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gobbets of blood.
    The wind in the grasses, which had whispered at Grendel’s coming, held its breath icily as this new horror slithered on toward hall Heorot. The rats ran away, tails lashing, eyes blind with panic. The owls forgot to ask their
Who? Who? Who?
    The creatures of the fen knew who—and they were frightened.
    A long, long time ago She had come from Her bottomless pool to join with the murderer Cain. The fen shook then with unnatural storms as it witnessed their loathsome em-bracings. The moon dripped blood, and the strict stars collided in their courses. A bolt of lightning struck Cain dead for the horror of what he had done. But She lived on. She was too much a part of death to ever die. She was neither older nor younger than She had been in the beginning. What She was could never be destroyed.
    A werewolf howled on a crag.
    A cloud of white vampire moths hovered above Her grisly head.
    She had no name.
    She was She, She, She …
    Grendel’s Mother!
    Unferth knew.
    Unferth knew that Something was coming.
    Not even his boil or his silver trinket or his long black cloak could comfort his hands this time. They twitched with a life of their own. His thumbs pricked. His fingers itched. The veins in his sweaty palms were hard and swollen and painful.
    Half-moaning, half-humming, he sat and watched the sleepers in the hall. He despisedthem all. Stupid Hrothgar, he thought. Stupid Hrothgar, ugly Wealhtheow, murderous Beowulf. They were only people, silly creatures of flesh and blood, mortal trash. He hated them.
    Unferth longed for he knew not what. Something vast and dark and terrible. Something that would recognize him as a cut above the merely human. Something that would press him to Its hideous heart and make him welcome as Its own.
    He was terribly alone. He did not belong here, in the torchlit hall littered with cups and harps, the debris of celebrations he had taken no part in. He belonged out there in the night, the fatal darkness, the imperishable black. For day, he thought, did not really kill the dark. It was always there, out there in the fen, living on in the veins of the children of Cain. Beowulf believed he could put a stop to it simply by slaying one monster. What a fool! He, Unferth, knew better, knew that good and evil were locked in such an endless contest that the death of just one of the powers of darkness was of no significance whatsoever. As well believe you could destroy a tree by tearing off a single leaf!
    And the tree of evil looked taller and more familiar to Unferth than the slender green tree of good. Its twisted roots went down intohis own being. He could feel its festering sap in every fiber of him. Even his boil, he reasoned, was an outward mark of his difference from such as Beowulf. If only Grendel had understood …
    But Grendel had not understood. Grendel had tried to kill him. Why?
    Unferth slapped his side as a sudden illumination came into the dark chamber of his thought.
    It was not Grendel who had misunderstood. It was himself. Grendel had wanted to take him for his own, to bear him off to where he belonged, to join the baleful company of the fen; but he, Unferth, had held back through fear. All at once he hated his fear—the sweat on his cheeks that proved him weak and human, the trembling of his hands that measured the distance between him and Grendel, all the frailties of his humble mortal state.
    Unferth stared at his own flesh with a bad taste in his mouth. It seemed an unwarrantable interference, something that held his lovely capacity for evil behind bars. If only he could strip it off, be free of it, live solely and forever as a sort of cruel essential ghost or demon of himself … If only, if only…
    Unferth gnawed at his knuckles like an animaltrying to rid itself of a wounded and unwanted limb.
    He was very near to madness in that night.
    She came into hall Heorot.
    She made no noise.
    She looked at Unferth and She smiled.
    Her lips were red.
    She had eyes in