it had overreached itself. Its tail part came lashing, switching after it.
All she did was shudder, in a form of death without contact. Then she deflated as suddenly as it had leaped, her waist sank in, rippled down over the edge of the seat, and she sidled inertly to the ground, retched a couple of times. There beside her own discarded black coif, with the two jet ornaments spaced on the front of it, and the long sinuous length of whipped-around veiling, that bulged like muscular haunches in places, that the wind had been sending creeping stealthily up on her a little at a time.
Cruel minutes went by, in a gift of renewed life that was hardly wanted any more, it had been so expensive. She got to her feet again somehow, presently, the black garment on her a biased misfit now, too high up on one shoulder, down off the other one entirely. Smoky ribbons on her white legs where there had been stockings before. She wasn’t a civilized being any more. She wasn’t a young girl of the city. She wasn’t the Viuda de Contreras’ daughter. She had no name, she had no address. She wasn’t feminine, and she wasn’t masculine, she’d sunk to a lower genderless plane. She’d forgotten what love was, and her tears or the action of her hand had carried a surly red streak of lipstick from the corner of her mouth down to the bottom of her chin and under. She was just a blindly instinctive thing, struggling feebly to get from the dark to the light, to get from fear to safety.
Terror now was only something comparative. There were accesses of it at times, then at other times there were diminutions of it; there never at any time was a complete absence of it. She wavered along, on the move once more, head lolling downward on her chest, legs splaying stiffly out behind her, first one then the other, like crutches. There were stars over her, but they were cold and meaningless. They seemed so distant, so aloof; pin-point intelligences without pity, looking down from a great height on something trapped in a black pit, watching it go around and around, trying to find its way out, and knowing that it never would.
Then suddenly a new terror was added to those she was already enduring. A chromatic one, this time. Color began to well up into the cemetery, giving it a new dimension, giving its horrors depth, that the two-dimensional black and gray had lacked until now. It was like a reflection from a distance; she couldn’t see where it was coming from at first. It was like the shine of red fire through the trees and between the graves, not rising high, but creeping closely over the ground.
A great, angry eye was opening behind her. The moon. But not the cool, tapered moon of lovers and of wishes. Full-bellied, carnivorous. With animus toward the living, like everything else in here. Fuming, fevered, glaring diseasedly, redolent of evil and of things they had taught you long ago in church not to believe in. Unhallowed things. Ghouls and goblins, grinning cadavers that pushed their way up out of graves, all subcuticle muscular ligaments in crisscross patches, like something on a medical students’ dissection table. The moon. The planet that controls madness and psychopathic urge to shed blood.
It doubled, tripled the shadows where it had been black before. And in the places where it had been less than black, it brought a horrifying, threatening simulation of motion, filtering through the restless leaves and branches. It made the forms and figures on the graves seem to waver, to sidle and stir and shift in its rays, to mottle like leprous things and glower and leer, where they had at least been still before. Trees became gnarled shapes bending toward her, reaching down to clutch at her. Monuments became things crouched behind the bushes and the flowers, dropping their heads lower at the moment she skirted by, to rear up again and slink out after her the instant her back was to them. Even her own shadow turned against her now, treacherously
All she did was shudder, in a form of death without contact. Then she deflated as suddenly as it had leaped, her waist sank in, rippled down over the edge of the seat, and she sidled inertly to the ground, retched a couple of times. There beside her own discarded black coif, with the two jet ornaments spaced on the front of it, and the long sinuous length of whipped-around veiling, that bulged like muscular haunches in places, that the wind had been sending creeping stealthily up on her a little at a time.
Cruel minutes went by, in a gift of renewed life that was hardly wanted any more, it had been so expensive. She got to her feet again somehow, presently, the black garment on her a biased misfit now, too high up on one shoulder, down off the other one entirely. Smoky ribbons on her white legs where there had been stockings before. She wasn’t a civilized being any more. She wasn’t a young girl of the city. She wasn’t the Viuda de Contreras’ daughter. She had no name, she had no address. She wasn’t feminine, and she wasn’t masculine, she’d sunk to a lower genderless plane. She’d forgotten what love was, and her tears or the action of her hand had carried a surly red streak of lipstick from the corner of her mouth down to the bottom of her chin and under. She was just a blindly instinctive thing, struggling feebly to get from the dark to the light, to get from fear to safety.
Terror now was only something comparative. There were accesses of it at times, then at other times there were diminutions of it; there never at any time was a complete absence of it. She wavered along, on the move once more, head lolling downward on her chest, legs splaying stiffly out behind her, first one then the other, like crutches. There were stars over her, but they were cold and meaningless. They seemed so distant, so aloof; pin-point intelligences without pity, looking down from a great height on something trapped in a black pit, watching it go around and around, trying to find its way out, and knowing that it never would.
Then suddenly a new terror was added to those she was already enduring. A chromatic one, this time. Color began to well up into the cemetery, giving it a new dimension, giving its horrors depth, that the two-dimensional black and gray had lacked until now. It was like a reflection from a distance; she couldn’t see where it was coming from at first. It was like the shine of red fire through the trees and between the graves, not rising high, but creeping closely over the ground.
A great, angry eye was opening behind her. The moon. But not the cool, tapered moon of lovers and of wishes. Full-bellied, carnivorous. With animus toward the living, like everything else in here. Fuming, fevered, glaring diseasedly, redolent of evil and of things they had taught you long ago in church not to believe in. Unhallowed things. Ghouls and goblins, grinning cadavers that pushed their way up out of graves, all subcuticle muscular ligaments in crisscross patches, like something on a medical students’ dissection table. The moon. The planet that controls madness and psychopathic urge to shed blood.
It doubled, tripled the shadows where it had been black before. And in the places where it had been less than black, it brought a horrifying, threatening simulation of motion, filtering through the restless leaves and branches. It made the forms and figures on the graves seem to waver, to sidle and stir and shift in its rays, to mottle like leprous things and glower and leer, where they had at least been still before. Trees became gnarled shapes bending toward her, reaching down to clutch at her. Monuments became things crouched behind the bushes and the flowers, dropping their heads lower at the moment she skirted by, to rear up again and slink out after her the instant her back was to them. Even her own shadow turned against her now, treacherously
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