He hated the idea that what he was witnessing was real; doing so violated all his logical faculties. But what was the alternative? That he'd slipped and fallen, and was now lying at the bottom of the stairs in a semi-comatose state, imagining all this? It was a pretty solution, but as he had no way of knowing whether it was true or not, his only option was to find Joe and get the hell out of here before the place began to get even crazier than it already was. The less he knew about this country—the less its grotesqueries lodged in his psyche—the happier the rest of his life would surely be.
With that thought he began a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree scanning of the landscape, calling Joe's name as he did so. His din (even his simple presence) was enough to stir life in the bushes and trees. He felt himself watched by several species of unlikely animal, their eyes huge and luminous, their postures, and in some cases the details of their physiognomies, vaguely human, as though this twilight world had witnessed all kinds of criminal couplings.
Finally, he heard a response from Joe.
"Who's there?"
"Eppstadt."
"Come over here. Quickly. You gotta help me."
He followed the sound of the man's shouting. There was a small copse ahead, and Joe had clambered a few feet into a tree by means of a crude wooden ladder which had been propped against one of the trunks.
"What the hell are you doing?" Eppstadt wanted to know.
Joe simply repeated his plea: "You gotta help me."
"There's no time, Joe," Eppstadt said. "You've got to come back with me. Right now. Christ, I sent you down to close the door. Why'd you come in?"
"For the same reason you did," Joe said. "I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Are you going to help me or not?"
Eppstadt had pressed his way into the midst of the thicket as he and Joe spoke, snagging his suit on the briars that grew in profusion here several times as he did so. The tableau that now came into view appalled him.
There was a man crucified among the higher branches of the tree Joe had climbed, the deed done with both rope and nails. Joe had already managed to remove a couple of the nails (spattering his arms and face with blood in the process) and was now pulling at the knotted rope with his teeth. He was desperate to get the man down from the tree, and he had reason. The branches around the man's head were bustling with birds, the Devil's Country's version of carrion-crows: bigger, crueler versions. They'd clearly made several assaults on the man's face already. There were deep gouges around the victim's sockets where the birds had gone after his eyes. Blood from the wounds poured down his face. He might have resembled Christ but for the brightness of his blonde hair, which fell in dirty curls to his shoulders.
"I need a stone!" Joe yelled down at Eppstadt.
"What for?"
"Just find me a fucking stone, will you?"
Eppstadt didn't like to take orders—especially from a waiter—but he saw the urgency of the situation, and did as he was asked, looking around until he laid his hands on a long, sharp stone, which he passed on up to Joe. From his perch on the ladder, Joe took aim at the closest of the carrion crows. It was a good throw. The stone struck the most ambitious of the flock—who had apparently decided to come in for the kill—and messily smashed open the bird's head, but its companions did not fly off, as Joe had hoped. They simply retreated up the tree a branch or two, squawking in fury and frustration, while the dead bird dropped from the perch.
As if awoken from a grateful sleep by the din of the birds, the crucified man raised his head, and opened his mouth. A black snake, no thicker than a baby's thumb, slid out from between his lips in a thin gruel of blood, spittle and bile. The snake dangled from the man's lower lip for a few moments, hooked by its tail. Then it fell to the ground, a foot from Eppstadt.
He stepped away in disgust, throwing a backward glance at the door, just to reassure himself that his means of escape from this insanity was still in view. It was. But the snake had changed his perspective on this mercy mission.
"The guy's on the way out," Eppstadt said to Joe. "You can't do anything for him."
"We can still get him down."
"And I'm telling you he's beyond help, Joe. Look at him."
There did indeed seem little purpose in laboring to depose the man; he was obviously close to death. His eyes had rolled back beneath fluttering eyelids, showing nothing but white. He was attempting to say something, but his mind and his tongue were beyond the complex business of speech.
"You know what?" Eppstadt said, glancing around the landscape. "This is a set-up." There were indeed dozens of hiding places for potential attackers—human or animal—within fifty yards of them: rocks, holes, thicket. "We should just get the hell out of here before whoever did this to him tries the same on us."
"Leave him, you mean?"
"Yes. Leave him."
Joe just shook his head. He had succeeded in getting this far, and wasn't going to give up now. He pulled on the rope that held the man's right hand. The arm fell free. Blood pattered on the leaves over Eppstadt's head, like a light rain.
"I'm almost done," Joe said.
"Joe, I—"
"Get ready," Joe said again, leaning across the victim's body to untie the other hand. "You're going to have to catch him," he warned Eppstadt.
"I can't do that."
"Well who else is going to do it?" Joe snapped.
Eppstadt wasn't paying attention, however.
He'd heard a noise behind him, and now he turned to find that a freakish child, naked and runty, had appeared from somewhere, and was looking up at him.
"We've got company," he said to Joe, who was still struggling to free the crucified man's other hand.
When Eppstadt looked back at the freak, it had approached a few steps, and Eppstadt had a clearer view of it. There was something goatish in the gene-pool, Eppstadt decided. The child's bandy legs were sheathed with dirty-yellow fur, and his eyes were yellow-green. From beneath the pale dome of his belly there jutted a sizable erection, which was out of all proportion to the rest of his body. He fingered it idly while he watched.
"Why are you taking the man down?" he said to Joe. Then, getting no answer from Joe, directed the same question at Eppstadt.
"He's in pain" was all Eppstadt could find to say, though the phrase scarcely seemed to match the horror of the victim's persecution.
"That's the way my mother wants him," the goat-boy said.
"Your mother?"
"Lil-ith," he said, pronouncing the word as two distinct syllables. "She is the Queen of Hell. And I am her son."
"If you're her son," Eppstadt said, playing along for time until a better way to deal with this absurdity occurred, "then it follows, yes . . . she would be your mother."
"And she had him put up there so I could see him!" the goat-boy replied, the head of his pecker echoing his own head in its infuriated nodding.
The angrier he became, the more the evidence of his extreme inbreeding surfaced. He had a hare-lip, which made his outrage harder to understand, and his nose—which was scarcely more than two gaping wet holes in his face—ran with catarrhal fluids. His teeth, when he bared them, were overlapped in half-a-dozen places, and his eyes were slightly crossed. In short, he was an abomination, the only perfect piece of anatomy he'd inherited was that monstrous member between his legs, which had lost some of its hardness now, and hung like a rubber club between his rough-haired legs.
"I'm going to tell my mother about you!" he said, stabbing a stunted forefinger in Eppstadt's direction. "That man is a crinimal."
"A crinimal?" Eppstadt said, with a supercilious smirk. The idiot-child couldn't even pronounce the word correctly.
"Yes," the goat-boy said, "and he's supposed to hang there till the birds pluck out his eyes and the dogs eat out his end tails."