Nine
Somewhere, out beyond the range of the light, something distracted Oshosi from his work. The pause gave him a new and sudden understanding. He walked again to edge of the light ring with the warm, wet blob of flesh still held in the one travailed hand. He scratched his chin with the other hand. Oshosi turned his closed-eyelid gaze to the place in the darkness from where he now realized he was being watched. And at the same time, the one who had been watching secretly in the dark knew himself to be discovered. There was terror in the realization, and a certainty of outcome as inevitable as the falling of a heavy stone from a cliff.
Oshosi moved out of the light and deeper into the black shadows. He began to search for the hidden Watcher. The head, which rose like a wrinkled mushroom from the shoulders of the old man, was tilted left, then right, then left again, in a series of jerky twitches. The movement seemed more normal to the effort of listening than to that of seeing. The old man moved deeper into the darkness, jerkily, methodically, as if his limbs were strung up to some unseen control above. Oshosi moved the old man like a puppet toward the hidden Watcher, and the old man’s arm in turn wielded the torn-out knob of flesh ahead of him, like an eye.
The Watcher watched the old man’s advance – farther and farther from the firelight and nearer to him. The Watcher was paralyzed with fear. He saw how the old man’s body was silhouetted by the distant dance and flare of the orange fire. A hideous shadow lashed over and again on the small pile where the Watcher had hidden himself. And the rolling shadow produced a blinking effect that made the advance seem even more inexorable and awful. The hobbling, twitching figure of the old man vanished into darkness for a second off to on side of the flames behind him, only to cross against the light again, revealing how much nearer he had come. Irreversible, like the fall of a stone.
Oshosi stopped suddenly in the tall grass. The light of the fire behind him was now only a small bright puncture in the complete blackness of the night. The distant flickering of the camp fire set the deep crags on his face into horrific relief, as he turned his head, looking. The slimy nub was now flagrantly an eye for seeing. Oshosi fanned it out, left and right, on the end of his lurid, two-tone arm. The organ became an instrument of fine detection, for finding what was now very close, and not to be blundered past with broad strokes.
Under his pile, the Watcher trembled and drew tightly against his face the bunched fabric, so that only his black eyes were visible at the inward end of a deep tunnel. Now the old man’s feet were being dragged along the ground in half-steps by Oshosi. So close! He stopped, and the wrinkled mushroom head was held skyward. For the first time, a grin twisted itself sickeningly from the ruined skin, and the Watcher saw the distant firelight glint along the wet streak of calf’s blood on the old man’s chin. The dreadful blue-green “eye�? glimmered in a point now very, very close. The Watcher felt himself to be not only a thing poorly hidden and now discovered, but also a thing with sweet flesh that attracted a whole assortment of unmentionable appetites.
The old man’s other, un-bloodied, hand reached out suddenly toward the Watcher. In a movement that was like a convulsive scream of the body, the Watcher flung the white pile of fabric off of himself, and retreated to the farthest distance he could reach, which was not very far. He waited for the inevitable. In just another moment, the reaching hands would come across the taut expanse of the white fitted sheet. One hand with the brown fingers like dry twigs to catch on his tender flesh, the other hand, bloodied with that awful, awful bit of fresh death held out to smear on him the mess of killing. A mess that could never be washed off, ever. In another moment, the wrinkled, eyeless goblin’s head would come twitching over the white, enamel footboard, horribly seeing him somehow. Then, the clawing at his pajamas and the struggling of legs would be brief, and then all things would come to an end. The goblin would eat him as surely as a stone must fall from a cliff – inevitable. If only he could wake up.