Books of Blood Vol 2

THE SKINS OF THE FATHERS

THE CAR COUGHED, and choked, and died. Davidson was suddenly aware of the wind on the desert road, as it keened at the windows of his Mustang. He tried to revive the engine, but it refused life. Exasperated, Davidson let his sweating hands drop off the wheel and surveyed the territory. In every direction, hot air, hot rock, hot sand. This was Arizona.

He opened the door and stepped out on to the baking dust highway. In front and behind it stretched unswervingly to the pale horizon. If he narrowed his eyes he could just make out the mountains, but as soon as he attempted to fix his focus they were eaten up by the heat-haze. Already the sun was corroding the top of his head, where his blond hair was thinning. He threw up the hood of the car and peered hopelessly into the engine, regretting his lack of mechanical know-how. Jesus, he thought, why don't they make the damn things foolproof? Then he heard the music.

It was so far off it sounded like a whistling in his ears at first: but it became louder.

It was music, of a sort.

How did it sound? Like the wind through telephone lines, a sourceless, rhythmless, heartless air-wave plucking at the hairs on the back of his neck and telling them to stand. He tried to ignore it, but it wouldn't go away.

He looked up out of the shade of the bonnet to find the players, but the road was empty in both directions. Only as he scanned the desert to the southeast did a line of tiny figures become visible to him, walking, or skipping, or dancing at the furthest edge of his sight, liquid in the heat of the earth. The procession, if that was its nature, was long, and making its way across the desert parallel to the highway. Their paths would not cross.

Davidson glanced down once more into the cooling entrails of his vehicle and then up again at the distant line of dancers.

He needed help: no doubt of it.

He started off across the desert towards them.

Once off the highway the dust, not impacted by the passage of cars, was loose: it flung itself up at his face with every step. Progress was slow: he broke into a trot: but they were receding from him. He began to run.

Over the thunder of his blood, he could hear the music more loudly now. There was no melody apparent, but a constant rising and falling of many instruments; howls and hummings, whistlings, drummings and roarings.

The head of the procession had now disappeared, received into distance, but the celebrants (if that they were) still paraded past. He changed direction a little, to head them off, glancing over his shoulder briefly to check his way back. With a stomach-churning sense of loneliness he saw his vehicle, as small as a beetle on the road behind him, sitting weighed down by a boiling sky.

He ran on. A quarter of an hour, perhaps, and he began to see the procession more clearly, though its leaders were well out of sight. It was, he began to believe, a carnival of some sort, extraordinary as that seemed out here in the middle of God's nowhere. The last dancers in the parade were definitely costumed, however. They wore headdresses and masks that tottered well above human height — there was the flutter of brightly-coloured feathers, and streamers coiling in the air behind them. Whatever the reason for the celebration they reeled like drunkards, loping one moment, leaping the next, squirming, some of them, on the ground, bellies to the hot sand.

Davidson's lungs were torn with exhaustion, and it was clear he was losing the pursuit. Having gained on the procession, it was now moving off faster than he had strength or willpower to follow.

He stopped, bracing his arms on his knees to support his aching torso, and looked under his sweat-sodden brow at his disappearing salvation. Then, summoning up all the energy he could muster, he yelled: Stop!

At first there was no response. Then, through the slits of his eyes, he thought he saw one or two of the revelers halt. He straightened up. Yes, one or two were looking at him. He felt, rather than saw, their eyes upon him.

He began to walk towards them.

Some of the instruments had died away, as though word of his presence was spreading among them. They'd definitely seen him, no doubt of that.

He walked on, faster now, and out of the haze, the details of the procession began to come clear.

His pace slowed a little. His heart, already pounding with exertion, thudded in his chest.

— My Jesus, he said, and for the first time in his thirty-six godless years the words were a true prayer.

He stood off half a mile from them, but there was no mistaking what he saw. His aching eyes knew papier-mâché from flesh, illusion from misshapen reality.

The creatures at the end of the procession, the least of the least, the hangers-on, were monsters whose appearance beggared the nightmares of insanity.

One was perhaps eighteen or twenty feet tall. Its skin, that hung in folds on its muscle, was a sheath of spikes, its head a cone of exposed teeth, set in scarlet gums. Another was three-winged, its triple ended tail thrashing the dust with reptilian enthusiasm. A third and fourth were married together in a union of monstrosities the result of which was more disgusting than the sum of its parts. Through its length and breadth this symbiotic horror was locked in seeping marriage, its limbs thrust in and through wounds in its partner's flesh. Though the tongues of its heads were wound together it managed a cacophonous howl.

Davidson took a step back, and glanced round at the car and the highway. As he did so one of the things, black and red, began to scream like a whistle. Even at a half mile's distance the noise cut into Davidson's head. He looked back at the procession.

The whistling monster had left its place in the parade, and its clawed feet were pounding the desert as it began to race towards him. Uncontrollable panic swept through Davidson, and he felt his trousers fill as his bowels failed him.

The thing was rushing towards him with the speed of a cheetah, growing with every second, so he could see more detail of its alien anatomy with every step. The thumbless hands with their toothed palms, the head that bore only a tri-coloured eye, the sinew of its shoulder and chest, even its genitals, erect with anger, or (God help me) lust, two-pronged and beating against its abdomen.

Davidson shrieked a shriek that was almost the equal of the monster's noise, and fled back the way he had come.

The car was a mile, two miles away, and he knew it offered no protection were he to reach it before the monster overcame him. In that moment he realized how close death was, how close it had always been, and he longed for a moment's comprehension of this idiot honor.

It was already close behind him as his shit-slimed legs buckled, and he fell, and crawled, and dragged himself towards the car. As he heard the thud of its feet at his back he instinctively huddled into a ball of whimpering flesh, and awaited the coup de grace.

He waited two heart-beats.

Three. Four. Still it didn't come.

The whistling voice had grown to an unbearable pitch, and was now fading a little. The gnashing palms did not connect with his body. Cautiously, expecting his head to be snapped from his neck at any moment, he peered through his fingers.

The creature had overtaken him.

Perhaps contemptuous of his frailty it had run on past him towards the highway.

Davidson smelt his excrement, and his fear. He felt curiously ignored. Behind him the parade had moved on. Only one or two inquisitive monsters still looked over their shoulders in his direction, as they receded into the dust.

The whistling now changed pitch. Davidson cautiously raised his head from ground level. The noise was all but outside his hearing-range, just a shrill whine at the back of his aching head.

He stood up.

The creature had leapt on to the top of his car. Its head was thrown back in a kind of ecstasy, its erection plainer than ever, the eye in its huge head glinting. With a final swoop to its voice, which took the whistle out of human hearing, it bent upon the car, smashing the windshield and curling its mouthed hands upon the roof. It then proceeded to tear the steel back like so much paper, its body twitching with glee, its head jerking about. Once the roof was torn up, it leapt on to the highway and threw the metal into the air. It turned in the sky and smashed down on the desert floor. Davidson briefly wondered what he could possibly put on the insurance form. Now the creature was tearing the vehicle apart. The doors were scattered. The engine was ripped out. The wheels slashed and wrenched off the axles.

To Davidson's nostrils there drifted the unmistakable stench of gasoline. No sooner had he registered the smell than a shard of metal glanced against another and the creature and the car were sheathed in a billowing column of fire, blackening into smoke as it balled over the highway.

