“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 unfortunate 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.