24.2.29 1.0版本发布：更新了若干错误，移除了译名表，将原文中斜体部分重新使用了斜体，同时翻译部分已经完成，校对后放出
24.1.29 0.9版本发布
此为上半部分：
本人注：本小说与CoC模组《燃烧的星辰》(The Burning Star)关联极其密切，如果你准备作为玩家参与这个模组，请不要阅读以下内容
文章来源：《Twice Dead Things》故事九，P208-266，英文版由本人手打完成，如有错漏，请在评论区指出，不胜感激
文章作者：A. A. Attanasio
出版社：Elder Signs Press
你还可以在于 Ramsey Campbell 编纂的 《New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos》一书找到此文章。
（我是分界线）
Henley Easton had lost complete control of his body. It moved by another will, and he merely observed. The last days that he spent in his body riddled him with madness. He had begun to alter rapidly after he found his way to the old man in New York. Autway was the old one's name, and he was a sorcerer, a Voudoun . He carried a calabash filled with snake vertebrae, and whenever he rattled it, the men in his presence responded. He never had to speak directly to them. The sound of the calabash imparted sufficient instruction.
When Henley's body began to change, Autway provided loose-fitting white trousers and a wide-sleeved anorak with a hood that allowed him to move freely and didn't chafe his sensitive skin. A black squamous growth that had begun around his foot wound and his mouth spread quickly over limbs and torso. His skin itched terribly and emitted a thick putrefying odor. Autway salved this anguished flesh with the pulp of crushed roots and somewhat eased the discomfort.
For over a week, they kept him in a spacious cellar hung with draperies of dark nubbling. Autway came down frequently with younger men, all of them dark with wide faces that had the cast of full-blood Indians. For hours at a stretch, they rattled gourds and chanted, "" The sounds they intoned had a peculiar effect on Henley. Hearing them, he felt star-calm, crazy-alive, glittering with energy. The rhythms spun a vortex around him of mutable, luculent sounds, sometimes dark as the sea, sometimes streaming fire. Often, the songs charged him so full of power his body rose and turned about in lithe, sleek movements. The others imitated him best they could, but none could match the demonic fury with which his body wheeled and pitched.
By the time they left for Haiti, Henley's face had darkened with scales. Ears, cheeks, forehead and scalp remained clear, but he had the mouth of an iguana and black circles ringed his eyes. After some febrile explanations at the airport about how sickly he was, no one made a fuss.
Autway brought him far out to the North End and a trench hut on the mountainous outskirts of the slums. There the chants continued, only now there were many more people, kettle drums, torch parades, and the ceremony of , the worship of an undersea island. At the peak of the ceremony, elderly devotees gouged themselves to death with sharp stones. Henley watched in horror as his body danced its insane, impossible movements.
During the days, he walked about restlessly with the anorak pulled up over his head. His body swayed through the shantytowns. He seemed to hover over the ground, shifting his weight like so much smoke. The breeze wherever he went, full of patterns, flitted shadows around him without any apparent source. Workers stopped in the fields when they saw him coming and blew high lonely notes on whistles made from the wing bones of seabirds.
Once, as he drifted down a shanty road, a very tall woman with yellow eyes and wild tangled braids came out of a shack carrying a child. She laid the infant in the white dust, stood before Henley and lifted her skirts. Her eyes appealed, charged with sorrow like a dying horse, and Henley understood that the baby was dead. With long fingers, she touched her breast, then slowly, slowly, her sullen eyes staring, she glided the tips of her fingers down over her belly to the cloud of hair below. That moment, a swirl of shadows like a shifting pattern of clouds played around the small corpse, and it stirred. A muffled outcry shook loose from onlookers who had stayed hidden in their huts. The woman fell to the side of the child, her face slippery with joyful tears. The baby looked up at him not with an infant's wonder-bright gaze but a fully alert, seductive stare that promised violent knowledge deeper than innocence or guilt.
