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. Caprichoso, 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.”