But the black-clad arms rose, falling away from yellowwhite claws ... the claws that had left the marks on the trees, the claws that had torn off the deer's head and then ripped its body apart.
'No,' Trisha whispered. 'No, don't, please. I don't want to see.
The blackrobe paid no attention. It pushed back its hood. There was no face there, only a misshapen head made of wasps. They crawled over each other, jostling and buzzing. As they moved Trisha saw disturbing ripples of human feature: an empty eye, a smiling mouth. The head hummed as the flies had hummed on the deer's ragged neck; it hummed as though the creature in the black robe had a motor for a brain.
'I come from the thing in the woods,' the blackrobe said in a buzzing, inhuman voice. He sounded to Trisha like that
guy on the radio who told you not to smoke, the one who had lost his vocal cords in a cancer operation and had to talk through a gadget he held to his throat. 'I come from the God of the Lost. It has been watching you. It has been waiting for you. It is your miracle, and you are its.'
'Go away!' Trisha tried to yell this, but only a husky whining whisper actually came out.
'The world is a worst-case scenario and I'm afraid all you sense is true,' said the buzzing wasp-voice. Its claws raked slowly down the side of its head, goring through its insect flesh and revealing the shining bone beneath. 'The skin of the world is woven of stingers, a fact you have now learned for yourself Beneath there is nothing but bone and the God we share. This is persuasive, do you agree?'
Terrified, crying, Trisha looked away-looked back down the stream. She found that when she wasn't looking at the hideous wasp-priest, she could move a little. She raised her hands to her cheeks, wiped away her tears, then looked back. 'I don't believe you! I don't-'
The wasp-priest was gone. All of them were gone. There were only butterflies dancing in the air across the stream, eight or nine now instead of just three, all different colors instead of just white and black. And the light was different; it had begun to take on a gold-orange hue. Two hours had gone by at least, probably more like three. So she had slept. 'It was all a dream,' as they said in the stories ... but she couldn't remember going to sleep no matter how hard she tried, couldn't remember any break in her chain of consciousness at all. And it hadn't felt like a dream.
An idea occurred to Trisha then, one which was simultaneously frightening and oddly comforting: perhaps the nuts and berries had gotten her high as well as feeding her. She knew there were mushrooms that could get you high, that sometimes kids ate pieces of them to get off, and If mushrooms could do that, why not checkerberries? 'Or the leaves,' she said. 'Maybe it was the leaves. I bet it was.' Okay, no more of them, zippy or not.
Trisha got up, grimaced as a cramp pulled at her belly, and bent over. She passed gas and felt better. Then she went to the stream, spotted a couple of good-sized rocks sticking out of the water, and used them to hop across. In some ways she felt like a different girl, clear-eyed and full of energy, yet the thought of the wasp-priest haunted her, and she knew her unease would only get worse after the sun went down. If she wasn't careful, she'd have the horrors. But if she could prove to herself it had only been a dream, brought on by eating checkerberry leaves or maybe by drinking water that her system still wasn't entirely used to ...
Actually being in the small clearing made her feel nervous, like a character in a slasher movie, the stupid girl who goes into the psycho's house asking, 'Is anybody here?' She looked back across the stream, immediately felt that something was looking at her from the woods on this side, and reversed direction so fast she almost fell down. Nothing there. Nothing anywhere, as far as she could tell.
'You dingbat,' she said softly, but that feeling of being watched had come back, and come back strong. The God of the Lost, the wasp-priest had said. It has been watching you, it has been waiting for you. The wasp-priest had said other things, too, but that was what she remembered: Watching you, waiting for you.
Trisha went to where she was pretty sure she had seen the three robed figures and looked for any sign of them, any sign at all. There was nothing. She dropped to one knee to look more closely and there was still nothing, not so much as a patch of scuffed needles which her frightened mind could have interpreted as a footprint. She got up again, turned to cross the stream, and as she did, something in the forest to her right caught her eye.
She walked in that direction, then stood looking into the tangled darkness where young trees with thin trunks grew close together, fighting for space and light aboveground, no doubt fighting with the grasping bushes for moisture and root-room below. Here and there in the darkening green, birches stood like gaunt ghosts. Splashed across the bark of one of these was a stain. Trisha looked nervously over her shoulder, then pushed her way into the woods and toward the birch. Her heart was thumping hard in her chest and her mind was screaming at her to stop this, to not be such a fool, such a dingbat, such an asshole, but she went on.
Lying at the foot of the birch was a snarly coil of bleeding intestine so fresh that it had as yet collected only a few flies. Yesterday the sight of such a thing had had her struggling with all her might not to throw up, but life seemed different today; things had changed. There were no butterflutters, no meaty hiccups way down deep in her throat, no instinctive urge to turn away or at least avert her eyes. Instead of these things she felt a coldness that was somehow much worse. It was like drowning, only from the inside out.
There was a swatch of brown fur caught in the bushes to one side of the guts, and on it she could see a spatter of white spots. This was the remains of a fawn, one of the two she had come upon in the beechnut clearing, she was quite sure. Further into the trees, where the woods were already darkening toward night, she saw an alder tree with more of those deep claw-marks slashed into it. They were high up, where only a very tall man could have reached. Not that Trisha believed a man had made the marks.
It has been watching you, Yes, and was watching again right now. She could feel eyes crawling on her skin the way the little bugs, the minges and noseeums, crawled there. She might have dreamed the three priests, or hallucinated them, but she wasn't hallucinating the deerguts or the claw-marks on the alder. She wasn't hallucinating the feel of those eyes, either.
Breathing hard, her own eyes jerking from side to side in their sockets, Trisha backed toward the sound of the stream, expecting to see it in the woods, the God of the Lost. She broke free of the underbrush and, clutching small branches, backed all the way to the stream. When she was there, she whirled and leaped across it on the rocks, partly convinced that even now it was bursting out of the woods behind her, all fangs, claws, and stingers. She slipped on the second rock, almost fell into the water, managed to keep her balance, and staggered up on the far bank. She turned and looked back. Nothing over there. Even most of the butterflies were gone now, although one or two still danced, reluctant to give up the day.
This would probably be a good place to spend the night, close to the checkerberry bushes and the beechnut clearing, but she couldn't stay where she had seen the priests. They were probably just figures in a dream, but the one in the black robe had been horrible. Also, there was the fawn. Once the flies did arrive in force, she would hear them buzzing.
Trisha opened her pack, got a handful of berries, then paused. 'Thank you,' she told them. 'You're the best food