Another time, on a side street in North End, two blacks wearing cutoff denims and bulky pajama-striped jackets over clean white T-shirts confronted him. They looked malicious. One was missing half an ear. The other had on a large hat and dark glasses. The one with the glasses grabbed Henley's arm and felt its spongy consistency. He let it go like a hot wire and jumped back. The abruptness of his action spun Henley around to face them. Inertia tugged back the hood of his anorak, and the two men gaped, unable to move for a rigid moment. Then the one with half an ear drew a gun. Henley's stomach tightened, and the gunman flew backward, tumbling to the ground. Henley pulled up his hood, walked down the street and turned a corner. In the secluded alley, his stomach knuckled again, and he hoisted into the air, light-stepping over tin roofs until he settled into a garden patch several houses away.
Henley no longer felt awed by such feats. The terror of dislocation from his will had numbed him to all surprise. Memories of his previous life dimmed, and he watched events shaping themselves around him as if in a dream. Even when Autway led him up into the mountains to see the star pools, he arrived unmoved.
Beyond spectral shapes of moss and fern and tall cypresses that spired above enchanted swamps, far up in the smoky hill, they came to a series of large ponds devoid of all vegetation. Hewn logs and packed gravel banked poolsides, the work of many generations. On their shores at irregular intervals reared monoliths of black rock, graven inscriptions exhausted by time.
Standing there beneath a quail's-breast sky with wind blowing in off the pools and swirling around their heels like a discarded garment, Autway let out a low moan and began chanting. The red light of dusk moved as if it were a breeze on the water. They stood facing east until darkness settled around them. Henley's body became very excited. A ringing in his collar bones began at the sound of the old man's droning voice, and the thick muscles massed in his legs stirred. Barely able to remain still, shuffling feet sounding like breath, breath like a forgotten language, he watched the stone star, the moon, rise over the black water.
By moonlight, he intuited something stirring under the water. There, many shapes massed as one shadow. They moved closer beneath the surface, and the expectation of their arrival nailed his breath. A splash sounded far to the left followed by a loud scuttling noise on the rocks. Something approached.
Henley's body unsealed its breath and inhaled deeply. Slow as a planet, he turned to face the darkness. Labored wingbeats sounded from a distance. A hulk loomed on the dark edge of the pool. Outlined in moonlight, Henley couldn't make sense of it. Writhing gouts of flesh and a tangle of limbs moved with slippery grace and then, abruptly, narrowed and sipped back beneath the glass grained water.
A torpid languor overcame him. Autway steered him away from the shining water. Henley felt wrong. His body had never labored so wearily before. By the time they got back to trenchtown, his movements had nearly locked up, rigid with exhaustion.
He slept dreamlessly, and when he woke Autway relentlessly marched him into the countryside again, this time to a remote channel where limestone dust from the quarries thickly covered the shore in duff pristine as snow. Three white huts crouched there, and, beyond them, an albino horse watched from a corral. Henley's fright of recognition jerked him taller. To his left, drifting in the lazy current, a white catboat with one man standing glided closer.
Autway rattled his calabash, and the boatman punted to shore. With great trepidation, Henley watched him moor his boat and remove a black jug.
"De lurkers will naw come until we purge you."
Henley watched the white horse's pink eyes watching him while it champed. He wanted to face Autway and couldn't.
"Yas. We must make room for de Host. We gone take you out. Too bad we can't kill you, but dat dere is bad for de Host. You naw get with your bruthers, . Nyarlathotep cotch you and now let go. , the black waters cotch you. You gone dere. You gone to go."
The boatman approached with the jug in his hands. His cretinous face smiled at nothing, blank and washed as the sky.
Autway stepped closer, whispered in Henley's ear. "If even de earth itself knew. But dere is naw way to know. Speak to de dead and what do dey say? I can be anyone."
Henley's bones filled with a cold mist as the idiot offered Autway the jug. The took it reverently and turned to Henley. His face pressed close, a crust of harsh planes, and the shard of mirror clouded. He spoke, and there was steel in his voice. "Silence be your shepherd. What is beneath you be triumphant."
Autway titled the jug so that its mouth gaped before Henley's eyes. He leaned out of his body toward it and looked down. There were lights, tiny and dim, moving there. They swung closer, swirls of stars and misty galaxies flying apart through dread night. He fell, baffled booming with fear. Midnight black gulfed him, and there would have been a tremendous scream, a howl hysterical and depraved, but for the soundlessness of those blind depths.
