'What's that you're looking at? Some rival to the Bible?'
The other laughed uneasily. 'No, just an almanac, something I haven't opened for years.' He squinted at the cover, but the name had long since worn away, and he turned instead to the tide page. 'Byfield's Newly Revised Agricultural Almanack and Celestial Guide f or 1947,' he read. 'I found it at a church bazaar in Trenton for fifteen cents.' Looking down, he flipped through several more pages, then paused. 'Ah, here's what I've been searching for.' He handed the open book to Freirs, pointing to a line in the middle of what appeared to be a chart. 'See? Right there.'
The book itself smelled faintly of mildew, its covers warped and faded. Freirs scanned the opened page. Festivals of the Ancients, it said at the top; below it lay a complicated-looking calendar. He found the indicated line. August 1, it said. Lammas.
'It's got nought to do with lambs,' said Poroth. 'Nor does the night before.'
Freirs checked the previous column. July 31, he read. Lammas Eve. 'Hmmm, sounds sinister!'
'It can be. Black magic's always powerful on Lammas Eve. There'll probably be some odd doings somewhere in the world that night.'
'Why's that?'
Instead of answering, Poroth merely pointed back to the calendar in the book. There was something called Roodmas on May third, and Midsummer on the twenty-fourth of June, and the day Deborah had spoken of, St Swithin's, on the fifteenth of July. Several dates, he noticed now, were marked with tiny asterisks – dates like the first of May and the last day of October. So was Lammas Eve, the last day of July.
He looked down at the bottom of the page. There beside an asterisk was the footnote, a simple one, just two words long:
Sabbats likely.
Moonlight slanted through the misty air of the place known as McKinney's Neck, through motes of dust and dancing insects, through the latticework of ancient roots that spread from the column of a fallen cottonwood, down through the roots, down to the freshly built little altar of rock and mud and bone.
The altar was smaller than the first but considerably more colorful. Between each of the tiny standing pebbles that encircled the mound like a miniature Stonehenge lay freshly plucked rose blossoms that shone, by day, like red beacons in the mud, and at night looked like small knots of darkness. And stuck at the top of the mound, like a comical little pompom atop a clown's hat, there now lay a single round head, eye sockets empty but ears and whiskers intact – and with black fur still soft enough to pet.
Night. The crescent moon is hidden by trees as the animal creeps out upon the lawn and sits gazing at the farmhouse. Singing comes from a dimly lit room on the second floor where the farmer and his woman are at their evening devotions.
'Watchman ofZion, herald the story,
Sin and death His kingdom shall destroy… '
It moves closer, to crouch below the window. Forty miles away and twelve floors up, a wrinkled shape upon a bed hears the closing verses of their song.
'All the earth shall sing of His glory;
Praise Him, ye angels, ye who behold Him,
Great is Jehovah, King over all.'
The voices die away. Briefly the man is heard again, reciting a short prayer; the woman joins him, echoing his words. Then, as always, the light goes out. Soon the room will echo to the sounds of their lovemaking. The animal moves on.
Around the front of the house, lights are still burning on the first floor. There he sits again tonight, the visitor from the city, absorbed in a book, his plump white face glowing like a full moon in the lamplight. The animal watches, and the Old One watches, as he turns another page.
Momentarily, as if aware he is observed, the visitor sets down the book and goes to the window. His troubled eyes peer blindly through the screen, unable to see past the lamplight. Seven feet away, the animal sits watching him, shielded by the darkness.
The man returns to his chair and, moments later, to the thick grey book he has been reading. The animal turns and pads briskly around the side of the house to the porch steps in the back. There, in the darkness beneath the stairway, two metal garbage cans stand reeking of death and corruption. On one of them the scent is old, but the other has accumulated a full week's stock of tiny mangled corpses, a choice supply of putrefying meat.
And this very putrefaction has its uses.
With the easy swipe of a paw and a clank of metal the can is overturned, the lid tumbling noisily off to roll several feet away upon the grass.
Upstairs, in the darkness, the woman's grip tightens on the man's shoulder. 'Honey, wait,' she whispers. 'Did you hear that?'
He makes a low sound of assent. 'Coon,' he says, and enters her again.
Downstairs, in the living room, the visitor puts down the book and walks around the room, carefully shutting each window.
The animal, untroubled, creeps into the darkness of the overturned can. The fragrance of death fills its lungs. Before it lies the little mound of bodies, the field mice, frogs, and snakes. Delicately, methodically, it runs its razor claws through the soft and rotting flesh – first the front claws, then the rear, shredding the flesh with machinelike efficiency, working the corruption into the fur and deep beneath each gracefully hooked nail.
Forty miles away the Old One watches, smells the death smell, feels the decay beneath the nails of his own fingers. Yes, it is good: it may be helpful in tomorrow evening's enterprise. A little poison never hurts.
July Twenty-second
Amos Reid had a bag of Bordeaux dust under his arm for the leaf blight on his cukes, young Abram Sturtevant was about to buy his third can of Malathion for a sudden invasion of aphids, and Rupert Lindt was stocking up on Gurney's patented worm powder for the cutworms and snails that had already slaughtered a third of his tomato plants. None of them had any moral qualms about using chemicals on their crops; what qualms they had were purely economic. Pesticides were expensive, but under the circumstances they were going to have to rely on them and salvage whatever they could. It was suddenly turning out to be a bad year. You could see it in their faces; you could hear it in their talk.
Not even Bert Steegler was happy, though business had been brisk today. He and his wife worked mainly on salary; the profit or loss they derived from the store hardly differed from anyone else's. Besides, Bert's married daughter, Irma, had just had an entire plot of pattypan squash wiped out, almost overnight, by a particularly voracious breed of corpulent grey slug that had never been seen in the area before.
'You heard about what happened at the Verdocks?' asked Steegler, as he rang up Abram Sturtevant's purchase.
'I've been too busy tryin' to save my crops to worry myself about other folks' affairs,' said Sturtevant.
'I'll tell you,' said Rupert Lindt, from halfway across the store. 'Lise got herself kicked in the head by one of Adam's cows, tryin' to squeeze a bit of milk from it.'
'You don't say! Lord's mercy on her, how's she bearin' up?'
'Pretty bad,' said Lindt. 'They think she may not live till Sunday.'
'We've been prayin' for her regular,' added Amos Reid. "Tis all we can do.'
'I'll be sure to do the same,' said Sturtevant. 'Does my brother know of this?'
'You can ask him yourself,' said Steegler, who'd been looking out the screen door. 'That's him comin' now.'
They heard Joram’s heavy foosteps on the porch outside. He was a tall, formidable-looking figure with eyebrows black and heavy as his beard, but as he entered the store he appeared pale and unwell. 'Aye,' he said, of the news about Lise, 'I'll be headin' over there this evenin' to pray with Brother Adam and their girl.' He sounded troubled, but from the briefness of his response it was clear that it was some other trouble that occupied his mind.
'And how's Sister Lotte bearin' up,' said Amod Reid, 'in her time of trial?'