Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,60

this sally Depape and Reynolds had laughed like trolls)—and so she had, but the hoofbeats of their horses had been swallowed by the wind now, and she would do as she liked. The girl whose tits had stolen what little there was of Hart Thorin’s mind would not be here for another hour, at least (the old woman had insisted that the girl walk from town, citing the purification value of such a moonlit heel-and-toe, actually just wanting to put a safe bumper of time between her two appointments), and during that hour she would do as she liked.

“Oh, it’s beautiful, I’m sure ’tis,” she whispered, and did she feel a certain heat in that place where her ancient bowlegs came together? A certain moisture in the dry creek which hid there? Gods!

“Aye, even through the box where they hid it I felt its glam. So beautiful, Musty, like you.” She took the cat from her shoulder and held it in front of her eyes. The old tom purred and stretched out its pug of a face toward hers. She kissed its nose. The cat closed its milky gray-green eyes in ecstasy. “So beautiful, like you—so y’are, so y’are! Hee!”

She put the cat down. It walked slowly toward the hearth, where a late fire lazed, desultorily eating at a single log. Musty’s tail, split at the tip so it looked like the forked tail of a devil in an old drawing, switched back and forth in the room’s dim orange air. Its extra legs, dangling from its sides, twitched dreamily. The shadow which trailed across the floor and grew up the wall was a horror: a thing that looked like a cat crossed with a spider.

The old woman rose and went into her sleeping closet, where she had taken the thing Jonas had given her.

“Lose that and you’ll lose your head,” he’d said.

“Never fear me, my good friend,” she’d replied, directing a cringing, servile smile back over her shoulder, all the while thinking: Men! Foolish strutting creatures they were!

Now she went to the foot of her bed, knelt, and passed one hand over the earth floor there. Lines appeared in the sour dirt as she did. They formed a square. She pushed her fingers into one of these lines; it gave before her touch. She lifted the hidden panel (hidden in such a way that no one without the touch would ever be able to uncover it), revealing a compartment perhaps a foot square and two feet deep. Within it was an ironwood box. Curled atop the box was a slim green snake. When she touched its back, its head came up. Its mouth yawned in a silent hiss, displaying four pairs of fangs—two on top, two on the bottom.

She took the snake up, crooning to it. As she brought its flat face close to her own, its mouth yawned wider and its hissing became audible. She opened her own mouth; from between her wrinkled gray lips she poked the yellowish, bad-smelling mat of her tongue. Two drops of poison—enough to kill an entire dinner-party, if mixed in the punch—fell on it. She swallowed, feeling her mouth and throat and chest burn, as if with strong liquor. For a moment the room swam out of focus, and she could hear voices murmuring in the stenchy air of the hut—the voices of those she called “the unseen friends.” Her eyes ran sticky water down the trenches time had drawn in her cheeks. Then she blew out a breath and the room steadied. The voices faded.

She kissed Ermot between his lidless eyes (time o’ the Kissing Moon, all right, she thought) and then set him aside. The snake slipped beneath her bed, curled itself in a circle, and watched as she passed her palms over the top of the ironwood box. She could feel the muscles in her upper arms quivering, and that heat in her loins was more pronounced. Years it had been since she had felt the call of her sex, but she felt it now, so she did, and it was not the doing of the Kissing Moon, or not much.

The box was locked and Jonas had given her no key, but that was nothing to her, who had lived long and studied much and trafficked with creatures that most men, for all their bold talk and strutting ways, would run from as if on fire had they caught even the smallest glimpse of them. She stretched one hand