Daniel and John walked off, and went around the playground assembling all the children from Mrs. Novato’s class. They gradually gathered in the corner by the annex, out of sight of the main schoolhouse, and Toby stood up on a root of the maple tree so that he could talk to them.

The children stood quite silent, as if they were dazed. They ignored the stares of children from other classes, and the noise of cops and robbers and tag.

Toby said, “This is the ritual of joining ourselves by the spirits of the tree demons, as it was ordained by the gods of the desert lands and the plains. It joins together the brothers from the hills and the forests and the brothers from the waste places. It binds them so that they can work their wonders together, so that their powers are one. We have little time, so let us begin it now.”

The children stood in two parallel lines, eleven children on each line. Daniel Soscol brought the cardboard box, and Toby took out the first lizard. He held it up by its tail, writhing and jerking, while the first four children drew closer together.

Toby whispered, “Ossadagowah, son of Sadogowah, we bow ourselves before you. We call upon your powers, feared of elder times, in the days before the white man touched the sacred lands, and we call upon you Nashuna, and you Pa-la-kai, and upon the demons of the lakes and the forests and the crawling beasts upon the earth. We call upon those from beyond the darkest stars, those who have no human shape, and we beg their aid.”

Each of the first four children, Toby and Daniel and Debbie and Petra, took a wriggling leg of the lizard between their lips. Then, at a slight nod from Toby, they each bit into their leg, and the lizard’s limbless body dropped to the dust.

Then Debbie and Petra turned around to the next two children, Andy and John. Toby brought another lizard out of the box and held it dangling between them while he spoke the words of the incantation again. Again, the four children brought their faces together and took one of the reptile’s legs in their mouths. Again, they bit, with a slight crunching sound, and the lizard’s body dropped to the yard.

Andy and John, in their turn, faced the two children behind them, and Toby produced yet another lizard. The ritual was repeated ten times, all the way down the line, until the school yard was littered with the writhing bloody bodies of ten lizards. Daniel Soscol, his face serious, collected them, and put them back in the cardboard box.