Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,240

it?” Stanley asked, hurrying down to her. “Near scared ten years off my life, ye did.”

“The moon, Stanley!” she whispered. “Oh, look at the moon, would ye!”

He looked up, and what he saw set his heart thumping, but he tried to speak reasonably and calmly. “Come now, Pettie, it’s dust, that’s all. Be reasonable, dear, ye know how the wind’s blown these last few days, and no rain to knock down what it carries; it’s dust, that’s all.”

Yet it didn’t look like dust.

“I know what I see,” whispered Pettie.

Above them, Demon Moon grinned and winked one eye through what appeared to be a shifting scrim of blood.

CHAPTER VII

TAKING THE BALL

1

While a certain whore and certain bartender were still gaping up at the bloody moon, Kimba Rimer awoke sneezing.

Damn, a cold for Reaping, he thought. As much as I have to be out over the next two days, I’ll be lucky if it doesn’t turn into—

Something fluffed the end of his nose, and he sneezed again. Coming out of his narrow chest and dry slot of a mouth, it sounded like a small-caliber pistol-shot in the black room.

“Who’s there?” he cried.

No answer. Rimer suddenly imagined a bird, something nasty and bad-tempered, that had gotten in here in daylight and was now flying around in the dark, fluttering against his face as he slept. His skin crawled—birds, bugs, bats, he hated them all—and he fumbled so energetically for the gas-lamp on the table by his bed that he almost knocked it off onto the floor.

As he drew it toward him, that flutter came again. This time puffing at his cheek. Rimer screamed and recoiled against the pillows, clutching the lamp to his chest. He turned the switch on the side, heard the hiss of gas, then pushed the spark. The lamp lit, and in the thin circle of its radiance, he saw not a fluttering bird but Clay Reynolds sitting on the edge of the bed. In one hand Reynolds held the feather with which he had been tickling Mejis’s Chancellor. His other was hidden in his cloak, which lay in his lap.

Reynolds had disliked Rimer from their first meeting in the woods far west of town—those same woods, beyond Eyebolt Canyon, where Farson’s man Latigo now quartered the main contingent of his troops. It had been a windy night, and as he and the other Coffin Hunters entered the little glade where Rimer, accompanied by Lengyll and Croydon, were sitting by a small fire, Reynolds’s cloak swirled around him. “Sai Manto,” Rimer had said, and the other two had laughed. It had been meant as a harmless joke, but it hadn’t seemed harmless to Reynolds. In many of the lands where he had travelled, manto meant not “cloak” but “leaner” or “bender.” It was, in fact, a slang term for homosexual. That Rimer (a provincial man under his veneer of cynical sophistication) didn’t know this never crossed Reynolds’s mind. He knew when people were making small of him, and if he could make such a person pay, he did so.

For Kimba Rimer, payday had come.

“Reynolds? What are you doing? How did you get in h—”

“You got to be thinking of the wrong cowboy,” the man sitting on the bed replied. “No Reynolds here. Just Señor Manto.” He took out the hand which had been under his cloak. In it was a keenly honed cuchillo. Reynolds had purchased it in Low Market with this chore in mind. He raised it now and drove the twelve-inch blade into Rimer’s chest. It went all the way through, pinning him like a bug. A bedbug, Reynolds thought.

The lamp fell out of Rimer’s hands and rolled off the bed. It landed on the foot-runner, but did not break. On the far wall was Kimba Rimer’s distorted, struggling shadow. The shadow of the other man bent over it like a hungry vulture.

Reynolds lifted the hand which had held the knife. He turned it so the small blue tattooed coffin between thumb and forefinger was in front of Rimer’s eyes. He wanted it to be the last thing Rimer saw on this side of the clearing.

“Let’s hear you make fun of me now,” Reynolds said. He smiled. “Come on. Let’s just hear you.”

2

Shortly before five o’clock, Mayor Thorin woke from a terrible dream. In it, a bird with pink eyes had been cruising slowly back and forth above the Barony. Wherever its shadow fell, the grass turned yellow, the leaves fell shocked from the trees, and the crops