by T E. D Klein
The reality will be even better. Stepping nimbly from stone to stone, the Old One crosses the stream.
It takes him but a moment to bind the wrists. He is dragging Freirs' inert form roughly toward the brook, scanning the property one more time to make sure there are no witnesses to what's about to happen, when his gaze comes to rest on the smokehouse and the pale thing hanging upside down inside it, clearly visible through the wide-open door and outlined in the final rays of sunlight.
The fool! He moves quickly, cursing. This must not be discovered. Left like this, the body can be seen by anyone who chances to visit the farm. And anyone searching for the Poroths will find it within minutes. Better to hide the thing deep in the woods, where it will be safe until tonight.
Abandoning Freirs for the moment, he hurries to the smokehouse. The little wooden structure already reeks of decay, the smell of something that's been dead more than a week. He does not find it disagreeable; he steps inside, brushing away swarms of flies, and finds himself face to face with Deborah Poroth's earthly remains. Her upside-down eyes, hanging level with his own, are shrunken in their sockets like old apples. His glance takes in her dangling arms, the hands even with his belt, and the crumpled black torn place in her throat, pulled wider by the weight of the head and gaping like a second mouth. The sight inspires in his breast precisely nothing. Reaching up, he grasps the rib cage and pulls.
The body does not give. From somewhere above him comes a muffled buzzing sound, easily confused with the buzzing of the flies that continue to swarm around his head.
He pulls harder, but without success. The two kinds of buzzing blend together in an irritating song.
Grabbing the limp arms, he yanks with all his might. Still the body doesn't move.
Embracing the thing now, he puts all his weight on it, hands grimacing with his own feet in the air. Vertebrae snap, some strands of long black hair shake loose and drift slowly toward the floor, but the legs remain stuck fast.
Wiping away a drop of sweat that has formed on his brow, he stands on tiptoe, reaches up as high as he is able, and grasps the legs nearer the ceiling, tugging on each one individually, trying to dislodge them from the wood. There is a cracking sound; the body starts to give a little. The buzzing overhead is growing angrier, and loud enough for him to distinguish it from the flies.
But now there is a more urgent sound.
'Sarr! Deborah!'
Voices ring out from up the slope, by the farmhouse and the road.
Instinctively he pulls the door closed and turns the catch, concealing himself within the tiny shack. It is hot inside, airless, dark and crowded as a coffin. He is pressed against the wall by the loose, ungainly bulk of the corpse. But he is still confident. There is still time. Distracted, he shoves the corpse aside.
With a splintering of wood it tears loose, crashing to the floor of the smokehouse – and behind it, like a demon from a bottle, rushes a torrent of invisible wings and legs and death-dealing stingers, buzzing, stinging again and again, as if it is the sound itself that brings the pain. They "take their venomous revenge, as wasps will, upon the only living thing at hand; and as wasps will, they go first for the eyes.
Blindly he batters at the closed door. The tiny building echoes with his screams.
For nearly a minute they grow louder, higher-pitched, the screaming of a thing no longer human, carrying across the farm, the fields, the woods. The smokehouse trembles, rocks on its foundation, shivers with the pounding from within.
Then at last it is silent.
His sleep was invaded by screaming, high and womanish and just out of reach. He dreamed of Carol. He willed himself to go to her, to help her, but his body was a thing of rock and would not move.
At last the screams ended, and there was silence. And then that ended too. Dimly he heard voices, men this time, confused, frightened, shouting out to one another in their fear – and then screams again, and running, and a great inhuman buzzing…
He didn't see Rupert Lindt throw wide the smokehouse door, or the cloud of maddened wasps that spilled out, scattering the men and leaving the two who'd been the closest, Lindt and Stoudemire, with painfully stung arms, necks, and faces. He didn't see the horrible swollen red thing that came tumbling out after the wasps to lie twitching and oozing on the grass, a thing almost unrecognizable as human, puffed up as it was to nearly twice its size. And he didn't see what lay behind it on the smokehouse floor, a moldering corpse easily identifiable as human, female, young…
'Oh, my God – Deborah!'
'Matt's right. It's Deborah Poroth.'
'How long's she been dead?'
'Looks like a long time.'
