Something even more morbid spidered along my awareness. “Where,” I dared to ask, “are Mary’s children? She told me she’s had eight—and expectant of a ninth—but I only witnessed one child around her property.”
Zalen huffed as he proceeded. “No women in the collective are allowed to keep all their children. They’re only allowed to keep one—their first.”
“I already know what happens to the others,” I all but choked. “But I need to know specifically.”
“Oh, do you, now?”
“You called me dense for assuming the newborns are sacrificed in an occult rite. If that’s not the case then what exactly are these things doing with all those newborns?”
“How do I know, man?” he smirked back at me. “I’m not one of them, remember? I was never allowed into the town collective—I’m considered an outcast.”
But not so much an outcast to be excluded from serving these things, I reasoned. I loathed this man—for what he was and what I’d seen him do—but I knew I mustn’t rile him. His information was too valuable, and it may well serve to help assist my escape. An escape I was determined to make with Mary…
“The babies that don’t come out right,” he went on in grave monotone, “I guess they use for food. Candace’s kid, for instance. She had it today, and it was all messed up from the horse she was shooting—I warned the bitch—but she lucked out in the end. She died while she was having it.”
“Only in a manner of speaking,” I begged to differ. “That dead girl almost killed me on the waterfront tonight.”
“Oh, so that explains the shot I heard—”
“Indeed, it does. I killed her, but she was already dead. I also saw Mr. Nowry disposing of bodies in the first cavern. He was dead in the same ambulance with Candace only hours before.”
Zalen shrugged. “They don’t do it much, only when they need extra workers—”
“You’re talking about raising the dead!” I exclaimed.
“Keep your voice down!” he sneered back at me. “And I’m talking about a lot more than that. You better pray you never have to see one of the fullbloods, but don’t be fooled. They may look primitive but they’re superior to humans in every way. And, yeah, they have some sort of reagent that can restore life to people who’ve died under certain circumstances. They’ve always had it. It’s more of that cellular stuff…”
More genetic science, I realized but my thoughts kept deflecting. I simply couldn’t get her off my mind. “How long… has Mary been part of this town collective?”
“Five years, maybe, six years. Who cares? And speaking of your precious Mary…” Zalen slowed amid the woods, and urged me westerly. Suddenly my eyes bloomed in frosty moonlight; I was looking at something I’d already seen…
Where the modest lake had earlier gleamed in sunlight, now it shimmered in the light of the moon. I glimpsed figures along the lake’s shore.
Zalen held me back behind some trees before I had chance to blunder forth. “Not a sound,” Zalen warned.
Verbosity couldn’t have been further from my mind; instead, it was witness. Several dozen women stood in a semi-circle just at the water’s edge, and I must say, this first glimpse of them made me think singularly of occultism. The late hour, the moonlight, and the location only exacerbated a namelessly sinister provocation in my mind…
The women wore primal robes whose color was indistinguishable in the intense moonlight, but what could be distinguished were fringed panels of fabric segmented by lighter-colored stitch-work. Within these segments more elaborate embroidery could be seen: symbols quite glyph-like and the oddest designations of geometry that, when looked upon to stridently, caused my head to ache. Were the angles of the horrific geometrics actually moving? Each woman, too, held a candle before her—a candle whose flame burned green—and I thought I could hear the faintest chimes, the notes of which instilled in me, to the core of my very guts, a feeling of uncontemplatable dread via the idea of utter absence. Absence of light, absence of benevolence, absence of morality, absence of all things sane. Even more softly than the sourceless chimes there came to my ears a vocal diaphony that made me want to fall to my knees and be sick: a discordant and cacodaemonically unstructured sequence of words which sounded like:
“Ei…”
“Cf’ayak vulgtuum…”
“Ei…”
“Vugtlagln, sjulnu…”
“Ei, ph’nglui, hkcthtul’ei…”
“Wgah’nagl fhtagen—ei…”
“Ei, ei, ei…”
The perverse chants seemed to grow lighter rather than louder, but for some reason the more difficult this evil song was to hear, the more impact it had on my mind, a veritable pressure, a tactuality against my face. Yet as sick as I felt, I felt something else concurrently: a most powerful carnal arousal.
“Keep back,” Zalen whispered. He forced me to crouch lower. “This lake empties into the bay…”
The solemnity of that information didn’t at first occur to me. My vision, instead, remained hijacked to these macabre, robed women. The chorus was chanted again when all the women at once dropped their robes and stood nude.
Nude, I had no choice but to observe, and pregnant.
All the while, the chant seemed to compress my brain within the confines of my skull. It was sordid and erotic, seeing this in such a manner that I could not look away—indeed, it was evil. Most of the women appeared in their twenties, but I did make out Mrs. Nowry and some others more middle-aged. All of them, then, one by one, tossed their queerly green candles into the water, and I could take an oath that as each stick of wax sunk beneath the surface, the green flame was not extinguished, and at the same time my eyes seemed to acclimate more intensely to this tinseled night: the moonlight grew sharper, brighter, and with this, my vision grew more acute. Even from this considerable distance, I could make out refined details of each gravid woman. I could see the pores on their white skin, the minute line between each iris and the whites of their eyes, the papillae of each and every nipple, and the fine traceries of venousity within each milk-soused breast. Eventually all of them lowered to the muck of the lake shore, and what took place then I’ll only distinguish as an obscene bacchanal of the flesh, a libertine debauch intent on mutual satiation akin to the Isle of Lesbos. I shouldn’t have to specify, either, that one of these concupiscent attendants was Mary herself…
My eyes held rapt on the orgiastic scene, and for a time I thought that even a gun to my head couldn’t make me look away even in the self-knowledge averting my eyes was the only Godly thing to do. But it was Zalen, not God, who urged my surcease.
“It’s coming out now—”
“It?” I questioned in the slightest whisper.
“We’re not going to be here to see it. Believe me, Morley, you don’t want to see it…”
He hauled me back into the woods just at the same moment a figure began to rise from the lake.
My head thankfully cleared with proximity. “What—what was that, Zalen?”
“It was one of them—what did you think?” the long haired, greasy-coated man chided.
One of them, I thought. A fullblood…