He opened his arms and they fell to the earth, to lie at odd angles, blood emerging from their ears, noses, and mouths. Their eyes were wide. They did not breathe.
“You dare?” the vicar cried. “You dare to touch my people?”
The Count turned his head slowly, raising his arms again.
“You presume,” he said, “to address me so.”
He flowed toward the vicar, but much more slowly. The music came clearer and clearer, the chanting louder, the inscription brighter. And as he moved, I beheld a silent form in the shadows to my right, whose presence had first reached me in the form of his scent, which I recognized from an encounter in a wood by moonlight. He approached soundlessly, the stranger wolf.
The vicar’s hand snaked out from beneath his cloak, casting something toward the Count. Immediately, the flowing ceased and the Count stiffened. In the meantime, shielded from the vicar’s view by the Count’s body, the stranger wolf entered the firelight, took hold of Lynette’s shoulder and continued what Larry had begun, dragging her back into the darkness.
The Count was suddenly less than graceful. He swayed. He took an awkward step toward the vicar, whose hand dipped beneath his own cloak to emerge and repeat whatever he had done.
“What, is it?” the Count asked, reeling toward the vicar, who retreated before him.
Then the Count fell.
“Dirt from one of your own caskets,” the vicar replied, “mixed with pieces of my church’s altar stone relic, left over from more papish times. Fingerbone of St. Hilarian, according to the records. You require your consecrated soil, but overconsecration is like the difference between a therapeutic and a debilitating dose of strychnine. Do you not agree?”
The Count muttered a reply in a foreign language, as the wolf disappeared with Lynette; and I realized that, from all his talks with Larry, plus his knowledge of drugs, and the samples he had obtained, he had succeeded several days ago in developing his own ideal dosage, and I had just witnessed the Great Detective’s greatest disguise yet. I howled a “Well done!” into the night. Later, a “Good luck!” came back to me.
The inscription glowed brilliantly now. Whether the deaths of Morris and MacCab had contributed to this was hard to tell. The vicar looked up and saw that Lynette was gone. He glared at Jill.
“You should have told me,” he said.
“I didn’t notice till now,” she replied.
“Neither did I,” said Nightwind.
The vicar picked up the sacrificial knife which he had dropped, moved back to his position, and drove the blade into the ground at his feet.
He straightened then, repeated the word of power, and said another. Immediately, his face became the snouted, tusked visage of a boar with a shredded ear. This lasted for perhaps a minute before Larry’s eyes opened. He turned his head, saw that Lynette was gone, looked immediately to the altar, saw she was not there either. He tried to rise, failed. I wondered how serious his condition was. True, there was a lot of blood, but head wounds are often that way. Even a silver bullet still has to hit something major. Larry tried to crawl forward, succeeded in moving perhaps half a foot, paused, and panted.
The vicar spoke another word. Graymalk was suddenly striped like a small tiger. This, too, passed quickly. Tekela was starting to look like a vulture. Suddenly, Jill was an ancient hag, bent far forward, hooked nose almost touching her jutting chin, strands of white hair hanging about her face. I glanced at Jack and saw that he suddenly wore the shaggy head of a great brown bear, yellow eyes staring forward, saliva running from the corners of his mouth. Looking downward, I saw that my fur was blood-red and moist; and I felt as if horns jutted from my brow. I had no idea what I might resemble, but Graymalk drew back in alarm. The boar spoke again, and the word rang like a bell in the chill air. The Count was suddenly a skeleton wrapped in black. Something unseen passed high overhead, laughing like a demented child. Pale mushrooms sprang up all about us, and a shifting of breezes brought me sulfurous scents from the fire. A green liquid flowed outward from that blaze, spreading in bubbling streams. The chanting now seemed to contain all of our names. MacCab had become a woman whose painted face began to peel off in long strips. Beside him, Morris was now an ape, his long hairy arms reaching to the ground, and he leaned to rest upon his knuckles. His mouth was opened wide, showing an enormous expanse of teeth and gums. Larry was now a bleeding man sprawled upon the ground. The air before us shimmered and became a mirror, giving this entire prospect back to us. Then our reflected heads detached themselves and drifted leftwards. It was a strange feeling, passing out of one and into another, for I seemed unmoved, though I felt the sudden weight of the bear-head, saw the hog’s drift by to settle upon Jack’s shoulders. Graymalk suddenly wore an overlarge one, horned, demonic; Jill, a small striped cat’s head, and so on along our crescent. Then the bodies shifted to the right, and I was a cat with a bear’s head, lying flat because of its weight, my heart thudding like a steam engine. Jack had become a boar-headed demon. Again, the laughter rang from overhead. If I were not my body or my head, what was I, sprawled there amid the mushrooms and the stench, another wave of chanting rolling in my ears? Illusion, it must all be illusion, mustn’t it? I never knew before and I still didn’t know. The mushrooms blackened, shriveled, and fell when the hot green flow reached them. Our images in the mirror wavered, became splashes of our dominant colors, flowed together. I looked downward again, but everything was hazy. Upward then, at some half-noted change. The moon had gone blood-red and was dripping upon us. A shooting star cut past it. Another. Another. Soon multitudes of them rained down the heavens. The mirror cracked, and Jack and I stood alone at our end, our forms returned to us, as a great gust of wind out of the north blew away the haze. The others came clear, also, restored, in their piece of reflection. The starfall lessened. The moon grew pink, then turned back to butter and ivory. I sighed and held my place, felt Graymalk’s gaze pass over me. The green tendrils from the fire began to congeal, lavalike. For a moment, I seemed to hear a collection of animal sounds from within the flames, baas, nickers, whinnies, whimpers, a sharp barking, several varieties of howling, the coughing of a giant cat, a croaking, a mewling cry. There followed a stillness, save for the fire’s own cracking and snapping.