It was a sunbright, late-spring morning, and before Lucy was a level field of tall grasses, and in the center of this, an apple tree. He walked toward it, collapsing at its base. The sun spilled through the branches, and the earth itself was warm; he allowed this warmth into his blood, then his bones, and there were apples on the ground all around him which he ate one after the other, and his life felt a fantasy of luxury. Soon, he slept; waking around noon-time, he returned to the mouth of the cavern and called to Mr. Broom and Tomas, waiting there for an hour and more before walking away, to the east, in the direction of the castle. Possibly it would have been best to re-enter the cave and attempt to locate his friends, but this didn’t occur to Lucy until later, and then only dimly. He liked to think the men had been deposited unscathed back upon the sandy bank, and were chattering away yet in their voluble fashion, but in his deeper heart he knew they were corpses, now.
There was a peculiar foreignness to all the world around him which made Lucy feel wary. Some hours later the village came into view, and he thought of Klara, which summoned an anguish in him. Everything he had been through of late, what difference did it make? What was it for that he had survived, even? When he saw her shanty in the distance he knew he had to go there at once, and he located and hefted a heavy stone in his hand, this to nullify Adolphus’s skull. Lucy had no plan beyond this, but there was the sense in him that once this was accomplished, then other avenues and possibilities would present themselves.