“Soy sowma moo didomie,” read the Baron. His normal voice was high-pitched and unsteady, always on the verge of cracking. Now it had dropped an octave and had power enough to drive straw into motion on the floor a yard away.
“Soy sowma moo didomie,” thundered the Neill clan. Sparrows, nested on the roof trusses, fluttered and peeped as they tried furiously to escape from the barn. In the darkness, they could not see the vents under the roof peaks by which they flew in and out during daylight.
Baron Neill read the remainder of the formula, line by line. The process was becoming easier, because the smoky candle had begun to burn with a flame as white as the noonday sun. The syllables which had been written on age-yellowed paper and a background of earlier words now stood out and shaped themselves to the patriarch’s tongue.
At another time, the Baron would have recognized the power which his tongue released but could not control. This night the situation had already been driven over a precipice. Caution was lost in exhilaration at the approaching climax, and the last impulse to stop was stilled by the fear that stopping might already be impossible.
The shingles above shuddered as the clan repeated the lines, and the candleflame climbed with the icy purpose of a stalagmite reaching for completion with a cave roof. Jen kicked at her stall in blind panic, cracking through the old crossbar, but none of the humans heard the sound.
“Hellon moy,” shouted Baron Neill in triumph. “Hellon moy! Hellon moy!”
Mary Beth suddenly broke the circle and twisted. “Hit’s hot!” she cried as she tore the front of her dress from neckline to waist in a single hysterical effort.
The woman’s breasts swung free, their nipples erect and longer than they would have seemed a moment before. She tried to scream, but the sound fluted off into silence as her body ran like wax in obedience to the formula she and her kin had intoned.
The circle of the Neill clan flowed toward its center, flesh and bone alike taking on the consistency of magma. Clothing dropped and quivered as the bodies it had covered runneled out of sleeves and through the weave of the fabrics.
The bullhide strop sagged also as Baron Neill’s body melted beneath it. As the pink, roiling plasm surged toward the center of the circle, the horns lifted and bristles that had lain over the bull’s spine in life sprang erect.
The human voices were stilled, but the sparrows piped a mad chorus and Jen’s hooves crashed again onto the splintering crossbar.
There was a slurping, gurgling sound. The bull’s tail stood upright, its brush waving like a flag, and from the seething mass that had been the Neill clan rose the mighty, massive form of a black bull.
Eldon Bowsmith lurched awake on the porch of the Neill house. He had dreamed of a bull’s bellow so loud that it shook the world.
Fuddled but with eyes adapted to the light of the crescent moon, he looked around him. The house was still and dark.
Then, as he tried to stand with the help of the porch rail, the barn door flew apart with a shower of splinters. Spanish King, bellowing again with the fury of which only a bull is capable, burst from the enclosure and galloped off into the night.
Behind him whinnied a horse which, in the brief glance vouchsafed by motion and the light, looked a lot like Jen.
* * *
When Eldon Bowsmith reached the cabin, Old Nathan was currying his bull by the light of a burning pine knot thrust into the ground beside the porch. A horse was tethered to the rail with a makeshift neck halter of twine.
“Sir, is thet you?” the boy asked cautiously.
“Who en blazes d’ye think hit ‘ud be?” the cunning man snapped.
“Don’t know thet ‘un,” snorted Spanish King. His big head swung toward the visitor, and one horn dipped menacingly.
“Ye’d not be here, blast ye,” said Old Nathan, slapping the bull along the jaw, ” ‘ceptin’ fer him.”
“Yessir,” said Bowsmith. “I’m right sorry. Only, a lot uv what I seed t’night, I figgered must be thet I wuz drinkin’.”