The cry that woke Dennis the third time was wordless and terrible.
He leaped to his feet. The Wizard Serdic lay face-up on the pole. The fire had fallen to ash and a shimmer everywhere but beneath the corpse's hips—where fat had bubbled out to burn with yellow flames and a soapy odor.
"Now you've done it, boy," said the corpse. It freed its wrists by twisting them against the withie which bound them to the pole, then hunched its knees forward and untied its ankles.
"I'm coming for you, boy," said the Wizard Serdic, dead a month and wrapped in a miasma of decay and smoldering flesh. He crabbed his legs sideways and stood up, still impaled on the spit.
Dennis screamed and ran into the night.
The jungle had tricked him, enticed him from his duties and lulled him to sleep. Now it was all clawing thorns and saw-edged leaves again.
Dennis would have thrown himself willingly into a hedge of spears if it were the only way to escape from the corpse. His last view of Serdic was a memory of white terror: the wizard with his arms lifted, pulling out the pole that impaled him, hand over hand.
Trees battered the youth as he clubbed himself on their trunks and fallen branches. His forearms stung from cuts and scratches, but the pounding the rest of his body took during his wild careen through the night was a red, dull ache with no end and no location.
That red pulse became the whole universe for him, replacing hope and the memory of Serdic. It was so omnipresent that when Dennis' eyes told him that there was a glow which silhouetted the dark thickets, the information merged with pain and was lost until his feet tripped on the threshold.
Then he stumbled into the cabin he had fled a lifetime before.
Dennis would have gotten up and run further, but his body failed him at last. His hands and feet scrabbled briefly on the floor of smooth hardwood puncheons, but they could raise his torso only for a moment before he flopped down again.
He wasn't crying; he had no tears left.
For minutes, Dennis lay on the floor with his breath sobbing in and out while his muscles recovered themselves enough to hurt individually.
The fireplace held a bed of glowing coals. Their light seemed brighter than it had earlier, when the cabinet opened and Dennis ran from Serdic the first time... but time lacked the reality it had when this terrible night began.
The cabinet still stood in the corner, open and empty. The cabin's front door stirred vaguely in a breeze that made Dennis shiver.
The youth got up, moving like a man who'd lived with pain for decades. A cramp suddenly knotted the big muscles of his right thigh. The flesh contorted, taking away Dennis' breath with the fresh agony and almost throwing him to the floor again.
Almost. With his eyes slitted, he hopped on his good leg until he caught the edge of the door and supported half his weight on it until the fiery throbbing subsided. He slammed the heavy door; barred it; and, as an afterthought, tweaked in the latchstring that still hung out through the hole above the lintel.
The feathery pelt was gone. He'd probably lost it in the jungle when he bolted out the door.
That didn't matter. Dennis had slept with frogs in a pool of rainwater. The warm puncheons were a more attractive choice now than the bed that in the shadows across the room.
Dennis curled up in front of the fire, cradling his head on his crossed arms. He could feel the aches draining from him. His muscles relaxed, giving up the tautness which had doubled the pain of his injuries. He was logy with fatigue, drifting into a slumber as deep as the realm of the sea hag...
"What will you give me for your lodging, boy?" demanded the Wizard Serdic from outside the cabin.
Dennis roused. He felt as though his skin were covered with needles which pricked him every time he moved. His ears buzzed so loudly that for a moment he thought he must be dreaming, because he couldn't hear any real sound over the roar of blood and exhaustion.
"What will you give me, boy?" the voice demanded.
Dennis stepped to the door. He didn't feel his scrapes and bruises, but pulses of heat rose until they expanded away from the top of his head as he moved.
He lifted the bar and pulled the door open. The corpse stared at him with eyes lighted orange by reflected firelight.
Dennis had been frightened too badly and for too long to have any fear remaining.
"Come in, wizard," he said, moving his arm in a welcoming gesture. He would have bowed if he'd been sure that he wouldn't fall over if he tried.
Serdic stepped forward stiffly, not from pain but as if he were pieced together out of wood rather than flesh. The fire had tangled his long fingernails into a mass like knotted hair, giving his hands the appearance of deformed hoofs.
The hole in Serdic's right shoulder—where one end of the spit had been inserted—was puckered and bloodless.
"You owe me for your lodging, boy," said the corpse. "What is it that you will give me?"
Dennis stepped back and let the door swing closed behind Serdic. A greenish fungus traced patterns like tattoos on the right side of the corpse's face.
Dennis smiled. "I'll give you a story, wizard," he said. The syllables drifted through his consciousness like bubbles glimmering on dark water for the moment before they burst.
"I'll tell you about a boy—a man... A man who enters a cabin open in the night and who finds a dead man there. Does this interest you, wizard? It's fair pay, isn't it, a story?"
Serdic said nothing. Either Dennis' body or his consciousness swayed. He wasn't sure he was still standing up, but his voice continued, "And the man runs, but the corpse follows him, carried by four rogues, bloody rogues. The man has to watch the corpse warming on a fire, but he doesn't mind it well and the corpse chases him down again to ask for pay."
The pattern on Serdic's cheek writhed, but Dennis couldn't tell whether it was the flesh or the fungus or his own reeling mind that caused the movement.
"And the man has nothing to pay with," he went on, almost shouting now. "He's naked and friendless and the night may never end. And so he offers a story, a wonderful story—and that's fair pay, isn't it, for it's all he has?"
The corpse didn't move.
"Isn't it, Serdic?" Dennis cried, leaning forward so that his face was only inches from the dead face of the dead wizard. "And if it isn't—then to Hell with you, where you belong. And to Hell with me as well, if it must be."
The corpse smiled, an expression made more horrible by the fact that decay had already begun to shrivel the gums away from the yellow teeth they held. Serdic reached out with one stiff hand, stopping just short of contact with Dennis' cheek.
"Shall we play a game, boy?" he asked in a voice like the paw of a cat dabbing at its prey.
Dennis lifted his chin in a brusque nod. He was suddenly afraid to speak.
"We will play this game, then," said the wizard. "I will leave you now. But when next my name is spoken, boy—then I will come. Understand me, boy?"
"I understand," Dennis whispered.
He could feel himself slipping away, but he wasn't sure that it was his body falling. The Wizard Serdic was dissolving, but everything was dissolving into the night. At the last, nothing remained but the pattern of fungus glowing green and hideous though the cheek on which it grew had disappeared.
And then even the pattern was gone, except in Dennis' nightmare.