Sam took a Winchester Model 1200 from the gun cabinet and filled up the tube with double 00 buck. He pumped one into the chamber. He took a .41 magnum revolver from the cabinet and checked the loads in that. Fully loaded. He shoved the big pistol behind his belt and turned to his wife.
'Stay in the house with Little Sam. You have your pistol with you and you know how to fire every weapon in this house.' He smiled. 'Well,
Sam walked out the back door and started across the field. It was then the faint odor struck his nostrils. Nydia had been correct. The Beasts were here. He remembered that smell from behind Falcon House in Canada.
Sam and Nydia were falling in love. They both knew they were in love hours after they met.
They had left Falcon House, walking toward the deep timber behind the great house, holding hands like kids. They walked into the timber, and the silence of God's free nature seemed to make them stronger and draw them closer. The mood was almost religious, the towering trees a nondenominational cathedral silently growing around the young couple. They came to a small, rushing creek and sat on a log by the bubbling waters.
'Tell me more about being a Christian, Sam.'
'I don't know that much about it, Nydia. I sometimes think it's a feeling one must have. And I don't have it very often.'
'1 think you're a better person than you will admit to being, Sam.'
'Maybe.'
They sat and talked and both felt the evil from the great house. It penetrated even the deep timber. Nydia told him about a circle of stones not too far away, a place that frightened her. Sam wanted to see that place.
At the circle of stones, Sam knelt down, studying closely and with great interest the largest stone of the circle, which depicted scenes of great depravity: of men with huge jutting phalluses; of women with legs widespread, exposing the genitalia; scenes of mass orgies: men with men, women with women, men with small children; scenes of hideous torture; of grotesque creatures, monsters, leaping and snarling. And finally, on the east side of the great stone, a scene depicting a saintly looking man who was locked in some sort of combat with a beastlike creature.
'Let's see this hole in the ground,' Sam said.
They smelled the stench long before they came to the hole, both of them wrinkling their noses at the foul odor. 'Can you imagine what it's like deep in that hole?' Sam tried a grin, unaware that his real father had said almost the same thing to a couple of friends back in 1958, standing near The Digging. (The Devil's Kiss).
It was then Sam had put his hand into his jacket pocket, jerking his hand out as if he had touched a snake.
His father's old army issue .45 was in his pocket. But before leaving his room at Falcon House that morning, Sam had put his own .38 revolver in that pocket.
Sam and Nydia looked at the pistol. A brass name-plate was riveted into the handle. SGT. SAM BALON KOREA 1953.
The young couple both felt themselves being overwhelmed by a dark force field. They sank to the ground, helplessly immobile as the strange force took them under its control.
Time took them winging backward. They watched a naked man fighting with a naked woman. Both Sam and Nydia knew, somehow, the identities of the couple. Sam Balon, Sr. and Nydia's mother, Roma, the witch.
Articles of clothing and equipment flew about the struggling couple. Both were bloody from the combat. The woman impaled herself on the man's erect penis, hunching on him. He struck her, knocking her away. But again and again she mounted the man, only to have him shove her away, each shove less forceful than the preceding one.
Then, shrieking her taunting laughter, the witch lunged at the man, wailing her delight as his phallus drove to the inner depths of her. For what seemed like hours, the mortal and the witch fucked their way across trackless worlds of space.
The young couple could see the man was nearly dead.
With one last supreme burst of courage and strength, the man grabbed something out of the maze of clothing and equipment that circled the couple. The objects seemed to fly from his hand, through the years, straight toward the young man and young women frozen to the ground on Earth, 1980.
Nydia screamed. Sam ducked.
They both jumped to their feet. All was peaceful. The scene replayed in their minds was gone. Sam looked at the gun in his hand. His father's gun. From years and worlds away.
When they returned to Falcon House, Sam found his father's old Thompson SMG lying on the bed.
Sam shook off the memories and walked across the old apple orchard, his irritation growing with each step. The smell grew fouler. Twice Sam changed direction as the smell grew fainter. Then he was standing over the hole in the ground. He picked up a rock from the ground and savagely hurled it down the stinking hole.
'Bastards!' he cursed. 'I know, somehow, you didn't follow us here, so you must have been here all along. Come on out, bastards—face me.'
Only silence greeted his words.
'Satan's filth!' Sam called to the dark hole.
Silence.
The wind sighed as it shifted direction. Sam looked around him. The old orchard was void of life. That he could see.
Then he began putting it all together. This hole was not the entrance to any living quarters for the Beasts, but only an exit and entrance hole. He thought for a moment. The land belonged to Norman Giddon; the man who owned the mansion that bordered Fox Estate. 'Uh-huh,' Sam said. 'And the new girl, Desiree, her parents own Fox
