VI | The Children
The faces swirled about him in what he had begun to suspect was a dream: pale as his own, swollen, webbed with bulging veins—all of them betraying quivering eyes full of abject terror which converged into one and filled his field of vision so that he saw in its iris the reflection of a man.
It was himself, Dravidian, and yet it was not himself. Rather, it was the black-clad ferryman, hidden behind his boney mask (now sprinkled with fresh blood), while the previously whirling faces (some also marred with blood) had been those of his recent charges and their families: the fire-eater and his son—who again cried out, “A curse on you for killing my father! A curse on the ferrymen!”—the man from Branigan and his wife and children .... And yet, were not those his—Dravidian’s—o
