“You think a spirit doesn’t know the tricks of a witch, Merrick,” said Goblin in his low flat voice, which carried over the noise of the fire—a voice I hadn’t heard in over four years. “You think I don’t know you want to kill me, Merrick? You hate me, Merrick.”

At once the figure began to thin out and grow immense and come down with full force upon Merrick, but she cried out:

“Burn now, burn!”

And we all cut loose with our force against him, crying out the single word, “burn,” as we sent the power, and as he rose over the flames we saw him, a thing of myriad tiny flames, paralyzed above the fire and retracting and howling in a soundless and ghastly confusion, and then turning in on himself and coiling so that he became a formed wind assaulting the altar, and then a funnel as he bore down on Merrick once again.

The noise was intolerable. The leaves were a hurricane upon us and the blaze flared. Merrick staggered backwards, but we kept up the force, crying out:

“Burn, Garwain, burn!”

“Burn till all of you is pure ghost as it should be!” cried Merrick, “and you can pass into the Light as God wills, Garwain!”

And then she turned and from the large black bag she snatched a small bundle, and, peeling back the white blankets that covered it, she revealed the small shriveled corpse of a child!

“This is you, Garwain!” she cried out. “This is you, brought from your grave, the body from which you departed, wandering astray, confounded and confused! This is your mortal body, your infant self, and from this self you have roamed lost and feeding upon Quinn! See this tiny form, this is your form, Goblin!”

“Liar!” came his voice, and he rose up on this side of the altar, right before us, my doppelgänger down to the buttons, raging at her and trying to snatch the tiny black shriveled infant out of her arms, but she wouldn’t let it go and she roared at him:

“You are smoke and mirrors, you are air and will and theft and terror. Go where God will send you! Lord, I beg you, take this servant, take him as you will!”

His image wavered. He was trying to fuse with her. She was resisting him with all her power. I could see him faltering and fading. He grew pale and large and billowing in the firelight. What did the fire feel like to him?

Once again, he rose high above us, spread out above us like a canopy.

I raised my voice: “Dear God, who made Julien, Gravier, Patsy, take him, take this orphan! Grace, Alice, Rose, come for this doomed wanderer. Add your prayers to ours.”