The thing did not call out: or if it did its agonies were beyond hearing. It staggered out of the inferno with its flesh on fire, every inch of its body alight; its arms flailed wildly in a vain attempt to douse the fire, and it began to run off down the highway, fleeing from the source of its agony towards the mountains. Flames sprouted off its back and the air was tinged with the smell of its cooking flesh.

It didn't fall, however, though the fire must have been devouring it. The run went on and on, until the heat dissolved the highway into the blue distance, and it was gone.

Davidson sank down on to his knees. The shit on his legs was already dry in the heat. The car continued to burn. The music had gone entirely, as had the procession.

It was the sun that drove him from the sand back towards his gutted car.

He was blank-eyed when the next vehicle along the highway stopped to pick him up.

Sheriff Josh Packard stared in disbelief at the claw prints on the ground at his feet. They were etched in slowly solidifying fat, the liquid flesh of the monster that had run through the main street (the only street) of Welcome minutes ago. It had then collapsed, breathing its last breath, and died in a writhing ball three trucks' length from the bank. The normal business of Welcome, the trading, the debating, the how do you do's, had halted. One or two nauseous individuals had been received into the lobby of the Hotel while the smell of fricasseed flesh thickened the good desert air of the town.

The stench was something between over-cooked fish and an exhumation, and it offended Packard. This was his town, overlooked by him, protected by him. The intrusion of this fireball was not looked upon kindly.

Packard took out his gun and began to walk towards the corpse. The flames were all but out now, having eaten the best of their meal. Even so destroyed by fire, it was a sizeable bulk. What might once have been its limbs were gathered around what might have been its head. The rest was beyond recognition. All in all, Packard was glad of that small mercy. But even in the charnel-house confusion of rendered flesh and blackened bone he could make out enough inhuman forms to quicken his pulse.

This was a monster: no doubt of it.

A creature from earth: out of earth, indeed. Up from the underworld and on its way to the great bowl for a night of celebration. Once every generation or so, his father had told him, the desert spat out its demons and let them loose awhile. Being a child who thought for himself Packard had never believed the shit his father talked but was this not such a demon?

Whatever mischance had brought this burning monstrosity into his town to die, there was pleasure for Packard in the proof of their vulnerability. His father had never mentioned that possibility.

Half-smiling at the thought of mastering such foulness, Packard stepped up to the smoking corpse and kicked it. The crowd, still lingering in the safety of the doorways, cooed with admiration at his bravery. The half-smile spread across his face. That kick alone would be worth a night of drinks, perhaps even a woman.

The thing was belly up. With the dispassionate gaze of a professional demon-kicker, Packard scrutinized the tangle of limbs across the head. It was quite dead, that was obvious. He sheathed his gun and bent towards the corpse.

"Get a camera out here, Jebediah," he said, impressing even himself.

His deputy ran off towards the office.

"What we need," he said, "is a picture of this here beauty."

Packard went down on his haunches and reached across to the blackened limbs of the thing. His gloves would be ruined, but it was worth the inconvenience for the good this gesture would be doing for his public image. He could almost feel the admiring looks as he touched the flesh, and began to shake a limb loose from the head of the monster.

The fire had welded the parts together, and he had to wrench the limb free. But it came, with a jellied sound, revealing the heat-withered eye on the face beneath.

He dropped the limb back where it had come with a look of disgust.

A beat.

Then the demon's arm was snaking up — suddenly — too suddenly for Packard to move, and in a moment sublime with terror the Sheriff saw the mouth open in the palm of its forefoot and close again around his own hand.

Whimpering he lost balance and sat in the fat, pulling away from the mouth, as his glove was chewed through, and the teeth connected with his hand, clipping off his fingers as the rasping maw drew digits, blood and stumps further into its gut.

Packard's bottom slid in the mess under him and he squirmed, howling now, to loose himself. It still had life in it, this thing from the underworld. Packard bellowed for mercy as he staggered to his feet, dragging the sordid bulk of the thing up off the ground as he did so.

A shot sounded, close to Packard's ear. Fluids, blood and pus spattered him as the limb was blown to smithereens at the shoulder, and the mouth loosed its grip on Packard. The wasted mass of devouring muscle fell to the ground, and Packard's hand, or what was left of it, was in the open air again. There were no fingers remaining on his right hand, and barely half a thumb; the shattered bone of his digits jutted awkwardly from a partially chewed palm.

Eleanor Kooker dropped the barrel of the shotgun she had just fired, and grunted with satisfaction.

"Your hand's gone," she said, with brutal simplicity.

Monsters, Packard remembered his father telling him, never die. He'd remembered too late, and now he'd sacrificed his hand, his drinking, sexing hand. A wave of nostalgia for lost years with those fingers washed over him, while dots burst into darkness before his eyes. The last thing he saw as a dead faint carried him to the ground was his dutiful deputy raising a camera to record the whole scene.

The shack at the back of the house was Lucy's refuge and always had been. When Eugene came back drunk from Welcome, or a sudden fury took him because the stew was cold, Lucy retired into the shack where she could weep in peace. There was no pity to be had in Lucy's life. None from Eugene certainly, and precious little time to pity herself.

Today, the old source of irritation had got Eugene into a rage: The child.

The nurtured and carefully cultivated child of their love; named after the brother of Moses, Aaron, which meant "exalted one". A sweet boy. The prettiest boy in the whole territory; five years old and already as charming and polite as any East Coast Momma could wish to raise.

Aaron.

Lucy's pride and joy, a child fit to blow bubbles in a picture book, fit to dance, fit to charm the Devil himself.

That was Eugene's objection.

"That flicking child's no more a boy than you are," he said to Lucy. "He's not even a half-boy. He's only fit for putting in fancy shoes and selling perfume. Or a preacher, he's fit for a preacher."

He pointed a nail-bitten, crook-thumbed hand at the boy.

"You're a shame to your father."

Aaron met his father's stare.

"You hear me, boy?"

Eugene looked away. The boy's big eyes made him sick to his stomach, more like a dog's eyes than anything human.

"I want him out of this house."

"What's he done?"

"He doesn't need to do a thing. It's sufficient he's the way he is. They laugh at me, you know that? They laugh at me because of him."

"Nobody laughs at you, Eugene."

"Oh yes —"

"Not for the boy's sake."

"Huh?"

"If they laugh, they don't laugh at the boy. They laugh at you."

"Shut your mouth."

"They know what you are, Eugene. They see you clear, clear as I see you."

"I tell you, woman —"

"Sick as a dog in the street, talking about what you've seen and what you're scared of—"

He struck her as he had many times before. The blow drew blood, as similar blows had for five years, but though she reeled, her first thoughts were for the boy.

"Aaron," she said through the tears the pain had brought. "Come with me."

"You let the bastard alone." Eugene was trembling.

"Aaron."

The child stood between father and mother, not knowing which to obey. The look of confusion on his face brought Lucy's tears more copiously.

"Mama," said the child, very quietly. There was a grave look in his eyes, that went beyond confusion. Before Lucy could find a way to cool the situation, Eugene had hold of the boy by his hair and was dragging him closer.

"You listen to your father, boy."

"Yes —"

"Yes, sir, we say to our father, don't we? We say, yes, sir."

Aaron's face was thrust into the stinking crotch of his father's jeans.

"Yes, sir."

"He stays with me, woman. You're not taking him out into that fucking shack one more time. He stays with his father."

The skirmish was lost and Lucy knew it. If she pressed the point any further, she only put the child at further risk.

