“Joe, I — ”
“Get ready,” Joe said again, leaning across the victim’s body to untie the other hand. You’re going to have to catch him,” he warned Eppstadt.
“I can’t do that.”
“Well who else is going to do it?” Joe snapped.
Eppstadt wasn’t paying attention, however.
He’d heard a noise behind him, and now he turned to find that a freakish child, naked and runty, had appeared from somewhere, and was looking up at him.
“We’ve got company,” he said to Joe, who was still struggling to free the crucified man’s other hand.
When Eppstadt looked back at the freak, it had approached a few steps, and Eppstadt had a clearer view of it. There was something goatish in the gene-pool, Eppstadt decided. The child’s bandy legs were sheathed with dirty-yellow fur, and his eyes were yellow-green. From beneath the pale dome of his belly there jutted a sizeable erection, which was out of all proportion to the rest of his body. He fingered it idly while he watched.
“Why are you taking the man down?” he said to Joe. Then, getting no answer from Joe, directed the same question at Eppstadt.
“He’s in pain,” was all Eppstadt could find to say, though the phrase scarcely seemed to match the horror of the victim’s persecution.
“That’s the way my mother wants him,” the goat-boy said.
“Your mother?”
“Lil-ith,” he said, pronouncing the word as two distinct syllables. “She is the Queen of Hell. And I am her son.”
“If you’re her son,” Eppstadt said, playing along for time until a better way to deal with this absurdity occurred, “then it follows, yes … she would be your mother.”
“And she had him put up there so I could see him!” the goat-boy replied, the head of his pecker echoing his own head in its infuriated nodding.
The angrier he became, the more the evidence of his extreme in-breeding surfaced. He had a hair-lip, which made his outrage harder to understand, and his nose — which was scarcely more than two gaping wet holes in his face, ran with cataharral fluids. His teeth, when he bared them, were overlapped in half a dozen places, and his eyes were slightly crossed. In short, he was an abomination, the only perfect piece of anatomy he’d inherited that monstrous member between his legs, which had lost some of its hardness now, and hung like a rubber club between his rough-haired legs.
“I’m going to tell my mother about you!” he said, stabbing a stunted forefinger in Eppstadt’s direction. “That man is a crinimal.”
“A crinimal?” Eppstadt said, with a supercilious smirk. The idiot-child couldn’t even pronounce the word correctly.
“Yes,” the goat-boy said, “and he’s supposed to hang there till the birds fluck out his eyes and the dogs eat out his end tails.”
“Entrails.”
“End tails!”
“All right, have it your way. End tails.”
“I want you to leave him up there.”
During this brief exchange, Eppstadt’s gaze had been drawn to the goat-boy’s left foot. The nail of his middle toe had not been clipped (he guessed) since birth. Now it looked more like a claw than a nail. It was six, perhaps seven, inches long, and stained dark brown.
“Who the hell are you talking to?” Joe yelled down from the top of the ladder. The density of the foliage made it impossible for him to see the goat-boy.
“Apparently he’s up there as a punishment, Joe. Better leave him there.”
“Who told you that?”
Joe came down the ladder far enough to have sight of the goat-boy. “That?”
The boy bared his teeth at Joe. A dribble of dark saliva came from the corner of his mouth and ran down onto his chest.
“I really think we should just get going … ” Eppstadt said.
“Not until this poor sonofabitch is down from here,” Joe said, returning up the ladder. “Fucking freak.”
“This isn’t our business, Joe,” Eppstadt said. There was something about the way the air was rolling around them; something about the way the clouds churned overhead, covering the already depleted light of the sun, that made Eppstadt fearful that something of real consequence was in the offing. He didn’t know what this place was, or how it was created; nor, at that moment, did he care. He just wanted to be out through the door and upstairs again.