“Only a little.”
“Corn?”
“A little more.”
The gunslinger nodded. “Is there a cellar?”
“Yes.” Jake looked at him. The pupils of his eyes had grown to a huge, fragile size. “You pull up on a ring in the floor, but I didn’t go down. I was afraid the ladder would break and I wouldn’t be able to get up again. And it smells bad. It’s the only thing around here that smells at all.”
“We’ll get up early and see if there’s anything down there worth taking. Then we’ll go.”
“All right.” The boy paused and then said, “I’m glad I didn’t kill you when you were sleeping. I had a pitchfork and I thought about doing it. But I didn’t, and now I won’t have to be afraid to go to sleep.”
“What would you be afraid of?”
The boy looked at him ominously. “Spooks. Ofhimcoming back.”
“The man in black,” the gunslinger said. Not a question.
“Yes. Is he a bad man?”
“I guess that depends on where you’re standing,” the gunslinger said absently. He got up and pitched his cigarette out onto the hardpan. “I’m going to sleep.”
The boy looked at him timidly. “Can I sleep in the stable with you?”
“Of course.”
The gunslinger stood on the steps, looking up, and the boy joined him. Old Star was up there, and Old Mother. It seemed to the gunslinger that if he closed his eyes he would be able to hear the croaking of the first spring peepers, smell the green, almost-summer smell of the court lawns after their first cutting (and hear, perhaps, the indolent click of wooden balls as the ladies of the East Wing, attired only in their shifts as dusk glimmered toward dark, played at Points), could almost see Cuthbert and Jamie as they came through the break in the hedges, calling for him to ride out with them...
It was not like him to think so much of the past.
He turned back and picked up the lamp. “Let’s go to sleep,” he said.
They crossed to the stable together.
VI
The next morning he explored the cellar.
Jake was right; it smelled bad. It had a wet, swampy stench that made the gunslinger feel nauseous and a little lightheaded after the antiseptic odorlessness of the desert and the stable. The cellar smelled of cabbages and turnips and potatoes with long, sightless eyes gone to everlasting rot. The ladder, however, seemed quite sturdy, and he climbed down.
The floor was earthen, and his head almost touched the overhead beams. Down here spiders still lived, disturbingly big ones with mottled gray bodies. Many were muties, the true thread long-lost. Some had eyes on stalks, some had what might have been as many as sixteen legs.
The gunslinger peered around and waited for his nighteyes.
“You all right?” Jake called down nervously.
“Yes.” He focused on the corner. “There are cans. Wait.”
He went carefully to the corner, ducking his head. There was an old box with one side folded down. The cans were vegetables—green beans, yellow beans—and three cans of corned beef.
He scooped up an armload and went back to the ladder. He climbed halfway up and handed them to Jake, who knelt to receive them. He went back for more.
It was on the third trip that he heard the groaning in the foundations.
He turned, looked, and felt a kind of dreamy terror wash over him, a feeling both languid and repellent.
The foundation was composed of huge sandstone blocks that had probably been evenly cornered when the way station was new, but which were now at every zigzag, drunken angle. It made the wall look as if it were inscribed with strange, meandering hieroglyphics. And from the joining of two of these abstruse cracks, a thin spill of sand was running, as if something on the other side was digging itself through with slobbering, agonized intensity.