"If you harm him —"

"I'm his father, woman," Eugene grinned. "What, do you think I'd hurt my own flesh and blood?"

The boy was locked to his father's hips in a position that was scarcely short of obscene. But Lucy knew her husband: and he was close to an outburst that would be uncontrollable. She no longer cared for herself— she'd had her joys — but the boy was so vulnerable.

"Get out of our sight, woman, why don't you? The boy and I want to be alone, don't we?"

Eugene dragged Aaron's face from his crotch and sneered down at his pale face.

"Don't we?"

"Yes, Papa."

"Yes, Papa. Oh yes indeed, Papa."

Lucy left the house and retired into the cool darkness of the shack, where she prayed for Aaron, named after the brother of Moses. Aaron, whose name meant "exalted one"; she wondered how long he could survive the brutalities the future would provide.

The boy was stripped now. He stood white in front of his father. He wasn't afraid. The whipping that would be meted out to him would pain him, but this was not true fear.

"You're sickly, lad," said Eugene, running a huge hand over his son's abdomen. "Weak and sickly like a runty hog. If I was a farmer, and you were a hog, boy, you know what I'd do?"

Again, he took the boy by the hair. The other hand, between the legs.

"You know what I'd do, boy?"

"No, Papa. What would you do?"

The scored hand slid up over Aaron's body while his father made a slitting sound.

"Why, I'd cut you up and feed you to the rest of the litter. Nothing a hog likes better to eat, than hog-meat. How'd you like that?"

"No, Papa."

"You wouldn't like that?"

"No thank you, Papa."

Eugene's face hardened.

"Well I'd like to see that, Aaron. I'd like to see what you'd do if I was to open you up and have a look inside you."

There was a new violence in his father's games, which Aaron couldn't understand: new threats, new intimacy. Uncomfortable as he was the boy knew the real fear was felt not by him but by his father; fear was Eugene's birthright, just as it was Aaron's to watch, and wait, and suffer, until the moment came. He knew (without understanding how or why), that he would be an instrument in the destruction of his father. Maybe more than an instrument.

Anger erupted in Eugene. He stared at the boy, his brown fists clenched so tight that the knuckles burned white. The boy was his ruin, somehow; he'd killed the good life they'd lived before he was born, as surely as if he'd shot his parents dead. Scarcely thinking of what he was doing, Eugene's hands closed around the back of the boy's frail neck.

Aaron made no sound.

"I could kill you boy."

"Yes, sir."

"What do you say to that?"

"Nothing, sir."

"You should say thank you, sir."

"Why?"

"Why, boy? 'Cause this life's not worth what a hog can shit, and I'd be doing you a loving service, as a father should a son."

"Yes, sir."

In the shack behind the house Lucy had stopped crying. There was no purpose in it; and besides, something in the sky she could see through the holes in the roof had brought memories to her that wiped the tears away. A certain sky: pure blue, sheeny-clear. Eugene wouldn't harm the boy. He wouldn't dare, ever dare, harm that child. He knew what the boy was, though he'd never admit to it.

She remembered the day, six years ago now, when the sky had been sheened like today, and the air had been livid with the heat. Eugene and she had been just about as hot as the air, they hadn't taken their eyes off each other all day. He was stronger then: in his prime. A soaring, splendid man, his body made heavy with work, and his legs so hard they felt like rock when she ran her hands over them. She had been quite a looker herself; the best damn backside in Welcome, firm and downy; a divide so softly haired Eugene couldn't keep from kissing her, even there, in the secret place. He'd pleasure her all day and all night sometimes; in the house they were building, or out on the sand in the late afternoon. The desert made a fine bed, and they could lie uninterrupted beneath the wide sky.

That day six years ago the sky had darkened too soon; long before night was due. It had seemed to blacken in a moment, and the lovers were suddenly cold in their hurried nakedness. She had seen, over his shoulder, the shapes the sky had taken: the vast and monumental creatures that were watching them. He, in his passion, still worked at her, thrust to his root and out the length again as he knew she delighted in, ‘til a hand the colour of beets and the size of a man pinched his neck, and plucked him out of his wife's lap. She watched him lifted into the sky like a squirming jack-rabbit, spitting from two mouths, North and South, as he finished his thrusts on the air. Then his eyes opened for a moment, and he saw his wife twenty feet below him, still bare, still spread butterfly wide, with monsters on every side. Casually, without malice, they threw him away, out of their ring of admiration, and out of her sight.

She remembered so well the hour that followed, the embraces of the monsters. Not foul in any way, not gross or harmful, never less than loving. Even the machineries of reproduction that they pierced her with, one after the other, were not painful, though some were as large as Eugene's fisted arm, and hard as bone. How many of those strangers took her that afternoon — three, four, five, mingling their semen in her body, fondly teasing joy from her with their patient thrusts. When they went away, and her skin was touched with sunlight again, she felt, though on reflection it seemed shameful, a loss; as though the zenith of her life was passed, and the rest of her days would be a cold ride down to death.

She had got up at last, and walked over to where Eugene was lying unconscious on the sand, one of his legs broken by the fall. She had kissed him, and then squatted to pass water. She hoped, and hope it was, that there would be fruit from the seed of that day's love, and it would be a keepsake of her joy.

In the house Eugene struck the boy. Aaron's nose bled, but he made no sound.

"Speak, boy."

"What shall I say?"

"Am I your father or not?"

"Yes, father."

"Liar!"

He struck again, without warning; this time the blow carried Aaron to the floor. As his small, uncalloused palms flattened against the kitchen tiles to raise himself he felt something through the floor. There was a music in the ground.

"Liar!" his father was saying still.

There would be more blows to come, the boy thought, more pain, more blood. But it was bearable; and the music was a promise, after a long wait, of an end to blows once and for all.

Davidson staggered into the main street of Welcome. It was the middle of the afternoon, he guessed (his watch had stopped, perhaps out of sympathy), but the town appeared to be empty, until his eye alighted on the dark, smoking mound in the middle of the street, a hundred yards from where he stood.

If such a thing had been possible, his blood would have run cold at the sight.

He recognized what that bundle of burned flesh had been, despite the distance, and his head spun with horror. It had all been real after all. He stumbled on a couple more steps, fighting the dizziness and losing, until he felt himself supported by strong arms, and heard, through a fuzz of head-noises, reassuring words being spoken to him. They made no sense, but at least they were soft and human: he could give up any pretence to consciousness. He fainted, but it seemed there was only a moment of respite before the world came back into view again, as odious as ever.

He had been carried inside and was lying on an uncomfortable sofa, a woman's face, that of Eleanor Kooker, staring down at him. She beamed as he came round.

"The man'll survive," she said, her voice like cabbage going through a grater.

She leaned further forward.

"You seen the thing, did you?"

Davidson nodded.

"Better give us the low-down."

A glass was thrust into his hand and Eleanor filled it generously with whisky.

"Drink," she demanded, 'then tell us what you got to tell —"

He downed the whisky in two, and the glass was immediately refilled. He drank the second glass more slowly, and began to feel better.

The room was filled with people: it was as though all of Welcome was pressing into the Kooker front parlour. Quite an audience: but then it was quite a tale. Loosened by the whisky, he began to tell it as best he could, without embellishment, just letting the words come. In return Eleanor described the circumstances of Sheriff Packard's "accident" with the body of the car-wrecker. Packard was in the room, looking the worse for consoling whiskies and pain killers, his mutilated hand bound up so well it looked more like a club than a limb.

