by Stephen King
“It shows?” was all she said.
“Of course it does,” Cordelia replied. “Now tell me, girl. Has he been on thee?”
“Yes. . .no. . .no.”
Aunt Cord sat in her chair, knitting in her lap, eyebrows raised, waiting for more.
At last Susan told her what had happened, speaking in a tone that was mostly flat—a little tremble intruded toward the end, but that was all. Aunt Cord began to feel a cautious sort of relief. Perhaps more goose-girl nerves was all it came down to, after all!
The substitute gown, like all the substitutes, hadn’t been finished off; there was too much else to do. Maria had therefore turned Susan over to blade-faced Conchetta Morgen-stern, the chief seamstress, who had led Susan into the downstairs sewing room without saying anything—if saved words were gold, Susan had sometimes reflected, Conchetta would be as rich as the Mayor’s sister was reputed to be.
Blue Dress With Beads was draped over a headless dressmaker’s dummy crouched beneath one low eave, and although Susan could see ragged places on the hem and one small hole around to the back, it was by no means the tattered ruin she had been expecting.
“Can it not be saved?” she asked, rather timidly.
“No,” Conchetta said curtly. “Get out of those trousers, girl. Shirt, too.”
Susan did as she was bid, standing barefoot in the cool little room with her arms crossed over her bosom . . . not that Conchetta had ever shown the slightest interest in what she had, back or front, above or below.
Blue Dress With Beads was to be replaced by Pink Dress With Appliqué, it seemed. Susan stepped into it, raised the straps, and stood patiently while Conchetta bent and measured and muttered, sometimes using a bit of chalk to write numbers on a wall-stone, sometimes grabbing a swag of material and pulling it tighter against Susan’s hip or waist, checking the look in the full-length mirror on the far wall. As always during this process, Susan slipped away mentally, allowing her mind to go where it wanted. Where it wanted to go most frequently these days was into a daydream of riding along the Drop with Roland, the two of them side by side, finally stopping in a willow grove she knew that overlooked Hambry Creek.
“Stand there still as you can,” Conchetta said curtly. “I be back.”
Susan was hardly aware she was gone; was hardly aware she was in Mayor’s House at all. The part of her that really mattered wasn’t there. That part was in the willow grove with Roland. She could smell the faint half-sweet, half-acrid perfume of the trees and hear the quiet gossip of the stream as they lay down together forehead to forehead. He traced the shape of her face with the palm of his hand before taking her in his arms . . .
This daydream was so strong that at first Susan responded to the arms which curled around her waist from behind, arching her back as they first caressed her stomach and then rose to cup her breasts. Then she heard a kind of plowing, snorting breath in her ear, smelled tobacco, and understood what was happening. Not Roland touching her breasts, but Hart Thorin’s long and skinny fingers. She looked in the mirror and saw him looming over her left shoulder like an incubus. His eyes were bulging, there were big drops of sweat on his forehead in spite of the room’s coolness, and his tongue was actually hanging out, like a dog’s on a hot day. Revulsion rose in her throat like the taste of rotten food. She tried to pull away and his hands tightened their hold, pulling her against him. His knuckles cracked obscenely, and now she could feel the hard lump at the center of him.
At times over the last few weeks, Susan had allowed herself to hope that, when the time came, Thorin would be incapable—that he would be able to make no iron at the forge. She had heard this often happened to men when they got older. The hard, throbbing column which lay against her bottom disabused her of that wistful notion in a hurry.
She had managed at least a degree of diplomacy by simply putting her hands over his and attempting to draw them off her breasts instead of pulling away from him again (Cordelia, impassive, not showing the great relief she felt at this).
“Mayor Thorin—Hart—you mustn’t—this is hardly the place and not yet the time—Rhea said—”
“Balls to her and all witches!” His cultured politician’s tones had been replaced by an accent as thick as that in the voice of any back-country farmhand from Onnie’s Ford. “I must have something, a bonbon, aye, so I must. Balls to the witch, I say! Owlshit to ’er!” The smell of tobacco a thick reek around her head. She thought that she would vomit if she had to smell it much longer. “Just stand still, girl. Stand still, my temptation. Mind me well!”
