His stomach muscles aching from the contractions, he uprooted some ferns and wiped his mouth and chin, then washed his hands in the damp soil and stood up. The rough treatment had done its job; there was a marked improvement in his condition.
He turned his back on his spilled stomach and wandered further away from the house. Though the thatch of leaves and branches was heavy above, some starlight trickled down, enough illumination to give a tenuous solidity to trunk and brush. Walking in the ghost-wood enchanted him. He let the gentle spectacle of light and leafshade heal his wounded vanity. He saw how all his dreams of finding a permanent and trusted place in
Whitehead’s world had been pretension. He was, and always would be, a marked man.
He walked quietly here, where the trees thickened and the undergrowth, light-starved, thinned. Small animals scuttled ahead of him; night insects whirred in the grass. He stood still to hear the nocturne better. As he did so he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. He looked toward it, seeking focus through the receding corridor of trunks. It was no trick. There was somebody, gray as the trees, standing thirty or so yards from him-now still, now moving again. Concentrating, he fixed the figure in the matrix of shadow and deeper shadow.
It was a ghost surely. So quiet, so casual. He watched it as a deer might watch a hunter; not certain if he had been seen but unwilling to break cover. Fear ran in his scalp. Not of an open blade; he’d long ago faced those terrors and mastered them. This was the prickly heat fear of child-hood; the essential fear. And paradoxically, it made him whole. It didn’t matter if he were four or thirty-four, he was the same creature at heart.
He’d dreamed of such woods, of such encompassing night. He touched his terror reverently, frozen to the spot, while the gray figure-too taken with its own business to notice him-watched the earth between the trees.
They stood in that relation, ghost and he, for what seemed like several minutes. Certainly a good time passed before he heard a noise that was neither owl, nor rodent, filtering between the trees. It had been there all along, he had just failed to interpret it for what it was: the sound of digging. The rattle of tiny stones, the fall of earth. The child in him said bad: leave it be, leave it all be. But he was too curious to ignore it. He took two experimental steps toward the ghost. It made no sign of seeing or hearing him. Taking courage, he advanced a few more steps, attempting to keep as close to a tree as possible, so that should the ghost look his way he could find cover quickly. In this way he advanced ten yards toward his quarry. Close enough to see the host in enough detail for recognition.
It was Mamoulian.
The European was still staring down at the earth at his feet. Marty slid into hiding behind a trunk and flattened himself there, his back to the scene. There was obviously somebody digging, at Mamoulian’s feet; he conceivably had other cohorts in the vicinity. The only safety was in lying doggo and hoping to God no one had been spying on him as he had spied on the European.
At length the digging stopped; and so, as if on an unspoken cue, did the nocturne. It was bizarre. The whole assembly, insect and animal alike, seemed to hold its breath, aghast.
Marty slid down the trunk into crawling position, his ears straining for every clue as to what was going on. He chanced a look. Mamoulian was moving off in what Marty guessed to be the direction of the house. Undergrowth obscured his view: he could see nothing of the digger, or the other disciples who were accompanying the European. He heard their passage, however; the brush of their dragging steps. Let them go, he thought. He was past protecting Whitehead. That bargain was defunct.
He sat, knees hugged against his chest, and waited until Mamoulian had woven between the trees and disappeared. Then he counted to twenty and stood up. Pins and needles pricked at his lower legs, and he had to rub the circulation back into them. Only then did he start toward the spot where Mamoulian had lingered.