"It's not the only devil out there," said Packard when the stories were out.

"So's you say," said Eleanor, her quick eyes less than convinced.

"My Papa said so," Packard returned, staring down at his bandaged hand. "And I believe it, sure as Hell I believe it."

"Then we'd best do something about it."

"Like what?" posed a sour looking individual leaning against the mantelpiece. "What's to be done about the likes of a thing that eats automobiles?"

Eleanor straightened up and delivered a well-aimed sneer at the questioner.

"Well let's have the benefit of your wisdom, Lou," she said. "What do you think we should do?"

"I think we should lie low and let ‘em pass."

"I'm no ostrich," said Eleanor, "but if you want to go bury your head, I'll lend you a spade, Lou. I'll even dig you the hole."

General laughter. The cynic, discomforted, fell silent and picked at his nails.

"We can't sit here and let them come running through," said Packard's deputy, between blowing bubbles with his gum.

"They were going towards the mountains," Davidson said. "Away from Welcome."

"So what's to stop them changing their goddam minds?" Eleanor countered. "Well?"

No answer. A few nods, a few head shakings. "Jebediah," she said, "you're deputy — what do you think about this?"

The young man with the badge and the gum flushed a little, and plucked at his thin moustache. He obviously hadn't a clue.

"I see the picture," the woman snapped back before he could answer. "Clear as a bell. You're all too shit­ scared to go poking them divils out of their holes, that it?"

Murmurs of self-justification around the room, more head-shaking.

"You're just planning to sit yourselves down and let the women folk be devoured."

A good word: devoured. So much more emotive than eaten. Eleanor paused for effect. Then she said darkly: "Or worse."

Worse than devoured? Pity sakes, what was worse than devoured?

"You're not going to be touched by no divils," said Packard, getting up from his seat with some difficulty. He swayed on his feet as he addressed the room.

"We're going to have them shit-eaters and lynch ‘em." This rousing battle-cry left the males in the room unroused; the sheriff was low on credibility since his encounter in Main Street.

"Discretion's the better part of valour," Davidson murmured under his breath.

"That's so much horse-shit," said Eleanor.

Davidson shrugged, and finished off the whisky in his glass. It was not refilled. He reflected ruefully that he should be thankful he was still alive. But his work-schedule was in ruins. He had to get to a telephone and hire a car; if necessary have someone drive out to pick him up. The "divils", whatever they were, were not his problem. Perhaps he'd be interested to read a few column-inches on the subject in Newsweek, when he was back East and relaxing with Barbara; but now all he wanted to do was finish his business in Arizona and get home as soon as possible.

Packard, however, had other ideas.

"You're a witness," he said, pointing at Davidson, "and as Sheriff of this community I order you to stay in Welcome until you've answered to my satisfaction all inquiries I have to put to you."

The formal language sounded odd from his slobbish mouth.

"I've got business —" Davidson began.

"Then you just send a cable and cancel that business, Mr fancy-Davidson."

The man was scoring points off him, Davidson knew, bolstering his shattered reputation by taking pot-shots at the Easterner. Still, Packard was the law: there was nothing to be done about it. He nodded his assent with as much good grace as he could muster. There'd be time to lodge a formal complaint against this hick-town Mussolini when he was home, safe and sound. For now, better to send a cable, and let business go hang.

"So what's the plan?" Eleanor demanded of Packard.

The Sheriff puffed out his booze-brightened cheeks.

"We deal with the divils," he said.

"How?"

"Guns, woman."

"You'll need more than guns, if they're as big as he says they are —"

"They are —" said Davidson, "believe me, they are."

Packard sneered.

"We'll take the whole fucking arsenal," he said jerking his remaining thumb at Jebediah. "Go break out the heavy-duty weapons, boy. Anti-tank stuff. Bazookas."

General amazement.

"You got bazookas?" said Lou, the mantelpiece cynic.

Packard managed a leering smile.

"Military stuff," he said, "left over from the Big One." Davidson sighed inwardly. The man was a psychotic, with his own little arsenal of out-of-date weapons, which were probably more lethal to the user than to the victim. They were all going to die. God help him, they were all going to die.

"You may have lost your fingers," said Eleanor Kooker, delighted by this show of bravado, "but you're the only man in this room, Josh Packard."

Packard beamed and rubbed his crotch absent mindedly. Davidson couldn't take the atmosphere of hand-me-down machismo in the room any longer.

"Look," he piped up, "I've told you all I know. Why don't I just let you folks get on with it."

"You ain't leaving," said Packard, "if that's what you're rooting after."

"I'm just saying —"

"We know what you're saying son, and I ain't listening. If I see you hitch up your britches to leave I'll string you up by your balls. If you've got any."

The bastard would try it too, thought Davidson, even if he only had one hand to do it with. Just go with the flow, he told himself, trying to stop his lip curling. If Packard went out to find the monsters and his damn bazooka backfired, that was his business. Let it be.

"There's a whole tribe of them," Lou was quietly pointing out. "According to this man. So how do we take out so many of them?"

"Strategy," said Packard.

"We don't know their positions."

"Surveillance," replied Packard.

"They could really fuck us up Sheriff," Jebediah observed, picking a collapsed gum-bubble from his mous­tache.

"This is our territory," said Eleanor. "We got it: we keep it."

Jebediah nodded.

"Yes, ma," he said.

"Suppose they just disappeared? Suppose we can't find them no more?" Lou was arguing. "Couldn't we just let ‘em go to ground?"

"Sure," said Packard. "And then we're left waiting around for them to come out again and devour the women folk."

"Maybe they mean no harm —" Lou replied.

Packard's reply was to raise his bandaged hand.

"They done me harm."

That was incontestable.

Packard continued, his voice hoarse with feeling.

"Shit, I want them come-bags so bad I'm going out there with or without help. But we've got to out-think them, out manoeuvre them, so we don't get anybody hurt."

The man talks some sense, thought Davidson. Indeed, the whole room seemed impressed. Murmurs of approval all round; even from the mantelpiece.

Packard rounded on the deputy again.

"You get your ass moving, son. I want you to call up that bastard Crumb out of Caution and get his boys down here with every goddam gun and grenade they've got. And if he asks what for you tell him Sheriff Packard's declaring a State of Emergency, and I'm requisitioning every asshole weapon in fifty miles, and the man on the other end of it. Move it, son."

Now the room was positively glowing with admiration, and Packard knew it.

"We'll blow the fuckers apart," he said.

For a moment the rhetoric seemed to work its magic on Davidson, and he half-believed it might be possible; then he remembered the details of the procession, tails, teeth and all, and his bravado sank without trace.

They came up to the house so quietly, not intending to creep, just so gentle with their tread nobody heard them.

Inside, Eugene's anger had subsided. He was sitting with his legs up on the table, an empty bottle of whisky in front of him. The silence in the room was so heavy it suffocated.

Aaron, his face puffed up with his father's blows, was sitting beside the window. He didn't need to look up to see them coming across the sand towards the house, their approach sounded in his veins. His bruised face wanted to light up with a smile of welcome, but he repressed the instinct and simply waited, slumped in beaten resignation, until they were almost upon the house. Only when their massive bodies blocked out the sunlight through the window did he stand up. The boy's movement woke Eugene from his trance.

"What is it, boy?"

