by Stephen King
“Took you long enough, missy,” Rhea said. She continued to look into the fireplace, as if Susan were of no account . . . but one foot tapped below the dirty hem of her dress, and her eyebrows were drawn together.
Susan crossed the room, peering over the load of wood in her arms as well as she could while she walked. It wouldn’t surprise her a bit to spy the cat lurking near, hoping to trip her up. “I saw a spider,” she said. “I flapped my apron at it to make it run away. I hate the look of them, so I do.”
“Ye’ll see something ye like the look of even less, soon enough,” Rhea said, grinning her peculiar one-sided grin. “Out of old Thorin’s nightshirt it’ll come, stiff as a stick and as red as rhubarb! Hee! Hold a minute, girl; ye gods, ye’ve brought enough for a Fair-Day bonfire.”
Rhea took two fat logs from Susan’s pile and tossed them indifferently onto the coals. Embers spiraled up the dark and faintly roaring shaft of the chimney. There, ye’ve scattered what’s left of yer fire, ye silly old thing, and will likely have to rekindle the whole mess, Susan thought. Then Rhea reached into the fireplace with one splayed hand, spoke a guttural word, and the logs blazed up as if soaked in oil.
“Put the rest over there,” she said, pointing at the woodbox. “And mind ye not be a scatterbark, missy.”
What, and dirty all this neat? Susan thought. She bit the insides of her cheeks to kill the smile that wanted to rise on her mouth.
Rhea might have sensed it, however; when Susan straightened again, the old woman was looking at her with a dour, knowing expression.
“All right, mistress, let’s do our business and have it done. Do ye know why you’re here?”
“I am here at Mayor Thorin’s wish,” Susan repeated, knowing that was no real answer. She was frightened now—more frightened than when she had looked through the window and seen the old woman crooning to the glass ball. “His wife has come barren to the end of her courses. He wishes to have a son before he is also unable to—”
“Pish-tush, spare me the codswallop and pretty words. He wants tits and arse that don’t squish in his hands and a box that’ll grip what he pushes. If he’s still man enough to push it, that is. If a son come of it, aye, fine, he’ll give it over to ye to keep and raise until it’s old enough to school, and after that ye’ll see it no more. If it’s a daughter, he’ll likely take it from ye and give it to his new man, the one with the girl’s hair and the limp, to drown in the nearest cattle-wallow.”
Susan stared at her, shocked out of all measure.
The old woman saw the look and laughed. “Don’t like the sound of the truth, do yer? Few do, missy. But that’s neither here nor there; yer auntie was ever a trig one, and she’ll have done all right out of Thorin and Thorin’s treasury. What gold you see of it’s none o’ mine . . . and won’t be none o’ yours, either, if you don’t watch sharp! Hee! Take off that dress!”
I won’t was what rose to her lips, but what then? To be turned out of this hut (and to be turned out pretty much as she had come, and not as a lizard or a hopping toad would probably be the best luck she could hope for) and sent west as she was now, without even the two gold coins she’d brought up here? And that was only the small half of it. The large was that she had given her word. At first she had resisted, but when Aunt Cord had invoked her father’s name, she had given in. As she always did. Really, she had no choice. And when there was no choice, hesitation was ever a fault.
She brushed the front of her apron, to which small bits of bark now clung, then untied it and took it off. She folded it, laid it on a small, grimy hassock near the hearth, and unbuttoned her dress to the waist. She shivered it from her shoulders, and stepped out. She folded it and laid it atop the apron, trying not to mind the greedy way Rhea of Cöos was staring at her in the firelight. The cat came sashaying across the floor, grotesque extra legs bobbling, and sat at Rhea’s feet. Outside, the wind gusted. It was warm on the hearth but Susan was cold just the same, as if that wind had gotten inside her, somehow.
“Hurry, girl, for yer father’s sake!”
Susan pulled her shift over her head, folded it atop the dress, then stood in only her drawers, with her arms folded over her bosom. The fire painted warm orange highlights along her thighs; black circles of shadow in the tender folds behind her knees.
“And still she’s not nekkid!” the old crow laughed. “Ain’t we lahdi-dah! Aye, we are, very fine! Take off those drawers, mistress, and stand as ye slid from yer mother! Although ye had not so many goodies as to interest the likes of Hart Thorin then, did ye? Hee!”