He heard the cries of horror and dismay, the babble of unanswered questions, and a voice that demanded, 'Where's Sarr Poroth?'
He didn't see or hear the rest: how the thing lay there looking up at them with what was left of its eyes, and how, before dying, it smiled. 'Too late,' it whispered toothlessly through cracked lips, as its eyes rolled toward the darkening sky. 'Too late.'
It stands above the expectant earth, its feet planted wide upon the topmost boulder of the great spiked thing it has built against the side of the hill. In the dying light it surveys the scene below.
Twenty feet down, the forest floor lies streaked by shadow, except for a flickering light at the base of the hill where, within a tiny ring of stones, a fire burns. Higher, midway up the altar, on a flat outcropping of granite some ten feet from its perch, it can see the body of the woman, her nakedness pale against the dark grey stone, her hair an obscene splash of red. Her body has not yet been painted. Her eyes, it sees, are shut tight now, her breathing slow; she is dreaming again, lost once more in a drugged slumber. By her hands and feet lie curled the lengths of rugged cloth ripped from the farmer's shirt and trousers, crude substitutes for the straps the Ceremony requires, but sufficient.
The Old One, it remembers, had brought leather straps from the city, but he has not returned. He may not arrive in time to help it shave its head clean for the Marriage, to light the fire, to sing the words. But his absence is of no importance; it can perform the Ceremony without the old man. It knows what to do.
The great hill towers at its back like an immense dark hood. Along the ground the encircling trees make black, twisted patterns in the twilight, the visible veins of some vast invisible being. Shadowy forms shift like woodsmoke in the air overhead. The altar stone trembles at its feet.
It is time. Reaching up past its farmer's face and running its fingers through the shattered remnants of its scalp, it proceeds with its grooming for the Marriage, yanking out clumps of the farmer's black hair, ignoring the swatches of flesh that come loose and the sluggish gouts of blood. No assistance is needed; it puts the old man from its mind. Before the final rays of sunlight have faded from the summit of the hill, its skull is as smooth as a freshly cracked egg. Tearing open the tattered remains of its shirt, it lifts its long pale arms in invocation. Above it, as if a monstrous hand has thrown the switch, the sky darkens.
The mound beneath its feet is trembling more violently now. It can hear the frightened cries of animals in the woods below; black hunched shapes are racing back and forth among the trees.
Carefully, dropping on all fours, it picks its way past the girl and down the slope. Seizing a burning brand, it touches it three times to the ring of wood, undergrowth, and debris it has piled at the base of the hill. The pile smokes, flickers, catches: like a moat that makes of them an island, cutting them off from the surrounding forest, a line of fire leaps outward in a great circle, sweeping out of sight around the far side of the hill, the flames seeming to speed the advancing darkness.
The woman moans, stirs. Firelight glistens in her hair; in the farmer's shattered skull the spaces glow a deeper red. The two of them are like a pair of brands: pale slim bodies, smooth limbs, heads of flame. The trees beyond the firelight are almost invisible now, dim skeletal shapes half hidden by the smoke. The dark hill rears mali
gnly toward the empty sky; the stars are not out, the moon not yet risen. Screaming shapes wheel unseen overhead.
At the foot of the altar it throws the brand aside, stretches up on tiptoe, fingertips reaching toward the ledge, and, like some long pale lizard, climbs laboriously up the rock face toward the woman. Crouching above her, in the absence of the Old One, it opens wide its corpse's mouth, tilts its face skyward, and starts to sing the words.
' "Too late," ' Abram Sturtevant repeated, for at least the sixth time. He fingered his coffee-colored beard. "Twas exactly what the man said, wasn't it?'
Galen Trudel nodded. 'His very words.' He and Matthew Geisel had gone up to the house and had found nothing but four cats who'd followed them back down here, where the others were standing in an awkward, puzzled group around the sleeping form of Freirs. The wasps had missed him; he lay in the grass on his belly, his wrists freed from the straps, arms thrown forward as if to embrace the earth.
'And we were too late, weren't we?' said Sturtevant. 'Too late for him. That would be what he meant. Had we arrived any sooner, we could've saved the poor old man's life.'
It made sense to them. It was just about the only thing that did.