Somehow she did. There was even some distant part of her mind, a part totally dedicated to self-preservation, that hoped he would mistake her shudders of revulsion for maidenly excitement. He had drawn her tight against him, hands working energetically on her breasts, his respiration a stinky steam-engine in her ear. She stood back to him, her eyes closed, tears squeezing out from beneath the lids and through the fringes of her lashes.
It didn’t take him long. He rocked back and forth against her, moaning like a man with stomach cramps. At one point he licked the lobe of her ear, and Susan thought her skin would crawl right off her body in its revulsion. Finally, thankfully, she felt him begin to spasm against her.
“Oh, aye, get out, ye damned poison!” he said in a voice that was almost a squeal. He pushed so hard she had to brace her hands against the wall to keep from being driven face-first into it. Then he at last stepped back.
For a moment Susan only stood as she was, with her palms against the rough cold stone of the sewing room wall. She could see Thorin in the mirror, and in his image she saw the ordinary doom that was rushing at her, the ordinary doom of which this was but a foretaste: the end of girlhood, the end of romance, the end of dreams where she and Roland lay together in the willow grove with their foreheads touching. The man in the mirror looked oddly like a boy himself, one who’s been up to something he wouldn’t tell his mother about. 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 strov
e 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 of a broken promise, the shame of a faithless child. He would want thee to go on with it, Susan. If thee would remember his face, thee must go on with it.”
Susan looked at her, mouth drawn down in a trembling arc, eyes filling with tears again. I’ve met someone I love! That was what she would have told her if she could. Don’t you understand how that changes things? I’ve met someone I love! But if Aunt Cord had been the sort of person to whom she could have said such a thing, Susan would likely never have been impaled on this stick to begin with. So she turned and stumbled from the house without saying anything, her streaming eyes blurring her vision and filling the late summer world with rueful color.
6
She rode with no conscious idea of where she was going, yet some part of her must have had a very specific destination in mind, because forty minutes after leaving her house, she found herself approaching the very grove of willows she had been daydreaming about when Thorin had crept up behind her like some bad elf out of a gammer’s story.
It was blessedly cool in the willows. Susan tied Felicia (whom she had ridden out bareback) to a branch, then walked slowly across the little clearing which lay at the heart of the grove. Here the stream passed, and here she sat on the springy moss which carpeted the clearing. Of course she had come here; it was where she had brought all her secret griefs and joys since she had discovered the clearing at the age of eight or nine. It was here she had come, time and time again, in the nearly endless days after her father’s death, when it had seemed to her that the very world—her version of it, at least—had ended with Pat Delgado. It was only this clearing that had heard the full and painful measure of her grief; to the stream she had spoken it, and the stream had carried it away.
Now a fresh spate of tears took her. She put her head on her knees and sobbed—loud, unladylike sounds like the caw of squabbling crows. In that moment she thought she would have given anything—everything—to have her father back for one minute, to ask him if she must go on with this.
She wept above the brook, and when she heard the sound of a snapping branch, she started and looked back over her shoulder in terror and chagrin. This was her secret place and she didn’t want to be found here, especially not when she was bawling like a kiddie who has fallen and bumped her head. Another branch snapped. Someone was here, all right, invading her secret place at the worst possible time.
“Go away!” she screamed in a tear-clotted voice she barely recognized. “Go away, whoever ye are, be decent and leave me alone!”
But the figure—she could now see it—kept coming. When she saw who it was, she at first thought that Will Dearborn (Roland, she thought, his real name is Roland) must be a figment of her overstrained imagination. She wasn’t entirely sure he was real until he knelt and put his arms around her. Then she hugged him with panicky tightness. “How did you know I was—”
“Saw you riding across the Drop. I was at a place where I go to think sometimes, and I saw you. I wouldn’t have followed, except I saw that you were riding bareback. I thought something might be wrong.”
“Everything’s wrong.”
