his feet. It was light and soft with rot, and wouldn’t hurt anybody if he hit them with it, but he thought it would make a good tool for a threat.
The wind shifted, and for a moment the voices were silent, and Teague cocked his head and squinted his eyes. “I’ve got a stick,” he said, but not very loudly. A bell sounded, tinny and high, and the night seemed to darken. The voices returned in a rush of laughter, and then Teague saw figures — all he could make out was the shape of them — capering through the trees, skipping and dancing and falling now and then to roll briefly on the ground before springing up again. He raised his stick up and said it again, much louder this time, as they rushed toward him: “I have a stick!” “And a pretty stick it is!” said a voice that was very familiar, though it took him a moment to place it. “As pretty as the hand that wields it, eh, Porcupine?” The lady from the club came walking out of the gloom, and though the night stayed just as dark, she seemed oddly lit somehow, as if the sun were shining only for her and only on her. She was just as ugly as she ever had been, and seemed even shorter and more bent, and yet somehow she seemed less pathetic than she had in the club.
“Oh, yes, Aardvark, my dear,” said another familiar voice. The man from the club came up behind her and put his arms around her, placing his head just to the side of her neck. Of course they were friends, Teague thought. That made perfect sense, even if it made no sense that they had just popped out of the night within sight of his house.
“What are you doing here?” Teague asked them in a whisper-shout. “Get off my property!”
“Duly, duly,” said the woman. “Duly and in time. But first, won’t you dance with me?”
“No!” Teague said. “Stop asking me that. Are you deaf? What part of not in a million years do you not understand?” The lady was hopping back and forth on her feet and smiling at him, and the man behind her was doing the same thing, but exactly out of sync, so he hopped on his left foot just as she hopped on her right, and he moved his head to peek at Teague from above one and then the other of the woman’s shoulders. Others were coming up behind them, figures whose faces were lit just like the old woman’s with a curious, source-less light, so Teague could tell from far away that they were just as ugly as she was, and indeed some were even uglier, lumpier and more misshapen, or too big or too small, and it was obvious that none of them had given the least bit of thought to their hair, or to what they were wearing. They shuffled and danced toward him, and surrounded the old woman and the old man in a hideous huddle.
“A million years? Will you dance with me in a million years?”
“No!” Teague shouted, not caring anymore if he woke his father up. In fact, he wanted his father to come out with a flashlight and a shotgun, and scare the hideous weirdos away. “I said not in a million years. Not even. Aren’t you listening to me?” The whole crowd of them laughed at him then, an odd sort of chuckle that circulated among the ones on the sides and the back and then came to the old man, who chuckled in the ugly lady’s ear, and she uttered a sharp little bark of mirth.
“Not with me? Not with any of us?”
“No!” Teague said, and he reached into his pocket to get his phone. “I’m calling the police now,” he said. “But I’ll dial slowly, so you have time to just go away.”
“Not with my friend?” the lady said, and indicated a large lumpy bundle which, he suddenly noticed, they were passing back and forth among them, each of them, even the small ones, shouldering the burden and passing it on. He thought it was a sack, but he couldn’t tell for sure because the light that fell on them seemed to miss the thing they carried.
“I’m dialing,” Teague said. But he was very slow about it, because he wasn’t very good at dialing with one hand, and also because he was getting increasingly nervous and afraid, because they were something else besides just ugly and annoying. There were a lot of them — it seemed like there were more of them every time he looked — and he was starting to appreciate that they might want to do something else besides dance with him.
“For the last time, Teague O’Kane,” the woman said, “won’t you dance with one of us, even out of pity, or fellow-feeling, to share just a little of your undeserved beauty with those who have lost their own?”
“Hello, police?” Teague said into his phone. He had dialed 911, but it wasn’t ringing yet. “I am being attacked by ugly people.”
“Attacked?” the woman said. “We only wanted to dance!” But just then the ugly old man picked up an orange and threw it at Teague. It missed, but another, thrown from farther back in the crowd, connected solidly with his head.
“Hey!” he said, and then he was hit again, on the ear he was using for the phone. A lady answered just as the phone flew away. He scrambled after it, stooping to pick it up, but before his fingers could reach it another orange struck and knocked it farther. “Stop that!” he said, and three more oranges came hurtling out of the darkness, two for his face and one for his stomach. Then a whole barrage of them started, and he stood there for a moment, trying to protect his face and his stomach and his groin, but when he covered up one part of himself they only hit him in another. He turned and ran.
He hadn’t gone very far before it occurred to him that he should be trying to run toward home, not away from it, that if he could make it to his front door he could rush through and lock it against them. And he hadn’t gone very much farther than that when they started to appear in front of him in ones and twos, strangely lucent in the darkness under the trees, smiling at him hideously as they lobbed oranges at him. He and his friends had been in the habit lately of driving along Orange Blossom Trail and throwing oranges at the prostitutes, just for the fun of it, and now he found himself regretting that, as fruit after fruit connected with his head. Looking back, he saw that he was being pursued by the wily crowd. They ran close together, one roiling beast, and in their light he could see the sack (it was definitely a sack) balanced on their shoulders, being passed among them as they ran. There was something terrible about their faces, in the glimpse he had of them before he turned his head around again, that was very different from mere ugliness.
He put his arms over his head, peeking out between his elbows to watch his way, and ran as hard as he could, not caring whether he was going toward the house or away from the house, only wanting to get away from them, and very shortly tripped, whether over a root or an outstretched foot, he didn’t know, but he found, as he fell down, that he was somewhat grateful for the trip, and he was less panicked, as he rolled and skidded on the dirt and coarse grass, than he had been as he ran. Well, he thought, I tried to get away, but there are too many of them, and they have too many oranges, and now they are going to get me. He lay on his back, looking up through the leaves of the orange trees at the dim stars, and they clustered around him.
“Orange you sad you didn’t dance with us now?” said the hag. She leaned over him with the man, and all around them the others were giving him orange-rind smiles, wedges of fruit stuck in their mouths, and juice dripping down their hairy chins.
“Go on and do it,” Teague said. “Rob me. Take my wallet. Take my jeans. They’re not going to fit you, and they won’t look good on anyone you know. But go on. Just get it over with.”
“Rob you?” said the hag.
“We aren’t here to take anything away,” the old troll said.
“We’ve come to give you a gift, Teague O’Kane,” the hag said.“It would have been a merry gift, if you had chosen to dance with us. It would have been a gift of poodle breath and panty lace and eyes bright with joyful tears. But you have spurned those who only meant to bless you, and now you must take another kind of gift from us entirely, and do a deed for us, or else.”
“Or else what?” he asked.
“Or else dark deadliness of poodle!” the old man said. “And suffering sobs!” said the woman. “And an acid bitter sadness in your soul that will last a million years.”
“A million billion!” said the man.
Teague wanted to say that was stupid, that nothing lasted that long, not — he was pretty sure — even the universe itself, but instead he asked, “What do you want me to do?”
“Only this,” the woman said. “Take our friend home, and put him to rest.” There was a flurry of activity among the others. Within a few seconds they threw down the bundle in the sack and uncovered it. Teague could tell there was something unpleasant in there by the noise it made when it hit the ground. It’s full of steak, he thought, and Who carries around a big sack of beef in the middle of the night? It seemed to attract the darkness as it lay on the ground, but when they uncovered it he could plainly tell what it was, and he shuddered because he had never seen a corpse before, nor ever seen a body in such an unnatural posture as it assumed when they rolled it toward him with their feet. It lay with its back to him, one arm stretched out underneath it and another up over its head. Its feet and its chest were bare, and the face was turned away, but he could tell by the breadth of its shoulders and
