Wizard and glass - Stephen King [67]
“Once my cares were far away,
Yes, once my cares were far away,
Now my love has gone from me
And misery is in my heart to stay.”
A bad song for a night such as this, mayhap, but her heart went its own way without much interest in what her head thought or wanted; always had. She was frightened to be out by moonlight, when werewolves were said to walk, she was frightened of her errand, and she was frightened by what that errand portended. Yet when she had gained the Great Road out of Hambry and her heart had demanded she run, she had run—under the light of the Kissing Moon and with her skirt held above her knees she had galloped like a pony, with her shadow galloping right beside her. For a mile or more she had run, until every muscle in her body tingled and the air she pulled down her throat tasted like some sweet heated liquid. And when she reached the upland track leading to this high sinister, she had sung. Because her heart demanded it. And, she supposed, it really hadn’t been such a bad idea; if nothing else, it had kept the worst of her megrims away. Singing was good for that much, anyway.
Now she walked to the end of the path, singing the chorus of “Careless Love.” As she stepped into the scant light which fell through the open door and onto the stoop, a harsh raincrow voice spoke from the shadows: “Stop yer howling, missy—it catches in my brains like a fishhook!”
Susan, who had been told all her life that she had a fair singing voice, a gift from her gramma, no doubt, fell silent at once, abashed. She stood on the stoop with her hands clasped in front of her apron. Beneath the apron she wore her second-best dress (she only had two). Beneath it, her heart was thumping very hard.
A cat—a hideous thing with two extra legs sticking out of its sides like toasting forks—came into the doorway first. It looked up at her, seemed to measure her, then screwed its face up in a look that was eerily human: contempt. It hissed at her, then flashed away into the night.
Well, good evening to you, too, Susan thought.
The old woman she had been sent to see stepped into the doorway. She looked Susan up and down with that same expression of flat-eyed contempt, then stood back. “Come in. And mind ye clap the door tight. The wind has a way of blowin it open, as ye see!”
Susan stepped inside. She didn’t want to close herself into this bad-smelling room with the old woman, but when there was no choice, hesitation was ever a fault. So her father had said, whether the matter under discussion was sums and subtractions or how to deal with boys at barn-dances when their hands became overly adventurous. She pulled the door firmly to, and heard it latch.
“And here y’are,” the old woman said, and offered a grotesque smile of welcome. It was a smile guaranteed to make even a brave girl think of stories told in the nursery—Winter’s tales of old women with snaggle teeth and bubbling cauldrons full of toad-green liquid. There was no cauldron over the fire in this room (nor was the fire itself much of a shake, in Susan’s opinion), but the girl guessed there had been, betimes, and things in it of which it might be better not to think. That this woman was a real witch and not just an old lady posing as one was something Susan had felt sure of from the moment she had seen Rhea darting back inside her hut with the malformed cat at her heels. It was something you could almost smell, like the reeky aroma rising off the hag’s skin.
“Yes,” she said, smiling. She tried to make it a good one, bright and unafraid. “Here I am.”
“And it’s early y’are, my little sweeting. Early y’are! Hee!”
“I ran partway. The moon got into my blood, I suppose. That’s what my da would have said.”
The old woman’s horrible smile widened into something that made Susan think of the way eels sometimes seemed to grin, after death and just before the pot. “Aye, but dead he is, dead these five years, Pat Delgado of the red hair and beard, the life mashed out of ’im by ’is own horse, aye, and went into the clearing at the end of the path with the music of