My feet hold firm. The pressure on my cortex fades with my rage, I step back a little and dig a heel into the clay. Then I turn about.
The man is closer than I knew: a little below, for I am at the top of the field’s rise.
I stare at him and my rage makes a thrust from my eyes down to his beetling form. I challenge him, silent. He is clearer now. I can make out in the dawn the smooth black cloth of his coat tight on his muscular body. I can see well the blind and larval rondure of his face.
My rage thrusts at him.
He rises from the ground.... “So this is how you dealt your tall man’s blow at Philip LaMotte?” ... and like a bird of prey he planes low up toward me, over my head. I whirl about and facing the kiln I see him slowly plane into its slime.
His face remains free and his face is turned toward me.
The silence is a texture of half-uttered words: thick, the humid air and the shut field and the kiln make for a silence bulging into sound.
The white head is motionless above the kiln. What I hear is his word. But the night speaks it, the night’s silence is the word of this man.
“Come down. The white one whom you met in the other room ... he is here. Come down. Join him. For it is he you seek, if you are in earnest in your seeking. Come down. You can’t quite see him: your eyes are too gross. I am all of him that you can see. But he’s here. Come down: and join him. Do not touch him again. What good is there in touching? Come down and join the white one who is you, in the other room.... Here, if you will but come, you and he are one. And I will be released. For I live in the edge, the jagged, cutting edge of the difference between you. And I am weary with your biddings, I have done them well, I am weary. Come down. And I will be released.”
My eyes go down into the kiln below my feet, to meet the eyes of the man. My knees hurt with a sudden strain. It grows. With the tendons and muscles of my body I am resisting the pull of the man inside the kiln.