All the rest was questions. Why had the stranger, so monstrously transformed by the venom and clearly in pain, died with a smile on his lips? And who was he, anyway? The men had come dashing down the slope from the road, hurrying toward his screams ringing like a woman's from the smokehouse, and had stumbled into a morass of questions – along with swarms of deadly insects, a pair of ruined corpses, and a sleeper who wouldn't wake up no matter what they did, even when Brother Rupert, his own arms and neck aching horribly from the stings, brought a hatful of cold water from the brook and threw it in Freirs' face. Freirs had simply turned back onto his belly, pressing his ear to the ground as if listening.
Questions. So many things they didn't understand…
They had prayed, all of them, over the bodies of the stranger and Deborah Poroth, and afterward had contented themselves with sending Klaus Buckhalter off to Flemington in his truck to summon the county police; on his way he would take the suffering Ham Stoudemire home, where Nettie could tend to his swellings. Rupert Lindt decided he would stay around, stings or no stings. 'I ain't leavin' till I get some answers,' he'd declared, nodding toward Freirs. 'Unless Klaus wants to drive him into Flemington.'
'Best not to move him,' said Sturtevant.
Freirs slept on. At least, now, he was freed from suspicion; the bound wrists had convinced them that here was no malefactor, just another victim.
But were they all victims? Even the stranger they'd seen die, red and swollen, at their very feet? And what had killed poor Sister Deborah, her (they remembered) so lately recovered from the attack of that demon-ridden cat? And where had Brother Sarr disappeared to? And who had tied up Freirs?
Questions. A sea of questions lapping at their ankles…
Silent and uneasy, the men shifted from foot to foot and looked at
Freirs lying motionless on the grass, the deserted farm, the frozen ranks of pines across the brook. They avoided looking at the two ruined corpses by the smokehouse; they avoided one another's eyes. This was not turning out as they'd expected; they had come, nursing their anger and their fear, to usher this intruder from their midst. .. and had found, instead, a mystery.
A breeze traveled up the slope toward the farmhouse, fluttering the leaves in the garden. Roses shook like fists in the waning light; the dark pines stirred. Night was coming on. At their feet the churning waters of the brook seemed strangely hushed. Somewhere in the forest a jay screamed, once, twice, three times, then fell silent. It was like the signal to begin.
Suddenly, overhead, the sky darkened. Beneath their feet, the ground shook. The land around them trembled with a deep, distant, almost inaudible rumbling.
'Oh, my God,' said Matthew, 'it's startin' again.'
He felt the planet pounding with the beating of his heart, the land beneath him rocking, blood squeezing once again through his veins. I'm alive! he thought dimly. But it was much too slow, too vast, and he realized it was coming from beneath him, and there were voices.
And darkness all around him.
'Looks like he's woke up.'
Sounds of footsteps.
'Son, listen to me.' Someone was standing above him. 'Listen, you've got to tell us-'
'His name's Freirs. Jeremiah Freirs.'
'No -' another voice' – it's Jeremy.'
Someone was shaking him. 'Listen… Jeremy. Tell us what's happened here. Where's Sarr Poroth?'
'Sarr?' He sat up, rubbed his eyes, searched in vain for his glasses. 'Ask-' He looked around him in the darkness, gripped by a sudden panic. 'Where's Carol?'
'Carol?'
'That's that girl o' his,' he heard someone say. "Twas her car we saw in the drive.' Rupert Lindt, it sounded like. But then another voice, much louder, demanded, 'What's she gone and done with Brother Sarr?'
He was confused. 'You mean – ' he stammered, 'you mean the Poroths still aren't back?'
'Deborah's dead, son,' said Matt Geisel.
And over the sound the earth was making, punctuated by tremors whose effects came more regularly now, they told him of the old man's death, and the body in the smokehouse, and the wasps.
'Rosie,' whispered Freirs, 'Deborah… ' He shook his head. It wasn't real, none of it, they were lying to him, and as soon as he found his glasses he would show them they were wrong. The world was a dark place, blurred and confusing. He felt the ground tremble. 'I don't know what's happened,' he said, raising his voice to compete with a rumbling that had grown progressively more insistent. 'All I know is I'm worried about the girl who came out here yesterday. We've got to find her.'
