Beautiful Blood

He moved toward a corner of the mouth, hoping to locate a less precipitous path of descent, and heard sibilance, like a chorus of whispers. He stopped dead in his tracks and the chorus subsided. A fierce tension stiffened his muscles. He lifted the lantern, but saw nothing inimical. Yet when he went forward again, after a half-dozen steps the whispering sounded again, louder and somehow larger, as if the number of whisperers had doubled or tripled. The voices held a querulous note, a charge of mean-spirited intensity, and he did not try to find their source, but picked up his pace, hurrying through the shrubs, skirting a forking of the tongue, head down, his fear restored in full. The voices fell silent, but as he approached the spot where he intended to begin his descent, they started up a third time, so shrill that he could no longer think of them as whisperings, but rather as an insane singing—they had a papery quality reminiscent of the scraping of cicadas. Tremulously, he held the lantern high over his head. Massed together, covering the illuminated portion of the interior cheek wall, were a host of insects. Large insects, each about the size of a two-year-old child, they resembled crickets with gray chitinous bodies, their many-faceted eyes pointed with reflected lantern light. Judging by the volume of their singing, by the way they stirred, seething forward, as if part of a tide, Rosacher guessed there were thousands more hidden by the dark, an army covering the upper wall and palette. They appeared to be one creature with a single cruel, inscrutable face replicated over and over; their feelers waved and their legs worked slightly, causing the tide of bodies to appear to billow and dimple like a mat bearing a repetitive design floating on the surface of choppy water. His astonishment gave way to terror. His bones were stalks of ice, his muscles incompliant. He tottered closer to the lip. The singing broke off and the insects surged lower on the cheek wall. Rosacher stopped walking and the singing resumed. He could, he thought, hurl himself off the lip and hope to snag a vine, or that the bushes below would break his fall. He tried to slow his breathing, to gather himself, certain that the insects would swarm toward him; but instead of attacking, their voices again fell silent and they swung about, all in unison, so they were every one of them facing toward the depths of the dragon’s throat.

Their synchronous action disconcerted Rosacher nearly as much as an attack would have done. He imagined a controlling agency that might pose a more significant threat than that of the insects themselves, and he was half-persuaded to accept the view that Griaule was not simply a moribund lizard of Brobdingnagian proportions, but a fabulous presence whose potentials were myriad and in large part unknown. He resisted the impulse to discover what had commanded the insects’ attention, afraid of looking away from them, but after a second or two, he turned to the throat. At first he saw only darkness, but then he noticed movement, though not the sort of movement he might have expected. A clot of atramentous black had materialized from the lesser blackness and billowed toward him, as if it were an entity that possessed the qualities of a gaseous cloud, one evolving into a shape and acquiring solidity, growing increasingly compact and menacing in form. A lion, he thought. No, a bull…or a crocodile with aspects of both bull and lion. He backed away from the cloud and, as it closed the space between them with a sudden surge, developing into a towering column that trembled with energy, on the verge—he believed—of assuming some final, dreadful shape, fear overwhelmed him and he flung himself from the dragon’s lip and fell screaming into the brush below.

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