"Entrails."
"End tails!"
"All right, have it your way. End tails."
"I want you to leave him up there."
During this brief exchange, Eppstadt's gaze had been drawn to the goat-boy's left foot. The nail of his middle toe had not been clipped (he guessed) since birth. Now it looked more like a claw than a nail. It was six, perhaps seven, inches long, and stained dark brown.
"Who the hell are you talking to?" Joe yelled down from the top of the ladder. The density of the foliage made it impossible for him to see the goat-boy.
"Apparently he's up there as a punishment, Joe. Better leave him there."
"Who told you that?"
Joe came down the ladder far enough to have sight of the goat-boy. "That?"
The boy bared his teeth at Joe. A dribble of dark saliva came from the corner of his mouth and ran down onto his chest.
"I really think we should just get going . . ." Eppstadt said.
"Not until this poor sonofabitch is down from here," Joe said, returning up the ladder. "Fucking freak."
"This isn't our business, Joe," Eppstadt said. There was something about the way the air was roiling around them; something about the way the clouds churned overhead, covering the already depleted light of the sun, that made Eppstadt fearful that something of real consequence was in the offing. He didn't know what this place was, or how it was created; nor, at that moment, did he care. He just wanted to be out through the door and upstairs again.
"Help me!" Joe yelled to him.
Eppstadt went to the bottom of the ladder and peered up. The crucified man had dropped forward over Joe's broad shoulder. Even in his semi-comatose state he could still beg for some show of compassion. "Please . . ." he murmured. "I meant no offense . . ."
"He wouldn't fuck my mother," said the goat-boy, by way of explanation for this atrocity. He was just a foot or two behind Eppstadt, staring up at Joe and the man he was attempting to save. He turned briefly; surveyed the sky. The wind was getting gusty again, slamming the door and then throwing it open.
"She's coming," the goat-boy said. "Smell that bitterness in the air?"
Eppstadt could indeed smell something; strong enough to make his eyes water.
"That's her," the goat-boy said. "That's Lilith. She's bitter like that. Even her milk." He made an ugly face. "It used to make me puke. And me? I love to suckle. I love it." He was getting hard again, talking himself into a fine little fever. He put his thumb in his mouth, and pulled hard on it, making a loud noise as he did so. He was every inch an irritating little child, excepting those inches where he was indisputably a man.
"I'd put him back if I were you," he said, pushing past Eppstadt to stand at the bottom of the ladder.
Eppstadt's gaze returned to the heavens. The sky was the color of cold iron, and the bitterness the child had said was his mother's stench was getting stronger with every gust of the cold wind. Eppstadt looked off into the distance, to see if there was any sign of an arrivee on the winding roads. But they were almost deserted. The only person on any of the roads right now was a man some two or three miles away, who was lying sprawled, his head against a stone. Eppstadt had no logical reason to believe this, but he was somehow certain the man was dead, his brains spattered on the stone where he laid his head.
Otherwise, the landscape was empty of human occupants.
There were plenty of birds in the air, struggling against the increasingly violent gusts to reach the safety of their roosts; and small animals, rabbits and the like, scampering through the whipping grass to find some place of safety. Eppstadt was no nature-boy, but he knew enough to be certain that when rabbits were making for their bolt-holes, it was time for human beings to get out of harm's way.
"We've got to go," he said to Joe. "You've done all you can."
"Not yet!" Joe yelled. The wind was strong enough to make even the heavy branches of the tree sway. Dead leaves were shaken down all around.
"For God's sake, Joe. What the fuck is wrong with you?"
He took a step up the ladder and caught hold of Joe's belt. Then he tugged. "You're coming, or I'm going without you."
"Then go—" Joe began to say. He didn't finish because at that instant the ladder, which was presently bearing the weight of Eppstadt, Joe the Samaritan, and the crucified man, broke.
Eppstadt was closest to the ground, so he sustained the least damage. He simply fell back on the sharp stones in which the copse and its briar thicket were rooted. He scrambled to his feet to find out what had happened to the other two men. Both had fallen among the thorns, the crucified man spread-eagled on top of Joe. Only now were the man's wounds fully displayed. Besides the peckings around his eyes, there were far deeper wounds—certainly not made by birds—in his chest. Somebody had had some fun with him before he was nailed up there, cutting star-patterns around his nipples.
Joe struggled to get himself out from under the man, but his flailing only served to catch him in the thorns.
"Help me," he said, throwing his hand back over his head toward Eppstadt. "Quickly. I'm being pricked to death here!"
Eppstadt approached the thicket and was about to take hold of Joe's hand when two of the largest wounds on the crucified man's chest gaped, and the flat black heads of two snakes, each ten times the size of the serpent that had slipped out of his throat, pressed their blood-soaked snouts out of the layers of flesh and yellow fat, and came slithering out of his torso. One of them trailed a multitude of what Eppstadt took to be eggs, suspended in a jellied mass of semi-translucent phlegm.
Eppstadt stepped away from the thicket, and from Joe. The serpents crisscrossed as they emerged, their beady white eyes seeking out some new warm place to nest.
"Are you going to help me or not?" Joe said.
Eppstadt simply shook his head.
"Eppstadt!" Joe wept. "For God's sake get me out."
Eppstadt had no intention of getting any closer to the snakes than he already was: but the goat-boy had no such scruples. He pushed past Eppstadt and grabbed hold of Joe's outstretched hand. His strength, like his member, was out of all proportion to his size. One good haul, and he had Joe halfway freed from the thorn bushes. Joe screamed as his back was scored by the thorns, which had been pressed deep into his flesh by the weight of the man on top of him.
"Ah now, shut up!" the goat-boy yelled over Joe's complaints. Hanging out of the thicket, poor Joe looked half-dead. The pain had made him vomit, and it was running from the side of his mouth. His demands had become pitiful sobs in the space of a few seconds. Horrified though he was—and guilty too (he'd come down here to help Joe; and now look at him)—Eppstadt still couldn't bring himself to intervene. Not with the snakes raising their heads from the body in which they'd nested, still eager for another victim.
Ignoring Joe's weak protests, the goat-boy pulled on him a second time, and then a third, which was the charm. Joe fell free of the thicket, landing heavily on his pierced back. Sheer agony lent him the strength to throw himself over onto his stomach. His back was nearly naked; the violence of the goat-boy's haulings had torn open his shirt. He lay face down in the dirt, retching again.
"That'll teach you," the goat-boy said. "Playing with crinimals! You should get some of your own!"
While he was addressing Joe in this witless fashion, Eppstadt chanced to look up at the man still sprawled on the bed of thorns. The two snakes had slithered over his chest and were now entwined around his neck. He was too close to death to even register this last assault. He simply lay there, eyelids fluttering over sightless eyes, while the life was throttled out of him.