He heard someone cry out and saw the others turn to look. Behind them one of the men was pointing into the darkness, where several small grey shapes were racing madly round the lawn in endless circles.
'The cats!' said Geisel. 'My Lord, just look at 'em, they're chasin' one another's tails… '
Freirs remembered the Uroborus, the dragon with its tail gripped in its teeth. A full circle, that's what it signaled. Completion. The rolling year come round again to this most special day…
'What we ought to do,' one of them was saying, 'is try Shem Fenchel's dogs. I hear they're real good trackers.'
'We should head back to the trucks,' said someone else, 'and split up when we get to town.' They began moving back toward the road.
In the east, like a great cyclopean beast lifting its huge head, the moon rose majestically above the treetops, casting long gigantic shadows across the lawn. It was full tonight, the second full moon of the month, and very bright. To Freirs, without his glasses, there seemed something new in its face, something baleful and malign. Yet at its rising he felt a surge of sudden, unlikely hope: maybe in the moonlight they would be able to search for Carol… like those searchers in the moonlight, on the two other nights, for the two other girls. The memory flooded back to him.
'Bloodhounds,' another was saying, as they drifted off, 'that's what we need. We ought to go back to town and get those two pups
Jacob's son's been raisin' out behind his house-'
'Wait,' Freirs called after them. 'Listen to me!' He stumbled to his feet.
The men paused, turned to face him. 'What is it?' came a voice.
'I know where they are.'
Several figures left the group and approached him in the darkness. 'Yeah?' said one. 'Where's that?'
He nodded toward the woods. 'McKinney's Neck.'
The night has deepened and the sky has turned a velvet black when the thing on the hillside finishes its song. Tiny crow's-feet of blood mark the corners of its mouth where, stretched taut by widening jaws, the skin has torn like old paper. Beneath its feet the land is shaking rhythmically now, throwing up small clouds of dust, as if the entire world, wilderness and cities and seas, were echoing to an immense heartbeat.
Poised naked
on a rock above the altar, it lifts its face to the sky. It spreads its arms like angel wings and dances like a serpent in the moonlight. It spins, leaps, crouches, stands, spits blood into its mutilated hands. It gestures toward the earth.
It speaks the final Name.
Around it birds fall to the ground and crawl among the rocks like lizards. They open their razor beaks, and the air is filled with a great roaring.
Spiderlike it turns and clambers down the wall of boulders, pointing its face toward the woman.
Miles to the south, the farmhouse stands trembling in the moonlight. Beneath its darkened windows, one by one, the roses in the garden lift their heads, point their faces toward the moon, and open wide their secret mouths; while in the night sky overhead, one by one, the stars come out of hiding.
It is Lammas Eve.
They ran noisily through the woods, crashing through the underbrush like a pack of dogs, dodging brambles and tree trunks, a few of the men in the rear armed with weapons they'd seized from the Poroths' barn – pitchforks, a rake, a long-handled axe with a smeared, discolored blade – mumbling snatches of prayer as they ran and shouting directions and encouragement to one another.
Freirs followed blindly behind them, relying mainly on sound, able to see only dimly without his glasses and still unsteady on his feet. In his right hand he gripped the sickle that he'd lifted from the wall of the barn, holding it before him as he stumbled forward through the darkness, trying to block the invisible branches that snapped painfully at his face. Amid the shouting and confusion he remembered how, at last Sunday's worship, the sickle had been blessed in the Cleansing; maybe it would bring him luck tonight.
They had charged heedlessly over the stream, all of them but Lindt who was hurt and Geisel who was old and Freirs who was sightless; these three had picked their way more slowly, fearful of losing their footing. Freirs had been the last. As he stumbled across, the air ringing with shouts and splashing and the subterranean rumbling that still hadn't ceased, he was sure that he'd heard singing behind him, a thin unearthly wailing, rising from the direction of the farmhouse. He had felt, in that sound, dark heads turn and tiny mouths gape wide, and he'd thought automatically, the cats but he'd shuddered, for the voices he'd heard hadn't sounded like cats, or anything that crept upon the earth. He heard them no longer, but he couldn't get them out of his mind. Just the cats, he told himself, and hurried on.