Odd. They all had died that year. Some sort of disaster, maybe. Plague, flood, famine in the land.
His eyes closed. Sunlight beat against the lids, while blades of grass brushed his cheek. For a moment he had a vision of long-lost souls with funnily spelled names.
Just as sleep claimed him, he recalled something else that had been odd: they had left out the death year for the one called Absolom. Idly, in a final thought, he wondered what it meant.
Maybe Absolom had simply died the same year he was born. Poor kid, he thought, and slept.
Wind sweeps in gusts across the Hudson, carrying the scent of oil from the Jersey shore: oil, and a burning, and the strange sweet far-off scent of roses.
No one has noticed – no one but the plump little figure perched unobtrusively at the end of the bench, a battered old umbrella by his side. No one else is watching; no one would understand. No one sees the patterns in the water, or smells the corruption beneath the flower scent, or hears the secret sound the grass makes when the wind dies.
Once more the air grows still. Small green moths flit among the weeds; hornets buzz thirstily around a barrel of refuse. No one could guess what is happening. The river rolls past the park, unobserved; the planet rolls through space, unsuspecting; the Old One's squat black shadow lengthens on the bench.
In the shadow, shielded from the afternoon sun, a baby sleeps peacefully, its tiny olive face protruding from a tight cocoon of blanket. A woman, presumably its mother, sits slumped beside it, head fallen forward, eyes sunken and shut tight, skeletal arms hanging like dead things at her sides. On the ground beneath her lies a crumpled paper bag from which the neck of a bottle emerges; the cap has long since rolled into the grass.
Except for the three figures on the bench, this area of the park is almost deserted. The only movement comes from near the trash barrel, where a pair of glossy yellowjackets rise and dip in ceaseless search for food. His face impassive, the Old One watches as one of the insects slips from sight behind the rim and falls greedily upon some rotting thing within. The other circles round the spot in ever-widening arcs until, having flown as far as the bench, it pauses above the paper bag, tiger stripes thrashing furiously beneath a blur of wings. Settling atop the bottle, it disappears inside.
Suddenly the air changes; he can feel it. Whispering the Second of Seven Names, the Old One turns his gaze toward the river, the farther shore, and the shadowy hills beyond. Strange clouds have appeared on the horizon; part two of the sequence is almost complete. He sits poised, ready, rigid with anticipation. In a moment- In a moment A small green moth flutters past his face and comes to rest on the back of his hand. Feebly its wings open and close, open… close. .. then at last fall open and lie still. All movement ceases.
At the far end of the bench the woman's head falls back as if, in a dream, she has offered her throat to the knife. A small bubble of saliva grows and bursts at her lips. Her mouth opens like a rose.
High overhead a white bird wheels erratically in its flight and falls screaming toward the Hudson.
The signs are all about him now. It is time. The Old One sings the Death Song to himself and shivers with exultation. He has been waiting more than a lifetime for this – waiting, and planning, and readying himself for what he has to do. Now the moment is at hand, and he knows that the years of preparation have not been in vain.
Above the park the sky remains a blinding blue; the sun glares mercilessly down. With a metallic gleam the second yellowjacket lifts from its feast and comes spiraling toward the woman on the bench, to hover inches from her gaping mouth. From the empty bottle the other insect rises buzzing toward the baby's face. Mother and child sleep on.
The Old One regards them silently, watching the slow rise and fall of the woman's chest, the hollow cheeks and ravaged flesh, the infant in its mindless sleep. Here it lies, in all its glory: humanity.
He has plans for it.
And now, after a century's contemplation, he is free to act; the future is clear at last. He has heard the strange, piercing cries of the white birds circling overhead. He has read the ancient words chipped into the city's blackened brick. He has seen the foulness at the edge of a young leaf, and the dark shapes that lie in wait behind the clouds. Last night as he marked the birth of May, standing in solemn observance upon the rooftop of his home, he has seen the horned moon with a star between the tips. There is nothing left to learn.
Flicking the moth from his hand, he reaches for his umbrella, stands up from the bench, and grinds the tiny body into the earth. No longer shielded from the afternoon sunlight, the baby stirs, squints, and opens its eyes. A yellowjacket settles lightly onto its cheek; the other buzzes with interest round a frantically twitching eyelid.
Bound within the blanket, the infant struggles helplessly to free its arms. The little mouth opens in a scream. Oblivious, the woman sleeps on.
The Old One stands watching for a time. Then, with a wintry smile, he turns his footsteps toward the city.
The world had darkened. A deep voice was intoning his name. Freirs jerked awake, grumpy and scared, to find his head in shadow; for a moment he didn't know where he was. A figure was standing over him, blocking out the sun.
'Jeremy Freirs?'
He managed a grunt of assent.
'I'm Sarr Poroth. My truck's down there by the road.'
The man looked as tall as the monument beside him. The sunlight at his back made him hard to see.
Still dazed, Freirs got to his feet and brushed himself off, then picked up his jacket and papers. Yawning, he rubbed his eyes behind his glasses.
'I think that bus ride knocked me out.'
Wishing he were still asleep, he followed Poroth through the rows of tombstones and down the slope toward an old dark-green pickup truck parked at the edge of the road. The Co-operative across the street was open now, he saw, with several more trucks and autos in the adjoining lot. All were as somber in color, and most of them as antiquated-looking, as the ones he'd seen earlier, like cars in old photographs. The Co-op's windows were unshuttered now, with merchandise spilling out the open door, and a balding man with glasses and a fringe of beard was busily dragging straw baskets of sponges, axe handles, rubber boots, and overalls from the doorway onto the porch. It looked like moving day. The porch ceiling was already filled, garlands of clothes-line, shiny metal farm implements, and kerosene lanterns dangling like mobiles from the hooks that had looked so ominous before. A stocky mechanic was bent beneath the raised hood of a car parked off to the side of the gas pumps; Freirs could hear the regular iron scrape of some tool he was using and, in the distance, the hum of a tractor. Sounds of civilization. He blinked in the sunlight as he followed Poroth toward the truck. His legs still felt stiff from his nap.
The screen door across the street swung wide and two young men – brothers, from the look of them, and hardly more than teenagers – emerged from the store carrying mesh bags stuffed with groceries. They couldn't have been more than high school age, yet both, like Poroth, wore beards without mustaches and dressed in black overalls over collarless white shirts, making them appear almost elderly. They had been talking together with some animation but fell silent as they saw Freirs and Poroth descending from the graveyard across the street. Poroth, ahead of him, raised his hand in greeting; they waved back. The smaller of the two glanced at Freirs in surprise but quickly looked away, following the other down the steps toward one of the parked trucks. The strangeness, a feeling almost of foreignness, lay not so much in how they dressed as in how they moved: they walked closer together than boys in Freirs' world, and without the defiant swagger most of them affected. As they climbed into their truck, giving Freirs a last subdued glance over their shoulders, he had the impression that they'd have liked to stare longer but that it would have been rude, betraying an unseemly curiosity. Such restraint was somehow unnerving; he felt like one of the first Westerners to enter Japan must have felt, being received courteously and correctly but, it was clear, by people who considered themselves superior.