'Hey!' the boy's voice said. 'Where is he? You see him, Davidson?' Davidson shook his head. Then —'Wait! Wait! I see a light — look, straight ahead awhile.'
'I see it.'
With exaggerated caution, Eugene motioned Davidson back into the driver's seat.
'Drive, boy. But slowly. And no lights.'
Davidson nodded. More jelly-fish for the spiking, he thought; they were going to get the bastards after all, and wasn't that worth a little risk? The convoy started up again, creeping forward at a snail's pace.
Lucy began to run once more: she could see the tiny figure of Aaron now, standing on the lip of a slope that led under the sand. The cars were moving towards it.
Seeing them approaching, Aaron stopped his calls and began to walk away, back down the slope. There was no need to wait any longer, they were following for certain. His naked feet made scarcely a mark in the soft- sanded incline that led away from the idiocies of the world. In the shadows of the earth at the end of that slope, fluttering and smiling at him, he could see his family.
'He's going in,' said Davidson.
'Then follow the little bastard,' said Eugene. 'Maybe the kid doesn't know what he's doing. And get some light on him.'
The headlights illuminated Aaron. His clothes were in tatters, and his body was slumped with exhaustion as he walked.
A few yards off to the right of the slope Lucy watched as the lead car drove over the lip of the earth and followed the boy down, into—'No,' she said to herself, 'don't.'
Davidson was suddenly scared. He began to slow the car.
'Get on with it, boy.' Eugene jabbed the rifle into his crotch again. 'We've got them cornered. We've got a whole nest of them here. The boy's leading us right to them.'
The cars were all on the slope now, following the leader, their wheels slipping in the sand.
Aaron turned. Behind him, illuminated only by the phosphorescence of their own matter, the demons stood; a mass of impossible geometries. All the attributes of Lucifer were spread among the bodies of the fathers. The extraordinary anatomies, the dreaming spires of heads, the scales, the skirts, the claws, the clippers.
Eugene brought the convoy to a halt, got out of the car and began to walk towards Aaron.
'Thank you boy,' he said. 'Come here — we'll look after you now. We've got them. You're safe.'
Aaron stared at his father, uncomprehending.
The army was disgorging from the cars behind Eugene, readying their weapons. A bazooka was being hurriedly assembled; a cocking of rifles, a weighing-up of grenades.
'Come to Papa, boy,' Eugene coaxed.
Aaron didn't move, so Eugene followed him a few yards deeper into the ground. Davidson was out of the car now, shaking from head to foot.
'Maybe you should put down the rifle. Maybe he's scared,' he suggested.
Eugene grunted, and let the muzzle of the rifle drop a few inches.
'You're safe,' said Davidson. 'It's all right.'
'Walk towards us, boy. Slowly.'
Aaron's face began to flush. Even in the deceptive light of the headlamps it was clearly changing colour. His cheeks were blowing up like balloons, and the skin on his forehead was wriggling as though his flesh was full of maggots. His head seemed to liquefy, to become a soup of shapes, shifting and blossoming like a cloud, the façade of boyhood broken as the father inside the son showed its vast and unimaginable face.
Even as Aaron became his father's son, the slope began to soften. Davidson felt it first: a slight shift in the texture of the sand, as though an order had passed through it, subtle but all-pervasive.
Eugene could only gape as Aaron's transformation continued, his entire body now overtaken by the tremors of change. His belly had become distended and a harvest of cones budded from it, which even now flowered into dozens of coiled legs; the change was marvellous in its complexity, as out of the cradle of the boy's substance came new glories.
Without warning Eugene raised his rifle and fired at his son.
The bullet struck the boy-demon in the middle of his face. Aaron fell back, his transformation still taking its course even as his blood, a stream part scarlet, part silver, ran from his wound into the liquefying earth.
The geometries in the darkness moved out of hiding to help the child. The intricacy of their forms was simplified in the glare of the headlamps but they seemed, even as they appeared, to be changing again: bodies becoming thin in their grief, a whine of mourning like a solid wall of sound from their hearts.
Eugene raised his rifle a second time, whooping at his victory. He had them... My God, he had them. Dirty, stinking, faceless flickers.
But the mud beneath his feet was like warm treacle as it rose around his shins, and when he fired he lost balance. He yelled for assistance, but Davidson was already staggering back up the slope out of the gully fighting a losing battle against the rising mire. The rest of the army were similarly trapped, as the desert liquefied beneath them, and glutinous mud began to creep up the slope.
The demons had gone: retreated into the dark, their lament sunk away.
Eugene, flat on his back in the sinking sand, fired off two useless, vehement shots into the darkness beyond Aaron's corpse. He was kicking like a hog with its throat cut, and with every kick his body sunk deeper. As his face disappeared beneath the mud, he just glimpsed Lucy, standing at the edge of the slope, staring down towards Aaron's body. Then the mire covered his face, and blotted him out.
The desert was upon them with lightning speed.
One or two of the cars were already entirely submerged, and the tide of sand climbing the slope was relentlessly catching up with the escapees. Feeble cries for assistance ended with choking silences as mouths were filled with desert; somebody was shooting at the ground in an hysterical attempt to dam the flow, but it reached up swiftly to snatch every last one of them. Even Eleanor Kooker wasn't to be let free: she struggled, cursing and pressing the thrashing body of a cop deeper into the sand in her frantic attempts to step out of the gully.
There were universal howls now, as panicking men groped and grasped at each other for support, desperately trying to keep their heads afloat in the sea of sand.
Davidson was buried up to his waist. The ground that eddied about his lower half was hot and curiously inviting. The intimacy of its pressure had given him an erection. A few yards behind him a cop was screaming blue murder as the desert ate him up. Further still from him he could see a face peering out from the seething ground like a living mask thrown on the earth. There was an arm close by, still waving, as it sank; a pair of fat buttocks was poking up from the silt sea like two watermelons, a policeman's farewell.
Lucy took one step backwards as the mud slightly overran the lip of the gully, but it didn't reach her feet. Nor, curiously, did it dissipate itself, as a water-wave might have done.
Like concrete, it hardened, fixing its living trophies like flies in amber. From the lips of every face that still took air came a fresh cry of terror, as they felt the desert floor stiffen around their struggling limbs.
Davidson saw Eleanor Kooker, buried to breast-level. Tears were pouring down her cheeks; she was sobbing like a little girl. He scarcely thought of himself. Of the East, of Barbara, of the children, he thought not at all.
The men whose faces were buried but whose limbs, or parts of bodies, still broke surface, were dead of asphyxiation by now. Only Eleanor Kooker, Davidson and two other men survived. One was locked in the earth up to his chin, Eleanor was buried so that her breasts sat on the ground, her arms were free to beat uselessly at the ground that held her fast. Davidson himself was held from his hips down. And most horribly, one pathetic victim was seen only by his nose and mouth. His head was tipped back into the ground, blinded by rock. Still he breathed, still he screamed.
Eleanor Kooker was scrabbling at the ground with torn nails, but this was not loose sand. It was immovable.
'Get help,' she demanded of Lucy, hands bleeding.
The two women stared at each other.
'Jesus God!' screamed the Mouth.
