They had emerged from the swamp and were passing through a stretch of slightly drier ground where the foliage was thinner, when they saw the fire. It was impossible to tell how large it was, or how far away. All of them were tired now, but seeing the flames through the skeletal forms of the trees, and with an objective at last in sight, they broke into a run, though not without a certain wariness lest the blaze prove so large they be forced to turn and flee.
They ran with a new urgency as it became more apparent, the nearer they drew to it, that the fire had been man-made. And suddenly they were running over rocks and debris, the forest had fallen away, and they found themselves facing a wall of leaping flames as tall as they were, and waves of scorching heat, and blinding smoke that blotted out the sky. And beyond the flames, like a great dark presence at the end of a dream, stood the hill.
It rose black and obscene in the moonlight, thrusting itself above the tops of the dwarfed trees like some huge squatting animal, its great humped back furred with clumps of vegetation. Freirs, racing up behind the others, saw them silhouetted against the fire at its base as they stumbled into the clearing with arms or weapons raised, and heard the screams of those who'd blundered too close to the flames. And above the screams a roaring split the night, and a buzzing as of insects, as loud as all the insects in the world; and the roaring came from all around them, from the land and the trees and the darkness itself, but the buzzing came only from the hill.
Beneath the sound he heard a higher, rhythmic cry, the moaning of a woman in pain.
'Carol!'
She was somewhere above him on the hill. Freirs pushed through the crowd of men and hurried forward, but the heat was too intense; he fell back wincing with pain, gasping, eyes smarting.
'She's up there!' He was shouting to anyone who could hear him over the deafening noise. No one turned. Several dim figures were poking feebly at the fire with pitchforks, keeping well back from the flames. He reached for the man who was closest, grabbing him roughly by the shoulder.
'We've got to reach her!'
The other turned, face glowing redly in the firelight, the eyes wide and frightened as a rabbit's, and Freirs saw that it was the leathery old farmer who'd given him a ride from town; he didn't even know the man's name. The farmer shook his head, said something unintelligible, pointed to his ear. He can't hear me, Freirs realized. And he doesn't hear Carol.
Freirs shielded his eyes and looked for the others. Amid the smoke they seemed a crowd of milling shadows, their figures black against the flames, blurred and distorted by the rising waves of heat. None of them seemed to hear.
The moaning came again.
She was just behind the wall of fire, he was sure of it; she sounded almost close enough to touch. And she was hurt, hurt badly; he could hear it in her voice. In despair he stared down at his body, with the fleeting realization that, for all its weight, it was a fragile and sensitive thing, easily pained, easy to damage irreparably, and knowing nonetheless that someone was going to have to do it, someone had to go. Fate, it seemed, had painted him into a corner; he had no choice. Throwing his left arm before his face and brandishing the sickle as if the flames were a curtain he could slice through, he thought of Carol as he wanted to remember her, so sweetly, trustingly naked that evening on the couch in her apartment, and leaped.
And as he did so, just as his feet left the ground, a final thought struck him: what if this was not a wall of fire? What if it was thicker than a wall, or had no end at all? What if He felt his feet drag against timber stacked too high for him to clear, felt some of it give way as he crashed through. He was suddenly surrounded by flames. They licked at his legs and his feet, and he screamed and kicked out as his skin burned beneath his shoes and clothing, his lungs were bursting from the heat, he was breathing fire
… and then he had passed through, he had tumbled among the rocks at the base of the hill and was dragging himself weakly to safety. Clutching the sickle, he staggered to his aching feet and looked up.
The world was a blur, a roaring, earsplitting blur aglow with flame. In its wavering red light he saw the huge mound looming blackly overhead, throbbing as if it were alive, with steady even beats that shook the ground like thunder; he saw the crude truncated pyramid of boulders piled against its sloping side; he saw the narrow ledge some ten feet above him to his left, midway up the rockpile, with a figure that must be Carol still moaning, lying up there on her back so that he could see a pale slice of her body – a leg, an arm, an edge of naked breast – in a travesty of the way he'd just remembered her; and he saw the slender white form, supple as a milk snake, that curled over her in an arch no human should have made, a white rainbow of flesh with ends at Carol's head and feet. This final figure looked barely human; an emaciated naked man, perhaps, with an abnormally elongated body and a shaved head…
He was no longer sure what he was seeing. Shapes were indistinct without his glasses, and the figures on the ledge seemed far away. He was sure the serpentine figure was a man, but he couldn't tell just where the face might be, or how a man could stretch like that, or what was happening to Carol; for all Freirs could see, the two might be enacting some strange solemn theorem of geometry. He noticed now that, in two places, slim white sticklike shapes hung down beneath the man's arched form like twin supports, pointing toward Carol's horizontal body, which now seemed to struggle and heave, her cries rising in pitch. Frantically he hauled himself up onto one of the lower boulders and climbed higher, drawing several yards closer to the level of the pair, and discerned at last the strips of black and white cloth binding Carol's wrists and ankles. He saw the sticks for what they were and realized, with a shock of disbelief, that what he was seeing was a rape.
But the rapist's head and face, he saw now, were not where he'd expected to find them: the act occurring up there on the rocks was a reverse one, a living yin and yang, a mystical obscenity as smooth as a symbol of the zodiac. The white rod of the man's sex, a long, preternaturally thin phallus, exaggerated like the things the satyrs bore in old pagan images, hovered expectantly above the girl's mouth, a mouth still open wide and moaning, while from the rapist's own mouth hung what Freirs at first took, crazily, for a long pale twisted horn, an instrument of bone or wood, but which he now perceived was a living appendage that curled and quested toward her open legs like a great blind worm, prodding them softly and irregularly with its tip. There was a tiger stripe across one thigh; he saw, as he climbed closer, that her legs had been painted at their juncture with a black design of two concentric rings.
Suddenly, like some hungry predator that's sensed the prey at last, the appendage stiffened with a life of its own, stretched taut, and seemed to bury itself deeper between her legs. The girl's struggles ceased, and at the same moment her cries were silenced as the man's sex slipped between her lips.
With the touch of these two organs it was as if a circuit had been forged, a switch thrown, the completion of a white circle there upon the altar, body linked to body, end to end, a double serpent swallowing its tail. Carol's body jerked as if touched with electricity, a great flash of red fire glowed up and down the length of the hill, and with it came the sound of the rending of earth.
Clinging to the trembling rock, Freirs craned his neck, squinted upward through the smoke, and gasped. A crack had appeared in the dark slope above him. The hill was beginning to open. Inside, fires glowed a molten red, smoke belched forth into the night, and he could see, dimly within, a great bunched shape begin to stir, coiling and uncoiling, like a giant worm curled within an apple.