should have been three days ago: death by water. His vivid dream of Deborah in the bathtub has been thwarted, chance has saved Freirs from the clutches of the Dhol, but now he will be able to do the job himself. In Freirs' insensible condition, it will be easy; he feels as if he has already done the deed, so detailed and real is the picture. He sees himself turn Freirs onto his belly for the precautionary tying of the wrists, then haul him by the ankles to the stream and shove his face beneath the rushing water. He sees a tremor shake the sleeper's frame, sees his arms twist and strain against the leather in an instinctive, futile effort to escape. The body jerks and thrashes as the Old One bends his full weight upon it. Once, twice, three times Freirs' dazed face, streaming water, lifts above the surface as he wrenches his neck back, legs kicking. But the Old One's grip is like iron, and the joy of what he's feeling now, savoring the final moments of a human life communicated through the spasmodic twitching of the flesh, gives him a tenfold strength. Just another minute to be sure all breathing's stopped…
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.