Rapf rounded the corner of the scabrous hotel where he had left his attaché. He peered through a chink in the wall that he had made with his knife when he first arrived and spied movement within. Cursing under his breath, he made out Duke Parmelee and Hi-Hat Chuckie Watz. They had scattered his underwear on the floor and were cutting open the mattress of his bed.
Rapf entered the hotel and edged up to his door, Walther drawn. Touching the body-warmed metal to his lips, he banged into the room.
His gun swung from man to man, and he hissed, "Don't move, screwfaces, or I kill you!"
Rapf closed the door behind him. Quick as wit, he had the two men sprawled against the wall while he removed their weapons. The Duke carried a forty-five Magnum, a switchblade and a pair of handcuffs. Hi-Hat had handcuffs, a thirty-eight, a serried blade in a sleeve-harness, and a hand-grip fitted with razor blades. "Feisty," Rapf said, waving the knuckle-grip. He threw it down on the bed with the other weapons and made the men crouch with their heads between their knees. Then, he pulled off their shoes and tossed them across the room. "Okay, strip." When they hesitated, he kicked each of them so hard their heads clunked against the wall.
He commanded the naked men to handcuff their right wrists to their left ankles, then he lowered his gun and picked up Hi-Hat's serried blade. "You know, my better judgment says I oughta kill the two of you," He yanked the mattress off its springboard. "But I believe in justice." Using the thick blade as a lever, he pried loose two hard-coiled springs and all the wire attached to them. "Justice tempered by vengeance. Oh, yes." He prized free more wire and began intertwining it. When he had a long braid of tightly plaited wire, he measured it against the length of their bodies and made a few adjustments. "It's a good thing I got an even temper or I'd mutilate you tough guys."
"Gusto wants you dead," the Duke growled. "So you better kill us while you got the chance."
"I got a little Cong trick I want to pull on you sweethearts." Rapf took more measurements with the wire and fashioned it into two crude harnesses. "I don't want you dead. I want Henley."
"Forget Henley," Chuckie whispered.
"Why so, pretty boy?"
"Henley's freaked."
"Yeah? Well, reserve your opinions till after I jump him?"
"Man, Henley's out," the Duke said. "I mean he's not even human anymore."
Rapf smiled. He had finished. He used the Duke's switchblade to cut their clothes into long cords out of which he made binding. As he tied Hi-Hat's ankles together, the Duke swung around with his free hand and sunk his fingers into the back of his neck. Rapf's knife hand whipped and skewered the Duke's palm.
"Mother!" Rapf bawled. He rubbed the back of his neck and pointed the bloodied tip of his knife at the Duke who sat silent and brooding. "For that you jokers get an added attraction." He finished binding their legs and arms and undid the handcuffs. Gently and with some pride, he slipped the nooses of wire around their necks. The adjustable nooses attached to a wire hooked by an ingenious rider-knot to the springs. He did the same with their feet before handcuffing them and cutting off the rags.
"The beauty of your situation, fellow deviants, is that the more you struggle, the tighter the wire gets. Squirm enough, you die. But if you're good and sit rock-steady, somebody, someday, may find you here."
Rapf stuffed their underwear into their mouths and gagged them with a rag cord. Before leaving, he pulled the shade and put the weapons and his clothes and money into his attaché. He found the proprietor in the lobby, a man with meat-colored eyes and toothless mouth sucked in. With strained courtesy, Rapf paid the money to rent his room for another month.
Rats ruled the black alleys, and after some hassle, Rapf managed to box two large ones. He hauled the oil-soaked carton to his room and let them loose. Hi-Hat jerked violently when he saw them, and the wire drew blood at his throat. "Don't get excited, fellas. At least wait till they start chewing on your toes." He closed the door and fidgeted with the lock, forcing it to jam.
Rapf headed north. For several days, he went in and out of small hill villages asking about Henley. No one had seen him, and even if they had, Rapf had the distinct feeling he'd be the last one they'd tell.
He sensed someone following. Once, he glanced over his shoulder to see a bay pirate working a nail into a footprint Rapf had left in the dust. His talisman awed the people he met, yet no one would speak with him. Finally one morning, after finding a rusted jackknife near his campfire, the blade closed on a shred of paper with his crude likeness scrawled on it, he decided to call it quits. He still had most of the money Pantucci had given him, and he considered going someplace exotic to hide out from Gusto.
