When Billy didn’t answer Randall's knocks the next morning, just before noon, Randall suspected that the end had come.

  “Billy,” he hollered through the door, “Billy, you alright?”

  Randall hadn’t waited for an answer before reaching for the door latch. It rattled as he twisted it and Billy made no sound. Randall pushed the door back on its creaking hinges and peered through the crack.

  He couldn’t see Billy’s face, didn’t want to see it, but he saw the withered form, the oozing pustules, and the bloody discharges that signaled death. Billy’s body was hunched on the ground in the corner of the shack, his head bowed between his knees and a tattered blanket draped over his shoulders. In his right hand, twisted up as though to keep it out of the filth coating the floor, Billy’s claw-like hand gripped a piece of white paper neatly folded in fours.

  All this, Randall took in all the horribly familiar macabre details in an instant and the smell, that awful piercing smell of utter decay, and then slammed the door shut and latched it firm.

  He reeled about and stumbled a few steps before his stomach emptied its contents again and even when emptied left him doubled over in the grass, heaving and spitting to clear the taste of bile from his mouth.

  When he could breathe freely again, Randall, overcome with the struggle and the stench and the sheer unfairness of if, rolled back onto his haunches in the grass and wept like a child.

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  He spent several long minutes in that feeble position before making any real effort to pull himself together and consider what to do next. He’d promised Billy a burial and intended to see to it as soon as possible which would entail a trip back into Lincolntown.

  Randall stood up, wiping his nose with his dirty sleeve, and started to walk back to his campsite to gather his things but he stopped short when he remembered Billy’s letter; he’d promised to send Billy’s letter to his sister.

  Randall looked back toward the shack and realized with a renewed revulsion that Billy still held that letter clasped in his claw-like hand. Randall took a deep breath to steady his nerves and took several shaky steps back toward the shack but a lump of bile rose higher in his throat with every step nearer. By the time he reached the door he was swallowing furiously just to keep from a new fit of heavings.

  He reached out a trembling hand for the latch and his head began to spin with a toxic mixture of terror of nausea. The memory of that hellish smell, that withered corpse, that clutching had were all too recent. He couldn’t bear to see it again, couldn’t bring himself to even imagine picking his way across that slick and putrid floor and reaching out to pluck the letter from Billy’s grip. His hand faltered and Randall turned away and doubled over, bracing his hands on his knees and staring at the gourd, breathing heavily and fighting down the impulse to vomit whatever was left in his stomach that could be violently wrung out.

  “I’m sorry, Billy,” he said aloud, “I can’t, I just can’t…”

  With the admission, the wave of sickness passed and after several more deep, cleansing breaths, Randall could stand erect again. He looked back at the shack, regarding it like one who’s seen the gateway to hell itself.

  “I’m sorry, Billy,” he said again for no determinable reason other than it felt right to apologize.

  Randall turned and left the shack behind to return to his campsite.