them. I was lighter and more limber than they were, and I should therefore be faster. Wild boars, however, have a top speed of thirty miles an hour. I didn’t know whether there was enough swine in these creatures for them to run that fast, but I knew for sure that, if they could, there wasn’t enough swine in me to escape them.
As they reached the bottom of the opposing hill and entered the grassy vale, I fired one round into the air. In retrospect, letting off a warning shot in that situation seems as foolish as shaking a finger in disapproval at a looming grizzly bear.
I hoped to chase them away rather than be forced to kill them, even if they might be looking forward to — as Mrs. Tameed vividly suggested to the nameless boy — buggering me a few times before chewing off my face.
When they kept coming across the narrow vale, I took a two-hand grip on the pistol, stepped into the isosceles stance, drew down on the brute at the right end of the line, and squeezed off five rounds.
I thought three of them hit their target. The beast staggered, dropped its axe, and swayed.
Copper-jacketed hollow points were killing ammo. They bloomed on penetration, and the damage to tissue could be grievous.
For a moment, the impact of the bullets knocked the beast’s voice out of it, but then it began to shriek.
Surprised that it remained on its feet, I pumped out two more shots. The second caused the wounded creature to clasp one hand to its throat. Then it toppled backward.
The three other swine things neither rushed toward nor away from me. They stood beside their fallen comrade, staring at it, as if not quite sure what had brought it down.
Still in a shooting stance, I sighted on another beast but waited, hoping that they would now see the wisdom of withdrawal.
The three turned and gazed up at me, at that moment not with rage and hatred, but with puzzlement. They looked back and forth from me to the dead creature, as though wondering how and why I had killed it. But then I thought that their expression might be less puzzlement than indecision. Among ordinary pigs, some have been known to eat their young; so perhaps these three were considering whether to pursue me or instead to settle down for a bit of cannibalism while the carcass was fresh.
I’d seen enough of their kind to have noted that instead of the sameness of faces within most other animal species, there were numerous differences in their features, one to another, not as many as among human beings, but enough to make them seem less like a pack and more like a gathering of individuals.
Now, as they looked from their dead companion to me, the unique quality of each grotesque face made them more terrifying than ever. If they didn’t think as one, all on the same track of blind instinct, if each could scheme in its singular fashion about how best to pursue and trap and kill its quarry, the likelihood of escaping them in any extended chase would be hardly greater than the likelihood of foiling black-robed Death himself when he knocked on your door with his harvesting scythe in one bony hand and a termination notice in his other.
Sunshine winked off the blades of the axes and laid a sheen on the skull-crushing hammer heads.
The freaks turned their attention from me and the corpse to one another. Their wide jackal mouths cracked open, but if they made any sounds, I could not hear them.
Each snaky, hairless, white tail, with a tuft of gray at the tip, raised straight up — one, two, three.
Their pointed ears twitched. Pricked forward. And then flattened back along their skulls.
They spread out at the foot of the slope, putting more space between one another.
Again, they swung their axes forward, back, forward, back, and around in a complete circle. As if the blades were stropped sharper against the whetting air, flares of sun flew from the weapons.
I had needed seven rounds to bring down the first freak. At that rate, I’d need twenty-one shots to kill the remaining three.
Ten rounds remained in the Beretta’s magazine. The spare in my holster contained another seventeen, but I doubted that I would have the time to swap it for the empty one as they stormed toward me.
Shakespeare has Falstaff say that discretion is the better part of valor, and on that slope I opted for discretion. I ran to the crown of the hill and down the other side.
I am aware that Falstaff was a fighter but also a coward, a thief but also a charmer. He serves as a role model only for those who believe that self-esteem is the highest of all values. The playwright meant for him to be a comic figure but not an admirable one, for he knew that when such men lose their capacity to amuse, they are dangerous in the extreme. They are the Charles Mansons and the Pol Pots of our time, no crime too terrible to dissuade them from committing it.
All of us are cowards at some time in our lives, but I took comfort in the fact that when I fled that hillside, I left no allies behind. With only my own butt at risk, I could justifiably claim that my action was caution rather than cowardice. Or so I told myself as I fled pell-mell into the glen where I had earlier parked for a moment in the mini truck, making thin quaverous sounds of childlike terror, repressing the urge to wet my pants, and turned north in the hope of making it on foot to the guest tower. By such self-deceptions do we survive — and also begin to put the most essential part of ourselves at risk.
Thirty-three
The topology of that part of Roseland was complicated, the hills and vales turning into one another in such a way that I was reminded of the folds and fissures on the surface of the brain. I was like a thought slipping through the fissures, and the thought was:
I stayed entirely in the lower places, some of which were shaded by looming hillsides, others by banyan trees that grew on slopes and by California laurels that rooted in swales between the hills, where the soil was always a little moist. Weaving quickly between trees, ducking under low branches, racing across open areas, I relied on intuition to decide which way to go each time the rumpled land folded upon itself in such a way that the path branched.
Focused on moving fast and faster, I dared not look back and risk faltering. Besides, if the freaks were gaining on me, I would rather not know until one of those taloned hands snared my sports jacket and wrenched me off my feet or until an axe cleaved my skull and killed me in the instant, sparing me what horrors I might have to endure if I were taken alive.
Only a couple of hours earlier, I had been cozy in the main-house kitchen, eating quiche and cheesecake. My biggest problems had been how to penetrate the armored mysteries of Roseland and how to make sense of what people here told me when they pulled a cloak of inscrutability over themselves before every conversation.
At least the swine things weren’t inscrutable. They didn’t play word games with me or pretend to be distracted, or in any other way deceive. The freaks made their intentions clear: They wanted to club me, chop me, eat me, and sit around later reminiscing about the taste of me. They were as open about their intentions as were IRS agents.
I followed so many branching paths that I was not sure anymore whether I was moving toward or away from the guest tower. And I would not have been surprised to see on a hillside the abandoned vehicle with balloon tires and the three freaks playing cards while they waited for me to run in a circle and back into their arms.
A couple of times, the cool air shimmered with what seemed to be currents of rising heat, and I saw things in my peripheral vision that weren’t there when I turned my head for a closer look. Some of them might have been nothing but shadows that appeared solid and menacing only from the corner of the eye. But others were far more specific: an impression of a great pile of human skulls, of coyotes feeding on several dead freaks, of a naked woman chained to a post as cowled figures touched torches to the kindling at her feet.…
One vision did not vanish when I looked directly at it. I came out of a grove of laurels, and twenty feet ahead, the path divided around a promontory of land. Marking the crossroads was a leafless black-limbed tree that someone had used as the framework for a mobile of sun-bleached bones. Hanging from the branches were the delicate skeletons of children, some of whom had been perhaps as young as three, none older than ten, when they were murdered and stripped of their clothing and arranged just so in this insane celebration of cruelty.
The sight was like a road sign announcing that ahead lay a town in the thrall of savage violence that knew no limits.
For the first time in my headlong flight, I faltered when the apparition didn’t dissolve before me. But I regained my footing and hurried on, taking the path to the right.
