entire world, wilderness and cities and seas, were echoing to an immense heartbeat.
Poised naked on a rock above the altar, it lifts its face to the sky. It spreads its arms like angel wings and dances like a serpent in the moonlight. It spins, leaps, crouches, stands, spits blood into its mutilated hands. It gestures toward the earth.
It speaks the final Name.
Around it birds fall to the ground and crawl among the rocks like lizards. They open their razor beaks, and the air is filled with a great roaring.
Spiderlike it turns and clambers down the wall of boulders, pointing its face toward the woman.
Miles to the south, the farmhouse stands trembling in the moonlight. Beneath its darkened windows, one by one, the roses in the garden lift their heads, point their faces toward the moon, and open wide their secret mouths; while in the night sky overhead, one by one, the stars come out of hiding.
It is Lammas Eve.
They ran noisily through the woods, crashing through the underbrush like a pack of dogs, dodging brambles and tree trunks, a few of the men in the rear armed with weapons they'd seized from the Poroths' barn – pitchforks, a rake, a long-handled axe with a smeared, discolored blade – mumbling snatches of prayer as they ran and shouting directions and encouragement to one another.
Freirs followed blindly behind them, relying mainly on sound, able to see only dimly without his glasses and still unsteady on his feet. In his right hand he gripped the sickle that he'd lifted from the wall of the barn, holding it before him as he stumbled forward through the darkness, trying to block the invisible branches that snapped painfully at his face. Amid the shouting and confusion he remembered how, at last Sunday's worship, the sickle had been blessed in the Cleansing; maybe it would bring him luck tonight.
They had charged heedlessly over the stream, all of them but Lindt who was hurt and Geisel who was old and Freirs who was sightless; these three had picked their way more slowly, fearful of losing their footing. Freirs had been the last. As he stumbled across, the air ringing with shouts and splashing and the subterranean rumbling that still hadn't ceased, he was sure that he'd heard singing behind him, a thin unearthly wailing, rising from the direction of the farmhouse. He had felt, in that sound, dark heads turn and tiny mouths gape wide, and he'd thought automatically, the cats but he'd shuddered, for the voices he'd heard hadn't sounded like cats, or anything that crept upon the earth. He heard them no longer, but he couldn't get them out of his mind. Just the cats, he told himself, and hurried on.
They were well past the stream now, heading north through the swampy sections of the woods, where their progress was slowed as their feet were sucked down by the mud. Yet even here the ground was quivering as if alive, and below it thunder rolled, as if echoing from caverns deep within the earth.
There were other voices too, filling the darkness with sound. Occasionally he could hear the weird night cries of woodland creatures and, far off, a low, indistinct roaring as from a thousand animal throats; and once a great pale round shape had come hurtling toward them out of a clump of bushes like some boulder come to life, squealing in terror.
'Brother Galen,' someone had called, 'twas one o' your hogs.'
And there was still another sound now, far in the distance, a vast and wrathful buzzing. It was like the warning growl that cats make just before they strike, only amplified a million times, or like the buzzing of a million bees.
Panting, Freirs pushed onward, desperate to keep up with the others and afraid of losing them in the darkness. The sporadic shafts of moonlight illuminating the spaces between the trees were of little help and only confused him, like panels in a hall of mirrors. Branches seemed to reach out toward him, as if to hold him back. Thorns and brambles tore at him as he passed. Once, at the edge of the swamp, he tripped over a root and fell headlong in the mud, nearly losing the sickle. Floundering to his feet, he stumbled onward. The roaring was all around him now, rising and falling in time with the beating of the earth, and the buzzing had grown louder.
They had emerged from the swamp and were passing through a stretch of slightly drier ground where the foliage was thinner, when they saw the fire. It was impossible to tell how large it was, or how far away. All of them were tired now, but seeing the flames through the skeletal forms of the trees, and with an objective at last in sight, they broke into a run, though not without a certain wariness lest the blaze prove so large they be forced to turn and flee.
