The woman-thing straddles a huge sow, pulling herself out of the air and wrapping her limbs around it as if it is a loved toy. Her head draws back, and the long mouth-jag extends a few inches extra, as smooth as a crossbow quarrel. Then the mosquito-woman jerks her face forward, her stretched-open mouth twisting, and she slams the proboscis into the body of the animal.

The pig screams and screams. Bellis still watches (her legs taking her away from that sight, but her eyes staying desperately fixed on it). The pig’s legs give way in sudden shock as its skin is punctured, as six, ten, twelve inches of chitin ease through the resistance of skin and muscle and infiltrate the deepest parts of its bloodstream. The mosquito-woman straddles the collapsed animal and pushes her mouth into it, and grinds her proboscis deep, and tenses her body (every muscle and tendon and vein visible through the shrunken skin) and begins to suck.

For a few seconds, the pig continues to scream. And then its voice gives out.

It is thinning.

Bellis can see it shrink.

Its skin shifts uneasily and begins to wrinkle. The tiniest trickles of blood ooze out from the imperfect seal where the anophelii mouthparts puncture it. Bellis watches in disbelief, but it is not her imagination-the pig is shrinking. Its legs kick with spastic terror, and then with the judder of dying nerves as its extremities are drained. Its fat shanks are compressing as its innards shrivel, drying. Its skin is well creased now, in tides and ridges all over its diminishing body. The color is leaving it.

And as the blood and health disappear from the sow, they enter the mosquito-woman.

Her belly swells. She attached herself to the pig a husk, gaunt and malnourished. As the pig lessens, she grows, becoming fatter at an astonishing rate, color flooding her from her distending stomach outward. She moves oily on the dying animal, growing sluggish and replete.

Bellis watches with sick fascination as the pints of pig blood pass fast through that bony fletch, rushing from one body into another.

The pig is dead now, its rucked skin sinking into new valleys between its drained muscles and its bones. The anophelius is fat and pinking. Her arms and legs have nearly doubled in girth, and the skin is now stretched around them. The swelling is mostly concentrated on her bosoms and belly and arse, which are obese now, but not soft like human fat. They look tumorous: taut, gore-swelled, and pendulous growths.

All around the clearing, the same is happening to the other animals. Some are adorned with one woman, some with two. All are shriveling, as if sun-dried and desiccated, and all the anophelii are growing gross and tight with blood.