Feeling caught in a nightmare, Susan did as she was bid. With her mound and bush uncovered, her crossed arms seemed foolish. She lowered them to her sides.
“Ah, no wonder he wants ye!” the old woman said. “ ’Tis beautiful ye are, and true! Is she not, Musty?”
The cat waowed.
“There’s dirt on yer knees,” Rhea said suddenly. “How came it there?”
Susan felt a moment of awful panic. She had lifted her skirts to crawl beneath the hag’s window . . . and hung herself by doing it.
Then an answer rose to her lips, and she spoke it calmly enough. “When I came in sight of your hut, I grew fearful. I knelt to pray, and raised my skirt so as not to soil it.”
“I’m touched—to want a clean dress for the likes o’ me! How good y’are! Don’t you agree, Musty?”
The cat waowed, then began to lick one of its forepaws.
“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 t
o 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 touch.
“Caulked tight, ye are!” Rhea cried. “Good as ever was! But Thorin’ll see to that, so he will! As for you, my girl, I’ll tell yer a secret yer prissy aunt with her long nose ’n tight purse ’n little goosebump tits never knew: even a girl who’s intact don’t need to lack for a shiver now ’n then, if she knows how!”
The hag’s withdrawing fingers closed gently around the little nubbin of flesh at the head of Susan’s cleft. For one terrible second Susan thought they would pinch that sensitive place, which sometimes made her draw in a breath if it rubbed just so against the pommel of her saddle when she was riding, but instead the fingers caressed . . . then pressed . . . and the girl was horrified to feel a heat which was far from unpleasant kindle in her belly.
“Like a little bud o’ silk,” the old woman crooned, and her meddling fingers moved faster. Susan felt her hips sway forward, as if with a mind and life of their own, and then she thought of the old woman’s greedy, self-willed face, pink as the face of a whore by gaslight as it hung over the open box; she thought of the way the drawstring bag with the gold pieces in it had hung from the wrinkled mouth like some disgorged piece of flesh, and the heat she felt was gone. She drew back, trembling, her arms and belly and breasts breaking out in gooseflesh.
“You’ve finished what you were paid to do,” Susan said. Her voice was dry and harsh.
Rhea’s face knotted. “Ye’ll not tell me aye, no, yes, or maybe, impudent stripling of a girl! I know when I’m done, I, Rhea, the Weirding of Cöos, and—”
“Be still, and be on your feet before I kick you into the fire, unnatural thing.”
The old woman’s lips wriggled back from her few remaining teeth in a doglike sneer, and now, Susan realized, she and the witch-woman were back where they had been at the start: ready to claw each other’s eyes out.
“Raise hand or foot to me, you impudent cunt, and what leaves my house will leave handless, footless, and blind of eye.”
“I do not much doubt you could do it, but Thorin should be vexed,” Susan said. It was the first time in her life she had ever invoked a man’s name for protection. Realizing this made her feel ashamed . . . small, somehow. She didn’t know why that should be, especially since she had agreed to sleep in his bed and bear his child, but it was.
The old woman stared, her seamed face working until it folded into a parody of a smile that was worse than her snarl. Puffing and pulling at the arm of her chair, Rhea got to her feet. As she did, Susan quickly began to dress.
“Aye, vexed he would be. Perhaps you know best after all, missy; I’ve had a strange night, and it’s wakened parts of me better left asleep. Anything else that might have happened, take it as a compliment to yer youth ’n purity . . . and to yer beauty as well. Aye. You’re a beautiful thing, and there’s no doubtin it. Yer hair, now . . . when yer let it down, as ye will for Thorin, I wot, when ye lay with him . . . it glows like the sun, doesn’t it?”
Susan did not want to force the old hag out of her posturing, but she didn’t want to encourage these fawning compliments, either. Not when she could still see the hate in Rhea’s rheumy eyes, not when she could feel the old woman’s touch still crawling like beetles on her skin. She said nothing, only stepped into her dress, set it on her shoulders, and began to button up the front.
Rhea perhaps understood the run of her thoughts, for the smile dropped off her mouth and her manner grew businesslike. Susan found this a great relief.
