In the paralysis of her shock and revulsion, the gun dropped unnoticed from her hand. The scene before her, too plain in the flickering moonlight, was beyond the worst imaginings of even an Hieronymus Bosch, fouler than the most infernal depths of satanic demons.

On the forest path just yards away she saw a floor of seething malignancy. Roaches enormous beyond all experience were a livid carpet of putrefaction, exuding a sharp stink that curdled the air. The insects seemed not individual creatures but connected organs of a huge, reaching, blotchy beast. They flowed over the torn bodies of Blanche and Harvey Tinton like a living lava. A lava of clicking teeth and mandibles and grasping legs. A lava erupting from some maggoty, satanic pit.

But the unbelievable was real. The spiky-­legged roaches were devouring everything, everything. Incredibly, the woman saw that they were gobbling not just the flesh and bone and blood but the very clothes of the ravished couple. Hilda Cannon saw giant insects ripping at the man’s rubber sneakers, eating at his leather belt, the woman’s sandals.

The bodies themselves, soaked in their own blood, were maimed and mangled almost beyond recognition by now. The putrid horde of insects was slashing and cutting the flesh into pieces that a squad of even larger roaches was carrying away. Hilda Cannon tasted bile. Pieces of the Tinton bodies were being carted off, there was no other phrase for it. More unbelievably, hundreds of the larger roaches had somehow bound themselves together, as if by some gluey secretion, to form a kind of platform, sordidly like the bed of a truck. Gruesomely, pieces of flesh were being loaded onto it! Fingers were recognizable, toes, ears, small bones and larger, splintered ones. In obscene sumps of darkening blood all around lay flesh and whitish bone and soaked pink gristle and recognizable organs—mangled liver, torn heart. A whole ankle was being dismembered from one leg by a cluster of great roaches gnawing away at the bone with loud clicking noises that sounded to Hilda Cannon like fiendish knitting needles.

In a climax of the staggering, repellent horror, Hilda Cannon made out one band of insects picking clean a skull that had been severed from the neck. She couldn’t tell whether it was Harvey or Blanche. The head was a stark bloodstained bowl of death lying accusingly on blood-­red leaves. It was the ghastly centerpiece of the unholy feast. As more roaches climbed over the skull and ate away the last of the face muscles and tissue, the jaw fell open. The gaping skull seemed to be beseeching heaven for help, for justice, for reprieve from this vandalization of everything human.