The next day, he spotted Henley. Or what looked like Henley. Rapf picked out the coral-red hair from a long way off. The sighting took place in a decrepit trenchtown several kilometers out of North End. Here and there among the glinting litter of tin and broken glass a seabird poked, some perched on stumps and tall bamboo poles. Above, a high wind thinned clouds into long fish shapes. A lone bird rode a ring of wind.
Rapf kept his eye on the red hair as he jogged into town, attaché wagging beside him, white jellaba swelling behind. The closer he got, the less like Henley the figure looked. For one, the character was too tall, way over six feet. And there was something about the way he stood, legs akimbo, head tilted to one side like a puppet, that wasn't Henley and, very nearly, wasn't human.
The figure ahead stood alongside a rusted jeep that had large eyes painted on its fender, and Rapf peered so intently at him, he didn't see the old man. Autway stepped from behind a tarpaper shack and grabbed Rapf by the arm. When Rapf turned to face him, he squinted into sunlight flashing from his face.
"'Scuse me, fella. I want words wit you."
Autway turned, and Rapf saw himself in the mirror shard of his eye. "What do you want, old man?"
"Dat mon over dere is not de mon you lookin' for."
"How do you know I'm looking for anybody?"
Autway shook his calabash. He had a dog-crucifix around his neck, and he touched it. "I am this here . I know why you come here."
"Yeah? Why's that?"
"You would find Henley Easton."
Rapf's eyes narrowed. For one delirious moment, he thought one of Gusto's men had nailed him. But then the old man rolled his one eye and leered, showing black teeth. He wasn't one of Gusto's.
"How do you know that?”
"I told you. I am this here ." He rattled his calabash, touched the dog-crucifix. "You are Michael Rapf, eh?"
Rapf screwed up his face, reached out to grab the old man's stained mantle, thought better of it. "Yeah, and who fingered me? Henley?"
"Naw. This here knows."
Rapf shook his fist at Autway. "You will be gone-gone if you don't start giving me some straight answers."
Autway nodded. Knots of hair tossed across his haggard face, and he brushed them back. "You muss leave — quick. Dat is not Henley. Henley is afar us all."
Rapf put the attaché down. "He's dead?"
"Worse. Naw dead — afar us all."
Rapf stared through curtains of heat at the tall man alongside the jeep. Some young men clustered around him — the toughs that had pulled knives on Rapf and driven a nail through his footprint. "Mister, I haven't understood a thing you've told me."
"Den I will be forward. Dis voudoun salango. Dere is nuthin' like dis in de States. All power and weirding. Dat mon over dere was Henley Easton. But naw more."
Autway moved his calabash gently, and the tall man, as if hearing it, turned. When Rapf saw the man's face, he knew at once that it was Henley. They were his eyes. That was the line of his jaw. That was his red hair. But that was all that was his. The skin gleamed oily black. Not negroid but ink black. And the body appeared all wrong. Bizarrely elongated, loose as a marionette. Seeing it standing there cool and lean, eyes bright as nails, Rapf felt his mind peel away. He thought of spring clouds breaking up over a long line of cold lakes, and he felt as if an ocean current, dark, awesome, swept him out beyond himself. It passed quickly, blurred off like the shadow of fish. It lasted only long enough to instill in him dread foreboding.
"What happened to him?"
"Dot you wouldn't understan'?"
Rapf had to look away from Henley. He stared up at oyster- shell clouds, saw the full moon, a pale vapor in the day sky. "Tell me."
"De Old Ones — dey have corried Henley away. And dere, das dere messenger. Das Nyarlathotep. H-s-s-s-t!"
"Huh?"
"He de One dream Henley afar."
"How?"
Autway shook his head. "Best you ask why. How bring you to madness."
Henley turned and walked off with the toughs, drifting away as if a vapor. From someplace rose a thin mournful whistle.
"Dere are star pools in de hill. Up dere de minions take shape. B-r-r-r-p! De Kingdom been comin' for a long, long time."
"—"
"You see — dot you wouldn't understan'. Dis be de Kingdom. Nyarlathotep de Key. De world de lock. Entering, de Key is a blindness in de lock's eye, de dream dat always returns."
Rapf ran a hand over his face, fingers trembling. He bent to pick up his attaché, and the old man laid a hand on his shoulder, rain-soft, urging him to wait.