The child had backed off from the window, and was standing in the middle of the room, sobbing quietly with anticipation. His tiny hands were spread like sun-rays, his fingers jittering and twitching in his excitement.

"What's wrong with the window, boy?"

Aaron heard one of his true father's voices eclipse Eugene's mumblings. Like a dog eager to greet his master after a long separation, the boy ran to the door and tried to claw it open. It was locked and bolted.

"What's that noise, boy?"

Eugene pushed his son aside and fumbled with the key in the lock, while Aaron's father called to his child through the door. His voice sounded like a rush of water, counter pointed by soft, piping sighs. It was an eager voice, a loving voice.

All at once, Eugene seemed to understand. He took hold of the boy's hair and hauled him away from the door.

Aaron squealed with pain.

"Papa!" he yelled.

Eugene took the cry as addressed to himself, but Aaron's true father also heard the boy's voice. His answering call was threaded with piercing notes of concern.

Outside the house Lucy had heard the exchange of voices. She came out of the protection of her shack, knowing what she'd see against that sheening sky, but no less dizzied by the monumental creatures that had gathered on every side of the house. An anguish went through her, remembering the lost joys of that day six years previous. They were all there, the unforgettable creatures, an incredible selection of forms—Pyramidal heads on rose coloured, classically proportioned torsos, that umbrellaed into shifting skirts of lace flesh. A headless silver beauty whose six mother of pearl arms sprouted in a circle from around its purring, pulsating mouth. A creature like a ripple on a fast-running stream, constant but moving, giving out a sweet and even tone. Creatures too fantastic to be real, too real to be disbelieved; angels of the hearth and threshold. One had a head, moving back and forth on a gossamer neck, like some preposterous weather-vane, blue as the early night sky and shot with a dozen eyes like so many suns. Another father, with a body like a fan, opening and closing in his excitement, his orange flesh flushing deeper as the boy's voice was heard again.

"Papa!"

At the door of the house stood the creature Lucy remembered with greatest affection; the one who had first touched her, first soothed her fears, first entered her, infinitely gentle. It was perhaps twenty feet tall when standing at its full height. Now it was bowed towards the door, its mighty, hairless head, like that of a bird painted by a schizophrenic, bent close to the house as it spoke to the child. It was naked, and its broad, dark back sweated as it crouched.

Inside the house, Eugene drew the boy close to him, as a shield.

"What do you know, boy?"

"Papa?"

"I said what do you know?"

"Papa!"

Jubilation was in Aaron's voice. The waiting was over.

The front of the house was smashed inwards. A limb like a flesh hook curled under the lintel and hauled the door from its hinges. Bricks flew up and showered down again; wood-splinters and dust filled the air. Where there had once been safe darkness, cataracts of sunlight now poured onto the dwarfed human figures in the ruins.

Eugene peered up through the veil of dust. The roof was being peeled back by giant hands, and there was sky where there had been beams. Towering on every side he saw the limbs, bodies and faces of impossible beasts. They were teasing the remaining walls down, destroying his house as casually as he would break a bottle. He let the boy slip from his grasp without realizing what he'd done.

Aaron ran towards the creature on the threshold.

"Papa!"

It scooped him up like a father meeting a child out of school, and its head was thrown back in a wave of ecstasy. A long, indescribable noise of joy was uttered out of its length and breadth. The hymn was taken up by the other creatures, mounting in celebration. Eugene covered his ears and fell to his knees. His nose had begun to bleed at the first notes of the monster's music, and his eyes were full of stinging tears. He wasn't frightened. He knew they were not capable of doing him harm. He cried because he had ignored this eventuality for six years, and now, with their mystery and their glory in front of him, he sobbed not to have had the courage to face them and know them. Now it was too late. They'd taken the boy by force, and reduced his house, and his life, to ruins. Indifferent to his agonies, they were leaving, singing their jubilation, his boy in their arms forever.

In the township of Welcome organization was the by-word of the day. Davidson could only watch with admiration the way these foolish, hardy people were attempting to confront impossible odds. He was strangely enervated by the spectacle; like watching settlers, in some movie, preparing to muster paltry weaponry and simple faith to meet the pagan violence of the savage. But, unlike the movie, Davidson knew defeat was pre-ordained. He'd seen these monsters: awe-inspiring. Whatever the rightness of the cause, the purity of the faith, the savages trampled the settlers underfoot fairly often. The defeats just make it into the movies.

Eugene's nose ceased to bleed after half an hour or so, but he didn't notice. He was dragging, pulling, cajoling Lucy towards Welcome. He wanted to hear no explanations from the slut, even though her voice was babbling ceaselessly. He could only hear the sound of the monsters' churning tones, and Aaron's repeated call of ‘Papa', that was answered by a house-wrecking limb.

Eugene knew he had been conspired against, though even in his most tortured imaginings he could not grasp the whole truth.

Aaron was mad, he knew that much. And somehow his wife, his ripe-bodied Lucy, who had been such a beauty and such a comfort, was instrumental in both the boy's insanity and his own grief.

She'd sold the boy: that was his half-formed belief. In some unspeakable way she had bargained with these things from the underworld, and had exchanged the life and sanity of his only son for some kind of gift. What had she gained, for this payment? Some trinket or other that she kept buried in her shack? My God, she would suffer for it. But before he made her suffer, before he wrenched her hair from its holes, and tarred her flashing breasts with pitch, she would confess. He'd make her confess; not to him but to the people of Welcome — the men and women who scoffed at his drunken ramblings, laughed when he wept into his beer. They would hear, from Lucy's own lips, the truth behind the nightmares he had endured, and learn, to their horror, that demons he talked about were real. Then he would be exonerated, utterly, and the town would take him back into its bosom asking for his forgiveness, while the feathered body of his bitch-wife swung from a telephone pole outside the town's limits.

They were two miles outside Welcome when Eugene stopped.

"Something's coming."

A cloud of dust, and at its swirling heart a multitude of burning eyes.

He feared the worst.

"My Christ!"

He loosed his wife. Were they coming to fetch her too? Yes, that was probably another part of the bargain she'd made.

"They've taken the town," he said. The air was full of their voices; it was too much to bear.

They were coming at him down the road in a whining horde, driving straight at him — Eugene turned to run, letting the slut go. They could have her, as long as they left him alone; Lucy was smiling into the dust.

"It's Packard," she said.

Eugene glanced back along the road and narrowed his eyes. The cloud of divils was resolving itself. The eyes at its heart were headlights, the voices were sirens; there was an army of cars and motorcycles, led by Packard's howling vehicle, careering down the road from Welcome.

Eugene was confounded. What was this, a mass exodus? Lucy, for the first time that glorious day, felt a twinge of doubt.

As it approached, the convoy slowed, and came to a halt; the dust settled, revealing the extent of Packard's kamikaze squad. There were about a dozen cars and half a dozen bikes, all of them loaded with police and weapons.

A smattering of Welcome citizens made up the army, among them Eleanor Kooker. An impressive array of mean-minded, well-armed people.

Packard leant out of his car, spat, and spoke.

"Got problems, Eugene?" he asked.

"I'm no fool, Packard," said Eugene.

"Not saying you are."

"I seen these things. Lucy'll tell you."

"I know you have, Eugene; I know you have. There's no denying that there's divils in them hills, sure as shit. What'd you think I've got this posse together for, if it ain't divils?"

Packard grinned across to Jebediah at the wheel. "Sure as shit," he said again. "We're going to blow them all to Kingdom Come."

