"You are such scum!" she said. "You nasty-minded tiny-peckered little piece of excrement!"
She approached him as she yelled, but after the fight with Todd the last thing Eppstadt wanted was this woman laying her hands on him.
"Keep her away from me, Jerry," he demanded, raising his hands, palms out. As he did so he retreated towards the copse of trees. "Jerry? You hear me?"
"Leave him, Tammy."
"Well, he's scum."
"And tell her to cover herself up," Eppstadt fired back. "The sight of her cellulite makes me gag."
Jerry had caught hold of Tammy's arm.
Luckily for him, Tammy had suddenly lost interest in all this score-settling. She was studying a group of horsemen who were following a winding road that would eventually bring them, she quickly realized, to this very spot. "Todd ... " she said.
"Yes, I saw."
"We have visitors."
The Duke of Goga, of course, along with his entourage.
They still had plenty of time to get to the door, Tammy reckoned. The hunters were still some distance away, and it didn't seem that they'd yet spotted the interlopers. Jerry was already on his way to the exit. Todd had found some clean water to wash his wounds but he could be up and gone in a couple of seconds.
Eppstadt was the exception. He'd gone into the thorn-thicket to fetch his Italian shoe, and as he did so, something moved in amongst the mass of thorny branches off to the left of him.
He stopped reaching for his shoe, and studied the shadows. Whatever it was seemed to have become snagged in there, because it shook itself. Then it let out a kind of mewling sound and shook itself again, this time more violently. The maneuver worked however. Freed of the thicket it stumbled out into view. It was the goat-boy. He started to pull thorns out of his flesh, the pain of it making him weep, softly, to himself.
Eppstadt knew what this creature was capable of from his previous encounter and he had no desire to draw the attention of the beast. He gave up on his shoe and set his eyes on the door. Jerry Brahms was right: it was time they got the hell out of here.
The goat-boy had stopped weeping now, and for some reason had fixed his gaze upon Tammy. Or more particularly, upon her breasts. There was no equivocation in his stare; no attempt to pretend he was looking elsewhere. He simply stared lovingly at the upper part of Tammy's torso, and licked his lips.
Tammy had heard the boy's sobbing complaints, and was staring at him. So was Todd.
"Come on, Tammy." Todd said.
Tammy let her gaze go from the boy to the approaching hunters. Plainly they'd also heard the sound of the child's wails because they'd picked up their speed and were approaching at a hard gallop.
Tammy looked back at Lucifer's child, in all his goaty glory. His tears had dried now, and was less interested in picking thorns out of his flesh. They'd done some damage, she saw; little rivulets of dark red blood ran down his limbs from the places where he'd been pierced. There was one spot that looked particularly tender, deep in the groove of his groin. He worked the thorn out a little, but not once did he take his eyes off the objects of his present devotion. He didn't even glance over at the horsemen, though he must have heard their approach. He obviously knew how to out-maneuver them. He'd been doing it for centuries. He had a warren of hidey-holes to tuck himself away.
Tammy glanced up at the sky: at the moon locked in its unnatural position in front of the sun. Then she looked around at the landscape which that half-clouded light illuminated: the road and the approaching horsemen, the cluster of boulders where Todd was standing, stripped of his torn T-shirt, doing his best to lift handfuls of clean water up to his wounded face.
The goat-boy would be gone in a moment, Tammy knew. And when it was gone the Hunt would, as Zeffer had told her, continue in the same weary way it had been going for centuries.
Perhaps it was time to bring the whole sorry thing to an end, once and for alclass="underline" to see if she, little Tammy Lauper from Sacramento, couldn't deliver the Devil's child back into the hands of the Duke, who could then return him to its mother, and bring an end to this long, weary chase.
She knew of only one, desperate method by which she might do this. She didn't waste time enacting it. She unbuttoned her torn blouse, starting at the top. She had every jot of the goat-boy's attention from the moment her fingers touched the first button. He forgot about removing thorns from his flesh. He simply watched.
"Like them?" she said to him so softly she was certain nobody would hear.
The goat-boy heard her, as she knew he would. He had an animal's ears.
By way of reply he nodded; very slowly, indeed almost reverentially.
There were two buttons remaining. Two buttons, and her blouse would fall open, and he'd have a feast of her, hanging in front of his eyes. She stopped unbuttoning. He made a little growl in his throat. The smile suddenly went from his face. Perhaps she was imagining it, but there seemed to be a flicker of fire in his eyes.
She stopped her teasing and put her hands back up to the first of the remaining buttons. He rewarded her with a little smile, which showed her a detail she'd missed until now. His teeth, though small, were all sharpened to a fine point. He had the smile of a piranha. She literally felt the flesh around her nipple tighten up at the prospect of those needles coming anywhere near her.
She chanced a quick look in the direction of the horsemen, but they had disappeared from sight for a time. The road that was bringing them here had wound into an expanse of pine forest. She looked back at the goat-boy. He was tapping his left foot, which appendage boasted a nail that would not have shamed a raptor. Plainly he was just a little anxious about the proximity of the Duke and his men: he did not wish to be caught. But just as plainly he was not going to leave. Not yet; not until he'd seen what Tammy had to offer.
He pointed at her. Made a little waggling motion with his forefinger. "Show me," he said.
She smiled at him, but she didn't move to oblige.
"Show," he said again.
She continued to smile at him, all the while assessing how many strides of his flat little feet it would take for him to reach her, should he take it into his head to run. He could be on her in five strides, she guessed. Four if he pushed it.
She slipped one of the two buttons out of its hole. The blouse fell open a little, giving him a peek at her left nipple. She flashed, suddenly, on some hot summer's day in her fourteenth year, when she'd crept into her parents' room in the middle of the afternoon, and played striptease in the mirror. She had more to boast about than any of the other girls in her class. Bigger breasts, and hair down between her legs. Her life would have been a lot happier if her breasts had stopped growing that day. But they'd had a long way to go. By the time she was fifteen she was like a young Shelley Winters; and it just got worse from there.
Strange how things came round. How something that had become a source of shame for her was now, out of nowhere, redeemed. She let her fingers slip down to the last button, knowing that the goat-boy's gaze would go with them, and she would have a chance, however slim, to look up past him and see whether the horsemen had emerged from the forest.
The news was bad. There was no sign of the Duke and his men. Had they perhaps taken a wrong turning in the forest? Surely not. Surely they knew this entire territory, after so many years of riding it.
"Show me your tits," the goat-boy demanded.
As he spoke he lifted his left leg and struck a stone with his raptor claw. A bright spark leapt from the place and landed on a tuft of grey grass, where it erupted into a little fire. It had too little fuel to keep it sustained for long, but in the five or six seconds that it took for the cycle of spark, fire and extinction to play out Tammy heard the sound of the Duke's horses, and from the corner of her eye saw them emerging from between the trees.