“Reckon it might get stif-/br if it was one of your boys layin here with his rosy red ass stuck up in the air, sugar?” she asks, and then, For the last time, Sara laughs.
49o Devore draws his hand back to hit her again, his naked loins lying against her naked loins, his penis a flaccid worm between them. But here he can bring the hand down a child’s voice cries, “Ma/What they doin to you, Ma? Git off my mama, you bastards/” She sits up in spite of Devore’s weight, her laughter dying, her wide eyes searching Kito out and finding him, a slim young boy of eight standing on The Street, dressed in overalls and a straw hat and brand-new canvas shoes, carrying a tin bucket in one hand. His lips are blue with juice. His eyes are wide with confusion and fright. “Run, Kito!” she screams. “Run away h—”
Red fire explodes in her head,’ she swoons back into the bushes, hearing ole massa from a great distance: “Get him. Dassn’t let him ramble, now.”
Then she’s going down a long dark slope, she’s lost in a Ghost House corridor that leads only deeper and deeper into its own convoluted bowels,’ from that deep falling place she hears him, she hears, her darling one, he is screaming. I heard him screaming as I knelt by the gray rock with my carry-bag beside me and no idea how I’d gotten to where I was—I certainly had no memory of walking here. I was crying in shock and horror and pity. Was she crazy? Well, no wonder. No fucking wonder. The rain was steady but no longer apocalyptic. I stared at my fishy-white hands on the gray rock for a few seconds, then looked around. Devore and the others were gone. The ripe and gassy stench of decay filled my nose—it was like a physical assault. I fumbled in the carry-bag, found the Stenomask Rommie and George had given me as a joke, and slipped it over my mouth and nose with fingers that felt numb and distant. I breathed shallowly and tentatively. Better. Not a lot, but enough to keep from fleeing, which was undoubtedly what she wanted.
“No!” she cried from somewhere behind me as I grabbed the spade and dug in. I tore a great mouth in the ground with the first swipe, and each subsequent one deepened and widened it. The earth was soft and yielding, woven through with mats of thin roots which parted easily under the blade. “No! Don’t you dare!” I wouldn’t look around, wouldn’t give her a chance to push me away.
She was stronger down here, perhaps because it had happened here. Was that possible? I didn’t know and didn’t care. All I cared about was getting this done. Where the roots were thicker, I hacked through them with the pruning knife. “Leave me be!” Now I did look around, risked one quick glance because of the unnatural crackling sounds which had accompanied her voice—which now seemed to make her voice. The Green Lady was gone. The birch had somehow become Sara Tidwell: it was Sara’s face growing out of the criss-crossing branches and shiny leaves. That rain-slicked face swayed, dissolved, came together, melted away, came together again. For a moment all the mystery I had sensed down here was revealed. Her damp shifting eyes were utterly human. They stared at me with hate and supplication. “I ain’t done!” she cried in a cracked, breaking voice. “He was the worst, don’t you understand? He was the worst and it’s his blood in her and I won’t rest until I have it out!”
There was a gruesome ripping sound. She had inhabited the birch, made it into a physical body of some sort and intended to tear it free of the earth. She would come and get me with it if she could; kill me with it if she could. Strangle me in limber branches. Stuff me with leaves until I looked like a Christmas decoration. “No matter how much of a monster he was, Kyra had nothing to do with what he did,” I said. “And you won’t have her.”
“Yes I will!” the Green Lady screamed. The ripping, rending sounds were louder now. They were joined by a hissing, shaky crackle. I didn’t look around again. I didn’t dare look around. I dug faster instead. “Yes I will have her!” she cried, and now the voice was closer.
She was coming for me but I refused to see; when it comes to walking trees and bushes, I’ll stick to Macbeth, thanks. “I will have her! He took mine and I mean to take his!”
“Go away,” a new voice said. The spade loosened in my hands, almost fell. I turned and saw Jo standing below me and to my right. She was looking at Sara, who had materialized into a lunatic’s hallucination—a monstrous greenish-black thing that slipped with every step it tried to walk along The Street.
She had left the birch behind yet assumed its vitality somehow—the actual tree huddled behind her, black and shrivelled and dead. The creature born of it looked like the Bride of Frankenstein as sculpted by Picasso. In it, Sara’s face came and went, came and went. The Shape, I thought coldly. It was always real… and if it was always me, it was always her, too. Jo was dressed in the white shirt and yellow slacks she’d had on the day she died. I couldn’t see the lake through her as I had been able to see it through Devore and Devore’s young friends; she had materialized herself completely. I felt a curious draining sensation at the back of my skull and thought I knew how. “Git out, bitch!” the Sara-thing snarled. It raised its arms toward Jo as it had raised them to me in my worst nightmares. “Not at all.” Jo’s voice remained calm.
She turned toward me. “Hurry, Mike. You have to be quick. It’s not really her anymore. She’s let one of the Outsiders in, and they’re very dangerous.”
“Jo, I love you.”
“I love you t—” Sara shrieked and then began to spin. Leaves and branches blurred together and lost coherence; it was like watching something liquefy in a blender. The entity which had only looked a little like a woman to begin with now dropped its masquerade entirely. Something elemental and grotesquely inhuman began to form out of the maelstrom. It leaped at my wife. When it struck her, the color and solidity left Jo as if slapped away by a huge hand. She became a phantom struggling with the thing which raved and shrieked and clawed at her. “Hurry, Mike!” she screamed. “Hurry/” I bent to the job.
The spade struck something that wasn’t dirt, wasn’t stone, wasn’t wood.
I scraped along it, revealing a filthy mold-crusted swatch of canvas.
Now I dug like a madman, wanting to clear as much of the buried object as I could, wanting to fatten my chances of success as much as I could.
Behind me, the Shape screamed in fury and my wife screamed in pain. Sara had given up part of her discorporate self in order to gain her revenge, had let in something Jo called an Outsider. I had no idea what that might be and never wanted to know. Sara was its conduit, I knew that much. And if I could take care of her in time-I reached into the dripping hole, slapping wet earth from the ancient canvas. Faint stencilled letters appeared when I did: j. M. MCCUTDIE SAWMILL.
Mccurdie’s had burned in the fires of ’33, I knew. I’d seen a picture of it in flames somewhere. As I seized the canvas, the tips of my fingers punching through and letting out a fresh billow of green and gassy stench, I could hear grunting. I could hear Devore. He’s lying on top o/her and grunting like a pig. Sara is semiconscious, muttering unintelligibly through bruised lips which are shiny with blood. Devore is looking back over his shoulder at Draper Finney and Fred Dean. They have raced after the boy and brought him back, but he won’t stop yelling, he’s yelling to beat the band, yelling to wake the dead, and if they can hear the Methodists singing “How I Love to ll the Story” over here, then they may be able to hear the yowling nigger over there.
Devore says “Put him in the water, shut him up.” The minute he says it, as though the words are magic words, his cock begins to stifn. “What do you mean?” Ben Merrill asks. “You know goddam well, “Jared says. He pants the words out, jerking his hips as he speaks. His narrow ass gleams in the afternoon light. “He seen us! I3u want to cut his throat, get his blood all over you? Fine by me. Here. Take my knij, be my guest!”