The Headsman is nowhere to be seen. I stand and call for Him, softly at first, then at a volume to rival the pounding surf below. I climb and survey the area from many vantage points but see no trace. Am I being tested?

I return to our outcropping and I wait. I have courage enough to start homeward, but before I do, I must inspect the final place where the Headsman might be waiting.

With reluctant steps, I enter the cave. Once more I call for my master and the echo of my voice spurs violent sounds of movement. Startled, I stagger backwards. The firmly textured wall of the cave halts me. I feel the foul water that moistens the cave saturating my clothing. I squint to see but can discern little of my surroundings beyond mere black.

Something shifts in the darkness. Instinct causes me to look in the sound’s direction.

I see.

I do not want to see.

She is sitting up in her casket. Her stiffening body is luminous within this grim cave. The shroud we had used to wrap her remains like a gift for the afterlife is now twisted and rent. One large section is draped over the lip of the wicker coffin like flung bedclothes. The woman herself—or what had once been a woman—is like a startled dreamer who has bolted up in her bed. Her hands molest the air around her and her headless trunk twitches as if trying to see.

A strange logy feeling comes over me. As my eyes grow accustomed to the gloom, I truly scrutinize the thing in the box. I study the halved neck; lumps of muscle, knots of bone, all held in place by the gluey clotted blood.

The whole image becomes a primordial volcano, spitting up waves of blood-lava and fledgling landscapes of tendon and of bone.

It is as if a new world is flooding out all around me. I see it with the eyes of my heart. It is a potent land whose laws are the bristling nerve, the pulsing red caverns and the stiff digits of bone.

Who will be the god of this grim, corporal world? What deity would dare send down creeds in the lawless wilderness of quivering skin and flowing blood?

She leaps!

Her escape from the casket is sloppy and awkward. Her hands swat the wicker box while her feet wobble over the cave’s rutted floor. The thing staggers about in a series of blind, brutal rings. She is as a panicked moth trapped in a bell jar. Though she has no face, the headless thing turns to face me. Worse, I know that in some way she sees me. The dark blotches upon her breasts come to resemble eyes. Horror seizes me utterly. I collapse upon the jagged stones, yet I cannot look away.