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Show 20 became invisible behind it. As it came closer Lorin could see that the edges of the neck were not sharply defined after all but were a haze of particles in frantic motion. It came directly at him with frightening speed, and his last thought as he felt his pants turn warm was that no one but the dying knew that death was a long white neck of light that dropped through murk and sucked you from the face of the earth. He heard the squeal of a terrified pig in a remote part of his brain, and then the neck moved onto him. He was aware that a white noise in his ears that he had not noticed before had suddenly stopped, isolating the squeal, which reached a crescendo and dropped a minor second and gradually faded. At the same instant the pressure on his chest lifted, and his elbows dropped to the ground. The murk had been scoured from the air. He lay there feeling his chest rise and fall. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the grass he lay in looked like white flamelets, moving slightly, as though the light had set up a small wind. On his left the dead stump stood bleached, ringed with flowers with small spectral petals. Directly above his face two men in white robes stood looking at him. Bark had been peeled from the dead stump and lay in rags among the wildflowers. The rags were bleached out too, and looked like strips of fat. The remarkable thing about the two men was that they looked alike, but one was older. Lorin had peered into the rippled mirror that hung over the wash bucket outside the kitchen door and speculated which of his own features were likely to mutate, given age and ripening and decline, into his father's. He actually favored his mother's side of the family, the pale eyes, the thin nose, the long bony face and heavy lip, but now and then, taking himself by surprise, he had caught a flash of something belligerent and tainted in the face that looked back |