The twilight passed into the darkness of night. Shadows glided silently through the trees, gathering as if to stare out at him with small, round, rubicund eyes. Or was it his own eyes playing tricks with the dark?
Then he saw something emerge from the waist high ferns, crawling on all fours across the ground. It was almost black, its naked flesh dry and coarse, strung tight about its jutting bones. Its legs, though hairless, were as the legs of a goat, whilst shrunken breasts, some twelve in number, hung limply from its chest. They swayed as it moved, its jaundiced eyes gleaming from the deep black depths of their sockets with a foul anticipation. There was a convulsive twitching in its long, thin, bony hands.
Unable to move, Lamson watched it crawl towards him. Its penis was hard with lust, the dark nipples of its breasts enlarged and tight. Its lips were wet with overflowing saliva as it drew towards him.
Though partially human, it was hideously inhuman, a foul, unearthly, cacodaemoniacal Pan. Stiff black horns curved upwards from its brows; a scaled and rat-like tail flicked from its spine. He could see the mounting tension of its poised phallus.
He tried to scream.
With all his strength he tried to scream, to cry out and tear himself away from the hideous creature creeping towards him, but there was nothing he could do. He was paralyzed and defenseless.
A murmured chanting sibilantly issued encircling trees, flitting with the wind.
‘Ma dheantar aon scriosadh, athru, gearradh, lot no milleadh ar an ordu feadfar diultu d’e a ioc.’
The rhythmic chanting began to mimic the frenzied beating of a heart, faster and deeper, as the satyr, swaying its lean torso to the rhythms of the chants, came upon Lamson. Its left hand grasped him about the thigh, pulling him down till he knelt on the ground. Its foetid breath blew hot into his face like the searing gusts of a newly opened furnace. He could see the wrinkles in its clammy flesh and the sores suppurating on its lips.
With renewed urgency he wrenched himself free and tried to roll out of its way across the grass. But before he even saw it move he felt its hands grasping him once more. He kicked out at it, whimpering. Its talons tore a deep gash in his trousers and its palm slid searchingly down his leg.
Once more he kicked.
With a slow deliberation it reached out for the buckle of his belt and ripped it free.
It was crouched over him, its softly repulsive underbelly almost touching his legs. In the feeble light its body seemed huge.
With a sudden exertion Lamson managed at last to emit a scream.
As its hand reached for him between his legs darkness sprang up about him like a monstrous whirlpool.
He felt dizzy and sick, shuddering with horror as he awoke, his body drenched with perspiration in the tangled blankets of his bed. At the same time he felt the final climax of an orgasm clasp hold of him.
He lay back and gasped, weak with the intensity of his ejaculation. He felt suddenly fouled, as if he’d been dragged through demoniacal cesspools of sin.
Nauseated, he looked across from his bed at the carving. Its coarse features seemed even more hideous to him now than before, and he did not doubt but that in some repulsively Freudian way its lecherous features — mirrored, as he now realized, on the demon creature of his nightmare — had influenced his sleeping mind. As he looked at it he found it difficult to understand how he had failed to notice the unclean lust rampant about its face before, like some infernal incubus roused by the harlots of Hell. As he washed himself clean a few minutes later he wondered if it would not be better to get rid of the head, to throw it away and forget it, and in doing so, hopefully, rid himself of the dreams.
Only once, while he dressed, did a discordant thought make him wonder if, perhaps, the dream wasn’t connected in some way with his unsatisfactory relationship with Joan. But the two things were at such extremes in his mind that he could not connect them with anything other than shame. As he looked at the stone this shame transferred itself to this object, intensifying into a firm resolve to get rid of the thing. How could he possibly make any kind of headway with Joan, he told himself, with such a foul obscenity as that thing troubling him?
When Lamson left his flat a short time later, carrying the head in his raincoat pocket, it was with steps so unsteady that he wondered if he was coming down with something. The irritation on his hands had, if anything, become even worse, while aches and pains announced their presence from all over his body while he walked. He wondered if he had overstrained himself when he was helping his brother redecorate his farm, though he’d felt fit enough the day before. The Sunday morning streets were agreeably deserted as he walked along them. The only cars in sight were parked by the kerb. In a way he was glad that the dream had woken him as early as it had. Just past eight thirty now, it would be a while yet, he knew, before the city would start stirring into life today.
‘Dirt-y o-o1d ma-an, dirty o-old ma-an!’ He looked across to where the singsong voices came from. Two small boys of about ten or eleven years in age, perhaps less, were stood at the corner of the street in a shop doorway. Cheeky little brats, Lamson thought to himself as he noticed the shuffling figure their jeers were directed against, a stooped old man slowly making his way down a street leading off from the main road past a line of overfilled dustbins.
Although Lamson could not see his face he could tell that the old man knew the boys were calling out at him. Slow though his pace was, it was also unmistakably hurried, as if he was trying to get out of their way as quickly as he could on his old, decrepit legs.
‘Clear off!’ Lamson shouted angrily, feeling sorry for the old man.
The kids yelped and ran off down an alley, laughing.
If he had not felt so weary himself he would have run after them. How could they act so callously? He watched the old man as he continued up the street. There was something about the painful stoop of his back and the way his legs were bent, that struck a chord of remembrance somewhere. He could almost have been the tramp he met on the moors, except that he hadn’t been anything like as decrepit as this man obviously was, not unless his health had failed disastrously over the last couple of days.
Lamson crossed the road and headed up past St. James church, putting the old man out of his mind. The pleasant singing of the birds in the elms that filled the churchyard helped to ease his spirits, and he breathed in the scent of the grass with a genuine feeling of pleasure. He only wished that his legs didn’t feel so stiff and tired. He wondered again if he was coming down with a bug of some kind.
He paused suddenly by the wall and felt in his pocket, his fingers moving speculatively about the small stone head. Though he did not know properly why, he decided that the churchyard was too near his flat for him to get rid of the stone here. It would be better if he made his way to the canal where he could lose it properly without trace.
As he turned round to leave, he noticed a slight movement out of the corner of his eye. With a feeling of trepidation he paused, turned round and anxiously scanned the solemn rows of headstones.
Nothing moved, except for a light film of drizzle that began to filter down through the overhanging boughs of the trees. Yet, even though he could not see anything to account for what he seemed to have glimpsed, like a blurred shadow moving on the edge of his sight, he was sure that he was not mistaken. He stepped up the street to where a narrow gate led into the churchyard. He looked across it once again, and wished that he could make himself leave this suddenly disturbing place, but he could not. With slow, but far from resolute steps, he walked down the asphalt path between the headstones, his senses attuned to the least disturbance about him: the cold moisture of the drizzle on his hands and face, the hissing of the leaves as the rain passed through them, the singing of the birds that echoed and re-echoed about him, and the distant murmur of a car along Station Road as the clock tolled a quarter to nine. The air seemed strangely still. Or was it his own overwrought imagination, keyed up by the horrendous nightmare, scenes from which still flickered uncomfortably in front of him? He felt a fluttering sensation in his stomach as he looked along the roughhewn stones of the church with its incised windows of stained glass.