“All right! All right! She came from the dwellers! From the desert!”
“I thought so.” He relaxed a little. Southeast, in other words. Along the path he followed. The one he could even see in the sky, sometimes. And he guessed the preacher-woman had come a lot further than from the dwellers or even the desert. How had she traveled so far? By way of some old machine that still worked? A train, mayhap? “Where does she live?”
Her voice dropped a notch. “If I tell you, will you make love to me?”
“I’ll make love to you, anyway. But I want to know.”
Allie sighed. It was an old, yellow sound, like turning pages. “She has a house over the knoll in back of the church. A little shack. It’s where the... the real minister used to live until he moved out. Is that enough? Are you satisfied?”
“No. Not yet.” And he rolled on top of her.
XIV
It was the last day, and he knew it.
The sky was an ugly, bruised purple, weirdly lit from above with the first fingers of dawn. Allie moved about like a wraith, lighting lamps, tending corn fritters that sputtered in the skillet. He had loved her hard after she had told him what he had to know, and she had sensed the coming end and had given more than she had ever given, and she had given it with desperation against the coming of dawn, given it with the tireless energy of sixteen. But she was pale this morning, on the brink of menopause again.
She served him without a word. He ate rapidly, chewing, swallowing, chasing each bite with hot coffee. Allie went to the batwings and stood staring out at the morning, at the silent battalions of slow-moving clouds.
“It’s going to dust up today.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Are you ever?” she asked ironically, and turned to watch him get his hat. He clapped it on his head and brushed past her.
“Sometimes,” he told her. He only saw her once more alive.
XV
By the time he reached Sylvia Pittston’s shack, the wind had died utterly and the whole world seemed to wait. He had been in desert country long enough to know that the longer the lull, the harder the blow when it finally came. A queer, flat light hung over everything.
There was a large wooden cross nailed to the door of the place, which was leaning and tired. He rapped and waited. No answer. He rapped again. No answer. He drew back and kicked in the door with one hard shot of his right boot. A small bolt on the inside ripped free. The door banged against a haphazardly planked wall and scared rats into skittering flight. Sylvia Pittston sat in the hall, in a mammoth ironwood rocker, and looked at him calmly with those great and dark eyes. The stormlight fell on her cheeks in crazy half-tones. She wore a shawl. The rocker made tiny squeaking noises.
They looked at each other for a long, clockless moment.
“You will never catch him,” she said. “You walk in the way of evil.”
“He came to you,” the gunslinger said.
“And to my bed. He spoke to me in the Tongue. The High Speech. He—”
“He screwed you. In every sense of the word.”
She did not flinch. “You walk an evil way, gunslinger. You stand in shadows. You stood in the shadows of the holy place last night. Did you think I couldn’t see you?”
“Why did he heal the weed-eater?”
“He’s an angel of God. He said so.”
“I hope he smiled when he said it.”
She drew her lip back from her teeth in an unconsciously feral gesture. “He told me you would follow. He told me what to do. He said you are the Antichrist.”
The gunslinger shook his head. “He didn’t say that.”
She smiled up at him lazily. “He said you would want to bed me. Is it true?”
“Did you ever meet a man who didn’t want to bed you?”
