Wizard and glass - Stephen King [63]
Men! She could not understand why so many women feared them. Hadn’t the gods made them with the most vulnerable part of their guts hanging right out of their bodies, like a misplaced bit of bowel? Kick them there and they curled up like snails. Caress them there and their brains melted. Anyone who doubted that second bit of wisdom need only look at her night’s second bit of business, the one which still lay ahead. Thorin! Mayor of Hambry! Chief Guard o’ Barony! No fool like an old fool!
Yet none of these thoughts had any real power over her or any real malice to them, at least not now; the three men who called themselves the Big Coffin Hunters had brought her a marvel, and she would look at it; aye, fill up her eyes with it, so she would.
The gimp, Jonas, had insisted she put it away—he had been told she had a place for such things, not that he wanted to see it himself, not any of her secret places, gods forbid (at this sally Depape and Reynolds had laughed like trolls)—and so she had, but the hoofbeats of their horses had been swallowed by the wind now, and she would do as she liked. The girl whose tits had stolen what little there was of Hart Thorin’s mind would not be here for another hour, at least (the old woman had insisted that the girl walk from town, citing the purification value of such a moonlit heel-and-toe, actually just wanting to put a safe bumper of time between her two appointments), and during that hour she would do as she liked.
“Oh, it’s beautiful, I’m sure ’tis,” she whispered, and did she feel a certain heat in that place where her ancient bowlegs came together? A certain moisture in the dry creek which hid there? Gods!
“Aye, even through the box where they hid it I felt its glam. So beautiful, Musty, like you.” She took the cat from her shoulder and held it in front of her eyes. The old tom purred and stretched out its pug of a face toward hers. She kissed its nose. The cat closed its milky gray-green eyes in ecstasy. “So beautiful, like you—so y’are, so y’are! Hee!”
She put the cat down. It walked slowly toward the hearth, where a late fire lazed, desultorily eating at a single log. Musty’s tail, split at the tip so it looked like the forked tail of a devil in an old drawing, switched back and forth in the room’s dim orange air. Its extra legs, dangling from its sides, twitched dreamily. The shadow which trailed across the floor and grew up the wall was a horror: a thing that looked like a cat crossed with a spider.
The old woman rose and went into her sleeping closet, where she had taken the thing Jonas had given her.
“Lose that and you’ll lose your head,” he’d said.
“Never fear me, my good friend,” she’d replied, directing a cringing, servile smile back over her shoulder, all the while thinking: Men! Foolish strutting creatures they were!
Now she went to the foot of her bed, knelt, and passed one hand over the earth floor there. Lines appeared in the sour dirt as she did. They formed a square. She pushed her fingers into one of these lines; it gave before her touch. She lifted the hidden panel (hidden in such a way that no one without the touch would ever be able to uncover it), revealing a compartment perhaps a foot square and two feet deep. Within it was an ironwood box. Curled atop the box was a slim green snake. When she touched its back, its head came up. Its mouth yawned in a silent hiss, displaying four pairs of fangs—two on top, two on the bottom.
She took the snake up, crooning to it. As she brought its flat face close to her own, its mouth yawned wider and its hissing became audible.