Kem Nunn - Tapping the Source

The figure who had brought her now stood at her feet and removed his hood and Ike saw that it was the bald man he had earlier seen talking to Hound Adams in the garden. It was hard to guess the man’s age. His head was ringed by a fringe of light-colored hair, but whether the hair was blond or gray, Ike could not say. The man’s face appeared smooth and unlined as he stood silently and stared into the trees and music before him. Michelle did not move. She was still clothed in the white dress. After remaining motionless for several seconds, the man suddenly bent forward and with one swift movement ripped the dress apart, letting the white material fall back upon either side of the stone. The stone’s surface was slightly convex, so that as Michelle lay upon it her legs curved down and her head was thrown back, her body thrust forward into the night. She was naked now and with the blackness of the rock beneath her, the blackness of the sky above, her body, with arms stretched back as if to reach for the ground beneath her head, and breasts pulled flat, was like some slender white arc. There was something terribly beautiful in it, Ike thought, and something that made his bones numb with horror. He couldn’t take his eyes from her. He thought of her on the beach—sun-warm skin, hot beneath his fingers.

Someone now passed the man a large ceramic container and he began to anoint her, spattering what appeared to be the blood of the butchered animals upon her, mostly down the center of her body, until at last he tilted the container and emptied it upon her genitals. Still she did not move. The man placed the container on the ground and bent his face between her legs.

Ike was set upon by a cold flood of nausea. He wanted to move and yet the waves of sickness were like hot lead—like his body was shot through with it, too heavy to budge. He leaned forward, trying to gather himself for some action, to rise, to move toward her, but a hand came from somewhere behind him and pushed him back down. “Watch it,” a voice said, and he recognized the voice as Hound Adams’s. He thought of that photograph he had once glimpsed on the cliffs of Huntington Beach. Had it been the blood of animals in the picture, or the blood of the girl herself? Who were these people and how far would they go?

But he would never know for sure. For whatever Milo Trax had planned for his summer’s party that night, he had not planned the sudden rumble that shook the ground, a kind of dull thunder that seemed to begin somewhere beneath them and then rose, bringing to the night a fresh reddish glow that spread on the sky high above the light of the fires. Ike was aware of the hand leaving his shoulder, of Hound Adams stepping past him and into the clearing. Hound was not dressed in any dark robes, but rather in a pair of white cotton pants and a white Mexican pullover, and he stood now in sharp contrast to the dark figures around him. And then from the opposite side of the circle, Ike saw Milo Trax entering the clearing as well. And if it was true that Hound, in his white pants and pullover, might have stood in contrast to the figures in black, it was also true that the very contrast of black and white might have been taken for some part of the scene. Milo, however, was dressed in a pair of blue shorts and a wildly colored Hawaiian shirt. There was a skipper’s hat turned backward on his head and even in the darkness he still wore the small wire-rimmed shades.

The man who had been kneeling before Michelle had raised his head and was looking about him, first at Hound then at Milo, his face smeared now with the dark liquid. His robes had fallen open and Ike could see for the first time a necklace of skulls upon his chest and the flash of something metallic at his waist. Others were beginning to stir as well, looking toward the woods where the music had stopped.

It was an odd moment—like a frozen frame. Ike kept expecting some movement, but it did not come. Milo, Hound, the man nearest Michelle, all of them seemed locked in place, waiting. And then Milo reached to his face and pulled off the shades. He held them for a moment in his hand and then threw them to the ground in a gesture of disgust. He turned a bit and said something over his shoulder. It sounded like: “No, it’s not part of it.” And Ike saw that he was speaking to the silver-haired man in the blazer jacket. The man was barely visible, just at the edge of the clearing, beneath the white lights.

Milo looked back toward his house, toward the thunder that had given way to a distant crackling, and Ike saw for the first time that he was holding a small stick in his hand—something like a riding crop. He banged it against his leg, and then he did an odd thing with it. He held it up and shook it toward the trees, almost as if he could change things with it, Ike thought, as if it were a magic wand. And there was something almost comical in the gesture, in the absurd figure cut by Milo Trax—his squat, powerful body, his garish shirt, his little stick. But then the moment was past and the scene had begun to dissolve.

It took a moment for Ike to connect the sharp cracking sounds from the forest with what was happening to Milo. One second he was standing there in the clearing, arm upraised, the next he was on his back in the dirt, and then over on one side and there were holes in his chest—black, ugly places where the shirt was wet and stuck to the flesh—and there was this odd sound, something Ike knew he would not quickly forget, as if the holes were sucking air and blowing back a dark mist. But that moment of silence, in which the strange sound was audible, was short-lived—for suddenly it was not quiet at all, and it was not still. The adrenaline rush of pure fear had finally found the collective nerve and the night was one great circus of motion and sound, of panic and death. And if those hooded figures had come to practice some satanic ritual, or to invoke some devil, then it must have seemed, at least to a few of those demented minds, sailing on whatever twisted combinations of unnatural highs they’d been able to manage, that they had succeeded. For there must have been those who thought the half-naked giant descending upon them from the trees, his body a labyrinth of dark symbols, his hands filled with flame, was Lucifer himself.

It was all mixed up after that. There were people tearing hoods from their heads, looking for a way out. Some ran blindly into the night and disappeared at the cliff’s edge. Screams were drowned in the clatter of automatic rifle fire. The main thing Ike would remember later was the incredible effort it took to move, to force himself to his hands and knees, to crawl to where Michelle still lay, her hands over her face now, weeping, and to drag her with him. It took all of his strength and there was little time for other things. But he took with him a collage of images: faces twisted, blurred in flight or frozen in death, of Preston himself, bare-chested, dark pants and beret, wires crisscrossing his chest, like he was plugged into something, the dark box beneath one arm, automatic weapon spitting flame, an odd detail connected to that: Preston’s hand not fixed right somehow where one would think the trigger should be, but out a bit to the side. Suicide shifter against the palm of his hand, firing as Ike had told him to shift. There was more—bits and pieces that would not come back to him for some time: like the silver-haired man’s dark friend standing near the stone ring and firing a pistol. He was holding the thing with both hands and aiming it toward the trees. The gun made a funny popping sound, as if he were firing off caps. And there on the ground, at the feet of the man with the gun, was the man who had brought Michelle, close enough still to the stone ring that Ike realized he must have had to practically crawl over him to get to her, and yet had not seen him until later, until he was ready to try for the beach. The man was no longer bald—there was nothing there at all, the whole top half of his head having been blown away. He was flat out, on his back but with his legs bent back under him at an impossible angle. His robes had fallen open and Ike could see clearly what he’d only glimpsed before—that flash of metal at the man’s waist. It was a long dagger, the handle ornately carved, and gleaming still in the brilliant white light.