The Third Part
                                 by Barry N. Malzberg
     Beyond the woods, Jeb could see the burning, the thin haze from another level of darkn
it arced the trees, the denser hidden spaces. Birds emerged from this haze in little straggles
their chirps like screams. He squinted but could not find their color against that darkness; th
flight was tumult in the dangerous air. He did not know where to go. He was not lost, not
exactly, but the fire-haunted town and its people were behind him, and he did not know if h
could return, if they were looking for him.
    Presently, two black men Jeb had never seen before struggled from a space between the
trees, their clothing disheveled but their faces, as they tumbled toward Jeb, curiously neat a
blank as if their features were a bad artist's approximation of human facade. They were gap
their arms beckoning grotesquely. The taller might have been close to seven feet; the shorte
a peculiar hunched-over position, might have been any height at all, might have been deform
the cloak which covered him made his aspect mysterious. "Mister," this shorter man said, "
need water. We need help. Him there, that's Clayton. Me, I'm Damascus."
    There's going to be another lynching tonight, Jeb thought. The thought was like a caress,
something strange and soft enticing his mind as it entered then flapping through like one of
those birds in sudden flight. Those folks back there, maybe coming for me now, they are no
going to like this.
   "Don't have water," Jeb said roughly, that tone the only warning the men would get. If th
were too dumb to take it, he couldn't be blamed. They should have known.
    "Thirsty," Clayton said. He was elongate, but there was no bulk; it exaggerated his
helplessness. He was panting in his overalls. His open mouth as he talked revealed teeth as
black and twisted as the smoldered trees, rotting incongruously under the orderly lips like t
trees under the flat, gray sky. "It's burning; everything is burning. My mouth is burning."
    "Told you there's no water here. Fire burned it up." Jeb patted his water bottle, swaddl
secretly like an infant under his jacket as a bird whispering lynch, lynch sped through his s
again, fluttering its wings against his brain. Dumb all right. Dumb right out of the fire. And
going back for good, so soon.
    "Now we seen—" Clayton said and stumbled and fell. Damascus rolled toward him as
hold the man, but halfheartedly, like someone reaching for milkweed as it billowed away in
summer breeze. "It ain't nothin' like we ever seen," Clayton said, holding the ground. "It be
hellfire and damnation but worse."
    "Water," Damascus said again as if it were a sacred word. "We gonna die right here
without water. We out of the fire but we gonna die."
   Yes, Jeb thought, yes, you gonna die. A lynching might take the people's minds off him.
Might take his own mind off what he had seen: that once-flat field beyond the bowed trees
swollen like a pregnant woman, fire and lava spewing forth in molten red-and-black fury,
drowning the Monroe farm, the Belton farm, his own Weston Farm, the Church of the
Redemption, Reverend Smith's parsonage, the old red brick schoolhouse where he had labo
and grunted over the useless sums and readers, the run-down shacks of the sharecroppers an
beyond all of that, beyond to the horizon and the unknown behind that.
   "You too," Clayton said. "You another. You don't care."
    But Jeb did care: that was what had broken him. Casting his mind back, he still could n
understand how it had happened, even though there was a word for it: Volcano. He had lea
about volcanoes in that very same schoolhouse, old Miss So and So peering over her spins
spectacles as he and Tommy Lee Adams passed dirty pictures in the back of the classroom
thought about Mary Lu's boomers. Miss So and So had said there were no volcanoes in the
Southern U.S., not since the geological evolution. But ever so stupid Mary Lu had started to
when she heard about the hot lava and would not stop until Miss had promised that volcano
never grew here. Maybe in the Pacific States and Hawaii and Italy. Or Krakatoa. Now ther
was a name. Grew like Krakatoa.
    Grew. He still remembered that word. As if a volcano were a living thing like a tree or
ear of corn that could be planted. Mary Lu had stopped crying, he and Tommy Lee had gone
back to staring at her boomers, and Miss had returned to the blackboard, her hands shaking
lava burbling in the core of a volcano.
     He had not thought about that schoolroom or Mary Lu all these years. She had run off w
some traveling salesman decades before the trouble, and there were rumors she was dead.
