'You feel it too.'
He nodded, then realized that she couldn't see his face. 'Yeah,' he admitted.
She reached for him, took his hand again. 'Let's--' she began, then sucked in her breath, squeezed his hand. 'Look,' she said.
'What?'
'Over there.' She pulled him to the left, and he saw for the first time what looked like a clearing between the trunks of the trees. A meadow.
He didn't want to go to that meadow, wanted instead to turn back, return the way they'd come, but he allowed himself to be pulled along, and they passed between the trees, reached the edge of the clearing, and stopped.
'Oh, my God,' Penelope said. She was breathing heavily, in hiccuping spurts. 'Oh, my God.'
Dion felt suddenly cold.
The clearing was littered with shattered wine bottles, moonlight sparkling on the tiny pieces of broken glass. Here and there, busted kegs emerged from the sea of smashed bottles like dark whales. Scattered amongst the glass were pieces of bone. The pieces were small-- carpels, tarsels, metatarsels--but there were enough of them distributed just at their feet to let them know that this had been the sight of some major carnage, that the skeletal remains of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people could. be found here.
But it was not the bones which had chilled Dion so.
It was the blood.
Beneath the glass, beneath the bones, the grass and the dirt below the grass were stained a dark blackish red, the residual sediment of a wave or river of blood which seemed to have once flowed through the clearing. Even the trunks of the trees were darker than they should have been, and the small shrubs and wild bushes which grew around the perimeter of the meadow had a distinctly reddish brown tint, as though blood had seeped into their systems through the roots and had usurped the space of chlorophyll in the leaves.
Dion took a hesitant step forward. The soles of his tennis shoes stuck for a second to the ground, pulling out blades of grass as they moved upward, sounding and feeling stickily like the adhesion of wet paint.
'Don't,' Penelope breathed, pulling him back.
But he had to move forward, he had to see. He was horrified by the sight before him, he had never seen anything like it ... but something about it seemed familiar. It was not the bottles, not the bones, not the blood. It was the clearing itself, and this layer of detritus that had been overlaid on top of it had successfully hidden what was really there, effectively blocking what he should have recognized.
But why should he have recognized it? He had never been here before.
He walked into the meadow, Penelope at his side, still holding his hand.
It was larger than it had first appeared, and that brought home to him the enormity of what must have occurred here. They tread gingerly over the littered ground, carefully avoiding the bones.
Some of these might be Penelope's father's, he thought.
He said nothing.
The silence grew heavier, the already oppressive atmosphere even more oppressive. Before them, at the opposite end of the meadow, against the trees that fronted the hillside, was a low mound. Bones and skulls, many with bits of dried flesh still clinging to them, were arranged in ancient runic form on the section of cleared ground. From the center of the space rose a stone square about the size of a bed, and atop the square were arranged crude and ancient instruments of death. Grappling hooks hung from thick chains attached to the branches above. In the trees beyond there loomed a dark carved figure, a stone idol of some sort, and as they drew closer, Dion saw that it was the likeness of a god, festooned with what looked like the results of recent kills:
scalps, ears, fingers, penises.
The god had Dion's face.
Penelope's fingernails dug into his palm. 'Oh, shit.'
Dion backed up. 'No,' he whispered, shaking his head.
'We have to call the police,' Penelope said, pulling him back. 'This isn't something we can handle.'
Dion nodded dumbly.
From somewhere, from the woods, from the hill, there were screams and cries, laughter and singing, coming closer, low but getting louder. He looked at Penelope, she looked at him, and though both of them knew that they had to get out of the clearing, neither of them knew where to go.
The approaching noise was coming from an indeterminate direction, and they did not know if they would be moving away from the arriving people or toward them.
There was a chaotic feel to the noise, an impression of anarchic abandonment that Dion found at once frightening and reassuring. These people, these people who were laughing and crying and screaming, they might try to kill him, but he understood them, he knew where they were coming from, whoever they were.
Whoever they were?
He knew who they were.
They both knew who they were.
Penelope's mothers.
Sure enough, a group of figures burst through the trees at the far end of the clearing, from almost exactly the same spot at which they themselves had entered the meadow. Women. Naked women. Penelope's mothers. They carried between them two unmoving policemen.; They were drunk and moving jerkily, several of them! carrying what looked like spears, but they were obviously heading this way, and despite the apparent randomness of their movements, they were moving at a good pace, clearly making a beeline for the altar.
'We have to get out of here,' Penelope said.
Dion nodded. He wasn't sure if they had been spotted; yet, but unless they quickly found some cover, they soon;
would be. He took Penelope's hand, pulled her toward the trees to the right of the carved idol.
And they were seen.
A cry went up, the high-pitched wail of five women screaming in unison, and Dion turned to see, over his shoulder, Penelope's mothers dashing madly toward them, still screaming identically at the same pitch, grinning hugely and carrying the unmoving policemen with them.
'Run!' Penelope screamed.
He tried. They both tried. But her mothers were moving fast, and the screams were disorienting, and the trees here were thicker, the underbrush heavier, and ... And part of him wanted to be caught.
That was at the root of it. He was scared out of his wits, more terrified than he had ever been in his life, and he genuinely wanted to escape. But he held tightly to Penelope's hand, started running first one way, then another, and he realized that he not so subconsciously wanted her mothers to catch up to them. He wanted to know what would happen after that. He was frightened, but at the same time he felt strong, strangely energized, and he knew that whatever happened, no matter how freaky it got, he could handle it.
He wanted to handle it.
Her mothers caught up to them a few yards into the trees. Strong hands grabbed his arms, long nails digging into his skin, and he was yanked harshly around to face a leering, drunken Mother Margeaux.
He was not as prepared as he'd thought he was, nowhere near as strong and brave as he'd led himself to believe, and he screamed as the women dragged him back out of the trees toward the square altar on top of the mound. He heard Penelope screaming off to his left, but he could not turn his eyes to see her, and whether she was screaming in pain or fear--or both--he could not tell.
A flagon was shoved between his lips and cool wine forced out. Most of it dribbled down his chin, but some of it ran down his throat, and it felt good, strangely calming.
The he was lifted into the air and slammed down onto the concrete slab.
The breath was knocked out of him, and pain flared in his back and his head, but then more wine was being forced down his throat and the pain disappeared. His strength returned in one odd, cold shiver, and he sat up, or was allowed to sit up, and he saw that Mother Margaret and Mother Sheila were the ones holding his arms. Mother Sheila or Mother Felice? He could not remember which was which.
At the foot of the mound below him, he saw the other mothers laughing hysterically as Mother Margeaux shoved a pine cone-tipped spear into the now exposed belly of the older policeman. Blood pooled outward, not