From the back of the car, Miss Kooker leaned out the window; she was smoking a cigar.

"Seems we owe you an apology, Gene," she said, offering an apology for a smile. He's still a sot, she thought; marrying that fat-bottomed whore was the death of him. What a waste of a man.

Eugene's face tightened with satisfaction.

"Seems you do."

"Get in one of them cars behind," said Packard, "you and Lucy both; and we'll fetch them out of their holes like snakes —"

"The've gone towards the hills," said Eugene.

"That so?"

"Took my boy. Threw my house down."

"Many of them?"

"Dozen or so."

"OK Eugene, you'd best get in with us." Packard ordered a cop out of the back. "You're going to be hot for them bastards, eh?"

Eugene turned to where Lucy had been standing.

"And I want her tried —" he said.

But Lucy was gone, running off across the desert: doll-sized already.

"She's headed off the road," said Eleanor. "She'll kill herself."

"Killing's too good for her," said Eugene, as he climbed into the car. "That woman's meaner than the Devil himself."

"How's that, Gene?"

"Sold my only son to Hell, that woman —"Lucy was erased by the heat-haze.

"— to Hell."

"Then let her be," said Packard. "Hell'll take her back, sooner or later."

Lucy had known they wouldn't bother to follow her. From the moment she'd seen the car lights in the dust-cloud, seen the guns, and the helmets, she knew she had little place in the events ahead. At best, she would be a spectator. At worst, she'd die of heatstroke crossing the desert, and never know the upshot of the oncoming battle. She'd often mused about the existence of the creatures who were collectively Aaron's father. Where they lived, why they'd chosen, in their wisdom, to make love to her. She'd wondered also whether anyone else in Welcome had knowledge of them. How many human eyes, other than her own, had snatched glimpses of their secret anatomies, down the passage of years? And of course she'd wondered if there would one day come a reckoning time, a confrontation between one species and the other. Now it seemed to be here, without warning, and against the background of such a reckoning her life was as nothing.

Once the cars and bikes had disappeared out of sight, she doubled back, tracing her footmarks in the sand, ‘til she met the road again. There was no way of regaining Aaron, she realized that. She had, in a sense, merely been a guardian of the child, though she'd borne him. He belonged, in some strange way, to the creatures that had married their seeds in her body to make him. Maybe she'd been a vessel for some experiment in fertility, and now the doctors had returned to examine the resulting child. Maybe they had simply taken him out of love. Whatever the reasons she only hoped she would see the outcome of the battle. Deep in her, in a place touched only by monsters, she hoped for their victory, even though many of the species she called her own would perish as a result.

In the foothills there hung a great silence. Aaron had been set down amongst the rocks, and they gathered around him eagerly to examine his clothes, his hair, his eyes, his smile.

It was towards evening, but Aaron didn't feel cold. The breaths of his fathers were warm, and smelt, he thought, like the interior of the General Supplies Emporium in Welcome, a mingling of toffee and hemp, fresh cheese and iron. His skin was tawny in the light of the diminishing sun, and at his zenith stars were appearing. He was not happier at his mother's nipple than in that ring of demons.

At the toe of the foothills Packard brought the convoy to a halt. Had he known who Napoleon Bonaparte was, no doubt he would have felt like that conqueror. Had he known that conqueror's life-story, he might have sensed that this was his Waterloo: but Josh Packard lived and died bereft of heroes.

He summoned his men from their cars and went amongst them, his mutilated hand tucked in his shirt for support. It was not the most encouraging parade in military history. There were more than a few white and sickly-pale faces amongst his soldiers, more than a few eyes that avoided his stare as he gave his orders.

"Men," he bawled.

(It occurred to both Kooker and Davidson that as sneak-attacks went this would not be amongst the quietest.)

"Men — we've arrived, We're organized, and we've got God on our side. We've got the best of the brutes already, understand?"

Silence; baleful looks; more sweat.

"I don't want to see one jack man of you turn your heel and run, ‘cause if you do and I set my eyes on you, you'll crawl home with your backside shot to Hell!"

Eleanor thought of applauding; but the speech wasn't over.

"And remember, men," here Packard's voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, "these divils took Eugene's boy Aaron not four hours past. Took him fairly off his mother's tit, while she was rocking him to sleep. They ain't nothing but savages, whatever they may look like. They don't give a mind to a mother, or a child, or nothing. So when you get up close to one you just think how you'd have felt if you'd been taken from your mother's tit-"

He liked the phrase ‘mother's tit'. It said so much, so simply. Momma's tit had a good deal more power to move these men than her apple pie.

"You've nothing to fear but seeming less than men, men."

Good line to finish on.

"Get on with it."

He got back into the car. Someone down the line began to applaud, and the clapping was taken up by the rest of them. Packard's wide red face was cleft with a hard, yellow smile.

"Wagons roll!" he grinned, and the convoy moved off into the hills.

Aaron felt the air change. It wasn't that he was cold: the breaths that warmed him remained as embracing as ever. But there was nevertheless an alteration in the atmosphere: some kind of intrusion. Fascinated, he watched his fathers respond to the change: their substance glinting with new colours, graver, warier colours. One or two even lifted their heads as if to sniff the air.

Something was wrong. Something, someone, was coming to interfere with this night of festival, unplanned and uninvited. The demons knew the signs and they were not unprepared for the eventuality. Was it not inevitable that the heroes of Welcome would come after the boy? Didn't the men believe, in their pitiable way, that their species was born out of earth's necessity to know itself, nurtured from mammal to mammal until it blossomed as humanity?

Natural then to treat the fathers as the enemy, to root them out and try to destroy them. A tragedy really: when the only thought the fathers had was of unity through marriage, that their children should blunder in and spoil the celebration.

Still, men would be men. Maybe Aaron would be different, though perhaps he too would go back in time into the human world and forget what he was learning here. The creatures who were his fathers were also men's fathers: and the marriage of semen in Lucy's body was the same mix that made the first males. Women had always existed: they had lived, a species to themselves, with the demons. But they had wanted playmates: and together they had made men.

What an error, what a cataclysmic miscalculation. Within mere eons, the worst rooted out the best; the women were made slaves, the demons killed or driven underground, leaving only a few pockets of survivors to attempt again that first experiment, and make men, like Aaron, who would be wiser to their histories. Only by infiltrating humanity with new male children could the master race be made milder. That chance was slim enough, without the interference of more angry children, their fat white fists hot with guns.

Aaron scented Packard and his stepfather, and smelling them, knew them to be alien. After tonight they would be known dispassionately, like animals of a different species. It was the gorgeous array of demons around him he felt closest to, and he knew he would protect them, if necessary, with his life.

Packard's car led the attack. The wave of vehicles appeared out of the darkness, their sirens blaring, their headlights on, and drove straight towards the knot of celebrants. From one or two of the cars terrified cops let out spontaneous howls of terror when the full spectacle came into view, but by that time the attack force was committed. Shots were fired. Aaron felt his fathers close around him protectively, their flesh now darkening with anger and fear.

Packard knew instinctively that these things were capable of fear, he could smell it off them. It was part of his job to recognize fear, to play on it, to use it against the miscreant. He screeched his orders into his microphone and led the cars into the circle of demons. In the back of one of the following cars Davidson closed his eyes and offered up a prayer to Yahweh, Buddha and Groucho Marx. Grant me power, grant me indifference, grant me a sense of humour. But nothing came to assist him: his bladder still bubbled, and his throat still throbbed.