Rapf looked up at him with sharp eyes and straightened slowly. "You got the heroin?"
"You can have it. In exchange. For dat." He extended a knobbed coffee-colored finger and touched the talisman.
"You're kidding?"
Autway reached into his mantle and pull out a large cotton ditty bag.
"Let me see that." Rapf snatched the bag and tugged it open. He fingered the powder inside and touched it to his tongue. His head snapped back, and he grinned. "You got a deal, old man." He pulled tight the bag, bent down and put it in his attaché. With one hand, he secured the case lock, and with the other he removed the stone from around his neck and handed it to Autway.
As soon as the got his hands on it, he let out a giddy laugh that twisted under his tongue like a cry and curved off into a wail. "You stupid mon! Reap de wind. Thresh stone. All is lost. Now you done thrown away hope." He whooped.
Rapf scowled and stood up. Autway was already moving off, and Rapf watched him disappear down back wynds and alleys among the clustered huts. Despite the fact that he at last had what he wanted, he felt burned, and that was a dangerous way for him to feel.
He decided he wanted the stone back. This determination arrived as a dumb animal illumination, Rapf realized. Even so, that hunk of rock was suddenly important and getting to mean more each second.
Attaché under arm, Rapf loped down an alley, leaping over stacks of rubbish and debris. When he rounded the first corner he pulled up short, swiveled on his heels and threw himself back out of the alley. He had his Walther out, and he sat hunched behind his attaché as a man with a bison chest and a tight, sad smile came around the corner. "Pantucci."
"Slow down, stooge." Pantucci swung his hands free of his body. "If I was gunning for you, you'd be dead already."
"Turn around, captain."
Pantucci spun about, graceful as a dancer. "I'm light as a feather, Mike."
"Sure you are. Lift those pant legs."
The captain lifted his trousers to his knees. "I've been in your shadow for days, dupe. I was waiting for you to connect."
"Yeah? Well, what's that to you?"
"Somebody's going to have to move that stuff. And all seriousness aside, Gusto wants you to suffer more than he wants that dub."
"You're stating the obvious."
"You don't think you can move that kind of weight yourself?"
"Captain, I know you haven't been dog-breathing me all these days to keep me out of trouble. You're here to make your good out of my bad. Now I know that. But if you want a part of this, you're gonna have to do what I say."
"Okay. Shoot — not literally, chump."
Rapf didn't smile. "First, we'll leave your bag of lethal anecdotes in the alley where you dropped it. I saw that carry bag. How many pieces you got there?"
"A Magnum."
"Great. The neighborhood kids will love it." Rapf stood up and put his pistol away. "Next we're gonna find that old man I was talking with. He's got something of mine. After that, we'll take percentages. All right?”
Pantucci nodded, eyed the attaché.
"Oh, yeah." Rapf ran a thumbnail along the length of his jaw. "Don't underestimate me, captain. You're a lot bigger, but I'm very fast."
They prowled the trenchtown for an hour and found no trace of Autway. Rapf decided to head into the hills along the one path available. Four hours later, after much trekking through cypress groves and fern-matted glens, they heard the rattle of Autway's calabash.
Pantucci was restless and wanted to move toward the sound. Rapf quieted him down, and the captain went off behind some bushes. Rapf moved along the trail a short ways and slipped into a chute of granite outcropping hung with Spanish moss. Presently, Autway came padding along the trail. When Rapf burst out behind him, he bolted. His speed was incredible. If Pantucci hadn't been up ahead, he would have lost him.
Pantucci grabbed him by his mantle and threw him to the ground. Rapf came up quickly and pressed the barrel of his gun against the old man's ear. "Where's my stone, grandpa?"
"Dot's not yours."
Rapf swiped him across the face with the butt of his gun. "Your life's not mine either, but I'm gonna take that too if you don't turn over the stone."
Autway's face bled, and his one eye strained wide with defiance. "I dawn have it."
Rapf raised his gun to strike him again, and Pantucci moved to grab his wrist. Rapf rolled off in a blur, came up in a crouch with the Walther aimed at Pantucci's head. "Belay that, captain!"
"Rapf, it's just a friggin' rock!"
"Mister, he laughed at me. It's not a friggin' rock to him."
