Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,155

hope your friends will watch well.”

“They will.”

“Is there a signal?”

“The whistle of the nighthawk. Let’s hope we don’t hear it.”

“Aye, be it so.” She took his hand and drew him into the oilpatch.

13

The first time the gas-jet flared ahead of them, Will spat a curse under his breath (an obscenely energetic one she hadn’t heard since her father died) and dropped the hand not holding hers to his belt.

“Be easy! It’s only the candle! The gas-pipe!”

He relaxed slowly. “That they use, don’t they?”

“Aye. To run a few machines—little more than toys, they are. To make ice, mostly.”

“I had some the day we met the Sheriff.”

When the flare licked out again—bright yellow with a bluish core—he didn’t jump. He glanced at the three gas-storage tanks behind what Hambry-folk called “the candle” without much interest. Nearby was a stack of rusty canisters in which the gas could be bottled and carried.

“You’ve seen such before?” she asked.

He nodded.

“The Inner Baronies must be very strange and wonderful,” Susan said.

“I’m beginning to think they’re no stranger than those of the Outer Arc,” he said, turning slowly. He pointed. “What’s yon building down there? Left over from the Old People?”

“Aye.”

To the east of Citgo, the ground dropped sharply down a thickly wooded slope with a lane cut through the middle of it—this lane was as clear in the moonlight as a part in hair. Not far from the bottom of the slope was a crumbling building surrounded by rubble. The tumble-and-strew was the detritus of many fallen smokestacks—that much could be extrapolated from the one which still stood. Whatever else the Old People had done, they had made lots of smoke.

“There were useful things in there when my da was a child,” she said. “Paper and such—even a few ink-writers that would still work . . . for a little while, at least. If you shook them hard.” She pointed to the left of the building, where there was a vast square of crumbled paving, and a few rusting hulks that had been the Old People’s weird, horseless mode of travel. “Once there were things over there that looked like the gas-storage tanks, only much, much larger. Like huge silver cans, they were. They didn’t rust like those that are left. I can’t think what became of them, unless someone hauled them off for water storage. I never would. ’Twould be unlucky, even if they weren’t contaminated.”

She turned her face up to his, and he kissed her mouth in the moonlight.

“Oh, Will. What a pity this is for you.”

“What a pity for both of us,” he said, and then passed between them one of those long and aching looks of which only teenagers are capable. They looked away at last and walked on again, hand-in-hand.

She couldn’t decide which frightened her more—the few derricks that were still pumping or those dozens which had fallen silent. One thing she knew for sure was that no power on the face of the earth could have gotten her within the fence of this place without a friend close beside her. The pumps wheezed; every now and then a cylinder screamed like someone being stabbed; at periodic intervals “the candle” would fire off with a sound like dragon’s breath, throwing their shadows out long in front of them. Susan kept her ears pitched for the nighthawk’s piercing two-note whistle, and heard nothing.

They came to a wide lane—what had once undoubtedly been a maintenance road—that split the oilpatch in two. Running down the center was a steel pipe with rusting joints. It lay in a deep concrete trough, with the upper arc of its rusty circumference protruding above ground level.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“The pipe that took the oil to yon building, I reckon. It means nothing, ’tis been dry for years.”

He dropped to one knee, slid his hand carefully into the space between the concrete sleeve and the pipe’s rusty side. She watched him nervously, biting her lip to keep herself from saying something which would surely come out sounding weak or womanish: What if there were biting spiders down there in the forgotten dark? Or what if his hand got stuck? What would they do then?

Of that latter there had been no chance, she saw when he pulled his hand free. It was slick and black with oil.

“Dry for years?” he asked with a little smile.

She could only shake her head, bewildered.

14

They followed the pipe toward a place where a rotten gate barred the road. The pipe (she could now see