by Stephen King
Reynolds now judged it safe to ask a question. “When do the rest of Latigo’s men get there?”
“Men?” Jonas snorted. “Don’t we wish, cully! The rest of Latigo’s boys’ll ride out to Hanging Rock by moonlight, pennons no doubt flying for all the coyotes and other assorted desert-dogs to see and be awed by. They’ll be ready to do escort duty by ten tomorrow, I sh’d think… although if they’re the sort of lads I’m expecting, fuck-ups are apt to be the rule of the day. The good news is that we don’t much need em, anyway. Things look well in hand. Now go down there, get them about their business, and then ride back to me, just as fast’s you can.”
Jonas turned and looked toward the lumpy swell of hills to the northwest.
“We have business of our own,” he said. “Soonest begun, boys, soonest done. I want to shake the dust of fucking Mejis off my hat and boots as soon as I can. I don’t like the way it feels anymore. Not at all.”
9
The woman, Theresa Maria Dolores O’shyven, was forty years old, plump, pretty, mother of four, husband of Peter, a vaquero of laughing temperament. She was also a seller of rugs and draperies in the Upper Market; many of the prettier and more delicate appointments at Seafront had passed through Theresa O’shyven’s hands, and her family was quite well-to-do. Although her husband was a range-rider, the O’shyven clan was what would have been called middle-class in another place and time. Her two oldest children were grown and gone, one right out o’ Barony. The third eldest was sparking and hoping to marry his heart’s delight at Year’s End. Only the youngest suspected something was wrong with Ma, and this one had no idea how close Theresa was to complete obsessional madness.
Soon, Rhea thought, watching Theresa avidly in the ball. She’ll start doing it soon, but first she’s got to get rid of the brat.
There was no school at Reaptide, and the stalls opened only for a few hours in the afternoon, so Theresa sent her youngest daughter off with a pie. A Reaptide gift to a neighbor, Rhea surmised, although she couldn’t hear the soundless instructions the woman gave her daughter as she pulled a knitted cap down over the girl’s ears. And ’twouldn’t be a neighbor too close, either; she’d want time, would Theresa Maria Dolores O’shyven, time to be a-choring. It was a good-sized house, and there were a lot of corners in it that needed cleaning.
Rhea chuckled; the chuckle turned into a hollow gust of coughing. In the corner, Musty looked at the old woman hauntedly. Although far from the emaciated skeleton that his mistress had become, Musty didn’t look good at all.
The girl was shown out with the pie under her arm; she paused to give her mother a single troubled look, and then the door was shut in her face.
“Now!” Rhea croaked. “Them comers is waitin! Down on yer knees, woman, and get to business!”
First Theresa went to the window. When she was satisfied with what she saw-her daughter out the gate and down the High Street, likely-she turned back to her kitchen. She walked to the table and stood there, looking dreamy-eyed into space.
“No, none o’ that, now!” Rhea cried impatiently. She no longer saw her own filthy hut, she no longer smelled either its rank aromas or her own. She had gone into the Wizard’s Rainbow. She was with Theresa O’shyven, whose cottage had the cleanest comers in all Mejis. Mayhap in all Mid-World.
“Hurry, woman!” Rhea half-screamed. “Get to yer housework!”
As if hearing, Theresa unbuttoned her housedress, stepped out of it, and laid it neatly over a chair. She pulled the hem of her clean, mended shift up over her knees, went to the comer, and got down on all fours. “That’s it, my corazon!” Rhea cried, nearly choking on a phlegmy mixture of coughing and laughter. “Do yer chores, now, and do em wery pert!”
