Wizard and glass - Stephen King [69]
Susan reached beneath her apron (so stupid, wearing an apron for an errand on the backside of nowhere, but it was what custom demanded) and into her pocket. There, tied to a string so it could not be easily lost (by young girls suddenly moved to run in the moonlight, perchance), was a cloth bag. Susan broke the binding string and brought the bag out. She put it in the outstretched hand before her, the palm so worn that the lines marking it were now little more than ghosts. She was careful not to touch Rhea again . . . although the old woman would be touching her again, and soon.
“Is it the sound o’ the wind makes ye shiver?” Rhea asked, although Susan could tell her mind was mostly fixed on the little bag; her fingers were busy tugging out the knot in the drawstring.
“Yes, the wind.”
“And so it should. ’Tis the voices of the dead you hear in the wind, and when they scream so, ’tis because they regret—ah!”
The knot gave. She loosened the drawstring and tumbled two gold coins into her hand. They were unevenly milled and crude—no one had made such for generations—but they were heavy, and the eagles engraved upon them had a certain power. Rhea lifted one to her mouth, pulled back her lips to reveal a few gruesome teeth, and bit down. The hag looked at the faint indentations her teeth had left in the gold. For several seconds she gazed, rapt, then closed her fingers over them tightly.
While Rhea’s attention was distracted by the coins, Susan happened to look through the open door to her left and into what she assumed was the witch’s bedchamber. And here she saw an odd and disquieting thing: a light under the bed. A pink, pulsing light. It seemed to be coming from some kind of box, although she could not quite . . .
The witch looked up, and Susan hastily moved her eyes to a corner of the room, where a net containing three or four strange white fruits hung from a hook. Then, as the old woman moved and her huge shadow danced ponderously away from that part of the wall, Susan saw they were not fruits at all, but skulls. She felt a sickish drop in her stomach.
“The fire needs building up, missy. Go round to the side of the house and bring back an armload of wood. Good-sized sticks are what’s wanted, and never mind whining ye can’t lug ’em. Ye’re of a strappin good size, so ye are!”
Susan, who had quit whining about chores around the time she had quit pissing into her clouts, said nothing . . . although it did cross her mind to ask Rhea if everyone who brought her gold was invited to lug her wood. In truth, she didn’t mind; the air outside would taste like wine after the stench of the hut.
She had almost reached the door when her foot struck something hot and yielding. The cat yowled. Susan stumbled and almost fell. From behind her, the old woman issued a series of gasping, choking sounds which Susan eventually recognized as laughter.
“Watch Musty, my little sweet one! Tricksy, he is! And tripsy as well, betimes, so he is! Hee!” And off she went, in another gale.
The cat looked up at Susan, its ears laid back, its gray-green eyes wide. It hissed at her. And Susan, unaware she was going to do it until it was done, hissed back. Like its expression of contempt, Musty’s look of surprise was eerily—and, in this case, comically—human. It turned and fled for Rhea’s bedroom, its split tail lashing. Susan opened the door and went outside to get the wood. Already she felt as if she had been here a thousand years, and that it might be a thousand more before she could go home.
4
The air was as sweet as she had hoped, perhaps even sweeter, and for a moment she only stood on the stoop, breathing it in, trying to cleanse her lungs . . . and her mind.
After five good breaths, she got herself in motion. Around the side of the house she went . . . but it was the wrong side, it seemed, for there was no woodpile here. There was a narrow excuse for a window, however, half-buried in some tough and unlovely creeper. It was toward the back of the hut, and must look in on the old woman’s sleeping closet.
Don’t look