"He's goofing you."
"Maybe." Rapf shook his head. "But I want that stone or I'm not leaving."
Pantucci lifted Autway to his feet by his ears. "All right, crabface, where is it? Talk fast and clear or I'll pop that eye like a grape."
"I dawn have it. It's back dere." He nodded over his shoulder, up the mountain.
"How far?"
"Far back. Deep in de forest."
Rapf grabbed a shock of Autway's hair and jerked him around. "Let's go get it."
"Hold on, Mike. He'll lead us into trouble. His boys are probably up there."
Rapf opened his attaché and took out the forty-five and the thirty-eight. He checked to see if they were loaded, then he took the knives and hand-grip out and threw them into the bushes. He shoved the attaché to Pantucci. "You carry Satan." He put the Walther in its holster and the thirty-eight under his belt. The forty-five he pressed against the back of Autway's head. "Drop your rattle here, gone-gone, and march."
Autway undid his calabash and started up the trail. As they climbed higher, stillness settled around them like fog. Even the grass and the leaves went still as if lost in thought. Trees became larger, thick-boled old trees. After a while, the woods became so dense that only a few threads of light came through. In that calm radiance, dolmens and giant wheels hewn of rock and carved with curious oghams began to appeared among the tree, most of them half-buried or peering through luxuriant growths.
Soon Pantucci started getting restless again. He looked back over his shoulder. "Rapf, we're being watched."
"Is that right? Well, try to look your best."
A kilometer later, the trail narrowed to a trace so tight they had to lean forward to pass. A plangent breeze sifted through the forest.
Autway waved his hand, a gesture like wind in a sapling. "You go through dat brake up ahead and you dere. But go slow, mon. Go slow."
Pantucci pushed into a tangle of hedge growth, and Rapf shoved Autway after him. On the other side, they stopped and looked out across an expanse of pools with water green as fire. There were a half dozen ponds, ellipsoid, mirror flat, separated by huge mammocked trees and grasslands swaying in fumy and spirited mist. Beyond the green pools, the horizon hazed into jungle. A jade glow tinted the sky.
Pantucci gazed into the water, beguiled by pale sketches of coral shaped like ladders. A soft look touched his face. "This is a dream."
, Rapf thought, focusing on a drowsy sound, the whittled-down thunder of waves shogging to shore far away. He looked hard at the glades of blue trees, some growing out of the water, bent like crones. He had to shake his head to snap out of it.
With the barrel of his gun, he turned Autway around. The gangan's face confronted him, calm and dark as amber. "Where is it, grandpa?"
"Wit dat what come from it." The seamed face grinned cretinously.
On the opposite bank of the nearest pool, from behind a massively shaggy tree trunk, the long man with black skin emerged. He stood naked, elongated, unreal, and a sheen on his shoulders made him look like glass. His peculiar body light addled the air around him. He glided through the grass like an apparition, arms writhing, unjointed, undulant. Even as far off as he was, rounding the turn of the pool, all could see he was not human. Glassy flesh crumbled off his bones like soaked bread, and the bones themselves protruded long and rubbery.
Rapf fired without thinking. The bullet stopped him. Or seemed to. But the wrinkled air around him kept coming. Like a sheet of rain it billowed. As it approached, a whistle, very high and far, faraway, twisted in their ears. Abruptly, it shrilled to a wail, a projectile nose-diving. Then the trembling sheet of air swept over them, and the intensity jumped to a spinning siren. The whine became a needle skewed between their eyes, flinging them to the ground, limbs like fluttering rags. Ringing agony drilled into the bones of their teeth, shook vision to splinters, exploded louder with each heartbeat. The shriek went white-hot, and they knew it would kill them. Nyarlathotep was screaming.
Then, like a slamming door, the wailing stopped. Their ears kept roaring. Deaf as sod, they would have sat there in the rusted grass swaying like old women except for what began happening around them. All three of them saw it at once. Rapf quivered like a gong and Pantucci let out a pitiful moan. Autway began to laugh, then to howl.
Henley's black and distorted body writhed inhumanly on the ground, head bending backward to the feet, waist twisting full around. A huge greasy hole in its torso gaped where the bullet had exited, and that gap widened and rippled. The body peeled away, cracking open like a pod, droozing a quivering cheesy bladder — the delirious, gelatinous body of Nyarlathotep.
