They don’t. They can’t. They are too eager to have her. They arm-yank her behind the forehead of gray rock and call it good. She doesn’t pray easily but she prays now. She prays for them to let her live. She prays for Kito to stay clear, to keep filling his bucket slow by eating every third handful. She prays that if he does take a notion to catch up with her, he will see what’s happening and run the other way as fast as he can, run silent and get Reg.
‘Stick this in your mouth,’ George Armbruster pants. ‘And don’t you bite me, you bitch.’
They take her top and bottom, back and front, two and three at a time. They take her where anybody coming along can’t help but see them, and ole massa stands off a little, looking first at the panting young men grouped around her, kneeling with their trousers down and their thighs scratched from the bushes they are kneeling in, then he peers up and down the path with his wild and wary eyes. Incredibly, one of them — it is Fred Dean — says ‘Sorry, ma’am’ after he’s shot his
load feels like halfway up to east bejeezus. It’s as if he accidentally kicked her in the shin while crossing his legs.
And it doesn’t end. There’s come down her throat, come running down the crack of her ass, the young one has bitten the blood right out of her left breast, and it doesn’t end. They are young, and by the time the last one has finished, the first one, oh God, the first one is ready again. Across the river the Methodists are now singing ‘Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine’ and as ole massa approaches her she thinks, It’s almost over, woman, he the last, hold on hold steady and it be over.
He looks at the skinny redhead and the one who keeps squinching his eye up and tossing his head and tells them to watch the path, he’s going to take his turn now that she’s broke in.
He unbuckles his belt, he unbuttons his flies, he pushes down his underwear — dirty black at the knees and dirty yellow at the crotch-and as he drops a knee on either side of her she sees that ole massa’ s little massa is just as floppy as a snake with its neck broke and before she can stop it, that raucous laugh bursts all unexpected from her again — even lying here covered with the hot jelly spend of her rapists, she can’t help but see the funny side.
‘Shut up!’ Devore growls at her, and smashes the heel of one hard hand across her face, breaking her cheekbone and her nose. ‘Shut up that howling!’
‘Reckon it might get stiffer 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.
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 before 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.’