Theresa O’shyven poked her head forward to the full length of her neck, opened her mouth, stuck out her tongue, and began to lick the corner. She lapped it as Musty lapped his milk. Rhea watched this, slapping her knee and whooping, her face growing redder and redder as she rocked from side to side. Oh, Theresa was her favorite, aye! No doubt! For hours now she would crawl about on her hands and knees with her ass in the air, licking into the comers, praying to some obscure god-not even the Man-Jesus God-for forgiveness of who knew what as she did this, her penance. Sometimes she got splinters in her tongue and had to pause to spit blood into the kitchen basin. Up until now some sixth sense had always gotten her to her feet and back into her dress before any of her family returned, but Rhea knew that sooner or later the woman’s obsession would take her too far, and she would be surprised. Perhaps today would be the day-the little girl would come back early, perhaps for a coin to spend in town, and discover her mother down on her knees and licking the comers. Oh, what a spin and raree! How Rhea wanted to see it! How she longed to-
Suddenly Theresa O’shyven was gone. The interior of her neat little cottage was gone. Everything was gone, lost in curtains of shifting pink light. For the first time in weeks, the wizard’s glass had gone blank.
Rhea picked the ball up in her scrawny, long-nailed fingers and shook it. “What’s wrong with you, plaguey thing? What’s wrong?”
The ball was heavy, and Rhea’s strength was fading. After two or three hard shakes, it slipped in her grip. She cradled it against the deflated remains of her breasts, trembling.
“No, no, lovey,” she crooned. “Come back when ye’re ready, aye, Rhea lost her temper a bit but she’s got it back now, she never meant to shake ye and she’d never ever drop ye, so ye just-”
She broke off and cocked her head, listening. Horses approaching. No, not approaching; here. Three riders, by the sound. They had crept up on her while she was distracted.
The boys? Those plaguey boys?
Rhea held the ball against her bosom, eyes wide, lips wet. Her hands were now so thin that the ball’s pink glow shone through them, faintly illuminating the dark spokes that were her bones.
“Rhea! Rhea of the Coos!”
No, not the boys.
“Come out here, and bring what you were given!”
Worse.
“Farson wants his property! We’ve come to take it!”
Not the boys but the Big Coffin Hunters.
“Never, ye dirty old white-haired prick,” she whispered. “Ye’ll never take it.” Her eyes moved from side to side in small, shooting peeks. Scraggle-headed and tremble-mouthed, she looked like a diseased coyote driven into its final arroyo.
She looked down at the ball and a whining noise began to escape her. Now even the pink glow was gone. The sphere was as dark as a corpse’s eyeball.
10
A shriek came from the hut.
Depape turned to Jonas with wide eyes, his skin prickling. The thing which had uttered that cry hardly sounded human.
“Rhea!” Jonas called again. “Bring it out here now, woman, and hand it over! I’ve no time to play games with you!”
The door of the hut swung open. Depape and Reynolds drew their guns as the old crone stepped out, blinking against the sunlight like something that’s spent its whole life in a cave. She was holding John Farson’s favorite toy high over her head. There were plenty of rocks in the dooryard she could throw it against, and even if her aim was bad and she missed them all, it might smash anyway.
This could be bad, and Jonas knew it-there were some people you just couldn’t threaten. He had focused so much of his attention on the brats (who, ironically, had been taken as easy as milk) that it had never occurred to him to worry much about this part of it. And Kimba Rimer, the man who had suggested Rhea as the perfect custodian for Maerlyn’s Rainbow, was dead. Couldn’t lay it at Rimer’s doorstep if things went wrong up here, could he?
Then, just to make things a little worse when he’d have thought they’d gone as far west as they could without dropping off the cold end of the earth, he heard the cocking sound of Depape drawing the hammer of his gun.
“Put that away, you idiot!” he snarled.
“But look at her!” Depape almost moaned. “Look at her
, Eldred!”
He was. The thing inside the black dress appeared to be wearing the corpse of a putrefying snake around its throat for a necklace. She was so scrawny that she resembled nothing so much as a walking skeleton. Her peeling skull was only tufted with hair; the rest had fallen out. Sores clustered on her cheeks and brow, and there was a mark like a spider-bite on the left side of her mouth. Jonas thought that last might be a scurvy-bloom, but he didn’t really care one way or another. What he cared about was the ball upraised in the dying woman’s long and shivering claws.