It was massive. By some abominable infusion, it swelled to twice the size of the body that hatched it. Its surface, covered with something sticky, a black sap, bubbling, running off at the sides, carried with it a bed of pearls, shiny curdled clods of milk, thick clusters of eggs. Something like pinworms needled over the gummy black silk, glimmering with a rabid bacterial fire. The body it pulled from reduced to a cake of filaments that crumbled and lapsed with blue volts to dusty embers cooking in a soft incarnadine light. Then the thick odor of singed grease wafted over them, and Pantucci retched.
Rapf couldn't take his eyes off the thing. It hovered a few meters of the ground, its jelly sac bloated with webs of blue-pulsing blood nets. Tendrils, lion-red, flayed open around mouthlike gaping seams writhing below the bulbed body. Tentacles pushed it off into the air and it lifted, its hideous rippling hulk rising up over the puddling mess of its cocoon.
Rapf heaved himself to his feet. He intended to flee, to bolt like the wind, until another horror transfixed him. The pond churned. Dense forms rose to their shadows and broke the surface. Webbed appendages lashed among the foaming waters — flat faces, lizard-eyed shark maws splashed toward shore. Autway stood before them, arms outspread, wild hair whipped by his ecstatic movements.
The forms bobbed toward the bank, soaked black with the leakage and seepings of some putrid hell. Autway savagely danced, and Rapf heard him — he knew it was impossible, his ears were gluey with blood — yet he heard his cracked voice vomiting laughter: "" And then, he was gone. A humped, bubbling gob lurched out of the pool and sprawled over him. For an instant, Rapf thought he could see the shocked, screaming face in the midst of a throbbing amoebic thing.
Pantucci bellowed and clutched the attaché. With a whipped run, he scampered along the rim of the pool toward the forest. A beaked, squid-headed mauler slobbered to shore and with gangling limbs pursued him. He cried as he ran and desperately heaved the attaché away. It was no good. The creature was on him, all the seams and pleats of its throat fibrillating insanely as it lifted him up with one pincered, blotched arm. Even after the green-scaled beak crushed his face, he kicked spastically, swiveling his arms.
Rapf choked on his fear. A gun in each hand, he backed off into the forest, blasting several rounds into a gaping eyeless sucker-mouth. He burst through the hedge and broke into a frantic clipped run. Howling and sobbing, he hopped among root-tangles, lashed through hanging vines, and slammed into a thick thorn bush, shredding his jellaba, tearing his flesh to be free, and kicking off into the grave-dark forest. He could hear nothing. Deaf and too terrified to glance back, he sensed only vibrations — dull, thudding sensations that reached him through the ground.
Rapf, lunging over the rotted shell of a tree, caught his leg on something and saw the green-tangled ground jerk toward him. His guns flew out of his hands and vanished in the bracken. Rude hands banged him onto his back, and he stared up into the gnawed and lacerated face of Duke Parmelee. Hi-Hat Chuckie Watz reared behind him, face puffed, scabby, the lower lip merely a crust. They both wielded heavy butcher knives.
Wildly, Rapf tried to communicate with them in the forced modality of the deaf, and merely voiced whimpers. The Duke stooped to start in with his knife. Something beyond the trees distracted him. Hi Hat screamed first. Rapf saw his face wracked with horror. He shuffled backward, his foot tangled, and he fell to his back. Before he could rise, a segmented bulk with frantic legs and membranous wings descended on him in a blurred flurry. The Duke gawked bug-eyed and was still gawking when a lamprey with stalk-eyes lolled onto his back. He fled crazily this way and that, shrieking, trying to stab the slug-ball off his body, yet it clung to him, melled to his flesh. Finally, the slick mass swelled over his head, and he collapsed, still clutching at it.
While the Duke convulsed, Rapf rolled off, bucked to his feet and ran headlong into the clumsy hooked arms of something loathsome. The clasped forebrains of its head trembled voraciously, mandibles swiveling. Before it could crush him, Rapf unsprung his butterfly blade and slammed it into the agitated bulk. He spun backward, wheeled crazily to get his balance and then kicked off in a cloud of leaves.
