2
On a late afternoon three days after Roy Depape left Ritzy and headed his horse toward Hambry again, Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain rode north and west of town, first down the long swell of the Drop, then into the freeland Hambry folk called the Bad Grass, then into deserty waste lands. Ahead of them and clearly visible once they were back in the open were crumbled and eroded bluffs. In the center of these was a dark, almost vaginal cleft; its edges so splintered it looked as if it had been whacked into reality by an ill-tempered god wielding a hatchet.
The distance between the end of the Drop and the bluffs was perhaps six miles.
Three quarters of the way across, they passed the flatlands’ only real geographic feature: a jutting upthrust of rock that looked like a finger bent at the first knuckle.
Below it was a small, boomerang-shaped greensward, and when Cuthbert gave a ululating yell to hear his voice bounce back at him from the bluffs ahead, a pack of chattering billy-bumblers broke from this greenplace and went racing back southeast, toward the Drop.
“That’s Hanging Rock,” Roland said. “There’s a spring at the base of it—only one in these parts, they say.”
It was all the talk that passed between them on the ride out, but a look of unmistakable relief passed between Cuthbert and Alain behind Roland’s back. For the last three weeks they had pretty much marched in place as summer rolled around them and past them. It was all well for Roland to say they must wait, they
must pay greatest attention to the things that didn’t matter and count the things which did from the comers of their eyes, but neither of them quite trusted the dreamy, disconnected air which Roland wore these days like his own special version of Clay Reynolds’s cloak. They didn’t talk about this between themselves; they didn’t have to. Both knew that if Roland began courting the pretty girl whom Mayor Thorin meant for his gilly (and who else could that long blonde hair have belonged to?), they would be in very bad trouble. But Roland showed no courting plumage, neither of them spied any more blonde hairs on his shirt-collars, and tonight he seemed more himself, as if he had put that cloak of abstraction aside.
Temporarily, mayhap. Permanently, if they were lucky. They could only wait and see. In the end, ka would tell, as it always did.
A mile or so from the bluffs, the strong sea breeze which had been at their backs for the whole ride suddenly dropped, and they heard the low, atonal squalling from the cleft that was Eyebolt Canyon. Alain pulled up, grimacing like a man who has bitten into a fruit of extravagant sourness. All he could think of was a handful of sharp pebbles, squeezed and ground together in a strong hand. Buzzards circled above the canyon as if drawn to the sound.
“The lookout don’t like it. Will.” Cuthbert said, knocking his knuckles on the skull. “I don’t like it much, either. What are we out here for?”
“To count,” Roland said. “We were sent to count everything and see everything, and this is something to count and see.”
“Oh, aye,” Cuthbert said. He held his horse in with some effort; the low, grinding wail of the thinny had made it skittish. “Sixteen hundred and fourteen fishing nets, seven hundred and ten boats small, two hundred and fourteen boats large, seventy oxen that nobody will admit to, and, on the north of town, one thinny. Whatever the hell that is.”
“We’re going to find out,” Roland said.
They rode into the sound, and although none of them liked it, no one suggested they go back. They had come all the way out here, and Roland was right—this was their job. Besides, they were curious.
The mouth of the canyon had been pretty well stopped up with brush, as Susan had told Roland it would be. Come fall, most of it would probably be dead, but now the stacked branches still bore leaves and made it hard to see into the canyon.
A path led through the center of the brush-pile, but it was narrow for the horses
(who might have balked at going through, anyway), and in the failing light Roland could make out hardly anything.
“Are we going in?” Cuthbert asked. “Let the Recording Angel note that I’m against, although I’ll offer no mutiny.”
Roland had no intention of taking them through the brush and toward the source of that sound. Not when he had only the vaguest idea of what a thinny was. He had asked a few questions about it over the last few weeks, and gotten little useful response. “I’d stay away,” was the extent of Sheriff Avery’s advice. So far his best information was still what he had gotten from Susan on the night he met her.
“Sit easy, Bert. We’re not going in.”
“Good,” Alain said softly, and Roland smiled.
There was a path up the canyon’s west side, steep and narrow, but passable if they were careful. They went single file, stopping once to clear a rockfall, pitching splintered chunks of shale and hornfels into the groaning trench to their right.
When this was done and just as the three of them were preparing to mount up again, a large bird of some sort—perhaps a grouse, perhaps a prairie chicken—rose above the lip of the canyon in an explosive whir of feathers. Roland dipped for his guns, and saw both Cuthbert and Alain doing the same. Quite funny, considering that their firearms were wrapped in protective oilcloth and secreted beneath the floorboards of the Bar K bunkhouse.
They looked at each other, said nothing (except with their eyes, which said plenty), and went on. Roland found that the effect of being this close to the thinny was cumulative—it wasn’t a sound you could get used to. Quite the contrary, in fact: the longer you were in the immediate vicinity of Eye-bolt Canyon, the more that sound scraped away at your brain. It got into your teeth as well as your ears; it vibrated in the knot of nerves below the breastbone and seemed to eat at the damp and delicate tissue behind the eyes. Most of all, though, it got into your head, telling you that everything you had ever been afraid of was just behind the next curve of the trail or yonder pile of tumbled rock, waiting to snake out of its place and get you.
Once they got to the flat and barren ground at the top of the path and the sky opened out above them again it was a little better, but by then the light was almost gone, and when they dismounted and walked to the canyon’s crumbling edge, they could see little but shadows.
“No good,” Cuthbert said disgustedly. “We should have left earlier, Roland . . .
Will, I mean. What dummies we are!”
“I can be Roland to you out here, if you like. And we’ll see what we came to see and count what we came to count—one thinny, just as you said. Only wait.”
They waited, and not twenty minutes later the Peddler’s Moon rose above the horizon—a perfect summer moon, huge and orange. It loomed in the darkening violet swim of the sky like a crashing planet. On its face, as clear as anyone had ever seen it, was the Peddler, he who came out of Nones with his sackful of squealing souls. A hunched figure made of smudged shadows with a pack clearly visible over one cringing shoulder. Behind it, the orange light seemed to flame like hellfire.
“Ugh,” Cuthbert said. “That’s an ill sight to see with that sound coming up from below.”
Yet they held their ground (and their horses, which periodically yanked back on their reins as if to tell them they should already be gone from this place), and the moon rose in the sky, shrinking a little as it went and turning silver. Eventually it rose enough to cast its bony light into Eyebolt Canyon. The three boys stood looking down. None of them spoke. Roland didn’t know about his friends, but he didn’t think he himself could have spoken even if called on to do so.
A box canyon, very short and steep-sided, Susan had said, and the description was perfectly accurate. She’d also said Eyebolt looked like a chimney lying on its side, and Roland supposed that was also true, if you allowed that a falling chimney might break up a little on impact, and lie with one crooked place in its middle.
Up to that crook, the canyon floor looked ordinary enough; even the litter of bones the moon showed them was not extraordinary. Many animals which wandered into box canyons hadn’t the wit to find their way hack out again, and with Eyebolt the possibility of escape was further reduced by the choke of brush piled at the canyon’s mouth. The sides were much too steep to climb except maybe for one place, just before that crooked little jog. There Roland saw a kind of groove running up the canyon wall, with enough jutting spurs inside it