He could think of no words to comfort her. The uniquely feminine abasement was a horror beyond his understanding, although he pitied her and raged inwardly against the ones who had used her, planted a half-human parasite inside of her that fed on her, kicked against her internal organs and belly wall, then violated her again as it burst out into the open air. God! And she’d said that she loved the first baby! How was it possible? (He would have strangled the little bastards before they drew their first breath.) But she’d loved one, and would have loved the others, likely as not, if they hadn’t been taken away. She’d loved those pain givers, those unworthy children. Could a man ever make sense of the way of women?
And you’d think she’d never want to look at another male. But somehow she’d fathomed his own need and, yes!, needed him as well. She might even like him a little. Was she as generous as all that?
Almost as though she read his thoughts, she gave a sensuous little chuckle and beckoned him back to her. “We still have time. If you’re the man I think you are.”
“Not if it would hurt you,” he found himself saying even as he came back to life. “Never if it would hurt you.” But she only laughed again and pulled him down. Women were amazing.
Off in a remote little nook of his brain, something was typing out a message to him, a conviction that grew to enormous, almost frightening, proportions as the exquisite tension built to its culmination. This person was not “women.” She was not, as all the others had been to him, an abstraction of feminine sexuality, a comforter, a receptacle for physical release. She was different. She was Martha.
The message was hard to understand, but any minute now, he was going to figure it out.
CHAPTER FIVE
It had been Martha who gave the Bogle his title.
He had been there, sitting on a boulder and regarding them with a misanthropic glare, when they awoke early the next morning in their camp below the southern flank of the Feldberg. After brusquely identifying himself as an emissary from Sugoll, he had ordered them to pack up without even waiting to let Richard make breakfast. The pace he set up a spur ridge of the mountain was deliberately trying and he would have raced them uphill without a rest if Madame had not occasionally demanded that they stop to catch their breath. Plainly, the dwarfish creature was feeling ill-used at having to serve as a guide and had decided to wreak his own petty revenge.
The Bogle was much shorter than any Firvulag they had ever seen before, and much uglier, with a tubby little torso and skinny arms and legs. His skull was grotesquely compressed to the point of being birdlike. Large black eyes with overlapping pouches were set close together above his toucanish nose. Prominent ears drooped flaccidly at the upper margins. His skin shone greasy reddish brown, and his sparse hair twisted into strands like a string mop. The Bogle’s clothing, belying his physical repulsiveness, was neat and even beautiful: polished boots and a wide belt of carved black leather, wine-red breeches and shirt, and a long vest embroidered in flamelike patterns and studded with semiprecious stones. He wore a kind of Phrygian bonnet with a large brooch positioned just above his scraggly brows, which were knit in what seemed to be a permanent scowl.
Following their trollish guide, the five travelers skirted the mountain ravines, following a tiny but very distinct trail, and passed through a part of the Black Forest that had nearly as many broadleaf trees as conifers. Wherever the Feldberg brooks slowed enough to pool there were bosky dingles clogged with tall ferns and alders, creeping clematis vines, and fall-blooming primroses with poisonously bright blossoms. They came to a hollow where the waters of a hot spring bubbled to the surface. Lush and unhealthy-looking vegetation crowded the steamy swale. A flock of ravens croaked a sardonic greeting from the half-eaten carcass of a small deer that lay near the edge of a mineral-encrusted puddle. More bones, some clean, some furred with thick moss, were strewn about the undergrowth.
Farther east, the rock formations began to change. Colored limestone outcroppings intruded amongst the granite. “Cave country,” Claude remarked to Madame. They were walking side by side now, the path widening as they passed below a wooded cliff. The sun was warm; nevertheless, the paleontologist felt a subterranean chill. In the few places where the rock face was visible, they saw scarlet and blue swallows with long forked tails darting in and out of pocks in the limestone. Spiny-ribbed elephant-ears grew in dense patches beneath the trees. They sheltered clumps of distinctive mushrooms, white-stemed, red caps flecked in white.
“They are here,” the old woman said abruptly. “All around us! Can you not feel them? So many! And all… deformed.”
For a moment, he failed to catch the significance of what she was saying. But it fit, fit with the undercurrent of anxiety that had lurked at the edge of his consciousness ever since early morning. Fit with the surliness of the Bogle, whom Claude had mistaken for an ordinary Firvulag. “Les Criards,” Madame said. “They follow us. One of them leads us. The Howling Ones.”
The path led uphill at an easy slope, entirely free of debris. The swallows flickered among the firs and beeches. Great bars of golden lights slanted down into the forest as if through open windows.
The old woman said, “Such a beautiful place. But there is desolation here, mon vieux, a wretchedness of spirit that at once touches my heart and disgusts me. And it grows stronger.”
He lent her his arm, for she was faltering, apparently for no physical reason. Her face had gone dead white. “We could ask the Bogle to stop,” Claude suggested.
Her voice was dulled. “No. It is necessary to go on… Ah, Claude! You should thank God for not making you sensitive to the emanations of other minds! All sentient beings have secret thoughts, those that remain hidden except to the good God. But there are other thoughts as well, pitched, as it were, on different psychic levels, the nonvocal speech, the currents and storms of emotion. This latter is what I am enveloped in now. It is a most profound enmity, a malevolence that can come only from the most distorted personalities. The Howling Ones! They hate other beings but they hate themselves so much more. And their howling fills my mind…”
“Can’t you shut it out? Defend yourself as you did against the Hunt?”
“If I had been properly trained,” she said forlornly. “But all that I know I have taught myself. I do not know how to counter this horde. They don’t offer any concrete threat that I can seize upon.” Her expression was very near panic. “All they do is hate. With all their strength… they hate.”
“Do they seem to be more powerful than ordinary Firvulag?”
“I cannot be sure of that. But they are different in some unnatural way. That is why I called them deformed. With the Firvulag, and even with the Tanu, human metapsychics can feel a certain mental kinship. It is no matter that the exotic is an enemy. But never could I be akin to these Criards! I have never before been so close to so many of them. Only rarely did we encounter them in our little enclave within the Vosges, and there they were wary. But these… I…” Her voice broke off, harsh and too high-pitched. Her right fingers stroked the golden torc with a feverish urgency while those of her left hand dug painfully into Claude’s arm. She kept darting her eyes from side to side, scanning the crags. There was nothing unusual to be seen.
Felice, who had been at the tail end of the line behind them, now closed the distance and announced, “I don’t like this place at all. For the past half hour or so I’ve had the damnedest feeling. Nothing at all like those nervous fantods we got in the Fungus Forest, either. This time, there bloody well is something to be afraid of! Come on, Madame, what’s going on?”