The dead dance and the attack at the Heath

The dead dance and the attack at the Heath is a turning-point episode in which Flora watches the returned dead form a circle around a lamppost, then sees five young men assault and burn them. The shift from eerie fellowship to deliberate violence exposes the dead’s vulnerability and makes the courtyard’s fragile calm give way to grief and irreversible loss.

The Courtyard Dance

Flora moves through the fenced residential area among dead people sitting, standing, lying down, or walking through dark apartments. She is not frightened at first; the quiet makes her feel as though she is among friends. When a dead woman emerges from a doorway, however, Flora sees her drawn toward a man beneath a lamppost, as though the light has become a point of attraction. Other dead people join them, coming singly or in groups of two or three, until about fifteen have gathered.

Without any visible signal, the dead begin moving clockwise around the lamppost. Their circle is irregular: they bump into one another, stumble, and fall, but then resume their places. To Flora, the slow, continuous movement has the force of a primordial rite, recalling animals gathered around a central pole. She watches, overwhelmed by awe, as their shadows glide across the surrounding buildings. The dance does not vary or stop; pale faces appear in nearby windows as other dead watch from inside, too weak or unwilling to join. The scene gives the courtyard a temporary order and fellowship, even as the dead remain exposed within it.

The Attack Begins

The dance is interrupted not by a guard or a resident, but by five young men entering the courtyard with baseball bats. Flora senses them before she can make them out clearly: their thoughts are excited and fearful, tangled with one another by drink. The dead continue circling beneath the lamp, apparently unaware of the newcomers. The men treat the spectacle as entertainment, but their arrival changes the atmosphere of the courtyard. The gathering that had seemed to Flora a quiet community of the dead is now exposed to people who have come prepared to hurt them.

The men’s attention soon shifts to Flora. Their thoughts register her as an object of lust, and she instinctively steps back. She challenges the man who seems to lead them, but her warning cannot make them reconsider. As he invokes the dead’s legal status, Flora pictures an older man at a kitchen table explaining that the returned dead are defenceless because the law has already declared them deceased. The legal loophole is more than an excuse: it gives the attackers a rationale for treating vulnerable people as though they have no claim to protection.

The returned dead move toward the men, drawn closer and goaded by their hatred. A thin, short old man reaches for the leader’s shirt, tearing it. The leader responds by striking him above the ear with his bat. The blow sends the old man spinning through the air and onto the concrete; the leader’s friends congratulate him, then join the attack. What had been a circle of slow, repetitive movement becomes a scene of systematic destruction.

Flora cannot intervene. The men’s bloodlust and hatred overwhelm her thoughts, leaving her unable to move as they beat the dead one by one. The victims do not defend themselves, even when their legs are broken. They continue crawling toward their attackers, while the men keep striking them, as though the bodies were a wall that had to be smashed into pieces. When the attackers finally pause, they smoke and look down at what they have done. Their composure makes the violence more chilling: the dead have been reduced to a heap, while the young men can briefly regard the assault as finished business.

One of the men notices a bite on his arm. His friends joke about infection and tease him, and he crouches beside a badly injured old woman to offer her his arm mockingly. Her ruined mouth opens and closes, but then her other arm suddenly catches him and her teeth sink into his flesh. The man screams as she hangs from his arm; when he wrenches himself free, a substantial piece of flesh is torn from his lower arm. The bite briefly reverses the attackers’ sense of control, but it does not end the assault. The leader tears his shirt to make a pressure bandage, while the injured man ignores him, rummages through a backpack, and splashes liquid from two plastic bottles over the still-quivering bodies, taunting them as he empties the bottles.

Death, Fire, and the Aftermath

As the injured man drenches the bodies with liquid from two plastic bottles, Flora’s paralysis begins to lift. Across the courtyard she sees a figure approaching the heap: herself, yet not herself. The men are preparing matches and do not see the apparition. It spreads its arms as if inviting an embrace, and Flora finds herself making the same gesture. The double bends over the bodies and makes small plucking motions, as though gathering something from them. When a match lands, the figure raises its head and meets Flora’s gaze. Their identical eyes hold a moment of recognition; Flora feels that they share secrets. Then the fuel catches, and a wall of flame rises between them.

The young men stare at the fire before running from the courtyard. Their leader pauses to look at Flora, but leaves without speaking. When the flames subside, the double is gone, and Flora approaches the smouldering heap through cloying smoke. The fire has not consumed the bodies completely: with so little flesh and fat, it has only left isolated flare-ups. The dead who had circled the lamppost now lie blackened and curled, their bodies still. The contrast between the dance’s quiet, patterned movement and the fire’s destruction turns Flora’s earlier awe into grief. What had seemed a moment of fellowship has ended in the deaths of the dancers, while the attackers escape.

Something nevertheless moves among the burned bodies. Seven white caterpillars emerge, although around fifteen dead people had gathered before the attack. Flora perceives the caterpillars as the dead’s transformed remains and hears their anguish as they realise they are being drawn toward the Other Place. They swell until their membranes stretch, then burst one by one; their translucent fluid evaporates in the heat of the scorched bones, and the screams fade. The visible violence has ended, but the scene makes its consequence more final: the attackers have not merely damaged bodies but helped send the dead beyond reach.

Flora understands that her encounter with her double has given her knowledge she cannot bear or put into words. She sees the awakening of the dead not as an isolated earthly event but as a minor effect of a much larger order, like a butterfly’s wingbeat after a hurricane. The dance, assault, fire, and caterpillars compress that scale into one courtyard: for the attackers, violence is a drunken night’s destruction; for Flora, it opens onto the dead’s passage from the world. Her sorrow for the ruined gathering becomes sorrow for humankind and its recurring capacity to answer fear with hatred.

The Unwatched Enclosure

The attack also exposes the failure of the fenced Heath as a place of protection. As Flora senses the courtyard, she realizes that apart from herself, Peter, and the five approaching men, there is no living person inside the perimeter: no guards and no other observers able to intervene. The fence marks a boundary, but it does not secure the dead from those who enter with weapons. Flora’s presence gives the assault a witness, not a defense, and the attackers meet no resistance until the dead themselves reach for them. The courtyard’s apparent separation from ordinary life therefore sharpens the scene’s central imbalance: the returned dead are gathered together, but they are left without anyone charged with protecting them.