The glow of the moon continued to grow and rise. Soon it looked as though someone screwed a giant blue-tinted light-bulb into a spotlight and turned it towards the trees. Durst glanced at the ashtray and tried to ignore a growing idea.

But the encircling rural darkness made it impossible to keep his eyes away from the ghostly shine. Besides it and his dashboard, there wasn't a single point of light anyplace else. Only fields of wheat along the dirt track. Elm trees hemmed it all in beyond like a great green fence.

Godric rolled down the window to listen for the distant boom of EDM. It could be that some kids were having a tented rave in those woods and put up some stupid blue spotlight to shine on the DJ—but there was nothing. Only the tap of the rain, and the howl of the wind. Nor were there any headlights on the main road to hint at transit to and from a party, and the notion in his skull grew like an inflated lung, though he did not want it to be true, for fear of what it might mean.

Numerous post-boxes stabbed into the earth marked places where pavement branched off the stretch of road he'd come by—the area was inhabited more thickly than the silent woods suggested. Perhaps then it was indeed someone's yard or house producing that bizarre glow. Though it would take an unusual light set-up to produce the effect of such vivid blue against the tops of the trees artificially. The point of such a set-up in the middle of the country seemed non-existent too, beyond stretching rural eccentricity to its logical limits.

The glow became more powerful. Livid waves began to lick the air above the trees in one tight cluster. It was fire. What happened on a small scale in his pocket now occurred in the grand on the other side of those trees.

"Oh shit," Durst muttered.

The flames were huge—perhaps an entire house been consumed by them? Would the icy blueness remain as harmless at that scale? And Godric sat watching it. Minutes in which an entire family could've been consumed by azure fire as they slept. Children writhing in bed—screaming for help while their skin peeled off in icy chunks.

He sprang into guilty, embarrassed action. Grabbed his phone to dial emergency—the battery was dead. Had been at one hundred percent when he left his apartment, and Godric once again cursed.

Kicked on the engine some difficulty—it fought him and sputtered over in groaning pain before catching—and he began to turn round on the dirt road. Knew he'd better make for the first driveway up into those woods. If the house he found wasn't being consumed by a blue inferno he would use their phone to call the fire service.

While he brought the car about his high beams tore out over the wheat field between him and the fire. Something moved at the far end.

Not the swaying of plants and trees but muscled purposeful motion. A thing with bright red arms and a dark gray chest slipped from between the trunks. Godric squinted—a man—dashing across the field with a crimson limb stretched out to the side. Headed right for Godric!

Durst hit the brakes and once again retrieved his long, heavy security guard's flashlight. The thing was a club as much as it was a torch. Though the distant figure did not attempt to escape his high beams. When it came closer Godric blinked—the mysterious figure's chest was gray because of a breastplate. A lobsterpot helmet on his head.

A Roundhead soldier sprinting out of the woods—charging Durst's car as though he were a Cavalier. Wasn't unarmed either—held a broadsword clenched in his outstretched hand—a flintlock pistol at his waist.

A civil war re-enactor?

Yet the man's face was strange; half was lopsided, red, and swollen. All of it was ghastly pale.

A dozen feet from the car the Roundhead stopped. Close enough that the shadows no longer hid anything. Godric blinked, swallowed, for before him stood a hideous face created by savage carnage.

The swelling, lopsided tilt was owed to a dislocated and broken jaw. Above it was a massive bloody rend beneath his ear that stretched to the cheekbone like a ravine. Blood flowed down in thick globs that the rain failed to wash away. That he was alive and moving astonished.

The Roundhead opened his mouth to speak, and the high beams illuminated a ripped apart tongue surrounded by broken teeth. Two such pale chucks fell from his mouth with a stream of blood when the lips parted. No sound followed.

Godric had been about to tear off down the road before the man could close the distance and get on top of him with the sword, but he stopped himself. An attack was not this man's goal. The Roundhead's eyes were frantic—not angry—and instead of slashing the sword in a glint of deathly blue; he began to point with it at the flames. The other arm ushering Godric back towards their source. Beckoning.

That was it then—this man was a re-enactor—there had been an accident. Must have been. An explosion? Maybe he was rigging a powder charge for a mock battle and it went up in his face and started the fire. Yet there had been no boom.

Durst glanced at the ashtray, and the idea faded. Others, more terrible and stranger, appeared in its place.

"Alright!" Godric called out none-the-less, "I see it, I'll get help!"

After he said it the Roundhead tried to smile his broken face—though it only contorted—before then turning on a heel and springing back the way he'd come.

Godric called after him, "Wait! Stay there, I'll send an ambulance to you!"

The man paid no heed and kept running.

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