With the suddenness of a torn puffball, Ahtu sucked inward. The earth sagged as though in losing its ability to move it had also lost all rigidity. At first the clearing had been slightly depressed. Now the centre of it gaped like a drained boil, a twisted cylinder fed by the collapsing veins it had earlier shot through the earth.
When the blast came it was the more stunning for having followed a relative silence. There was a rending crash as something deep in the ground gave way; then a thousand tons of rock and soil blew skyward with volcanic power behind them. Where the earth had trembled with counterfeit life, filaments jerked along after the main mass. In some places they ripped the surface as much as a mile into the forest. After a time, dust and gravel began to strinkle down on the trees, the lighter particles marking the canopy with a long flume downwind while larger rocks pattered through layer after layer of the hindering leaves. But it was only dirt, no different from the soil for hundreds of miles around into which trees thrust their roots and drew life from what was lifeless.
'Goddamn if you didn't kill it,' Sparrow whispered, gazing in wonderment at the new crater.
There was no longer any light but that of the hooked moon to silver the carnage and the surprising number of Forest Guards straggling back from the jungle to which they had fled. Some were beginning to joke as they picked among the bodies of their comrades and the dancers.
'I didn't kill anything,' Dame Alice said. Her voice was hoarse, muffled besides by the fact that she was cradling her head on her knees. 'Surgeons don't kill cancers. They cut out what they can find, knowing that there's always a little left to grow and spread again...'
She raised her head. From across the clearing, Colonel Trouville was stepping towards them. He was as dapper and cool as always, skirting the gouge in the centre, skirting also the group of Baengas with a twoyear-old they must have found in one of the huts. One was holding the child by the ankles to drain all the blood through its slit throat while his companions gathered firewood.
'But without the ones who worshipped it,' Dame Alice went on, 'without the ones who drew the kernel up to a growth that would have been ... the end of man, the end of life here in any sense you or I or those out there would have recognized it ... It'll be more than our lifetimes before Ahtu returns. I wonder why those ones gave themselves so wholly to an evil that would have destroyed them first?'
Sparrow giggled again. Dame Alice turned from the approaching Belgian to see if the source of the humour showed on the gunman's face.
'It's like this,' Sparrow said. 'If they was evil, I guess that makes us good. I'd never thought of that before, is all.'
He continued to giggle. The laughter of the Baengas echoed him from the clearing as they thrust the child down on a rough spit. Their teeth had been filed to points which the moonlight turned to jewels.
The Faces at Pine Dunes by RAMSEY CAMPBELL
When his parents began arguing Michael went outside. He could still hear them through the thin wall of the trailer. 'We needn't stop yet,' his mother was pleading.
'We're stopping,' his father said. 'It's time to stop wandering.'
But why should she want to leave here? Michael gazed about the trailer park - the Pine Dunes Caravanserai. The metal village of trailers surrounded him, cold and bright in the November afternoon. Beyond the dunes ahead he heard the dozing of the sea. On the three remaining sides a forest stood: remnants of autumn, ghosts of colour, were scattered over the trees; distant branches displayed a last golden mist of leaves. He inhaled the calm. Already he felt at home.
His father was persisting. 'You're still young,' she told his father.
She's kidding! Michael thought. Perhaps she was trying flattery. 'There are places we haven't seen,' she said wistfully.
'We don't need to. We need to be here.'
The slowness of the argument, the voices muffled by the metal wall, frustrated Michael; he wanted to be sure that he was staying here. He hurried into the trailer. 'I want to stay here. Why do we have to keep moving all the time?'
'Don't come in here talking to your mother like that,' his father shouted.
He should have stayed out. The argument seemed to cramp the already crowded space within the trailer; it made his father's presence yet more overwhelming. The man's enormous wheezing body sat plumped on the couch, which sagged beneath his weight; his small frail wife was perched on what little of the couch was unoccupied, as though she'd been squeezed tiny to fit. Gazing at them, Michael felt suffocated. 'I'm going out,' he said.
'Don't go out,' his mother said anxiously; he couldn't see why. 'We won't argue any more. You stay in and do something. Study.'
'Let him be. The sooner he meets people here, the better.'
Michael resented the implication that by going out he was obeying his father. 'I'm just going out for a walk,' he said. The reassurance might help her; he knew how it felt to be overborne by the man.
At the door he glanced back. His mother had opened her mouth, but his father said, 'We're staying. I've made my decision.' And he'd lie in it, Michael thought, still resentful. All the man could do was lie there, he thought spitefully; that was all he was fit for. He went out, sniggering.
The way his father had gained weight during the past year, his coming to rest in this trailer park reminded Michael of an elephant's arrival at its graveyard.
It was colder now. Michael turned up the hood of his anorak. Curtains were closing and glowing.
Trees stood, intricately precise, against a sky like translucent papery jade. He began to climb the dunes towards the sea. But over there the sky was blackened; a sea dark as mud tossed nervously and flopped across the bleak beach. He turned towards the forest. Behind him sand hissed through grass.
The forest shifted in the wind. Shoals of leaves swam in the air, at the tips of webs of twigs. He followed a path which led from the Caravanserai's approach road. Shortly the diversity of trees gave way to thousands of pines. Pine cones lay like wattled eggs on beds of fallen needles. The spread of needles glowed deep orange in the early evening, an orange tapestry displaying rank upon rank of slender pines, dwindling into twilight.
The path led him on. The pines were shouldered out by stouter trees, which reached overhead, tangling. Beyond the tangle the blue of the sky grey deeper; a crescent moon slid from branch to branch. Bushes massed among the trunks; they grew higher and closer as he pushed through. The curve of the path would take him back towards the road.
The ground was turning softer underfoot. It sucked his feet in the dark. The shrubs had closed over him now; he could hardly see. He struggled between them, pursuing the curve. Leaves rubbed together rustling at his ear, like desiccated lips; their dry dead tongues rattled. All at once the roof of the wooden tunnel dropped sharply. To go farther he would have to crawl.
He turned with difficulty. On both sides thorns caught his sleeves; his dark was hemmed in by two ranks of dim captors. It was as though midnight had already fallen here, beneath the tangled arches; but the dark was solid and clawed. Overhead, netted fragments of night sky illuminated the tunnel hardly at all.
He managed to extricate himself, and hurried back. But he had taken only a few steps when his way was blocked by hulking spiky darkness. He dodged to the left of the shrub, then to the right, trying irritably to calm his heart. But there was no path. He had lost his way in the dark. Around him dimness rustled, chattering.
He began to curse himself. What had possessed him to come in here? Why on earth had he chosen to explore so late in the day? How could the woods be so interminable? He groped for openings between masses of thorns. Sometimes he found them, though often they would not admit his body. The darkness was a maze of false paths.
Eventually he had to return to the mouth of the tunnel and crawl. Unseen moisture welled up from the ground, between his fingers. Shrubs leaned closer as he advanced, poking him with thorns.