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world and up there was the God who ruled this world, and she had rejected him, had said no to one
of his priests and servitors. Save me! Don’t make me do it!
She knew she had to call out, to make appeal, to try and win the approbation of that God. I
can’t...save me!
She struggled and made terrible little mewling sounds trying to summon the words to cry
out, and suddenly she crossed a line, and screamed up into the echoing courtyard with a voice Leona
Ciarelli had never known enough to use.
“Him! Take him! Not me! I’m yours, I love you, I’m yours! Take him, not me, please not
me, take him, take him, I’m yours!”
And the black man was suddenly lifted away, wrenched off her, and off the balcony, whirled
straight up into the fog-thick air in the courtyard, as Beth sank to her knees on the ruined flower
boxes.
She was half-conscious, and could not be sure she saw it just that way, but up he went, end
over end, whirling and spinning like a charred leaf.
And the form took firmer shape. Enormous paws with claws and shapes that no animal she
had ever seen had ever possessed, and the burglar, black, poor, terrified, whimpering like a whipped
dog, was stripped of his flesh. His body was opened with a thin incision, and there was a rush as all
the blood poured from him like a sudden cloudburst, and yet he was still alive, twitching with the
involuntary horror of a frog’s leg shocked with an electric current. Twitched, and twitched again as
he was torn piece by piece to shreds. Pieces of flesh and bone and half a face with an eye blinking
furiously, cascaded down past Beth, and hit the cement below with sodden thuds. And still he was
alive, as his organs were squeezed and musculature and bile and shit and skin were rubbed,
sandpapered together and let fall. It went on and on, as the death of Leona Ciarelli had gone on and
on, and she understood with the blood-knowledge of survivors at any cost that the reason the
witnesses to the death of Leona Ciarelli had done nothing was not that they had been frozen with
horror, that they didn’t want to get involved, or that they were inured to death by years of television
slaughter.
They were worshippers at a black mass the city had demanded be staged; not once, but a
thousand times a day in this insane asylum of steel and stone.
Now she was on her feet, standing half-naked in her ripped nightgown, her hands tightening
on the wrought-iron railing, begging to see more, to drink deeper.
Now she was one of them, as the pieces of the night’s sacrifice fell past her, bleeding and
screaming.
Tomorrow the police would come again, and they would question her, and she would say
how terrible it had been, that burglar, and how she had fought, afraid he would rape her and kill her,
and how he had fallen, and she had no idea how he had been so hideously mangled and ripped apart,
but a seven-story fall, after all...
Tomorrow she would not have to worry about walking in the streets, because no harm could
come to her. Tomorrow she could even remove the police lock. Nothing in the city could do her any
further evil, because she had made the only choice. She was now a dweller in the city, now wholly
and richly a part of it. Now she was taken to the bosom of her God.
She felt Ray beside her, standing beside her, holding her, protecting her, his hand on her
naked backside, and she watched the fog swirl up and fill the courtyard, fill the city, fill her eyes and
her soul and her heart with its power. As Ray’s naked body pressed tightly inside her, she drank
deeply of the night, knowing whatever voices she heard from this moment forward would be the
voices not of whipped dogs, but those of strong, meat-eating beasts.
At last she was unafraid, and it was so good, so very good not to be afraid.
“When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or
