The gunslinger - Stephen King [54]
And it seemed that he could almost feel the laughter from the man in black, someplace far above them.
IV
Jake, calling him: that was how the gunslinger awoke. He’d tied Jake firmly to one of the tough bushes that grew nearby, and the boy was hungry and upset. By the sun, it was almost nine-thirty.
“Why’d you tie me up?” Jake asked indignantly as the gunslinger loosened the thick knots in the blanket. “I wasn’t going to run away!”
“You did run away,” the gunslinger said, and the expression on Jake’s face made him smile. “I had to go out and get you. You were sleepwalking.”
“I was?” Jake looked at him suspiciously. “I never did anything like that be—”
The gunslinger suddenly produced the jawbone and held it in front of Jake’s face. Jake flinched away from it, grimacing and raising his arm.
“See?”
Jake nodded, bewildered. “What happened?”
“We don’t have time to palaver now. I have to go off for a while. I may be gone the whole day. So listen to me, boy. It’s important. If sunset comes and I’m not back—”
Fear flashed on Jake’s face. “You’re leaving me!”
The gunslinger only looked at him.
“No,” Jake said after a moment. “I guess if you were going to leave me, you already would have.”
“That’s using your head. Now listen, and hear me very well. I want you to stay here while I’m gone. Right here in camp. Don’t stray, even if it seems like the best idea in the world. And if you feel strange—funny in any way—you pick up this bone and hold it in your hands.”
Hate and disgust crossed Jake’s face, mixed with bewilderment. “I couldn’t. I . . . I just couldn’t.”
“You can. You may have to. Especially after midday. It’s important. You may feel pukey or headachey when you first lay hold of it, but that’ll pass. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“And will you do what I say?”
“Yes, but why do you have to go away?” Jake burst out.
“I just do.”
The gunslinger caught another fascinating glimpse of the steel that lay under the boy’s surface, as enigmatic as the story he had told about coming from a city where the buildings were so tall they actually scraped the sky. It wasn’t Cuthbert the boy reminded him of so much as his other close friend, Alain. Alain had been quiet, in no way prone to Bert’s grandstanding quackery, and he’d been dependable and afraid of nothing.
“All right,” Jake said.
The gunslinger laid the jawbone carefully on the ground next to the ruins of the fire, where it grinned up through the grass like some eroded fossil that has seen the light of day after a night of five thousand years. Jake wouldn’t look at it. His face was pale and miserable. The gunslinger wondered if it would profit them for him to put the boy to sleep and question him, then decided there would be little gain. He knew well enough that the spirit of the stone circle was surely a demon, and very likely an oracle as well. A demon with no shape, only a kind of unformed sexual glare with the eye of prophecy. He wondered briefly if it might not be the soul of Sylvia Pittston, the giant woman whose religious huckstering had led to the final showdown in Tull . . . but no. Not her. The stones in the circle were ancient. Sylvia Pittston was a jilly-come-lately compared to the thing that made its den here. It was old . . . and sly. But the gunslinger knew the forms of speaking quite well and did not think the boy would have to use the jawbone mojo. The voice and mind of the oracle would be more than occupied with him. The gunslinger needed to know things, in spite of the risk . . . and the risk was high. Yet for both Jake and himself, he needed desperately to know.
The gunslinger opened his tobacco poke and pawed through it, pushing the dry strands of leaf aside until he came to a miniscule