Wizard and glass - Stephen King [280]
“They’re coming,” Alain said, snapping Roland out of his reverie.
The gunslinger stood up, Rusher’s reins in one fist. Cuthbert stood tensely nearby. “Large party or small? Does thee . . . do you know?”
Alain stood facing southeast, hands held out with the palms up. Beyond his shoulder, Roland saw Old Star just about to slip below the horizon. Only an hour until dawn, then.
“I can’t tell yet,” Alain said.
“Can you at least tell if the ball—”
“No. Shut up, Roland, let me listen!”
Roland and Cuthbert stood and watched Alain anxiously, at the same time straining their ears to hear the hooves of horses, the creak of wheels, or the murmur of men on the passing wind. Time spun out. The wind, rather than dropping as Old Star disappeared and dawn approached, blew more fiercely than ever. Roland looked at Cuthbert, who had taken out his slingshot and was playing nervously with the pull. Bert raised one shoulder in a shrug.
“It’s a small party,” Alain said suddenly. “Can either of you touch them?”
They shook their heads.
“No more than ten, maybe only six.”
“Gods!” Roland murmured, and pumped a fist at the sky. He couldn’t help it. “And the ball?”
“I can’t touch it,” Alain said. He sounded almost as though he were sleeping himself. “But it’s with them, don’t you think?”
Roland did. A small party of six or eight, probably travelling with the ball. It was perfect.
“Be ready, boys,” he said. “We’re going to take them.”
9
Jonas’s party made good time down the Drop and into the Bad Grass. The guide-stars were brilliant in the autumn sky, and Renfrew knew them all. He had a click-line to measure between the two he called The Twins, and he stopped the group briefly every twenty minutes or so to use it. Jonas hadn’t the slightest doubt the old cowboy would bring them out of the tall grass pointed straight at Hanging Rock.
Then, about an hour after they’d entered the Bad Grass, Quint rode up beside him. “That old lady, she want to see you, sai. She say it’s important.”
“Do she, now?” Jonas asked.
“Aye.” Quint lowered his voice. “That ball she got on her lap all glowy.”
“Is that so? I tell you what, Quint—keep my old trail-buddies company while I see what’s what.” He dropped back until he was pacing beside the black cart. Rhea raised her face to him, and for a moment, washed as it was in the pink light, he thought it the face of a young girl.
“So,” she said. “Here y’are, big boy. I thought ye’d show up pretty smart.” She cackled, and as her face broke into its sour lines of laughter, Jonas again saw her as she really was—all but sucked dry by the thing in her lap. Then he looked down at it himself . . . and was lost. He could feel that pink glow radiating into all the deepest passages and hollows of his mind, lighting them up in a way they’d never been lit up before. Even Coral, at her dirty busiest, couldn’t light him up that way.
“Ye like it, don’t ye?” she half-laughed, half-crooned. “Aye, so ye do, so would anyone, such a pretty glam it is! But what do ye see, sai Jonas?”
Leaning over, holding to the saddle-horn with one hand, his long hair hanging down in a sheaf, Jonas looked deeply into the ball. At first he saw only that luscious, labial pink, and then it began to draw apart. Now he saw a hut surrounded by tall grass. The sort of hut only a hermit could love. The door—it was painted a peeling but still bright red—stood open. And sitting there on the stone stoop with her hands in her lap, her blankets on the ground at her feet, and her unbound hair around her shoulders was . . .
“I’ll be damned!” Jonas whispered. He had now leaned so far out of the saddle that he looked like a trick rider in a circus show, and his eyes seemed to have disappeared; there were only sockets of