Wizard and glass - Stephen King [72]
“Get on with it,” Susan said. “You’ve been paid and I’ll obey, but stop teasing and have done.”
“You know what it is I have to do, mistress.”
“I don’t,” Susan said. The tears were close again, burning the backs of her eyes, but she would not let them fall. Would not. “I have an idea, but when I asked Aunt Cord if I was right, she said that you’d ‘take care of my education in that regard.’ ”
“Wouldn’t dirty her mouth with the words, would she? Well, that’s all right. Yer Aunt Rhea’s not too nice to say what yer Aunt Cordelia won’t. I’m to make sure that ye’re physically and spiritually intact, missy. Proving honesty is what the old ones called it, and it’s a good enough name. So it is. Step to me.”
Susan took two reluctant steps forward, so that her bare toes were almost touching the old woman’s slippers and her bare breasts were almost touching the old woman’s dress.
“If a devil or demon has polluted yer spirit, such a thing as might taint the child you’ll likely bear, it leaves a mark behind. Most often it’s a suck-mark or a lover’s bite, but there’s others . . . open yer mouth!”
Susan did, and when the old woman bent closer, the reek of her was so strong that the girl’s stomach clenched. She held her breath, praying this would be over soon.
“Run out yer tongue.”
Susan ran out her tongue.
“Now send yer breezes into my face.”
Susan exhaled her held breath. Rhea breathed it in and then, mercifully, pulled her head away a little. She had been close enough for Susan to see the lice hopping in her hair.
“Sweet enough,” the old woman said. “Aye, good’s a meal. Now turn around.”
Susan did, and felt the old witch’s fingers trail down her back and to her buttocks. Their tips were cold as mud.
“Bend over and spread yer cheeks, missy, be not shy, Rhea’s seen more than one pultry in her time!”
Face flushing—she could feel the beat of her heart in the center of her forehead and in the hollows of her temples—Susan did as told. And then she felt one of those corpselike fingers prod its way into her anus. Susan bit her lips to keep from screaming.
The invasion was mercifully short . . . but there would be another, Susan feared.
“Turn around.”
She turned. The old woman passed her hands over Susan’s breasts, flicked lightly at the nipples with her thumbs, then examined the undersides carefully. Rhea slipped a finger into the cup of the girl’s navel, then hitched up her own skirt and dropped to her knees with a grunt of effort. She passed her hands down Susan’s legs, first front, then back. She seemed to take special pains with the area just below the calves, where the tendons ran.
“Lift yer right foot, girl.”
Susan did, and uttered a nervous, screamy laugh as Rhea ran a thumbnail down her instep to her heel. The old woman parted her toes, looking between each pair.
After this process had been repeated with the other foot, the old woman—still on her knees—said: “You know what comes next.”
“Aye.” The word came out of her in a little trembling rush.
“Hold ye still, missy—all else is well, clean as a willow-strip, ye are, but now we’ve come to the cozy nook that’s all Thorin cares for; we’ve come to where honesty must really be proved. So hold ye still!”
Susan closed her eyes and thought of horses running along the Drop—nominally they were the Barony’s horse, overlooked by Rimer, Thorin’s Chancellor and the Barony’s Minister of Inventory, but the horses didn’t know that; they thought they were free, and if you were free in your mind, what else mattered?
Let me be free in my mind, as free as the horses along the Drop, and don’t let her hurt me. Please, don’t let her hurt me. And if she does, please help me to bear it in decent silence.
Cold fingers parted the downy hair below her navel; there was a pause, and then two cold fingers slipped inside her. There was pain, but only a moment of it, and not bad; she’d hurt herself worse stubbing her toe or barking her shin on the way to the privy in the middle of the night. The humiliation was the bad part, and the revulsion of Rhea’s ancient