Old Maid though was probably still alive in the nursing home upstate. Maybe she was look
at the volcano right now through the cracked windows and realizing how wrong she had be
    And she was wrong, because Main Street had been engulfed by the lava. A volcano had
grown in Georgia after all. And not just anywhere in Georgia: not in Atlanta, the city too bu
to hate; not in Milledgeville, with the museum; not in Macon, where Herman Talmadge had
walked the earth to the statehouse; but right here in Edgetown, where the cows still walked
through the streets and Reverend Smith's hellfire could graze the dead in the two cemeteries
had happened in Edgetown three weeks ago, and no one could say where or how it had star
it was just there. A mountain appeared from nowhere, jutting out of the earth, grotesque as a
monstrous boil. Then the birth, as the mountain heaved and convulsed her vile poisons onto
landscape and the town. The circle and the fire had cut them off from the world, left Jeb and
three hundred others in this carcass of a damned town, shut away where now Clayton and
Damascus, a stretched black man and a lumpish one, had staggered from the woods, crying
water.
    Once word came that they were here, it was clear what would happen. Beware the
darkness, the Reverend had screamed in the fire's first advance, and here, here was the
darkness itself, settled on the big man and little man before him.
    Maybe it was they who had brought it.
    Jeb fixed his full attention on the two men, trying to perceive real faces behind the smoo
and blank features, but there still was nothing distinct, only his savage and difficult repulsio
Now both were on the ground, jackknifed toward one another, and Jeb thought, watching the
struggle from awkwardness and thirst, soon someone is going to die. But he could not move
from this astonishment and fixity until it was broken suddenly by the voices on the hill.
    They were the voices he had feared, the voices behind him from the town in pursuit of J
But it was not Jeb, but the blacks they must have seen or somehow known would be there. T
must have known because as that cloud of pursuers half-resolved into individual and famili
faces, Jeb could measure their purpose, a purpose which at the beginning of their flight mig
have been diffuse but was now utterly focused as all of them melded into a single entity wit
single intent.
     Before Jeb could speak, before he could warn them, Damascus looked up and saw them
One moment Damascus had been looking at the ground and muttering something about dust t
dust to ashes, and then, with his recognition, the blank face suddenly erupted like the very e
itself, the rutting terror transversed, then shifting to a molten, swollen stream, a stream true
burning.
    Damascus kneeling, reached up toward Clayton, his mouth open in fierce prayer or entr
or warning, but no sound came out: all he could do was tug at the other's sleeve and point.
    "Mister," Clayton said. His voice was the peep of baby birds engulfed by smoke in thei
nests, abandoned by avian parents of strong wing and greater terror. "Don't let them hurt us
    "We didn't have nothin' to do with—with what happened," Damascus said. His voice h
returned but sounded like the rusty groaning of the old well bucket handle.
    Jeb said, "Then who did?"
    "The Lord," Clayton whispered.
  "Tell that to them." Jeb pointed at the mob advancing, closing in, fists raised, their open
mouths great black spoons doling out the red lava of hate.
   "Won't do any good, Mister," Damascus said. "Us talkin' to them and all. They won't lis
But they listen to you. You like them."
    Dumb, oh so dumb. "And why should I talk to them?"
    "Because we know," Clayton said. "They gotta listen 'cause we know."
    Jeb frowned at these two cowering and trembling on the ground before him. "You lie,"
said. "You just said before you don't know nothin' about all this." His tone, as it imitated th
identical voices, was as stern and sharp as Pa's whip, was meant to sting like Pa's whip. "W
did you lie?"
    Damascus looked at the ground, but Clayton said, "That's 'cause we was afraid to say th
truth." With good reason, Jeb thought. The crowd was almost on them.
   "Five minutes," Clayton said. "Make 'em stop just five minutes. We got somethin' to say
   Jeb considered this.
   "Five minutes," Clayton said again. "Then they can do what they want."
    Jeb put up a hand, signaling the people, and they shuffled to a stop, all of them. It was
surprising, the force that his hand had upon them: It was like lightning. Not hours before, the
had been out to get him. Go figure. He knew these people, and yet he did not know them. Fi
minutes earlier he could have picked anyone out of that crowd, but now they seem as blurre
and indistinguishable as the features on the two black men.
    Indulgence, Jeb thought, and: I seem to have the power. "They want five minutes," he sa
from the slight rise on which they stood. "Give them five minutes." Why not? What was
planned could wait. He felt the power in him now, a strange and mighty power. They had th
rest of the night and tomorrow night and tomorrow night and all of the fires of the volcano,
once Clayton and Damascus had been dispatched, everyone would again be left with the
horror, the fire, the unleashed, consuming serpent of dislocation and despair. Why not have
something then to look forward to instead of something that had already taken place, even if
was for another five minutes?
