Read Online The Wind Through The Keyhole by Stephen King - Free Book Online Page B

skin-man was at one of the women at Serenity. She’s badly disfigured.”
    “Been there, have ye?”
    “The women are terrified.” I thought this over, and remembered a knife strapped to a calf as thick as the trunk of a young birch. “Except for the prioress, that is.”
    He chuckled. “Everlynne. That one’d spit in the devil’s face. And if he took her down to Nis, she’d be running the place in a month.”
    I said, “Do you have any idea who this skin-man might be when he’s in his human shape? If you do, tell us, I beg. For, as my father told your Sheriff Anderson that was, this is not our fill.”
    “I can’t give ye a name, if that’s what you mean, but I might be able to give ye something. Follow me.”
    * * *
    He led us through the archway behind his desk and into the jail, which was in the shape of a T . I counted eight big cells down the central aisle and a dozen small ones on the cross-corridor. All were empty except for one of the smaller ones, where a drunk was snoozing away the late afternoon on a straw pallet. The door to his cell stood open.
    “Once all of these cells would have been filled on Efday and Ethday,” Peavy said. “Loaded up with drunk cowpunchers and farmhands, don’tcha see it. Now most people stay in at night. Even on Efday and Ethday. Cowpokes in their bunkhouses, farmhands in theirs. No one wants to be staggering home drunk and meet the skin-man.”
    “The salt-miners?” Jamie asked. “Do you pen them, too?”
    “Not often, for they have their own saloons up in Little Debaria. Two of em. Nasty places. When the whores down here at the Cheery Fellows or the Busted Luck or the Bider-Wee get too old or too diseased to attract custom, they end up in Little Debaria. Once they’re drunk on White Blind, the salties don’t much care if a whore has a nose as long as she still has her sugar-purse.”
    “Nice,” Jamie muttered.
    Peavy opened one of the large cells. “Come on in here, boys. I haven’t any paper, but I do have some chalk, and here’s a nice smooth wall. It’s private, too, as long as old Salty Sam down there doesn’t wake up. And he rarely does until sundown.”
    From the pocket of his twill pants the sheriff took a goodish stick of chalk, and on the wall he drew a kind of long box with jags all across the top. They looked like a row of upside-down V ’s.
    “Here’s the whole of Debaria,” Peavy said. “Over here’s the rail line you came in on.” He drew a series of hashmarks, and as he did so I remembered the enjie and the old fellow who’d served as our butler.
    “Sma’ Toot is off the rails,” I said. “Can you put together a party of men to set it right? We have money to pay for their labor, and Jamie and I would be happy to work with them.”
    “Not today,” Peavy said absently. He was studying his map. “Enjie still out there, is he?”
    “Yes. Him and another.”
    “I’ll send Kellin and Vikka Frye out in a bucka. Kellin’s my best deputy—the other two ain’t worth much—and Vikka’s his son. They’ll pick em up and bring em back in before dark. There’s time, because the days is long this time o’ year. For now, just pay attention, boys. Here’s the tracks and here’s Serenity, where that poor girl you spoke to was mauled. On the High Road, don’tcha see it.” He drew a little box for Serenity, and put an X in it. North of the women’s retreat, up toward the jags at the top of his map, he put another X . “This is where Yon Curry, the sheepherder, was killed.”
    To the left of this X , but pretty much on the same level—which is to say, below the jags—he put another.
    “The Alora farm. Seven killed.”
    Farther yet to the left and little higher, he chalked another X .
    “Here’s the Timbersmith farm on the High Pure. Nine killed. It’s where we found the little boy’s head on a pole. Tracks all around it.”
    “Wolf?” I asked.
    He shook his head. “Nar, some kind o’ big cat. At first. Before we lost the