The blackness had weight and mass and thickened around them. They were all talking at once, Gardner, Mrs. Hayes, and her grandmother. “She’s dying,” said someone, and it was one of those girls at the school, the horrible school, but the other girls laughed and jeered. “She’s faking, she’s a liar, she’s a slut!” Laughter, laughter rolling up into the blackness with Gardner chanting, “You’re mine, Rose, I forgive you for what you did to me, you’re mine.”

Uncle Lestan grabbed Gardner by the throat and dragged him away from her. Gardner snarled and screamed and fought. He bit into Uncle Lestan’s hand but Uncle Lestan tore Gardner’s head from him, stretching his neck like a long wrinkled elastic stocking—she gasped, she screamed—and Gardner’s head melted, mouth turning downwards, eyes bleeding downwards, black and fluid and ghastly, and his head flopped down at the end of the broken wrinkled neck, and the body dropped into a sea of blood. Beautiful blood.

“Rose, drink from me!” said Uncle Lestan. “I am the Blood. I am the life.”

“Don’t you do that, child!” screamed Mrs. Hayes.

She reached for Uncle Lestan’s golden hair, reached for him, for his shining face.

Your blood.

It filled her mouth! A great moan broke from her. She became the moan. She swallowed over and over again. The blood of Heaven.

Gardner’s body floated in a stream of blood, dark ruby-red and blackish blood, and the face of Mrs. Hayes expanded, grew immense, a gleaming white mask of wrath. Uncle Lestan snatched at it, tore it loose like a fragile veil, and her voice died as her face died, like a flag burning, and he sent it down into the dark blackish blood current. Her grandmother, the old Texas woman, was sliding downwards with her hands out, paling, disappearing into the river of blood too.

Like Dante’s river of blood, flowing on, bubbling, crimson, black, beautiful.

“And Hell shall have no dominion,” said Uncle Lestan.

“No, no dominion,” she whispered, and they were rising upwards, rising the way they had from the Greek island that was breaking into pieces below them, pieces falling into the foaming blue sea.

“Blood child, blood flower, blood Rose,” said Uncle Lestan.

She was safe in his arms. Her lips were open on his neck and his blood was pumping through her body, pumping into her skin, her tingling, prickling skin. She saw his heart, his blood-red heart, throbbing and brightening and the long lovely tendrils of his blood surrounding her heart and enclosing it and it seemed a great fire burned in his heart and her heart, too, and when he spoke, another immense voice echoed his words.

“Finest flower of the Savage Garden,” he said. “Life everlasting.”