Welcome until you've answered to my satisfaction all inquiries I have to put to you.'
The formal language sounded odd from his slobbish mouth.
'I've got business —' Davidson began.
'Then you just send a cable and cancel that business, Mr fancy-Davidson.'
The man was scoring points off him, Davidson knew, bolstering his shattered reputation by taking pot-shots at the Easterner. Still, Packard was the law: there was nothing to be done about it. He nodded his assent with as much good grace as he could muster. There'd be time to lodge a formal complaint against this hick-town Mussolini when he was home, safe and sound. For now, better to send a cable, and let business go hang.
'So what's the plan?' Eleanor demanded of Packard.
The Sheriff puffed out his booze-brightened cheeks.
'We deal with the divils,' he said.
'How?'
'Guns, woman.'
'You'll need more than guns, if they're as big as he says they are —'
'They are —' said Davidson, 'believe me, they are.'
Packard sneered.
'We'll take the whole fucking arsenal,' he said jerking his remaining thumb at Jebediah. 'Go break out the heavy-duty weapons, boy. Anti-tank stuff. Bazookas.'
General amazement.
'You got bazookas?' said Lou, the mantelpiece cynic.
Packard managed a leering smile.
'Military stuff,' he said, 'left over from the Big One.' Davidson sighed inwardly. The man was a psychotic, with his own little arsenal of out-of-date weapons, which were probably more lethal to the user than to the victim. They were all going to die. God help him, they were all going to die.
'You may have lost your fingers,' said Eleanor Kooker, delighted by this show of bravado, 'but you're the only man in this room, Josh Packard.'
Packard beamed and rubbed his crotch absent mindedly. Davidson couldn't take the atmosphere of hand- me-down machismo in the room any longer.
'Look,' he piped up, 'I've told you all I know. Why don't I just let you folks get on with it.'
'You ain't leaving,' said Packard, 'if that's what you're rooting after.'
'I'm just saying —'
'We know what you're saying son, and I ain't listening. If I see you hitch up your britches to leave I'll string you up by your balls. If you've got any.'
The bastard would try it too, thought Davidson, even if he only had one hand to do it with. Just go with the flow, he told himself, trying to stop his lip curling. If Packard went out to find the monsters and his damn bazooka backfired, that was his business. Let it be.
'There's a whole tribe of them,' Lou was quietly pointing out. 'According to this man. So how do we take out so many of them?'
'Strategy,' said Packard.
'We don't know their positions.'
'Surveillance,' replied Packard.
'They could really fuck us up Sheriff,' Jebediah observed, picking a collapsed gum-bubble from his moustache.
'This is our territory,' said Eleanor. 'We got it: we keep it.'
Jebediah nodded.
'Yes, ma,' he said.
'Suppose they just disappeared? Suppose we can't find them no more?' Lou was arguing. 'Couldn't we just let ‘em go to ground?'
'Sure,' said Packard. 'And then we're left waiting around for them to come out again and devour the women folk.'
'Maybe they mean no harm —' Lou replied.
Packard's reply was to raise his bandaged hand.
'They done me harm.'
That was incontestable.
Packard continued, his voice hoarse with feeling.
'Shit, I want them come-bags so bad I'm going out there with or without help. But we've got to out-think them, out manoeuvre them, so we don't get anybody hurt.'
The man talks some sense, thought Davidson. Indeed, the whole room seemed impressed. Murmurs of approval all round; even from the mantelpiece.
Packard rounded on the deputy again.
'You get your ass moving, son. I want you to call up that bastard Crumb out of Caution and get his boys down here with every goddam gun and grenade they've got. And if he asks what for you tell him Sheriff Packard's declaring a State of Emergency, and I'm requisitioning every asshole weapon in fifty miles, and the man on the other end of it. Move it, son.'
Now the room was positively glowing with admiration, and Packard knew it.
'We'll blow the fuckers apart,' he said.
For a moment the rhetoric seemed to work its magic on Davidson, and he half-believed it might be possible; then he remembered the details of the procession, tails, teeth and all, and his bravado sank without trace.
They came up to the house so quietly, not intending to creep, just so gentle with their tread nobody heard them.
Inside, Eugene's anger had subsided. He was sitting with his legs up on the table, an empty bottle of whisky in front of him. The silence in the room was so heavy it suffocated.
Aaron, his face puffed up with his father's blows, was sitting beside the window. He didn't need to look up to see them coming across the sand towards the house, their approach sounded in his veins. His bruised face wanted to light up with a smile of welcome, but he repressed the instinct and simply waited, slumped in beaten resignation, until they were almost upon the house. Only when their massive bodies blocked out the sunlight through the window did he stand up. The boy's movement woke Eugene from his trance.
'What is it, boy?'
The child had backed off from the window, and was standing in the middle of the room, sobbing quietly with anticipation. His tiny hands were spread like sun-rays, his fingers jittering and twitching in his excitement.
'What's wrong with the window, boy?'
Aaron heard one of his true father's voices eclipse Eugene's mumblings. Like a dog eager to greet his master after a long separation, the boy ran to the door and tried to claw it open. It was locked and bolted.
'What's that noise, boy?'
Eugene pushed his son aside and fumbled with the key in the lock, while Aaron's father called to his child through the door. His voice sounded like a rush of water, counter pointed by soft, piping sighs. It was an eager voice, a loving voice.
All at once, Eugene seemed to understand. He took hold of the boy's hair and hauled him away from the door.
Aaron squealed with pain.
'Papa!' he yelled.
Eugene took the cry as addressed to himself, but Aaron's true father also heard the boy's voice. His answering call was threaded with piercing notes of concern.
Outside the house Lucy had heard the exchange of voices. She came out of the protection of her shack, knowing what she'd see against that sheening sky, but no less dizzied by the monumental creatures that had gathered on every side of the house. An anguish went through her, remembering the lost joys of that day six years previous. They were all there, the unforgettable creatures, an incredible selection of forms—Pyramidal heads on rose coloured, classically proportioned torsos, that umbrellaed into shifting skirts of lace flesh. A
