She opens the door and steps out, putting on the panama hat and taking the gurkha knife in hand. In the car, Maury continues to moan.

Come on, Maury, she says. Hush up, would ya? Im listenin for the monster.

She steps off the tarmac into the tangle of ropy weeds on the shoulder. Evening is coming, but the cicadas havent started up yet. Instead the birdsong preaches clipped and constant through the air.

Come on out, monster, she says loud. Youre one of Gods own creatures. Aint no reason to hide.

Pushing through some viny branches, she comes into a clearing and finds a sight that makes her hush and not just her voice but every part of her, like feeling silence in her deep guts.

At first she thinks its a row of dead infants all lined up, but then she sees they are pink plastic dolls. Baby dolls, some naked, some clothed in dirty, rain-blanched outfits, some with tangles of fake hair and some bald with painted forelocks. And not all of them are complete. A couple are missing one arm, one has no limbs at all, and another is just a torso lying like a fleshy lozenge on the packed earth. Most are nested on cradles made of twigs, with leaves for pillows. She sees one that has been knocked askew, the twigs scattered and the doll lying face down, its pink lace dress, stiff and reedy, twisted up to expose the legs bent backwards in an unnatural way.

Its something she can feel in the back of her throat, her dislike of the scene, as though what shes looking upon is unholy, the conjunction of chaos and order in a forced fit where everything is stretched and bent in the wrong way like those baby legs.

She hears the breathing behind her, a raspy, fluttering intake of breath but her mind is gone to darker places, and by the time it comes back its too late. She turns to see the face a full two feet above her, skeletal and horrid, peeled half away, the bone dry and filthy grey, the gumless teeth, the intelligent eyes. Then she sees the arm like a tree limb, raised above her, and the stone clutched in the hand.

And when the hand falls, her mind explodes with light.

*

By the time she wakes, evening has fallen, the crickets and tree toads making their racket, the sky still umber with the leftover light of a sunken sun. She tries to get to her feet, but her head sways to right and left, and she cant control it so well. She sits down hard and waits for the pounding and the nausea to go away. She finds the spot on the back of her head where the bump has already raised. Her fingers come back bloody, and she can feel that its already begun to scab over. Shell be all right if she can stop the world from leaping around.