There was a huge rush of flame, a sucking explosion that simultaneously drew in air and expelled agonizing heat.

“Mom!” Laurie cried.

Her mother pushed her aside and, stone-faced, strode through the door and across the yard toward the house.

Laurie saw Dawn’s hair catch fire, the skin of her face darken and crinkle. Her father’s back blistered and peeled open, his blood bubbling black the second it hit the flames. They were both writhing and rolling on the dirt, trying to get away, but the fire was not around them, it was on them, and there was no way they could escape from it.

Laurie ran around to the side of the barn, got the hose, turned it on full blast, and squirted water on the fire, but it didn’t do any good, didn’t make a dent, and she ran sobbing back to the house to tell Mr. Billington to call the firemen, knowing even as she did so that they would not arrive in time to save her father, Dawn, or the barn.

“Mr. Billington!” she screamed. “Mr. Billington!”

Her father’s friend was nowhere to be seen, but her mother was lying on her back on the floor of the kitchen, her skirts hiked up.

With Dawn.

The girl was naked, but she was not burned and not dead, and the shock of seeing her here, alive, only seconds after watching her burn in the barn, overrode for a second the shock of what was happening.

Then Laurie noticed what was going on.

“Yes,” her mother was saying, and Dawn’s head was between her legs, moving slowly around. Laurie screamed at the top of her lungs, a desperate cry for help from someone, anyone.

All of a sudden, as her mother moaned in pleasure, the girl became a goat, arms turning to legs, gray hair growing over skin, and she started bucking, shoving her head forward with animal roughness, the horns spearing through the bare flesh of her mother’s stomach, as her mother’s expression of happiness and bliss changed instantly to one of horror and agony.

“Mom!” Laurie screamed.

For the first time since seeing her mother in the yard with the can of gasoline, her mom seemed to hear her, recognize her, acknowledge her. She was screaming in pain, trying to push the bucking goat away, but her eyes were hopeless, sad and despairing, filled with agonized regret, and they kept darting between Laurie and the door, and Laurie took the hint and ran.