“Help me!” Joe yelled to him.
Eppstadt went to the bottom of the ladder and peered up. The crucified man had dropped forward over Joe’s broad shoulder. Even in his semi-comatose state he could still beg for some show of compassion. “Please … ” he murmured. I meant no offense … ”
“He wouldn’t fuck my mother,” said the goat-boy, by way of explanation for this atrocity. He was just a foot or two behind Eppstadt, staring up at Joe and the man he was attempting to save. He turned briefly; surveyed the sky. The wind was getting gusty again, slamming the door and then throwing it open.
“She’s coming,” the goat-boy said. “Smell that bitterness in the air?”
Eppstadt could indeed smell something; strong enough to make his eyes water.
“That’s her,” the goat-boy said. “That’s Lil-ith. She’s bitter like that. Even her milk.” He made an ugly face. “It used to make me puke. And me? I love to suckle. I love it.” He was getting hard again, talking himself into a fine little fever. He put his thumb in his mouth, and pulled hard on it, making a loud noise as he did so. He was every inch an irritating little child, excepting those inches where he was indisputably a man.
“I’d put him back if I were you,” he said, pushing past Eppstadt to stand at the bottom of the ladder.
Eppstadt’s gaze returned to the heavens. The sky was the colour of cold iron, and the bitterness the child had said was his mother’s stench was getting stronger with every gust of the cold wind. Eppstadt looked off into the distance, to see if there was any sign of an arrivee on the winding road. But they were almost deserted. The only person on any of the roads right now was a man some two or three miles away, who was lying sprawled, his head against a stone. Eppstadt had no logical reason to believe this, but he was somehow certain the man was dead, his brains spattered on the stone where he lay his head.
Otherwise, the landscape was empty of human occupants.
There were plenty of birds in the air, struggling against the increasingly violent gusts to reach the safety of their roosts; and small animals, rabbits and the like, scampering through the roiling grass to find some place of safety. Eppstadt was no nature-boy, but he knew enough to be certain that when rabbits were making for their bolt-holes, it was time for human beings to get out of harm’s way.
“We’ve got to go,” he said to Joe. “You’ve done all you can.”
“Not yet!” Joe yelled. The wind was strong enough to make even the heavy branches of the tree sway. Dead leaves were shaken down all around.
“For God’s sake, Joe. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
He took a step up the ladder and caught hold of Joe’s belt. Then he tugged. “You’re coming, or I’m going without you.”
“Then go — ” Joe began to say. He didn’t finish because at that instant the ladder, which was presently bearing the weight of Eppstadt, Joe the Samaritan, and the crucified man, broke.
Eppstadt was closest to the ground, so he sustained the least damage. He simply fell back in the sharp stones in which the copse and its briar thicket were rooted. He scrambled to his feet to find out what had happened to the other two men. Both had fallen amongst the thorns, the crucified man spread-eagled on top of Joe. Only now were the man’s wounds fully displayed. Besides the peckings around his eyes, there were far deeper wounds-certainly not made by birds-in his chest. Somebody had had some fun with him before he was nailed up there, cutting star-patterns around his nipples.
Joe struggled to get himself out from under the man, but his flailing only served to catch him in the thorns.
“Help me,” he said, throwing his hand back over his head towards Eppstadt. “Quickly. I’m being pricked to death here!”
Eppstadt approached the thicket and was about to take hold of Joe’s hand when two of the largest wounds on the crucified man’s chest gaped, and the flat black heads of two snakes, each ten times the size of the serpent that had slipped out of his throat, pressed their blood-soaked snouts out of the layers of flesh and yellow fat, and came slithering out of his torso. One of them trailed a multitude of what Eppstadt took to be eggs, suspended in a jellied mass of semi-translucent phlegm.