trapdoor in a gibbet platform.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m here.”
“Yes. At last you’re here. As promised.” His smile broadened and he held his hands out to her. She took them, and as she reached him she felt his baking heat. He radiated it, like a well-stoked brick oven. His smooth, lineless hands slipped around hers… and then closed over them tight, like handcuffs.
“Oh, Nadine,” he whispered, and bent to kiss her. She turned her head just a little, looking up at the cold fire of the stars, and his kiss was on the hollow below her jaw rather than on her lips. He wasn’t fooled. She felt the mocking curve of his grin against her flesh.
But revulsion was only a scaly crust over something worse—a caked and long-hidden lust, an ageless pimple finally brought to a head and about to spew forth some noisome fluid, some sweetness long since curdled. His hands, slipping over her back, were much hotter than her sunburn. She moved against him, and suddenly the slim saddle between her legs seemed plumper, fuller, more tender, more aware. The seam of her slacks was chafing her in a delicately obscene way that made her want to rub herself, get rid of the itch, cure it once and for all.
“Tell me one thing,” she said.
“Anything.”
“You said, ‘As promised.’ Who promised me to you? Why me? And what do I call you? I don’t even know that. I’ve known about you for most of my life, and I don’t know what to call you.”
“Call me Richard. That’s my real name. Call me that.”
“That’s your real name? Richard?” she asked doubtfully, and he giggled against her neck, making her skin crawl with loathing and desire. “And who promised me?”
“Nadine,” he said, “I have forgotten. Come on.”
He slipped off the hood of the car, still holding her hands, and she almost jerked them away and ran… but what good would that have done? He would only chase after her, catch her, rape her.
“The moon,” he said. “It’s full. And so am I.” He brought her hand down to the smooth and faded crotch of his jeans and there was something terrible there, beating with a life of its own beneath the notched coldness of his zipper.
“No,” she muttered, and tried to pull her hand away, thinking how far this was from that other moonstruck night, how impossibly far. This was at the other end of time’s rainbow.
He held her hand against him. “Come out in the desert and be my wife,” he said.
“No!”
“It’s much too late to say no, dear.”
She went with him. There was a bedroll, and the blackened bones of a campfire under the silver bones of the moon.
He laid her down.
“All right,” he breathed. “All right, then.” His fingers worked his belt buckle, then the button, then the zipper.
She saw what he had for her and began to scream.
The dark man’s grin sprang forth at the sound, huge and glittering and obscene in the night, and the moon stared down blankly at them both, bloated and cheesy.
Nadine pealed forth scream after scream and tried to crawl away and he grabbed her and then she was holding her legs shut with all her strength, and when one of those blank hands inserted itself between them they parted like water and she thought:
And when the dead coldness of him slipped into her the shriek ripped up and out of her, bolted free, and she struggled, and the struggle was useless. He battered into her, invader, destroyer, and the cold blood gushed down her thighs and then he was in her, all the way up to her womb, and the moon was in her eyes, cold and silver fire, and when he came it was like molten iron, molten
The moon was almost down.
He had caught another rabbit, had caught the trembling little thing in his bare hands and broken its neck. He had built a new fire on the bones of the old one and now the rabbit cooked, sending up savory ribbons of aroma. There were no wolves now. Tonight they had stayed away—it was meet and right that they should have done. It was, after all, his wedding night, and the dazed and apathetic thing sitting lumpishly on the other side of the fire was his blushing bride.
He leaned over and raised her hand out of her lap. When he let it go it stayed in place, raised to the level of her mouth. He looked at this phenomenon for a moment and then put her hand back in her lap. There her fingers began to wiggle sluggishly, like dying snakes. He poked two fingers at her eyes, and she did not blink. That blank stare just went on and on.
He was honestly puzzled.
What had he done to her?
He couldn’t remember.
And it didn’t matter. She was pregnant. If she was also catatonic, what did that matter? She was the perfect incubator. She would breed his son, bear him, and then she could die with her purpose served. After all, it was what she was there for.
The rabbit was done. He broke it in two. He pulled her half into tiny pieces, the way you break up a baby’s food. He fed it to her a piece at a time. Some pieces fell out of her mouth and into her lap half-chewed, but she ate most of it. If she remained like this, she would need a nurse. Jenny Engstrom, perhaps.
“That was very good, dear,” he said softly.
She looked blankly up at the moon. Flagg smiled gently at her and ate his wedding supper.
Good sex always made him hungry.
He awoke in the latter part of the night and sat up in his bedroll, confused and afraid… afraid in the instinctive, unknowing way that an animal is afraid—a predator who senses that he himself may be stalked.
Had it been a dream? A vision—?
Frightened, he tried to understand the thought, to put it in some context. He couldn’t. It hung there on its own like a bad hex.
Who? Who was closer now?
The night wind whispered past him, seeming to bring him a scent. Someone was coming and—
While he slept, someone had passed his camp, headed east. The unseen third? He didn’t know. It was the night of the full moon. Had the third escaped? The thought brought panic with it.
He looked at Nadine. She was asleep, pulled up in a tight fetal position, the position his son would assume in her belly only months from now.