Deliberately, with his eyes wide open and serious, he began kissing her cheeks. He had done it several times on both sides of her face before she realized he was kissing her tears away. Then he took her by the shoulders and held her back from him so he could look into her eyes.
“Say it again and I will, Susan. I don’t know if that’s a promise or a warning or both at the same time, but . . . say it again and I will.”
There was no need to ask him what he meant. She seemed to feel the ground move beneath her, and later she would think that for the first and only time in her life she had actually felt ka, a wind that came not from the sky but from the earth. It has come to me, after all, she thought. My ka, for good or ill.
“Roland!”
“Yes, Susan.”
She dropped her hand below his belt-buckle and grasped what was there, her eyes never leaving his.
“If you love me, then love me.”
“Aye, lady. I will.”
He unbuttoned his shirt, made in a part of Mid-World she would never see, and took her in his arms.
7
Ka:
They helped each other with their clothes; they lay naked in each other’s arms on summer moss as soft as the finest goosedown. They lay with their foreheads touching, as in her daydream, and when he found his way into her, she felt pain melt into sweetness like some wild and exotic herb that may only be tasted once in each lifetime. She held that taste as long as she could, until at last the sweetness overcame it and she gave in to that, moaning deep in her throat and rubbing her forearms against the sides of his neck. They made love in the willow grove, questions of honor put aside, promises broken without so much as a look back, and at the end of it Susan discovered there was more than sweetness; there was a kind of delirious clinching of the nerves that began in the part of her that had opened before him like a flower; it began there and then filled her entire body. She cried out again and again, thinking there could not be so much pleasure in the mortal world; she would die of it. Roland added his voice to hers, and the sound of water rushing over stones wrapped around both. As she pulled him closer to her, locking her ankles together behind his knees and covering his face with fierce kisses, his going out rushed after hers as if trying to catch up. So were lovers joined in the Barony of Mejis, near the end of the last great age, and the green moss beneath the place where her thighs joined turned a pretty red as her virginity passed; so were they joined and so were they doomed.
Ka.
8
They lay together in each other’s arms, sharing afterglow kisses beneath Felicia’s mild gaze, and Roland felt himself drowsing. This was understandable—the strain on him that summer had been enormous, and he had been sleeping badly. Although he didn’t know it then, he would sleep badly for the rest of his life.
“Roland?” Her voice, distant. Sweet, as well.
“Yes?”
“Will thee take care
of me?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t go to him when the time comes. I can bear his touching, and his little thefts—if I have you, I can—but I can’t go to him on Reap Night. I don’t know if I’ve forgotten the face of my father or not, but I cannot go to Hart Thorin’s bed. There are ways the loss of a girl’s virginity can be concealed, I think, but I won’t use them. I simply cannot go to his bed.”
“All right,” he said, “good.” And then, as her eyes widened in startlement, he looked around. No one was there. He looked back at Susan, fully awake now. “What? What is it?”
“I might already be carrying your child,” she said. “Has thee thought of that?”
He hadn’t. Now he did. A child. Another link in the chain stretching back into the dimness where Arthur Eld had led his gunslingers into battle with the great sword Excalibur raised above his head and the crown of All-World on his brow. But never mind that; what would his father think? Or Gabrielle, to know she had become a grandmother?
A little smile had formed at the corners of his mouth, but the thought of his mother drove it away. He thought of the mark on her neck. When his mother came to his mind these days, he always thought of the mark he’d seen on her neck when he came unexpected into her apartment. And the small, rueful smile on her face.
“If you carry my child, such is my good fortune,” he said.
“And mine.” It was her turn to smile, but it had a sad look to it all the same, that smile. “We’re too young, I suppose. Little more than kiddies ourselves.”
He rolled onto his back and looked up at the blue sky. What she said might be true, but it didn’t matter. Truth was sometimes not the same as reality—this was one of the certainties that lived in the hollow, cavey place at the center of his divided nature. That he could rise above both and willingly embrace the insanity of romance was a gift from his mother. All else in his nature was humorless . . . and, perhaps more important, without metaphor. That they were too young to be parents? What of that? If he had planted a seed, it would grow.