11
The sunlight so dazzled Rhea’s eyes that she didn’t see the gun pointed at her, and when her vision cleared, Depape had put it away again. She looked at the men lined up across from her-the bespectacled redhead, the one in the cloak, and Old White-Hair Jonas-and uttered a dusty croak of laughter. Had she been afraid of them, these mighty Coffin Hunters? She supposed she had, but for gods’ sake, why? They were men, that was all, just more men, and she had been beating such all her life. Oh, they thought they ruled the roost, all right-nobody in Mid-World accused anyone of forgetting the face of his mother-but they were poor things, at bottom, moved to tears by a sad song, utterly undone by the sight of a bare breast, and all the more capable of being manipulated simply because they were so sure they were strong and tough and wise.
The glass was dark, and as much as she hated that darkness, it had cleared her mind.
“Jonas!” she cried. “Eldred Jonas!”
“I’m here, old mother,” he said. “Long days and pleasant nights.”
“Never mind yer sops, time’s too short for em.” She came four steps farther and stopped with the ball still held over her head. Near her, a gray chunk of stone jutted from the weedy ground. She looked at it, then back at Jonas. The implication was unspoken but unmistakable.
“What do you want?” Jonas asked.
“The ball’s gone dark,” she said, answering from the side. “All the time I had it in my keeping, it was lively-aye, even when it showed nothing I could make out, it was passing lively, bright and pink-but it fell dark almost at the sound of yer voice. It doesn’t want to go with ye.”
“Nevertheless, I’m under orders to take it.” Jonas’s voice became soft and conciliating. It wasn’t the tone he used when he was in bed with Coral, but it was close. “Think a minute, and you’ll see my situation. Far-son wants it, and who am I to stand against the wants of a man who’ll be the most powerful in Mid-World when Demon Moon rises next year? If I come back without it and say Rhea of the Coos refused me it, I’ll be killed.”
“If ye come back and tell him I broke it in yer ugly old face, ye’ll be killed, too,” Rhea said. She was close enough for Jonas to see how far her sickness had eaten into her. Above the few remaining tufts of her hair, the wretched ball was trembling back and forth. She wouldn’t be able to hold it much longer. A minute at most. Jonas felt a dew of sweat spring out on his forehead.
“Aye, mother. But d'you know, given a choice of deaths, I’d choose to take the cause of my problem with me. That’s you, darling.”
She croaked again-that dusty replica of laughter-and nodded appreciatively.” 'Twon’t do Farson any good without me in any case,” she said. “It’s found its mistress, I wot-that’s why it went dark at the sound of yer voice.”
Jonas wondered how many others had believed the ball was just for them. He wanted to wipe the sweat from his brow before it ran in his eyes, but kept his hands in front of him, folded neatly on the horn of his saddle.
He didn’t dare look at either Reynolds or Depape. and could only hope they would leave the play to him. She was balanced on both a physical and mental knife-edge; the smallest movement would send her tumbling off in one direction or the other.
“Found the one it wants, has it?” He thought he saw a way out of this. If he was lucky. And it might be lucky for her, as well. “What should we do about that?”
“Take me with ye.” Her face twisted into an expression of gruesome greed; she looked like a corpse that is trying to sneeze. She doesn’t realize she’s dying, Jonas thought. Thank the gods for that. “Take the ball, but take me, as well. I’ll go with ye to Farson. I’ll become his soothsayer, and nothing will stand before us, not with me to read the ball for him. Take me with ye!”
“All right,” Jonas said. It was what he had hoped for. “Although what Farson decides is none o’ mine. You know that?”
“Aye.”
“Good. Now give me the ball. I’ll give it back into your keeping, if you like, but I need to make sure it’s whole.”
She slowly lowered it. Jonas didn’t think it was entirely safe even cradled in her arms, but he breathed a little easier when it was, all the same. She shuffled toward him, and he had to control an urge to gig his horse back from her.
He bent over in the saddle, holding his hands out for the glass. She looked up at him, her old eyes still shrewd behind their crusted lids. One of them actually drew down in a conspirator’s wink. “I know yer mind, Jonas. Ye think, 'I’ll take the ball, then draw my gun and kill her, what harm?' Isn’t that true? Yet there would be harm, and all to you and yours. Kill me and the ball will never shine for Farson again. For someone, aye, someday, mayhap; but not for him… and will he let ye live if ye bring his toy back and he discovers it’s broken?”