They ran with a new urgency as it became more apparent, the nearer they drew to it, that the fire had been man-made. And suddenly they were running over rocks and debris, the forest had fallen away, and they found themselves facing a wall of leaping flames as tall as they were, and waves of scorching heat, and blinding smoke that blotted out the sky. And beyond the flames, like a great dark presence at the end of a dream, stood the hill.
It rose black and obscene in the moonlight, thrusting itself above the tops of the dwarfed trees like some huge squatting animal, its great humped back furred with clumps of vegetation. Freirs, racing up behind the others, saw them silhouetted against the fire at its base as they stumbled into the clearing with arms or weapons raised, and heard the screams of those who'd blundered too close to the flames. And above the screams a roaring split the night, and a buzzing as of insects, as loud as all the insects in the world; and the roaring came from all around them, from the land and the trees and the darkness itself, but the buzzing came only from the hill.
Beneath the sound he heard a higher, rhythmic cry, the moaning of a woman in pain.
'Carol!'
She was somewhere above him on the hill. Freirs pushed through the crowd of men and hurried forward, but the heat was too intense; he fell back wincing with pain, gasping, eyes smarting.
'She's up there!' He was shouting to anyone who could hear him over the deafening noise. No one turned. Several dim figures were poking feebly at the fire with pitchforks, keeping well back from the flames. He reached for the man who was closest, grabbing him roughly by the shoulder.
'We've got to reach her!'
The other turned, face glowing redly in the firelight, the eyes wide and frightened as a rabbit's, and Freirs saw that it was the leathery old farmer who'd given him a ride from town; he didn't even know the man's name. The farmer shook his head, said something unintelligible, pointed to his ear. He can't hear me, Freirs realized. And he doesn't hear Carol.
Freirs shielded his eyes and looked for the others. Amid the smoke they seemed a crowd of milling shadows, their figures black against the flames, blurred and distorted by the rising waves of heat. None of them seemed to hear.
The moaning came again.
She was just behind the wall of fire, he was sure of it; she sounded almost close enough to touch. And she was hurt, hurt badly; he could hear it in her voice. In despair he stared down at his body, with the fleeting realization that, for all its weight, it was a fragile and sensitive thing, easily pained, easy to damage irreparably, and knowing nonetheless that someone was going to have to do it, someone had to go. Fate, it seemed, had painted him into a corner; he had no choice. Throwing his left arm before his face and brandishing the sickle as if the flames were a curtain he could slice through, he thought of Carol as he wanted to remember her, so sweetly, trustingly naked that evening on the couch in her apartment, and leaped.
And as he did so, just as his feet left the ground, a final thought struck him: what if this was not a wall of fire? What if it was thicker than a wall, or had no end at all? What if He felt his feet drag against timber stacked too high for him to clear, felt some of it give way as he crashed through. He was suddenly surrounded by flames. They licked at his legs and his feet, and he screamed and kicked out as his skin burned beneath his shoes and clothing, his lungs were bursting from the heat, he was breathing fire
… and then he had passed through, he had tumbled among the rocks at the base of the hill and was dragging himself weakly to safety. Clutching the sickle, he staggered to his aching feet and looked up.
The world was a blur, a roaring, earsplitting blur aglow with flame. In its wavering red light he saw the huge mound looming blackly overhead, throbbing as if it were alive, with steady even beats that shook the ground like thunder; he saw the crude truncated pyramid of boulders piled against its sloping side; he saw the narrow ledge some ten feet above him to his left, midway up the rockpile, with a figure that must be Carol still moaning, lying up there on her back so that he could see a pale slice of her body – a leg, an arm, an edge of naked breast – in a travesty of the way he'd just remembered her; and he saw the slender white form, supple as a milk snake, that curled over her in an arch no human should have made, a white rainbow of flesh with ends at Carol's head and feet.
