Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,69

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 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