And darkness all around him.
'Looks like he's woke up.'
Sounds of footsteps.
'Son, listen to me.' Someone was standing above him. 'Listen, you've got to tell us-'
'His name's Freirs. Jeremiah Freirs.'
'No -' another voice' – it's Jeremy.'
Someone was shaking him. 'Listen… Jeremy. Tell us what's happened here. Where's Sarr Poroth?'
'Sarr?' He sat up, rubbed his eyes, searched in vain for his glasses. 'Ask-' He looked around him in the darkness, gripped by a sudden panic. 'Where's Carol?'
'Carol?'
'That's that girl o' his,' he heard someone say. "Twas her car we saw in the drive.' Rupert Lindt, it sounded like. But then another voice, much louder, demanded, 'What's she gone and done with Brother Sarr?'
He was confused. 'You mean – ' he stammered, 'you mean the Poroths still aren't back?'
'Deborah's dead, son,' said Matt Geisel.
And over the sound the earth was making, punctuated by tremors whose effects came more regularly now, they told him of the old man's death, and the body in the smokehouse, and the wasps.
'Rosie,' whispered Freirs, 'Deborah… ' He shook his head. It wasn't real, none of it, they were lying to him, and as soon as he found his glasses he would show them they were wrong. The world was a dark place, blurred and confusing. He felt the ground tremble. 'I don't know what's happened,' he said, raising his voice to compete with a rumbling that had grown progressively more insistent. 'All I know is I'm worried about the girl who came out here yesterday. We've got to find her.'
He heard someone cry out and saw the others turn to look. Behind them one of the men was pointing into the darkness, where several small grey shapes were racing madly round the lawn in endless circles.
'The cats!' said Geisel. 'My Lord, just look at 'em, they're chasin' one another's tails… '
Freirs remembered the Uroborus, the dragon with its tail gripped in its teeth. A full circle, that's what it signaled. Completion. The rolling year come round again to this most special day…
'What we ought to do,' one of them was saying, 'is try Shem Fenchel's dogs. I hear they're real good trackers.'
'We should head back to the trucks,' said someone else, 'and split up when we get to town.' They began moving back toward the road.
In the east, like a great cyclopean beast lifting its huge head, the moon rose majestically above the treetops, casting long gigantic shadows across the lawn. It was full tonight, the second full moon of the month, and very bright. To Freirs, without his glasses, there seemed something new in its face, something baleful and malign. Yet at its rising he felt a surge of sudden, unlikely hope: maybe in the moonlight they would be able to search for Carol… like those searchers in the moonlight, on the two other nights, for the two other girls. The memory flooded back to him.
'Bloodhounds,' another was saying, as they drifted off, 'that's what we need. We ought to go back to town and get those two pups
Jacob's son's been raisin' out behind his house-'
'Wait,' Freirs called after them. 'Listen to me!' He stumbled to his feet.
The men paused, turned to face him. 'What is it?' came a voice.
'I know where they are.'
Several figures left the group and approached him in the darkness. 'Yeah?' said one. 'Where's that?'
He nodded toward the woods. 'McKinney's Neck.'
The night has deepened and the sky has turned a velvet black when the thing on the hillside finishes its song. Tiny crow's-feet of blood mark the corners of its mouth where, stretched taut by widening jaws, the skin has torn like old paper. Beneath its feet the land is shaking rhythmically now, throwing up small clouds of dust, as if the entire world, wilderness and cities and seas, were echoing to an immense heartbeat.
Poised naked on a rock above the altar, it lifts its face to the sky. It spreads its arms like angel wings and dances like a serpent in the moonlight. It spins, leaps, crouches, stands, spits blood into its mutilated hands. It gestures toward the earth.
It speaks the final Name.
Around it birds fall to the ground and crawl among the rocks like lizards. They open their razor beaks, and the air is filled with a great roaring.
Spiderlike it turns and clambers down the wall of boulders, pointing its face toward the woman.
Miles to the south, the farmhouse stands trembling in the moonlight. Beneath its darkened windows, one by one, the roses in the garden lift their heads, point their faces toward the moon, and open wide their secret mouths; while in the night sky overhead, one by one, the stars come out of hiding.
It is Lammas Eve.
They ran noisily through the woods, crashing through the underbrush like a pack of dogs, dodging brambles and tree trunks, a few of the men in the rear armed with weapons they'd seized from the Poroths' barn – pitchforks, a rake, a long-handled axe with a smeared, discolored blade – mumbling snatches of prayer as they ran and shouting directions and encouragement to one another.
Freirs followed blindly behind them, relying mainly on sound, able to see only dimly without his glasses and still unsteady on his feet. In his right hand he gripped the sickle that he'd lifted from the wall of the barn, holding it before him as he stumbled forward through the darkness, trying to block the invisible branches that snapped painfully at his face. Amid the shouting and confusion he remembered how, at last Sunday's worship, the sickle had been blessed in the Cleansing; maybe it would bring him luck tonight.
They had charged heedlessly over the stream, all of them but Lindt who was hurt and Geisel who was old and Freirs who was sightless; these three had picked their way more slowly, fearful of losing their footing. Freirs had been the last. As he stumbled across, the air ringing with shouts and splashing and the subterranean rumbling that still hadn't ceased, he was sure that he'd heard singing behind him, a thin unearthly wailing, rising from the direction of the farmhouse. He had felt, in that sound, dark heads turn and tiny mouths gape wide, and he'd thought automatically, the cats but he'd shuddered, for the voices he'd heard hadn't sounded like cats, or anything that crept upon the earth. He heard them no longer, but he couldn't get them out of his mind. Just the cats, he told himself, and hurried on.
They were well past the stream now, heading north through the swampy sections of the woods, where their progress was slowed as their feet were sucked down by the mud. Yet even here the ground was quivering as if alive, and below it thunder rolled, as if echoing from caverns deep within the earth.
There were other voices too, filling the darkness with sound. Occasionally he could hear the weird night cries of woodland creatures and, far off, a low, indistinct roaring as from a thousand animal throats; and once a great pale round shape had come hurtling toward them out of a clump of bushes like some boulder come to life, squealing in terror.
'Brother Galen,' someone had called, "twas one o' your hogs.'
And there was still another sound now, far in the distance, a vast and wrathful buzzing. It was like the warning growl that cats make just before they strike, only amplified a million times, or like the buzzing of a million bees.
Panting, Freirs pushed onward, desperate to keep up with the others and afraid of losing them in the darkness. The sporadic shafts of moonlight illuminating the spaces between the trees were of little help and only confused him, like panels in a hall of mirrors. Branches seemed to reach out toward him, as if to hold him back. Thorns and brambles tore at him as he passed. Once, at the edge of the swamp, he tripped over a root and fell headlong in the mud, nearly losing the sickle. Floundering to his feet, he stumbled onward. The roaring was all around him now, rising and falling in time with the beating of the earth, and the buzzing had grown louder.