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.Something large struck the side of the building hard enough to make it shake and then bounced away.One of the men at the bar tore himself free and headed for some quieter locale, moving in great grotesque strides.Thunder racketed the sky with a sound like some god coughing.“All right!” the man in black grinned.“All right, let’s get down to it!”He began to spit into Nort’s face, aiming carefully.The spittle gleamed on the corpse’s forehead, pearled down the shaven beak of his nose.Under the bar, her hands worked faster.Sheb laughed, loon-like, and hunched over.He began to cough up phlegm, huge and sticky gobs of it, and let fly.The man in black roared approval and pounded him on the back.Sheb grinned, one gold tooth twinkling.Some fled.Others gathered in a loose ring around Nort.His face and the dewlapped rooster-wrinkles of his neck and upper chest gleamed with liquid—liquid so precious in this dry country.And suddenly the rain of spit stopped, as if on signal.There was ragged, heavy breathing.The man in black suddenly lunged across the body, jackknifing over it in a smooth arc.It was pretty, like a flash of water.He caught himself on his hands, sprang to his feet in a twist, grinning, and went over again.One of the watchers forgot himself, began to applaud, and suddenly backed away, eyes cloudy with terror.He slobbered a hand across his mouth and made for the door.Nort twitched the third time the man in black went across.A sound went through the watchers—a grunt—and then they were silent.The man in black threw his head back and howled.His chest moved in a quick, shallow rhythm as he sucked air.He began to go back and forth at a faster clip, pouring over Nort’s body like water poured from one glass to another and then back again.The only sound in the room was the tearing rasp of his respiration and the rising pulse of the storm.There came the moment when Nort drew a deep, dry breath.His hands rattled and pounded aimlessly on the table.Sheb screeched and exited.One of the women followed him, her eyes wide and her wimple billowing.The man in black went across once more, twice, thrice.The body on the table was vibrating now, trembling and rapping and twitching like a large yet essentially lifeless doll with some monstrous clockwork hidden inside.The smell of rot and excrement and decay billowed up in choking waves.There came a moment when his eyes opened.Allie felt her numb and feelingless feet propelling her backward.She struck the mirror, making it shiver, and blind panic took over.She bolted like a steer.“So here’s your wonder,” the man in black called after her, panting.“I’ve given it to you.Now you can sleep easy.Even that isn’t irreversible.Although it’s.so.goddamned.funny!” And he began to laugh again.The sound faded as she raced up the stairs, not stopping until the door to the three rooms above the bar was bolted.She began to giggle then, rocking back and forth on her haunches by the door.The sound rose to a keening wail that mixed with the wind.She kept hearing the sound Nort had made when he came back to life—the sound of fists knocking blindly on the lid of a coffin.What thoughts, she wondered, could be left in his reanimated brain? What had he seen while dead? How much did he remember? Would he tell? Were the secrets of the grave waiting downstairs? The most terrible thing about such questions, she reckoned, was that part of you really wanted to ask.Below her, Nort wandered absently out into the storm to pull some weed.The man in black, now the only patron in the bar, perhaps watched him go, perhaps still grinning.When she forced herself to go back down that evening, carrying a lamp in one hand and a heavy stick of stovewood in the other, the man in black was gone, rig and all.But Nort was there, sitting at the table by the door as if he had never been away.The smell of the weed was on him, but not as heavily as she might have expected.He looked up at her and smiled tentatively.“Hello, Allie.”“Hello, Nort.” She put the stovewood down and began lighting the lamps, not turning her back to him.“I been touched by God,” he said presently.“I ain’t going to die no more.He said so.It was a promise.”“How nice for you, Nort.” The spill she was holding dropped through her trembling fingers and she picked it up.“I’d like to stop chewing the grass,” he said.“I don’t enjoy it no more.It don’t seem right for a man touched by God to be chewing the weed.”“Then why don’t you stop?”Her exasperation had startled her into looking at him as a man again, rather than an infernal miracle.What she saw was a rather sad-looking specimen only half-stoned, looking hangdog and ashamed.She could not be frightened by him anymore.“I shake,” he said.“And I want it.I can’t stop.Allie, you was always good to me.” He began to weep.“I can’t even stop peeing myself.What am I? What am I?”She walked to the table and hesitated there, uncertain.“He could have made me not want it,” he said through the tears.“He could have done that if he could have made me be alive.I ain’t complaining.I don’t want to complain.” He stared around hauntedly and whispered, “He might strike me dead if I did.”“Maybe it’s a joke.He seemed to have quite a sense of humor.”Nort took his poke from where it dangled inside his shirt and brought out a handful of grass.Unthinkingly she knocked it away and then drew her hand back, horrified.“I can’t help it, Allie, I can’t,” and he made a crippled dive for the poke.She could have stopped him, but she made no effort.She went back to lighting the lamps, tired although the evening had barely begun.But nobody came in that night except old man Kennerly, who had missed everything
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