“Don’t move,” Marty said, “if you want to remain alive. If you try to run they’ll bring you down. Do you understand? I haven’t got that much control over them.”
The other said nothing; simply stared. His agony, Marty knew, must be acute. He wasn’t even a young man. His uneven growth of stubble showed more gray than black. The skull behind the lax and waxen flesh was severe, the features set on it used and weary: tragic even. His suffering was only apparent in the greasy sheen of his skin, and the fixedness of his facial muscles. His stare had the stillness of a hurricane’s eye, and its menace.
“How did you get in?” Marty asked.
“Get them away,” the man said. He spoke as if he expected to be obeyed.
“Come back to the house with me.”
The other shook his head, unwilling even to debate the possibility.
“Get them away,” he said again.
Marty conceded to the other’s authority, though not certain why. He called the dogs to him by name. They came to heel with rebuking looks, unhappy to surrender their prize.
“Now come back to the house,” Marty said.
“No need.”
“You’ll bleed to death, for God’s sake.”
“I loathe dogs,” the man said, still not taking his eyes off Marty. “We both do.”
Marty hadn’t time to think clearly about what the man was saying; he just wanted to stop the situation from escalating again. Blood loss had surely weakened the man. If he fell down Marty wasn’t certain he could prevent the dogs from going in for the kill. They were around his legs, glancing up at him irritably; their breath was hot on him.
“If you don’t come on your own accord, I’ll take you.”
“No.” The intruder raised his injured hand to chest height and glanced down at it. “I don’t need your kindnesses, thank you,” he said.
He bit down on the sinew of the mutilated finger, as a seamstress might through a thread. The discarded joints fell to the grass. Then he clenched his seeping hand into a fist, and thrust it into his ravaged jacket.
Marty said: “Christ Almighty.” Suddenly the lights along the fence were flickering again. Only this time they went out altogether. In the sudden pitch, Saul whined. Marty knew the dog’s voice, and shared his apprehension.
“What’s happening, boy?” he asked the dog, wishing to God it could reply. And then the dark broke; something lit the scene that was neither electricity nor starlight. The intruder was the source. He’d begun to burn with a faint luminescence. Light was dripping from his fingertips and oozing from the bloody holes in his coat. It enveloped his head in a flickering gray halo that consumed neither flesh nor bone, the light licking out of mouth and eyes and nostrils. Now it began to take on shapes, or seemed to. It was all seems. Phantoms sprang from the flux of light. Marty glimpsed dogs, then a woman, then a face; all, and yet perhaps none of these, a flurry of apparitions that transformed before they congealed. And in the center of these momentary phenomena the intruder’s eyes stared on at Marty: clear and cold.
Then, without a comprehensible cue, the entertainment took on a different tone altogether. A look of anguish slid across the fabricator’s face; a drool of bloody darkness spilled from his eyes, extinguishing whatever played in the vapor, leaving only bright worms of fire to trace his skull. Then they too went out, and just as suddenly as the illusions had appeared, they were gone, and there was just a torn man standing beside the humming fence.
The lights were coming back on again, their illumination so flat it drained any last vestige of magic. Marty looked at the bland flesh, the empty eyes, the sheer drabness of the figure in front of him and believed none of it
“Tell Joseph,” said the intruder.
-it had all been trickery of some kind-
“Tell him what?”
“That I was here.”
-but if it was just trickery, why didn’t he step forward and apprehend the man?
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Just tell him. ”
Marty nodded; he had no courage left in him