“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.”