Plunging down a steep bank, he tumbled head over heels in a clatter of stones and dust. His somersault splashed into marshy shallows and crashed to a stop against a thrust of boulder, head and shoulders underwater. The cool current revived him, and he shuddered to his feet, teetered like an old man, and plopped back into the water.
Above him, among the high bank's shrubbery, he could see humps of things lumbering in and out of view. Quickly, he rolled to his belly and dragged himself into deeper water. The stream buoyed him and carried him off.
Hours later, he came out of a faint and found himself washed upon a gritty shore. Pale ferns fronded nearby, framing tin roofs and cardboard doorways. He pulled himself to his feet, slowly, painfully and limped toward higher ground. His ears still whined, and his head felt heavy. He could just make out the shadow of sounds: the stream clattering pebbles and the curse of gravel under his feet.
He hobbled mindlessly toward the town, in a daze, eyes small and shiny as a reptile's. His mind had shut, and he moved mechanically. The people who saw him coming shied away, except for the children who pelted him with stones and ran close enough to snag him with wire-strung tin cans and garbage. Rapf shuffled on, unaware, face empty, eyes drifting.
A day later, the local police picked him up outside North End. Kids with slings and crude blow darts baited him like a pariah dog. Though he had been reeling frantically from street to street, occasionally lashing out with pitiful cries, he gave the police no trouble when they cuffed him.
Days afterward, his mind shuttered into place. It took a long minute for him to take in the stained and pitted wall. Then the cretinous look drained entirely from his features, and he hunched over, weeping. When he had gotten hold of himself, he stood up by the bars of his cell. He could see in the faces of the police and his cellmates that he had been raving. They wanted to know what had happened, if it had been mushrooms or village anis that had gone bad.
Rapf waved all speculation aside, and in a halting, fragmented way told them what he had seen in the hills. The police laughed, and his cellmates remained quiet, eyes averted.
The next day, they freed him. By then, he regretted telling anyone anything. An officer from Port-au-Prince arrived to hear his story, and Rapf feared they'd somehow find out about the heroin and detain him. But the officer was only concerned with the exact location of the star pools, and Rapf told him.
The man seemed different from the local police. He was stocky, with still eyes. And he believed Rapf. Enough, at any rate, to send four men up along the trail Rapf had followed days earlier. They wanted Rapf to go along and direct them, and when he refused, melting before them to a quaking, sniveling mess, they left him behind.
That night, Rapf stayed in the prison cell. The suggestion that he go back up into the hill had so shattered him that he had needed a shot to quiet him down. In his sleep, he dreamed of a sun, black yet shining, with strange stars tapping in the dark blue of the sky. He sat alone in a damp alley, greasy brick walls rising on either side toward the alien sky. There was a smirch in the air of something burnt, and his stomach closed at the smell of it.
Then, from the far end of the alley an icy light wavered and a figure approached. A man, thin and long as a stick, carried something. As he drew closer, Rapf made out that his face appeared cushiony, chin slippery with drool, eyes remote. An idiot's face. His swollen lips moved in a whisper:
Rapf's whole body clenched at the sound of that withered, barely audible voice. He couldn't turn away. He fixed upon what the idiot carried — a black cistern with a wide mouth. His eyes locked on it, watching it approach, tilt forward and reveal blackness gem-lit by a splatter of tiny lights, pin-bright, like stars.
The lights wheeled, and watching them curve through the dark, Rapf succumbed to a lurch of vertigo, keeled over, and fell howling into the depthless dark.
He shrugged awake and sat still a long time before accepting coffee and bread. The four men who had gone up into the hills had not returned. The office wired for a helicopter to cover their trail and see if any sign of them turned up. When Rapf was strong enough to leave the police shack, he emerged in time to see the helicopter return. The pilot and his partner staggered from the chopper. They had seen something. Rapf didn't lag around to find out what.
The long, tedious walk into Port-au-Prince in his condition would take most of the day. When he got there, the American consul would wire his sister in Stony Brook for money. Then he could leave, get out before Gusto sent down more of his boys or the hills sent down what they festered.
He ambled to the edge of the slums and stopped at the side of the road that led to the capital. One last time, he looked back. The helicopter had gone up again. Its insectlike body glinted in the distance as it dropped toward the horizon, sunlight splintering off its domed glass, a wandering star burning alone above the hills.