Ahead, the shriek of brakes. Davidson opened his eyes (just a slit) and caught sight of one of the creatures wrapping its purple-black arm around Packard's car and lifting it into the air. One of the back doors flung open and a figure he recognized as Eleanor Kooker fell the few feet to the ground followed closely by Eugene. Leaderless, the cars were in a frenzy of collisions — the whole scene partially eclipsed by smoke and dust. There was the sound of breaking windscreens as cops took the quick way out of their cars; the shrieks of crumpling hoods and sheered off doors. The dying howl of a crushed siren; the dying plea of a crushed cop.

Packard's voice was clear enough, however, howling orders from his car even as it was lifted higher into the air, its engine revving, its wheels spinning foolishly in space. The demon was shaking the car as a child might a toy until the driver's door opened and Jebediah fell to the ground at the creature's skirt of skin. Davidson saw the skirt envelop the broken-backed deputy and appear to suck him into its folds. He could see too how Eleanor was standing up to the towering demon as it devoured her son.

"Jebediah, come out of there!" she shrieked, and fired shot after shot into his devourer's featureless, cylindrical head.

Davidson got out of the car to see better. Across a clutter of crashed vehicles and blood-splattered hoods he could make the whole scene out more plainly. The demons were sloping away from the battle, leaving this one extraordinary monster to hold the bridgehead. Quietly Davidson offered up a prayer of thanks to any passing deity. The divils were disappearing. There's be no pitched battle: no hand-to-tentacle fight. The boy would be simply eaten alive, or whatever they planned for the poor little bastard. Indeed, couldn't he see Aaron from where he stood? Wasn't that his frail form the retreating demons were holding so high, like a trophy?

With Eleanor's curses and accusations in their ears the sheltering cops began to emerge from their hiding-places to surround the remaining demon. There was, after all, only one left to face, and it had their Napoleon in its slimy grip. They let off volley upon volley into its creases and tucks, and against the impartial geometry of its head, but the divil seemed unconcerned. Only when it had shaken Packard's car until the Sheriff rattled like a dead frog in a tin can did it lose interest and drop the vehicle. A smell of gasoline filled the air, and turned Davidson's stomach.

Then a cry: "Heads down!"

A grenade? Surely not; not with so much gasoline on the—Davidson fell to the floor. A sudden silence, in which an injured man could be heard whimpering somewhere in the chaos, then the dull, earth-rocking thud of the erupting grenade.

Somebody said Jesus Christ — with a kind of victory in his voice.

Jesus Christ. In the name of... for the glory of. .

The demon was ablaze. The thin tissue of its gasoline­ soaked skirt was burning; one of its limbs had been blown off by the blast, another partially destroyed; thick, colourless blood splashed from the wounds and the stump. There was a smell in the air like burnt candy: the creature was clearly in an agony of cremation. Its body reeled and shuddered as the flames licked up to ignite its empty face, and it stumbled away from its tormentors, not sounding its pain. Davidson got a kick out of seeing it burn: like the simple pleasure he had from putting the heel of his boot in the centre of a jelly-fish. Favourite summer-time occupation of his childhood. In Maine: hot afternoons: spiking men-o'-war.

Packard was being dragged out of the wreckage of his car. My God, that man was made of steel: he was standing upright and calling his men to advance on the enemy. Even in his finest hour, a flake of fire dropped from the flowering demon, and touched the lake of gasoline Packard was standing in. A moment later he, the car, and two of his saviours were enveloped in a billowing cloud of white fire. They stood no chance of survival: the flames just washed them away. Davidson could see their dark forms being wasted in the heart of the inferno, wrapped in folds of fire, curling in on themselves as they perished.

Almost before Packard's body had hit the ground Davidson could hear Eugene's voice over the flames.

"See what they've done? See what they've done?"

The accusation was greeted by feral howls from the cops. "Waste them!" Eugene was screaming. "Waste them!"

Lucy could hear the noise of the battle, but she made no attempt to go in the direction of the foothills. Something about the way the moon was suspended in the sky, and the smell on the breeze, had taken all desire to move out of her. Exhausted, and enchanted, she stood in the open desert, and watched the sky.

When, after an age, she brought her gaze back down to fix on the horizon, she saw two things that were of mild interest. Out of the hills, a dirty smudge of smoke, and the edge of her vision in the gentle night light, a line of creatures, hurrying away from the hills. She suddenly began to run.

It occurred to her, as she ran, that her gait was sprightly as a young girl's, and that she had a young girl's motive: that is, she was in pursuit of her lover.

In an empty stretch of desert, the convocation of demons simply disappeared from sight. From where Lucy was standing, panting in the middle of nowhere, they seemed to have been swallowed up by the earth. She broke into a run again. Surely she could see her son and his fathers once more before they left forever? Or was she, after all her years of anticipation, to be denied even that?

In the lead car Davidson was driving, commandeered to do so by Eugene, who was not at present a man to be argued with. Something about the way he carried his rifle suggested he'd shoot first and ask questions later; his orders to the straggling army that followed him were two parts incoherent obscenities to one part sense. His eyes gleamed with hysteria: his mouth dribbled a little. He was a wild man, and he terrified Davidson. But it was too late now to turn back: he was in cahoots with the man for this last, apocalyptic pursuit.

"See, them black-eyed sons of bitches don't have no fucking heads," Eugene was screaming over the tortured roar of the engine. "Why you taking this track so slow, boy?"

He jabbed the rifle in Davidson's crotch.

"Drive, or I'll blow your brains out."

"I don't know which way they've gone," Davidson yelled back at Eugene.

"What you mean? Show me!"

"I can't show you if they've disappeared."

Eugene just about appreciated the sense of the response. "Slow down, boy." He waved out of the car window to slow the rest of the army.

"Stop the car — stop the car!"

Packard brought the car to a halt.

"And put those fucking lights out. All of you!" The headlights were quenched. Behind, the rest of the entourage followed suit.

A sudden dark. A sudden silence. There was nothing to be seen or heard in any direction. They'd disappeared, the whole cacophonous tribe of demons had simply vanished into the air, chimerical.

The desert vista brightened as their eyes became accus­tomed to the gleam of the moonlight. Eugene got out of the car, rifle still at the ready, and stared at the sand, willing it to explain.

"Fuckers," he said, very softly.

Lucy had stopped running. Now she was walking towards the line of cars. It was all over by now. They had all been tricked: the disappearing act was a trump card no-one could have anticipated.

Then, she heard Aaron.

She couldn't see him, but his voice was as clear as a bell; and like a bell, it summoned. Like a bell, it rang out: this is a time of festival: celebrate with us.

Eugene heard it too; he smiled. They were near after all.

"Hey!" the boy's voice said. "Where is he? You see him, Davidson?" Davidson shook his head. Then —"Wait! Wait! I see a light — look, straight ahead awhile."

"I see it."

With exaggerated caution, Eugene motioned Davidson back into the driver's seat.

"Drive, boy. But slowly. And no lights."

Davidson nodded. More jelly-fish for the spiking, he thought; they were going to get the bastards after all, and wasn't that worth a little risk? The convoy started up again, creeping forward at a snail's pace.

Lucy began to run once more: she could see the tiny figure of Aaron now, standing on the lip of a slope that led under the sand. The cars were moving towards it.

