Bradbury that had been pasted with blood across Boggs’s face and arms like a form of armor. His top hat blacked out the moon. The knife was raised and bloody.
“There’s a rotter in you, too, son.” He nodded helpfully and crouched down. “Let me help you get it out.”
He drove his knife at my stomach. Only my churning legs kept the point from landing. I wrapped the small man in a bear hug and bucked, expecting each second an impalement. Instead he pulled away from me. Panting, he stood and with his remaining eye cataloged me: knuckles, pelvis, clavicle, skull.
“Don’t overreact, now. I ain’t trying to kill you.” He moistened his puffy lips and zeroed in on my sternum. “I’m trying to save you.”
He cavorted toward me with mincing steps. I leapt across the hole and while airborne revisited what I had seen earlier: it had not been Bradbury he’d been paging through while stumbling away. It had been the Rotters Book, and he’d finally come upon my photo. Physical laws meant little to him, but books were truth. If the pages said that I was dead, then I was dead.
Within arm’s reach of where I landed was our pile of belongings, and I dove for the swaddled Harpakhrad and lifted her as if she were mine. Though she was still wrapped in a blanket, the perfection of her weight and balance transfixed me. I was lost until a knife came out of nowhere to notch my shoulder blade. I felt the blow in my teeth.
“Rotter! Rotter! Don’t you touch her!”
I lashed out with Harpakhrad. Boggs was too short—she sailed over his head, the blanket unfurling as she twirled. The effort sank me; I collapsed to the grass. Boggs kicked me in the nose and, when I rolled again, the ear, and, when I rolled again, the teeth. Blasts of blood and pain clouded me. I couldn’t move and yet was moving: it was Boggs, toting me exactly the way Rhino had eons ago in the boys’ shower.
I opened my mouth to a foul taste—ZadenScent, I was sure of it. Then gravity compacted my guts and everything green and blue swapped places. I dropped. Ancient bones splintered against my chest. Oxygen shot from my lungs. Minutes were lost, many. I opened my eyes only in time to see the first shovelful of dirt swarming at me like a cloud of bees.
It hurt when it hit my face, a million little bullets. I used my elbows as cover and shouted for him to stop. Dirt caked my tongue. It kept coming, insanely fast, blotting out the sky. Already the weight was crushing. I corkscrewed and found myself face to face with the skeleton beneath me and wondered for an instant if it was my own—maybe the fall had knocked the rotter right out of me.
Up I went, taking hold of the edge, but the flat bottom of the shovel cracked against my knuckles. I collapsed but was right back up, taking two holds in hopes of being able to maintain one of them. It was no good: two strikes and I was at the bottom again. My arms and shoulders were numb. I feared losing more digits. But still I came, pedaling my feet up the dirt walls and elbowing back to the surface. This time the shovel connected with my left ear, just like my mother, two ear injuries, two deaths.
When I landed there was no sound. Dirt fell about me, mute as snow. Deafness then reversed itself and my skull shook with an ascension of noise so great it blew tears from my eyes. Hiding from the clamor was the only hope. I drew up my legs and burrowed inside the casket. I pulled on what remained of the lid, but pounds of dirt impeded the hinges, and the bulk of my backpack got in the way. Both of these problems were solved in a few frenetic seconds and then I was sealed off from weight and light. The dreadful ringing shifted to the left side of my head. Brittle hisses of dirt broke through the bulwark of sound. Somewhere within was the whisper of the Rat King, telling me that I should’ve seen this coming, I’d had so many chances, I should’ve taken him down first.
Terror whipped in black fragments. The anonymous name on the grave, it was mine. Hard surfaces pressed against my elbows and hips and knees. My lips kissed the casket lid and ate dust.