar masks may cover many dif’runt faces, but—”
“No,” Eddie said, thinking of gray horses. Not to mention all those sets of gray pants. All those green cloaks.
It made perfect sense. What was that old song his mother used to sing? You’re in the army now, you’re not behind the plow. You’ll never get rich, you son of a bitch, you’re in the army now.
“I’ll have to tell this story to my dinh,” Eddie said.
Gran-pere nodded slowly. “Aye,” he said, “as ye will. Ah dun’t git along well witta boy, ye kennit. Lukey tried to put’t’well where Tian pointed wit”t’ drotta stick, y’ken.”
Eddie nodded as if he understood this. Later, Susannah translated it for him: I don’t get along well with the boy, you understand. Lukey tried to put the well where Tian pointed with the dowsing stick, you see.
“A dowser?” Susannah asked from out of the darkness. She had returned quietly and now gestured with her hands, as if holding a wishbone.
The old man looked at her, surprised, then nodded. “The drotta, yar. Any ro’, I argued agin’ it, but after the Wolves came and tuk his sister, Tia, Lukey done whatever the boy wanted. Can’ee imagine, lettin a boy nummore’n seventeen site the well, drotta or no? But Lukey put it there and there were water, Ah’ll give’ee that, we all seen it gleam and smelt it before the clay sides give down and buried my boy alive. We dug him
out but he were gone to the clearing, thrut and lungs all full of clay and muck.”
Slowly, slowly, the old man took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes with it.
“The boy and I en’t had a civil word between us since; that well’s dug between us, do ya not see it. But he’s right about wan-tin’t’stand agin the Wolves, and if you tell him anything for me, tell him his Gran-pere salutes him damn proud, salutes him big-big, yer-bugger! He got the sand o’Jaffords in his craw, aye! We stood our stand all those years agone, and now the blood shows true.” He nodded, this time even more slowly. “Garn and tell yer dinh, aye! Every word! And if it seeps out… if the Wolves were to come out of Thunderclap early fer one dried-up old turd like me…”
He bared his few remaining teeth in a smile Eddie found extraordinarily gruesome.
“Ah can still wind a bah,” he said, “and sumpin tells me yer brownie could be taught to throw a dish, shor’
legs or no.”
The old man looked off into the darkness.
“Let ‘un come,” he said softly. “Last time pays fer all, yer-bugger. Last time pays fer all.”
Chapter VII: Nocturne, Hunger
ONE
Mia was in the castle again, but this time was different. This time she did not move slowly, toying with her hunger, knowing that soon it would be fed and fed completely, that both she and her chap would be satisfied.
This time what she felt inside was ravenous desperation, as if some wild animal had been caged up inside her belly. She understood that what she had felt on all those previous expeditions hadn’t been hunger at all, not true hunger, but only healthy appetite. This was different.