"Help with it, Kit-Fox! And I help also," Day-Torch yowled.

"I help!" Kit-Fox yelped. The room shuddered, the building shuddered, the whole afternoon shuddered. There was a rending of boulders, either on the prophet's mountain or in the special effects room of Professor Timacheff above them. There was a great breaking and entering, a place turning into a time.

There came a roaring like horses in the sky. Then was the multiplex crash (God save his soul, his body is done for) of bloody torso and severed limbs failing into the room from a great height, splintering the table at which the five of them sat, breaking the room, splattering them all with blood. But the ceiling above was unbreached and unharmed and there was no point of entry.

"I am not man enough even to watch it," Buford Strange gurgled, and he slumped sideways unconscious.

"Timacheff, you fool!" Vincent Rue bawled to the space above them.

"Watch your damned special effects! You're wrecking the place!"

Unquestionably that Timacheff was good. He used his special effects in classes on phenomenology that he taught up there.

"The head, the head! Don't let them forget the head!" Day-Torch cried in a flaming voice.

"I just remembered that Timacheff is out of town and is holding no classes today," Kit-Fox muttered in vulpine wonder.

"Make room for me! Oh, make room for me!" Adrian Mountain boomed. Then he was gone from the niidst of them. He would be a factor, though, "in days tocome."

Christopher and Vincent tried to straighten up the unconscious Buford Strange. They shook him, but he came apart and one arm came off him. He was revealed as a Straw-man filled with bloody straw, and no more.

"Why, he's naught but a poorly made scarecrow," Christopher Foxx said in wonder. "He was right that one who falls back from it cannot become an ordinary man again. He will be less than man."

"That's funny. He always looked like a man to me," Vincent Rue said.

"The head, the head! You forget the head. Let the head fall down!"

Day-Torch cried.

And the head fell down.

It smashed itself like a bursting pumpkin on the broken floor.

Under the town is a woollier town, And the blood splashed up and the head fell down.

-- Ballads, Henry Drumhead