She could not hope to outrun them. She knew that. So she ran toward the barn, thinking that if she could get to the old root cellar and lock it from the inside, she might be able to survive. The house was between her and the creatures and she was counting on it to hide her movements, to shield her whereabouts, at least until she could get into the cellar, but even before she reached the barn she heard the rattle of bones behind her. Grunts and the sharp exhalation of breath. She looked over her shoulder as she ran and they were upon her, moving faster than humanly possible, streaming around the house, over the dirt. Tiny hands grabbed her upper thighs, reached between her legs to pull at her crotch. They were already swarming past her, around her, and even as the hands on her legs yanked her down, she was tripping over the ones in front. One, the leader apparently, stood on the stump to the right of the clothesline, jumping up and down and shaking what looked like a maraca made from the skull of a rat.

The creatures were even smaller than she’d originally thought, two feet high at the most, but they were powerfully built and they all had weapons and there were far too many of them. They rolled her over, onto her back, and one held each side of her head. Two took her left arm, two her right, two more each foot, spreading her limbs.

One continued to grab between her legs.

She was crying hysterically, but even through her tears she could see that she’d been wrong at first. It was not just bees or beetles that accompanied the creatures but a whole host of bugs. And they were all strangely wrong, profoundly changed and disturbingly incorrect versions of ordinary insects.

Onto her face alighted a butterfly with the screaming head of a baby. It spit on her nose and flew away.

She was going to die and she knew it, and she was crying out for all she was worth, hoping someone—the returning Hube, a passing hiker, a visiting rancher—might hear her, but the clownish monsters did not seem to care and made no effort to gag her mouth or stifle her. They let her scream, and more than anything else, it was their lack of concern, their certainty that no one would come to her rescue, that impressed upon her the dire hopelessness of her predicament.

The creature holding the left side of her head looked down on her, opened its mouth, and the sound of a piano emerged from between its green lips.

The one with the rat-skull maraca jumped up and down on the stump, pointed at her, yelled, and the sound that came out of its mouth was that of a string quartet.