Customer Service Representative v. Customs Officer

After the burial of the dog-masked boy and the duel between the Customer Service Representative and the Custodian, the dueling ground grows quiet. The day's warm, a breeze wafts through the valley. It cools the CS Rep, who lies in the grass under the oak, napping. He falls in and out of sleep until dark.

He'd heard the Custodian jabber about a swarm of maniacs who shot from the forest and nearly killed him. Though he doubts what he'd heard--with good reason, given the Custodian's bizarre continence--because he can't explain the death of the dog-masked boy, he feels a growing dread as the sun falls behind the peak to the west, and night falls.

Throughout the night he hears sounds from the forest. He makes out the distant, barely audible throb of drums.

And from the west, too, he hears sounds: not drumming but the mild tones of a far-off waltz, carried by the breeze.

They issue hours apart from one another, the waltz coming decidedly after the drumming, and continuing throughout most of the night.

The Customs Officer arrives the next morning with a satchel full of bureaucratic stamps.

I bring my own stamps, she says brusquely, from home. I don't make them, I buy them from a catalogue. Government issued stamps are generally substandard is the reason.

She shows him several stamps of hers without him having asked. A list of some of the stamps shown:

- Rejected Foodstuffs
- Unsanitary Packaging
- Potentially Riotous
- Of Questionable Moral Composition

They raise their guns, their guns go off.

Custodian v. Customer Service Representative

It's unclear when they emerge from the forest.

Less clear is how many emerge.

Even with the full moon dimly illuminating the swarm, men flying in hideous file from the black recess, the Custodian, too terrified to scream, can't determine rightly if five, ten, or fifty are in the mass. He only sees costume, or fragments of many costumes: animals, some - crow, stag, beaver, wolf - others of more decadent design, abstractions of face in terrifying deformation, formed of twisted corn husk, straw, bark, bone, long shocks of twisted hair. Most horrifying is their silence - the speed and silence of their movements. The whisk of a corn husk cape, the flutter of leaves from the loincloth, the inaudible whistle of a feathered mask. The Custodian, petrified, watches as the party rolls forward - seemingly over itself, impossibly, like the undulating segments of a bristling caterpillar. They round the oak, snake to the graves, then to the northern border, where - all men in constant movement, shying and crowding, the mass of them shivering in a roiling boil of bodies - they stop, as if regarding. From the group one man emerges in a crouch and stands apart. From the cabin there's the spark - and a shot.

The man who stands apart falls.

The men of the party, previously silent, begins baying like beasts, and together - in tightly knit chaos - return to the east, to the forest.

Pepple, Mauser under his arm, walks from the cabin and regards the body. In the moonlight he removes the mask - the mask of a dog - and sees the face of the teenage boy, tan, with matted dirty blond haired and blue eyes. A ribbon of blood runs from his mouth. His eyes widen slightly - then dim.

The Custodian shuffles frantically to Pepple's side, both dueling pistols in each hand, his entire body shaking in fright.

My God mister... who were they?

Pepple covers the boy's face with the dog mask.

This is their apology, says Pepple, looking down at the dead body. It's ceremony.

W-what..., stammers the Custodian. But h-how did you know?

The yarrow stalks, he replies simply. And the signal.

They part without burying the boy.

The next morning the Custodian and Customer Service Representative watche as the Undertaker drags the boy's body from the ground to the dead land by the red rock, next to Pepple's cabin, and buries him under the shadow of the red rock.

They raise their guns, their guns go off.