Jonas had already considered this. “We have a bargain, old mother. You go west with the glass… unless you die beside the trail some night. You’ll pardon me for saying so, but you don’t look well.”
She cackled. “I’m better'n I look, oh yar! Years left 'fore this clock o’ mine runs down!”
I think you may be wrong about that, old mother, Jonas thought. But he kept his peace and only held his hands out for the ball.
For a moment longer she held it. Their arrangement was made and agreed to on both sides, but in the end she could barely bring herself to ungrasp the ball. Greed shone in her eyes like moonlight through fog.
He held his hands out patiently, saying nothing, waiting for her mind to accept reality-if she let go, there was some chance. If she held on, very likely everyone in this stony, weedy yard would end up riding the handsome before long.
With a sigh of regret, she finally put the ball in his hands. At the instant it passed from her to him, an ember of pink light pulsed deep in the depths of the glass. A throb of pain drove into Jonas’s head… and a shiver of lust coiled in his balls.
As from a great distance, he heard Depape and Reynolds cocking their pistols.
“Put those away,” Jonas said. “But-” Reynolds looked confused.
“They thought'ee was going to double-cross Rhea,” the old woman said, cackling. “Good thing ye’re in charge rather than them, Jonas… mayhap you know summat they don’t.”
He knew something, all right-how dangerous the smooth, glassy thing in his hands was. It could take him in a blink, if it wanted. And in a month, he would be like the witch: scrawny, raddled with sores, and too obsessed to know or care.
“Put them away!” he shouted.
Reynolds and Depape exchanged a glance, then reholstered their guns. “There was a bag for this thing,” Jonas said. “A drawstring bag laid inside the box. Get it.”
“Aye,” Rhea said, grinning unpleasantly at him. “But it won’t keep the ball from takin ye if it wants to. Ye needn’t think it will.” She surveyed the other two, and her eye fixed on Reynolds. “There’s a cart in my shed, and a pair of good gray goats to pull it.” She spoke to Reynolds, but her eyes kept turning back to the ball, Jonas noticed… and now his damned eyes wanted to go there, too.
“You don’t give me orders,” Reynolds said.
“No, but I do,” Jonas said. His eyes dropped to the ball, both wanting and fearing to see that pink spark of life deep inside. Nothing. Cold and dark. He dragged his gaze back up to Reynolds again. “Get the cart.”
12
Reynolds heard the buzzing of flies even before he slipped through the shed’s sagging doo
r, and knew at once that Rhea’s goats had finished their days of pulling. They lay bloated and dead in their pen, legs sticking up and the sockets of their eyes squirming with maggots. It was impossible to know when Rhea had last fed and watered them, but Reynolds guessed at least a week, from the smell.
Too busy watching what goes on in that glass ball to bother, he thought. And what’s she wearing that dead snake around her neck for?
“I don’t want to know,” he muttered from behind his pulled-up neckerchief. The only thing he did want right now was to get the hell out of here.
He spied the cart, which was painted black and overlaid with cabalistic designs in gold. It looked like a medicine-show wagon to Reynolds; it also looked a bit like a hearse. He seized it by the handles and dragged it out of the shed as fast as he could. Depape could do the rest, by gods. Hitch his horse to the cart and haul the old woman’s stinking freight to… where? Who knew? Eldred, maybe.
Rhea came tottering out of her hut with the drawstring bag they’d brought the ball in, but she stopped, head cocked, listening, when Reynolds asked his question.
Jonas thought it over, then said: “Seafront to begin, I guess. Yar, that’ll do for her, and this glass bauble as well, I reckon, until the party’s over tomorrow.”
“Aye, Seafront, I’ve never been there,” Rhea said, moving forward again. When she reached Jonas’s horse (which tried to shy away from her), she opened the bag. After a moment’s further consideration, Jonas dropped the ball in. It bulged round at the bottom, making a shape like a teardrop.
Rhea wore a sly smile. “Mayhap we’ll meet Thorin. If so, I might have something to show him in the Good Man’s toy that’d interest him ever so much.”
“If you meet him,” Jonas said, getting down to help hitch Depape’s horse to the black cart, “it’ll be in a place where no magic is needed to see far.”