Seeing them approaching, Aaron stopped his calls and began to walk away, back down the slope. There was no need to wait any longer, they were following for certain. His naked feet made scarcely a mark in the soft-sanded incline that led away from the idiocies of the world. In the shadows of the earth at the end of that slope, fluttering and smiling at him, he could see his family.

"He's going in," said Davidson.

"Then follow the little bastard," said Eugene. "Maybe the kid doesn't know what he's doing. And get some light on him."

The headlights illuminated Aaron. His clothes were in tatters, and his body was slumped with exhaustion as he walked.

A few yards off to the right of the slope Lucy watched as the lead car drove over the lip of the earth and followed the boy down, into—"No," she said to herself, "don't."

Davidson was suddenly scared. He began to slow the car.

"Get on with it, boy." Eugene jabbed the rifle into his crotch again. "We've got them cornered. We've got a whole nest of them here. The boy's leading us right to them."

The cars were all on the slope now, following the leader, their wheels slipping in the sand.

Aaron turned. Behind him, illuminated only by the phosphorescence of their own matter, the demons stood; a mass of impossible geometries. All the attributes of Lucifer were spread among the bodies of the fathers. The extraordinary anatomies, the dreaming spires of heads, the scales, the skirts, the claws, the clippers.

Eugene brought the convoy to a halt, got out of the car and began to walk towards Aaron.

"Thank you boy," he said. "Come here — we'll look after you now. We've got them. You're safe."

Aaron stared at his father, uncomprehending.

The army was disgorging from the cars behind Eugene, readying their weapons. A bazooka was being hurriedly assembled; a cocking of rifles, a weighing-up of grenades.

"Come to Papa, boy," Eugene coaxed.

Aaron didn't move, so Eugene followed him a few yards deeper into the ground. Davidson was out of the car now, shaking from head to foot.

"Maybe you should put down the rifle. Maybe he's scared," he suggested.

Eugene grunted, and let the muzzle of the rifle drop a few inches.

"You're safe," said Davidson. "It's all right."

"Walk towards us, boy. Slowly."

Aaron's face began to flush. Even in the deceptive light of the headlamps it was clearly changing colour. His cheeks were blowing up like balloons, and the skin on his forehead was wriggling as though his flesh was full of maggots. His head seemed to liquefy, to become a soup of shapes, shifting and blossoming like a cloud, the façade of boyhood broken as the father inside the son showed its vast and unimaginable face.

Even as Aaron became his father's son, the slope began to soften. Davidson felt it first: a slight shift in the texture of the sand, as though an order had passed through it, subtle but all-pervasive.

Eugene could only gape as Aaron's transformation continued, his entire body now overtaken by the tremors of change. His belly had become distended and a harvest of cones budded from it, which even now flowered into dozens of coiled legs; the change was marvellous in its complexity, as out of the cradle of the boy's substance came new glories.

Without warning Eugene raised his rifle and fired at his son.

The bullet struck the boy-demon in the middle of his face. Aaron fell back, his transformation still taking its course even as his blood, a stream part scarlet, part silver, ran from his wound into the liquefying earth.

The geometries in the darkness moved out of hiding to help the child. The intricacy of their forms was simplified in the glare of the headlamps but they seemed, even as they appeared, to be changing again: bodies becoming thin in their grief, a whine of mourning like a solid wall of sound from their hearts.

Eugene raised his rifle a second time, whooping at his victory. He had them... My God, he had them. Dirty, stinking, faceless flickers.

But the mud beneath his feet was like warm treacle as it rose around his shins, and when he fired he lost balance. He yelled for assistance, but Davidson was already staggering back up the slope out of the gully fighting a losing battle against the rising mire. The rest of the army were similarly trapped, as the desert liquefied beneath them, and glutinous mud began to creep up the slope.

The demons had gone: retreated into the dark, their lament sunk away.

Eugene, flat on his back in the sinking sand, fired off two useless, vehement shots into the darkness beyond Aaron's corpse. He was kicking like a hog with its throat cut, and with every kick his body sunk deeper. As his face disappeared beneath the mud, he just glimpsed Lucy, standing at the edge of the slope, staring down towards Aaron's body. Then the mire covered his face, and blotted him out.

The desert was upon them with lightning speed.

One or two of the cars were already entirely submerged, and the tide of sand climbing the slope was relentlessly catching up with the escapees. Feeble cries for assistance ended with choking silences as mouths were filled with desert; somebody was shooting at the ground in an hysterical attempt to dam the flow, but it reached up swiftly to snatch every last one of them. Even Eleanor Kooker wasn't to be let free: she struggled, cursing and pressing the thrashing body of a cop deeper into the sand in her frantic attempts to step out of the gully.

There were universal howls now, as panicking men groped and grasped at each other for support, desperately trying to keep their heads afloat in the sea of sand.

Davidson was buried up to his waist. The ground that eddied about his lower half was hot and curiously inviting. The intimacy of its pressure had given him an erection. A few yards behind him a cop was screaming blue murder as the desert ate him up. Further still from him he could see a face peering out from the seething ground like a living mask thrown on the earth. There was an arm close by, still waving, as it sank; a pair of fat buttocks was poking up from the silt sea like two watermelons, a policeman's farewell.

Lucy took one step backwards as the mud slightly overran the lip of the gully, but it didn't reach her feet. Nor, curiously, did it dissipate itself, as a water-wave might have done.

Like concrete, it hardened, fixing its living trophies like flies in amber. From the lips of every face that still took air came a fresh cry of terror, as they felt the desert floor stiffen around their struggling limbs.

Davidson saw Eleanor Kooker, buried to breast-level. Tears were pouring down her cheeks; she was sobbing like a little girl. He scarcely thought of himself. Of the East, of Barbara, of the children, he thought not at all.

The men whose faces were buried but whose limbs, or parts of bodies, still broke surface, were dead of asphyxiation by now. Only Eleanor Kooker, Davidson and two other men survived. One was locked in the earth up to his chin, Eleanor was buried so that her breasts sat on the ground, her arms were free to beat uselessly at the ground that held her fast. Davidson himself was held from his hips down. And most horribly, one pathetic victim was seen only by his nose and mouth. His head was tipped back into the ground, blinded by rock. Still he breathed, still he screamed.

Eleanor Kooker was scrabbling at the ground with torn nails, but this was not loose sand. It was immovable.

"Get help," she demanded of Lucy, hands bleeding.

The two women stared at each other.

"Jesus God!" screamed the Mouth.

The Head was silent: by his glazed look it was apparent that he'd lost his mind.

"Please help us..." pleaded Davidson's Torso. "Fetch help."

Lucy nodded.

"Go!" demanded Eleanor Kooker. "Go!"

Numbly, Lucy obeyed. Already there was a glimmer of dawn in the east. The air would soon be blistering. In Welcome, three hours walk away, she would find only old men, hysterical women and children. She would have to summon help from perhaps fifty miles distance. Even assuming she found her way back. Even assuming she didn't collapse exhausted to the sand and die.

It would be noon before she could fetch help to the woman, to the Torso, to the Head, to the Mouth. By that time the wilderness would have had the best of them. The sun would have boiled their brain-pans dry, snakes would have nested in their hair, the buzzards would have hooked out their helpless eyes.

She glanced round once more at their trivial forms, dwarfed by the bloody sweep of the dawn sky. Little dots and commas of human pain on a blank sheet of sand; she didn't care to think of the pen that wrote them there. That was for tomorrow.

After a while, she began to run.