“Sai?” he called, leading the mule into the yard. Capi balked as they neared the hut, planting his feet and lowering his neck, but when Sheemie tugged the halter, he came on again. Sheemie was almost sorry.
“Ma’am? Nice old lady that wouldn’t hurt a fly? You therey-air? It’s good old Sheemie with your graf.” He smiled and held out his free hand, palm up, to demonstrate his exquisite harmlessness, but from the hut there was still no response. Sheemie felt his guts first coil, then cramp. For a moment he thought he was going to shit in his pants just like a babby; then he passed wind and felt a little better. In his bowels, at least.
He walked on, liking this less at every step. The yard was rocky and the straggling weeds yellowish, as if the hut’s resident had blighted the very earth with her touch.
There was a garden, and Sheemie saw that the vegetables still in it—pumpkins and sharproot, mostly—were muties. Then he noticed the garden’s stuffy-guy. It was also a mutie, a nasty thing with two straw heads instead of one and what appeared to be a stuffed hand in a woman’s satin glove poking out of the chest area.
Sai Thorin’ll never talk me up here again, he thought. Not for all the pennies in the world.
The hut’s door stood open. To Sheemie it looked like a gaping mouth. A sickish dank smell drifted out.
Sheemie stopped about fifteen paces from the house, and when Capi nuzzled his bottom (as if to ask what was keeping them), the boy uttered a brief screech. The
sound of it almost set him running, and it was only by exercising all his willpower that he was able to stand his ground. The day was bright, but up here on this hill, the sun seemed meaningless. This wasn’t his first trip up here, and Rhea’s hill had never been pleasant, but it was somehow worse now. It made him feel the way the sound of the thinny made him feel when he woke and heard it in the middle of the night. As if something awful was sliding toward him—something that was all insane eyes and red, reaching claws.
“S-S-Sai? Is anyone here? Is—”
“Come closer.” The voice drifted out of the open door. “Come to where I can see you, idiot boy.”
Trying not to moan or cry, Sheemie did as the voice said. He had an idea that he was never going back down the hill again. Capriccioso, perhaps, but not him.
Poor old Sheemie was going to end up in the cookpot—hot dinner tonight, soup tomorrow, cold snacks until Year’s End. That’s what he would be.
He made his reluctant way to Rhea’s stoop on rubbery legs—if his knees had been closer together, they would have knocked like castanets. She didn’t even sound the same.
“S-Sai? I’m afraid. So I a-a-am.”
“So ye should be,” the voice said. It drifted and drifted, slipping out into the sunlight like a sick puff of smoke. “Never mind, though—just do as I say. Come closer, Sheemie, son of Stanley.”
Sheemie did so, although terror dragged at every step he took. The mule followed, head down. Capi had honked like a goose all the way up here—honked ceaselessly—but now he had fallen silent.
“So here ye be,” the voice buried in those shadows whispered. “Here ye be, indeed.”
She stepped into the sunlight falling through the open door, wincing for a moment as it dazzled her eyes. Clasped in her arms was the empty graf barrel. Coiled around her throat like a necklace was Ermot.
Sheemie had seen the snake before, and on previous occasions had never failed to wonder what sort of agonies he might suffer before he died if he happened to be bitten by such. Today he had no such thoughts. Compared to Rhea, Ermot looked normal. The old woman’s face had sunken at the cheeks, giving the rest of her head the look of a skull. Brown spots swarmed out of her thin hair and over her
bulging brow like an army of invading insects. Below her left eye was an open sore, and her grin showed only a few remaining teeth.
“Don’t like the way I look, do’ee?” she asked. “Makes yer heart cold, don’t it?”
“N-No,” Sheemie said, and then, because that didn’t sound right: “I mean yes!” But gods, that sounded even worse. “You’re beautiful, sai!” he blurted.
She chuffed nearly soundless laughter and thrust the empty tun into his arms almost hard enough to knock him on his ass. The touch of her fingers was brief, but long enough to make his flesh crawl.
“Well-a-day. They say handsome is as handsome does, don’t they?
And that suits me. Aye, right down to the ground. Bring me my graf, idiot child.”
“Y-yes, sai! Right away, sai!” He took the empty tun back to the mule, set it down, then fumbled loose the cordage holding the little barrel of graf. He was very aware of her watching him, and it made him clumsy, hut finally he got the barrel loose. It almost slid through his grasp, and there was a nightmarish moment when he thought it would fall to the stony ground and smash, but he caught his grip again at the last second. He took it to her, had just a second to realize she was no longer wearing the snake, then felt it crawling on his boots. Ermot looked up at him, hissing and baring a double set of fangs in an eerie grin.
“Don’t move too fast, my boy. ‘Twouldn’t be wise—Ermot’s grumpy today. Set the barrel just inside the door, here. It’s too heavy for me. Missed a few meals of late, I have.”
Sheemie bent from the waist (bow yer best bow, Sai Thorin had said, and here he was, doing just that), grimacing, not daring to ease the pressure on his back by moving his feet because the snake was still on them. When he straightened, Rhea was holding out an old and stained envelope. The flap had been sealed with a blob of red wax. Sheemie dreaded to think what might have been rendered down to make wax such as that.
“Take this and give it to Cordelia Delgado. Do ye know her?”
“A-Aye,” Sheemie managed. “Susan-sai’s auntie.”
“That’s right.” Sheemie reached tentatively for the envelope, but she held it back a moment. “Can’t read, can ye, idiot boy?”
“Nay. Words ‘n letters go right out of my head.”
“Good. Mind ye show this to no one who can, or some night ye’ll find Ermot waiting under yer pillow. I see far, Sheemie, d’ye mark me? I see far”
It was just an envelope, but it felt heavy and somehow dreadful in Sheemie’s fingers, as if it were made out of human skin instead of paper. And what sort of letter could Rhea be sending Cordelia Delgado, anyway? Sheemie thought back to the day he’d seen sai Delgado’s face all covered with cobwebbies, and shivered.
The horrid creature lurking before him in the doorway of her hut could have been the very creature who’d spun those webs.
“Lose it and I’ll know,” Rhea whispered. “Show my business to another, and I’ll know. Remember, son of Stanley, I see far.”
“I’ll be careful, sai.” It might be better if he did lose the envelope, but he wouldn’t.
Sheemie was dim in the head, everyone said so, but not so dim that he didn’t understand why he had been called up here: not to deliver a barrel of graf, but to receive this letter and pass it on.
“Would ye care to come in for a bit?” she whispered, and then pointed a ringer at his crotch. “If I give ye a little bit of mushroom to eat—special to me, it is—I can look like anyone ye fancy.”
“Oh, I can’t,” he said, clutching his trousers and smiling a huge broad smile that felt like a scream trying to get out of his skin. “That pesky thing fell off last week, that did.”
For a moment Rhea only gawped at him, genuinely surprised for one of the few times in her life, and then she once more broke out in chuffing bursts of laughter.
She held her stomach in her waxy hands and rocked back and forth with glee.
Ermot, startled, streaked into the house on his lengthy green belly. From somewhere in its depths, her cat hissed at it.
“Go on,” Rhea said, still laughing. She leaned forward and dropped three or four pennies into his shirt pocket. “Get out of here, ye great galoophus! Don’t ye linger, either, looking at flowers!”
“No, sai—”
Before he could say more, the door clapped to so hard that dust puffed out of the cracks between the boards.
7
Roland surprised Cuthbert by suggesting at two o’ the clock that they go back to the Bar K. When Bert asked why, Roland only shrugged and would say nothing