“Well, never mind it. Ye’ve proved honest; ye may dress yerself and go. But not a word of what passed between us to Thorin, mind ye! Words between women need trouble no man’s ear, especially one as great as he.” Yet at this Rhea could not forbear a certain spasming sneer. Susan didn’t know if the old woman was aware of it or not. “Are we agreed?”
Anything, anything, just as long as I can be out of here and away.
“You declare me proved?”
“Aye, Susan, daughter of Patrick. So I do. But it’s not what I say that matters. Now . . . wait . . . somewhere here . . .”
She scrabbled along the mantel, pushing stubs of candles stuck on cracked saucers this way and that, lifting first a kerosene lantern and then a battery flashlight, looking fixedly for a moment at a drawing of a young boy and then putting it aside.
“Where . . . where . . . arrrrr . . . here!”
She snatched up a pad of paper with a sooty cover (CITGO stamped on it in ancient gold letters) and a stub of pencil. She paged almost to the end of the pad before finding a blank sheet. On it she scrawled something, then tore the sheet off the spiral of wire at the top of the pad. She held the sheet out to Susan, who took it and looked at it. Scrawled there was a word she did not understand at first:
Below it was a symbol:
“What’s this?” she asked, tapping the little drawing.
“Rhea, her mark. Known for six Baronies around, it is, and can’t be copied. Show that paper to yer aunt. Then to Thorin. If yer aunt wants to take it and show it to Thorin herself—I know her, y’see, and her bossy ways—tell her no, Rhea says no, she’s not to have the keeping of it.”
“And if Thorin wants it?”
Rhea shrugged dismissively. “Let him keep it or burn it or wipe his bum with it, for all of me. It’s nothing to you, either, for you knew you were honest all along, so you did. True?”
Susan nodded. Once, walking home after a dance, she had let a boy slip his hand inside her shirt for a moment or two, but what of that? She was honest. And in more ways than this nasty creature meant.
“But don’t lose that paper. Unless you’d see me again, that is, and go through the same business a second time.”
Gods perish even the thought, Susan thought, and managed not to shudder. She put the paper in her pocket, where the drawstring bag had been.
“Now, come to the door, missy.” She looked as if she wanted to grasp Susan’s arm, then thought better of it. The two of them walked side by side to the door, not touching in such a careful way that it made them look awkward. Once there, Rhea did grip Susan’s arm. Then, with her other hand, she pointed to the bright silver disc hanging over the top of the Cöos.
“The Kissing Moon,” Rhea said. “ ’Tis midsummer.”
“Yes.”
“Tell Thorin he’s not to have you in his bed—or in a haystack, or on the scullery floor, or anywhere else—until Demon Moon rise
s full in the sky.”
“Not until Reaping?” That was three months—a lifetime, it seemed to her. Susan tried not to show her delight at this reprieve. She’d thought Thorin would put an end to her virginity by moonrise the next night. She wasn’t blind to the way he looked at her.
Rhea, meanwhile, was looking at the moon, seeming to calculate. Her hand went to the long tail of Susan’s hair and stroked it. Susan bore this as well as she could, and just when she felt she could bear it no longer, Rhea dropped her hand back to her side and nodded. “Aye, not just Reaping, but true fin de año—Fair-Night, tell him. Say that he may have you after the bonfire. You understand?”
“True fin de año, yes.” She could barely contain her joy.
“When the fire in Green Heart burns low and the last of the red-handed men are ashes,” Rhea said. “Then and not until then. You must tell him so.”
“I will.”
The hand came out and began to stroke her hair again. Susan bore it. After such good news, she thought, it would have been mean-spirited to do otherwise. “The time between now and Reaping you will use to meditate, and to gather your forces to produce the male child the Mayor wants . . . or mayhap just to ride along the Drop and gather the last flowers of your maidenhood. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” She dropped a curtsey. “Thankee-sai.”
Rhea waved this off as if it were a flattery. “Speak not of what passed between us, mind. ’Tis no one’s affair but our own.”
“I won’t. And our business is done?”
“Well . . . mayhap there’s one more small thing . . .” Rhea smiled to show it was indeed small, then raised her left hand in front of Susan’s eyes with three fingers together and one apart. Glimmering in the fork between was a silver medallion, seemingly produced from nowhere. The girl’s eyes fastened on it at once. Until Rhea spoke a single guttural word, that was.
