His power over the household has been deeply shaken by the events of the last weeks. It is the old woman who rules. It was her magic that saved the boy’s life - this is what she tells him - and his foolish trust, and the young woman’s pity, that exposed them all to destruction. The boy is, after all, his only grandson. When he watches him no it is with a quickened sense of how vulnerable the child is, how vulnerable he is, to extinction, and with some realization also of how little his strength of arms can do, and did do, at the moment of crisis. It is as if the old woman had found a way at last of poisoning his spirit, of stealing back the male strength she once gave him and which all these years has been the source of his ascendancy over her. There are moments when he seems almost like a child in her presence. One recognizes in the old woman’s face real hostility, a new sense of triumph. The house is filled with the glow of her magic, the smell of her herbs, her potions and the endless doddering syllables of her prayers.
At the first full moon she will sacrifice in the women’s grove outside the village, in thanksgiving for the boy’s life. Ryzak goes out alone to bring back the victim, a wild puppy, whose entrails will be burned on an altar of turf and offered up to the triple Hecate. The boy begs to go with him but is refused. The puppy will be taken from among the wild dogs, part mongrel, part wolf, that roams in packs through the undergrowth beyond the village and are, on occasion, since they are also sacred, fed scraps from the parapets. Lean, gray-black creatures, all ribs, they fight, tumbling in heaps over their strips of meat and rancid fat, then slink into the brush. Ryzak returns with the puppy in a little wicker basket, and for ten days, until the full moon, it whimpers in a corner of the room, and is a source of real agony to the Child. Waking in the dark, to hear the soft crying, I have thought it was the Child himself, and finding him crouched over the basket in the dark, answering the animal’s cries with little high-pitched whinings of his own, have had the greatest difficulty drawing him back to his pallet. And all the time I was aware of the old woman, sitting bolt upright in her corner, watching, and have imagined her invisible smile.
Does the Child know what is intended? Has she had the small creature brought here deliberately, and early, to establish this communication between them, the Child and her animal victim? Is the ceremony she is preparing less an offering of thanks for the life of the boy than an exorcism of the Child? As the time approaches the Child becomes more and more agitated and I fear he may relapse into his fever. The merest sound from the puppy sets him trembling now, and if I restrain him from going to the basket he will answer the creature from a distance, reproducing absolutely the whole range and pitch of its whinings, and the old woman laughs outright, her savage, crow like caw. Does the animal sense what is to occur? Does he communicate it to the Child? Or is it simply the presence in the room at last of some kindred spirit, something other than our human presence, that disturbs him? Or some new realization, in the animal’s distress, of his own loss of freedom? Or is it, night after night, the growing brightness of the moon? For nearly a week now the weather has been clear, and we sleep with the windows unbarred and the moon’s light upon the room, picking out its familiar objects with a ghostly blueness, which is the moonlight striking off snow, and making thick, almost palpable shadows.
At last the night arrives. The two women go out just after the rising of the moon, taking the boy, and Ryzak carries the basket as far as the courtyard gate, then climbs the ladder again and suggests one of our games with the tablet and pegs. From the window I watch the old woman’s party pass along the narrow lane, gathering adherents as it goes. All the women of the village will assemble at last in the grove. No man is permitted to see their rites. These are the offices of the moon, and belong to the world of women’s power and women’s worship, that are older, more mysterious, than the world of men. Ryzak, as we play, seems oddly ill at ease and I actually win a game. When the women come back they are silent, still wrapped in whatever power it is that the moon has over them, plucking as it does monthly at the tides of their bodies, swelling in them, waning, brooding over the darkness and transmuting all those things that we know by daylight in its softer, vaguer light. Almost immediately, without speaking, Ryzak retires to his pallet. Their silence oppresses him. The Child, who has made no move since the puppy was taken from the room, sits hunched in his corner, deep in one of his body trances, and refuses to sleep. I am aware all night of a strangeness that is upon us, a change, that may be simply the full moon, but seems rather to emanate from the Child’s dreamlike wakefulness, or the old woman’s, since all night she sits with her eyes wide open, unseeing, and the moon full upon her, taking its power deep into her and uttering, occasionally, great sighs, as if some stronger creature were breathing regularly through her.
In the morning, there is a stranger, harsher breathing in the room.
Ryzak has been stricken overnight with some illness, which is not the same illness the children had. His body buckles and heaves in violent paroxysms, is wrenched, drained, flooded; and when the old woman examines him there is just the mark she expected to find, a half-circle of small teeth marks on his wrist, almost healed now - the wound through which the beast has entered. She utters a piercing shriek, throws her hands in the air, and immediately beings wailing for the dead. This is what her rites of last evening were intended to avert. They have failed. It wasn’t the boy after all who was under threat, but the old man. The boy’s illness was a diversion. Now truly, she discovers, the Child has worked his evil upon them.
The animal spirit has deserted him at last and entered the old man, from whose lips come flecks of white like the foam on a horse that has been ridden too hard. The savage, animal like growls and roarings that burst from him make the hair stand on end, as hour after hour he writhes, and there bubbles in his throat a low grumbling that is like nothing I have ever heard before, and seems centuries from human speech. Between these passages of frenzy, he stiffens, all his limbs straining against the breaking out through him of whatever beast it is that is coming to birth in him, seeking its four hairy limbs, its fanged snout, its jaws clenched on the raw flesh of things. The end is inevitable, and obviously so from the first moment of the evil’s appearance. Even I see that. It is like a nightmare, as if we had all suddenly been swept up into his body’s drama, into the terrible process of it, the transfusion of his human energy into its animal form. The nightmare has its own momentum and takes us with it as if we were all participants suddenly in the same dream, waking together in our sleep to discover that the room had become a cage, and the air itself was an animal agency whose breath we shared, whose stench was ours, whose growls were our own choking attempt to cry out and shock ourselves awake. The shaman is sent for. But even he admits defeat. One look at the gray, wolf like face of the old man and he starts back in horror, shakes his head, flees with his magic before it too is contaminated.
It is all so sudden, so complete, we remain stunned, unable to shake ourselves back to reality. For five days the noise is ceaseless. The old man’s spirit wrestles and writhes, his strength seems inexhaustible. When the young woman tries to wet his lips with water, a terrible choking comes from him, as if some new form of speech were trying to burst out at his lips. All the muscles of his throat contract to make the new sound, but nothing comes forth. It is, the old woman screams, an animal attempting to speak its name - the unknown monster who all these years has suckled the Child, and has now left him and is bringing itself to birth again in the old man. At last on the fifth day he falls quiet, and the sudden stillness after all those hours of frenzy is terrifying. We hold our breath.