Free The Wind Through The Keyhole by Stephen King

trail, they changed into what looked like hooves. Then . . .” He looked at us grimly. “Footprints. First big—like a giant’s, almost—but then smaller and smaller until they were the size of any man’s tracks. Any-ro’, we lost em in the hardpan. Mayhap your father wouldn’t’ve, sai.”
    He went on marking the map, and when he was done, stepped away so we could see it clearly.
    “Such as you are supposed to have good brains as well as fast hands, I was always told. So what do you make of this?”
    Jamie stepped forward between the rows of pallets (for this cell must have been for many guests, probably brought in on drunk-and-disorderly), and traced the tip of his finger over the jags at the top of the map, blurring them a little. “Do the salt-houses run all along here? In all the foothills?”
    “Yar. The Salt Rocks, those hills’re called.”
    “Little Debaria is where?”
    Peavy made another box for the salt-miners’ town. It was close to the X he’d made to mark the place where the woman and the gambler had been killed . . . for it was Little Debaria they’d been headed for.
    Jamie studied the map a bit more, then nodded. “Looks to me like the skin-man could be one of the miners. Is that what you think?”
    “Aye, a saltie, even though a couple of them has been torn up, too. It makes sense—as much as anything in a crazy business like this can make sense. The new plug’s a lot deeper than the old ones, and everyone knows there are demons in the earth. Mayhap one of the miners struck on one, wakened it, and was done a mischief by it.”
    “There are also leftovers from the Great Old Ones in the ground,” I said. “Not all are dangerous, but some are. Perhaps one of those old things . . . those what-do-you-callums, Jamie?”
    “Artyfax,” he said.
    “Yes, those. Perhaps one of those is responsible. Mayhap the fellow will be able to tell us, if we take him alive.”
    “Sma’ chance of that,” Peavy growled.
    I thought there was a good chance. If we could identify him and close on him in the daytime, that was.
    “How many of these salties are there?” I asked.
    “Not s’many as in the old days, because now it’s just the one plug, don’tcha see it. I sh’d say no more’n . . . two hundred.”
    I met Jamie’s eyes, and saw a glint of humor in them. “No fret, Roland,” said he. “I’m sure we can interview em all by Reaptide. If we hurry.”
    He was exaggerating, but I still saw several weeks ahead of us in Debaria. We might interview the skin-man and still not be able to pick him out, either because he was a masterful liar or because he had no guilt to cover up; his day-self might truly not know what his night-self was doing. I wished for Cuthbert, who could look at things that seemed unrelated and spot the connections, and I wished for Alain, with his power to touch minds. But Jamie wasn’t so bad, either. He had, after all, seen what I should have seen myself, what was right in front of my nose. On one matter I was in complete accord with Sheriff Hugh Peavy: I hated mysteries. It’s a thing that has never changed in this long life of mine. I’m not good at solving them; my mind has never run that way.
    When we trooped back into the office, I said, “I have some questions I must ask you, Sheriff. The first is, will you open to us, if we open to you? The second—”
    “The second is do I see you for what you are and accept what you do. The third is do I seek aid and succor. Sheriff Peavy says yar, yar, and yar. Now for gods’ sake set your brains to working, fellows, for it’s over two weeks since this thing showed up at Serenity, and that time it didn’t get a full meal. Soon enough it’ll be out there again.”
    “It only prowls at night,” Jamie said. “You’re sure of that much?”
    “I am.”
    “Does the moon have any effect on it?” I asked. “Because my father’s advisor—and our teacher that was—says that in some of the old