    "Okay," he said to them again, feeling the power. "Listen to them," he said to the crowd
And smiled for the first time since the volcano had come. His hand was still high, and he
brought the other up with it, gesticulated like Reverend Smith had when he said he had seen
holy fire. "Stop! Wait!"
     The people, his townspeople who had come out here to kill, looked at one another,
confused. Hiram Monroe was brandishing a charred branch; old Franklin Wallace was shak
a fist. Soon they would be roaring. Reverend Smith would be preaching now if they hadn't
taken care of him last week, calling him a false prophet. That had been the first lynching.
   "Let them speak," Jeb said again. "Five minutes. Then you can do what you want."
    The crowd bellowed. Hiram Monroe cursed. But then a convulsion passed through them
like a sigh, and they were still standing there, the gap between the three of them and the cro
unbreached. "Now," Jeb said to Clayton. "You'd better have your say right now."
   Clayton stood slowly, stretching, tilted, pulled a Bible from his jacket and started to rea
     "And there were voices, and thunderings and lightnings, and an earthquake, and there
followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the Earth, and the third
of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up, a great mountain burning with fire."
   The Book of Revelation. Pa had used to read it to him on those nights, long nights in fro
of the fire, Mama's needles poking in and out of the fabric, Pa's voice sonorous like it got
before his rage, then terrifying in the flickering shadows. Clayton's voice had become sono
too and wait, this wasn't supposed to happen. Something had changed. Gone was the whisp
the simpering, sniveling dialect of ingratiation.
   "And the third part of the ships were destroyed, and there fell a great star from heaven,
burning as if it were a lamp, and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of t
moon, and the day shone not for a third part of it."
   The people were as silent as the gray and charred tree trunks although more than five
minutes had already elapsed.
    "And there arose a smoke from the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace."
    The ships destroyed, the fallen star from heaven, the pit, the furnace, and now Jeb knew
who had arrived on the ships, who had planted the star and why Clayton and Damascus wit
their shuffling, their leading drawl, their odious cringing, deserved to die. It was a suddenn
of fury like lava sprinting across the sky. "Kill them!" someone said. Jeb did not know if it
his voice or another's. "Kill them now!"
   The crowd lunged, daggers of flame and tongues of razor. Jeb reached into his jacket an
took out the secret flask, words of hate spilling onto the once-blank faces like the scalding
water of baptism from his bottle gone fiery.
    "And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone," Jeb sai
their dissolving faces, the redness and blackness running into each other like tributes to a ri
of redemption.
    Then from the center of the flailing crowd he heard Clayton say, "And death and hell sh
deliver up the dead, and they will be judged every man according to his works."
     And Damascus: "It is done. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the wate
life freely, and he shall inherit all things."
    Now Clayton again. "We are not dead. We are written into the Book of Life. It is you w
shall be cast into the lake of fire."
    But no. They were dead: Clayton and Damascus. The crowd had seen to that before
dispersing, whoops and cheers fading into the darkness, the shattered bones and clotting blo
triumphant testimony to their accomplishments. But the voices continued. From what fissure
the earth, from what seam in the heavens were they speaking?
    "We shall thirst no more. We have been given the fountain of the water of life freely."
    "You are dead," Jeb said fiercely to the mangled remains. "So shut up and return to you
rightful place."
    Still speaking. "We are the two, but you are the third part."
   "You are dead. You can't talk like that. Not to me, not to anyone."
   "We are not dead. We are written into the Book of Life, and you are the third part."
    "Apostates!" Jeb shouted, trapped in the gauze of a dream. "Liars! You speak not! Shut
up!"
    But the voices grew louder, ever louder, echoing in his head, bouncing in the air, racing
with the fire, thrashing in the mucilage of memory. Clayton and Damascus now soft and
sibilant, now sonorous, now harsh, the voices that could not be silenced. We are not dead.
are written into the Book of Life. We have been given the fountain of the water of life fre
And you: You are the third part. We are not dead. We have been given the fountain of the
water of life. You are the third part—
    He stumbled away, but their voices followed relentlessly: We are not dead, merciless
the sun and the darkness: You are the third part, the fire and the lava swelling, receding,
receding, swelling: We are not dead, running through all the corridors and corners of his
consciousness, his world, with their thunder and fury.
   Jeb was the third part.
                                              The End