“Garey!” Sidney cried as the bullet raced through his mouth and another bullet caught him in the chest, and then oddly enough two bullets from the deputies below caught him in the head and arm, and he lay back over the form of Roy Sturtevant, who rising up then said, “What is the time now, can you tell me?”

“It’s two o’clock in hell,” Gareth replied and shot him twice through the head.

It took all of another day to flush Gareth out of the house. He was badly wounded and more or less incoherent, but he was still full of fight, and as the radio kept telling people who listened to it (some were listening to it then for the first time in their lives) “dangerous and armed, and protecting his own body with the bodies of his two buddies whom he had murdered in cold blood.”

Neither the radio nor the police mentioned one dead man very often. That is to say, Brian McFee. They did report of course that he had been dug up from his coffin and brought to the house in what authorities believed was to have been the enactment of some weird and terrible rite. Words failed to explain it, in the phrasing of the report, and after a while the disinterred body was no longer mentioned in print or on the airways. And even at the later inquest, not much was made of it. It was whispered everywhere, though, and never forgotten in this community.

“Our little mountain town here, in remote West Virginia,” Dr. Ulric had said later, “has had its veil torn away, and there have been revealed things just as terrible as those we read about in great seaports and immense metropolises the world over. Only more terrible, I do believe. . . . In my day it was the story of Jesse and Ruthanna Elder . . . Now it’s these young men who have such strong passions . . . We’ve been brought up to date.”

The sheriff himself put the handcuffs on Gareth Vaisey even as he was put down on the stretcher and borne away.

“You don’t need to say anything, son,” the sheriff had told Gareth that evening when he looked in on him in the hospital jail, situated only a few miles from Warrior Creek and Roy’s rendering shacks and the place of the shooting. Despite the fact he was dying, surgery having been deemed out of the question, Gareth’s room was heavily guarded by five or more deputies, and two state troopers, and his ward was sealed off. A television crew was waiting outside, and the story of what had happened was being reported all over the world. The mountain village Dr. Ulric had spoken of for him at such length was being called by name and discussed, photographed and documented for the eyes of five continents.

About midnight, Gareth rallied. “I want to talk about it, sheriff,” Gareth began.