A rising, hysterical note. “Why didn’t it feel good? You fucking old … You hideous, cruel … you bastard … Why didn’t … Why can’t I…”
Glowworms, she had told John.
Technically beetles, said John, but I always loved them.
Narrow beetles with long strands hanging off them—a carpet of shifting, dead, winking lights at the top of the grave. Greenish, orangeish, yellowish, moving over one another silently with those long filaments hanging down. （Something came off the baby’s body; a foot, maybe. Paul jammed it back on.） And the water—the huge pool of real salt water, where she had knelt and drank—
She moved the baby’s body apart from the others. They could not stop her. She stepped into the water: A-a-a-ah! That was good. The water was ice-cold—it froze the baby’s heart in its tracks—but she was moving her now and did not need her heart. Someone said, “Let her go. It’s gravity. Let her go,” and those voices were dim now—she could no longer distinguish them. Most human voices sounded alike, after all. They were not beautiful. The waters parted for her and it became possible to walk, crunching through the bones at the bottom. The bones at the bottom; what did they make her think of?
John and she had swum to the centre hummock rising out of the pool. Not an island, not really. An outcropping. With the marble pillars, and the marble top, and the long low marble table. He said he thought it was a nice place to be. To lie down. She had liked hard things to lie down on. It was hard to endure having a spine. And there she was—
A long echo down the tunnel. The Lyctor with the broken body, screaming still in crazed agony, but getting closer.
There she was; John had made her so ugly, so unbearably ugly. The terrible face, with the terrible arms and legs and the terrible middle part, and the terrible hair, and the terrible ears: the nose too short, the ears too brief. But there she was—and within her the child, asleep, with the strange sword. The sword—her sword—her own edge had been pushed out, her swinging edge, her toy. Her plain bladed sword. And her body was chained up …
“No!” someone howled, from the shore. “No—no!”
She looked back beyond, and she saw Anastasia, tucked where nobody would find her: Anastasia, all bones. Not really Anastasia. But Anastasia’s body without the meat on it, snuggled right into the curve of the rock, ready to close the door whenever it was opened. She remembered Anastasia.
Her vision swam: her heart was in her throat.
“Well, happy birthday to me, I guess,” sighed Nona.
And Nona tumbled forward onto the icy dead breast of the Body.
Epilogue
WHEN THE ROCK THAT had been made meat awoke in a body, it cried out aloud, saying—You.
Then it broke the chains that were upon its right wrist, and the right wrist broke with them. It broke the chains that were upon its left wrist, and the left wrist also; so followed the chains upon the right ankle and upon the left, until its arms and its legs and the chains were broken all as one. When it raised its terrible head the chains around the neck collapsed into dust, and it cried, Ah, ah, ah.
At the breaking of the chains and of the bones, one of the children there offered violence to her, appearing on the altar and raising her weapon high. But the black-eyed infant collapsed on the altar chid her sharply in a clear voice, saying, What is this that thou wouldst do, Tridentarius? Touch her and our vow will come to nothing, and I will slay you where you stand.
To which the first child said, Thou knowest not what thou dost.
And the second child answered, Not lately, but now.
And the first child asked: Dost thou oppose me, and thou half-dead?
And the second child said, I am as one half-dead, but you would be two-halves dead, bitch.
To which the first child said, My sweet, I only die of longing for thee.
And the other child said, Then perish.
Upon which the body that had been rock rose from the altar and struck the child who had offered violence to her with one broken hand, forgetting the sword in the other, so that the child who offered violence was not slain, but was cast into the water like a detestable thing. And many skeletons emerged from the bones of the bier, and from the walls of the tomb, but when the sword was raised, they fled. When the broken feet touched the stone around the tomb, they were mended, and when the broken hands raised the sword they were mended also, but the body itself was not fully awake, and stumbled on the steps at the bier, crying, John, John; but did not fall.
And there was a crowd of dead children there. They were striving loudly against living children on the far-off shore of the tomb. The body did not understand how this had come to pass, yet when one on the shore called, Alecto, Alecto, then the body remembered, and was mightily dashed in the memory of Alecto, so that all their sleep was perished with a noise.