Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,164

Just a tall and gangly lad with strange gray hair and narrow twitching shoulders and a wet spot on the front of his trousers. Hart Thorin looked as if he didn’t quite know where he was. In that moment the lust was flushed out of his face, but what replaced it was no better—that vacant confusion. It was as if he were a bucket with a hole in the bottom: no matter what you put in it, or how much, it always ran out before long.

He’ll do it again, she thought, and felt an immense tiredness creep over her. Now that he’s done it once, he’ll do it every chance he gets, likely. From now on coming up here is going to be like . . . well . . .

Like Castles. Like playing at Castles.

Thorin looked at her a moment longer. Slowly, like a man in a dream, he pulled the tail of his billowy white shirt out of his pants and let it drop around him like a skirt, covering the wet spot. His chin gleamed; he had drooled in his excitement. He seemed to feel this and wiped the wetness away with the heel of one hand, looking at her with those empty eyes all the while. Then some expression at last came into them, and without another word he turned and left the room.

There was a little scuffling thud in the hall as he collided with someone out there. Susan heard him mutter “Sorry! Sorry!” under his breath (it was more apology than he’d given her, muttered or not), and then Conchetta stepped back into the room. The swatch of cloth she’d gone after was draped around her shoulders like a stole. She took in Susan’s pale face and tearstained cheeks at once. She’ll say nothing, Susan thought. None of them will, just as none of them will lift a finger to help me off this stick I’ve run myself on. “Ye sharpened it yourself, gilly,” they’d say if I called for help, and that’ll be their excuse for leaving me to wriggle.

But Conchetta had surprised her. “Life’s hard, missy, so it is. Best get used to it.”

5

Susan’s voice—dry, by now pretty much stripped of emotion—at last ceased. Aunt Cord put her knitting aside, got up, and put the kettle on for tea.

“Ye dramatize, Susan.” She spoke in a voice that strove to be both kind and wise, and succeeded at neither. “It’s a trait ye get from your Manchester side—half of them fancied themselves poets, t’other half fancied themselves painters, and almost all of them spent their nights too drunk to tap-dance. He grabbed yer titties and gave yer a dry-hump, that’s all. Nothing to be so upset over. Certainly nothing to lose sleep over.”

“How would you know?” Susan asked. It was disrespectful, but she was beyond caring. She thought she’d reached a point where she could bear anything from her aunt except that patronizing worldly-wise tone of voice. It stung like a fresh scrape.

Cordelia raised an eyebrow and spoke without rancor. “How ye do love to throw that up to me! Aunt Cord, the dry old stick. Aunt Cord the spinster. Aunt Cord the graying virgin. Aye? Well, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty, virgin I might be, but I had a lover or two back when I was young . . . before the world moved on, ye might say. Mayhap one was the great Fran Lengyll.”

And mayhap not, Susan thought; Fran Lengyll was her aunt’s senior by at least fifteen years, perhaps as many as twenty-five.

“I’ve felt old Tom’s goat on my backside a time or two, Susan. Aye, and on my frontside as well.”

“And were any of these lovers sixty, with bad breath and knuckles that cracked when they squeezed your titties, Aunt? Did any of them try to push you through the nearest wall when old Tom began to wag his beard and say baa-baa-baa?”

The rage she expected did not come. What did was worse—an expression close to the look of emptiness she had seen on Thorin’s face in the mirror. “Deed’s done, Susan.” A smile, short-lived and awful, flickered like an eyelid on her aunt’s narrow face. “Deed’s done, aye.”

In a kind of terror Susan cried: “My father would have hated this! Hated it! And hated you for allowing it to happen! For encouraging it to happen!”

“Mayhap,” Aunt Cord said, and the awful smile winked at her again. “Mayhap so. And the only thing he’d hate more? The dishonor