The Witch of the Wood Read Online Free PDF

temperature. The horseshoe rash was killing him, inflamed and smarting and underscored by a deep itching he knew he couldn’t get to without something medieval, or at least some sort of sharp gardening tool. He’d treated it with Vaseline, and it did nothing but make him feel greasy, as if he wasn’t dirty enough already. Normally he slept naked because clothes made him sweat, but tonight he had on wool jammie bottoms and his thick St. Joseph’s University sweatshirt. Either way it was going to be a damp night, and Rudy clasped his hands together while lying there on his back in the semi-darkness.
    Dear Lord, I’ve never been a praying man, but I ask your forgiveness tonight. Please don’t take away what little I have, please let me be all right. I . . . I may have hurt someone. Please let me know what to do.
    He was met with silence.
    All night he lay awake, running the incident through his mind, terrified of the banging on the door that was sure to come any second. He tossed and turned himself sober, making multiple trips to the bathroom, and by the time morning light crept under the shades he knew at least a couple of things.
    First, the horseshoe rash had gone purple at its edges, infected and raised up like a relief map. He needed professional medical attention. Now.
    Second, he was going to go to the police and confess to the sexual assault of April Orr. If there was going to be one last thing he’d have control of, it was his own sense of personal justice. Considering even the possibility that he could have hurt that beautiful, delicate woman, it was simply the right thing to do.
    But he didn’t go to the police.
    He didn’t even make it to the hospital.

    They were quills, or stingers, or splinters of some kind. The next morning Rudy had showered, focusing on the “sensitive area” with a wash towel, then a plastic back-scrubber, and finally a fucking soapstone, razing the skin raw, drawing blood. He’d gone all night letting it work its maddening itch deeper and deeper until it actually felt as if it was in the base of his balls, and this was payback. He was going to the hospital anyway, right?
    Of course, it felt like heaven for the moment, then fell right back into that deep-seated itching, now seasoned with a fresh stinging, and when Rudy shoved his pelvis forward into the shower spray, blood running off in little threads, he saw a few of the dark “dots” poking up out of the skin. He dropped the soapstone behind him and picked at one of the offenders, thumb and index in an O.K. sign. It pulled the skin a bit with it, but came right out, a cork from a bottle, and though there were about a hundred of these little bastards, Rudy actually felt relief from this solo evacuation.
    He held it up close to the eye. What was this? Did April have some kind of vindictive, stinging parasite infesting her privates? He was no doctor, but he simply found it hard to believe that she could have this multitude of vermin nested in her crotch area without climbing the walls and constantly going at it with a hairbrush or something.
    Rudy reached out around the curtain and set the sliver down on the sink, where it swam in a diluted red droplet. Down low, the bleeding was petering off, and Rudy soaped and rinsed one more time, gingerly, gingerly. After drying off, he went to the kitchen and got a monkey dish, a short drinking glass, and a bottle of alcohol. Of course, he had seriously considered going to get this looked at professionally, the original plan, since it was possibly some new strain of African swarming mite, dormant and incubating in the loins of its female human host, immediately curling up its hindquarters and stinging out in case of contact from the human male. And maybe these barbs had poison in them?
    But he wasn’t poisoned, just infected a bit by the penetration of the stingers themselves.
    And there was nothing “alive” down there between his legs. Rudy was no entomologist, but he had enough common