paped with a thick gray substance that would entrap a bullet and prevent a
ricochet.
Enoch walked over to a panel set inside a deep recess sunk into the
wall. He reached in and thumbed up a tumbler, then stepped quickly out into
the center of the room.
Slowly the room began to darken, then supenly it seemed to flare and he
was in the room no longer, but in another place, a place he had never seen
before.
He stood on a little hillock and in front of him the land sloped down
to a sluggish river bordered by a width of marsh. Between the beginning of
the marsh and the foot of the hillock stretched a sea of rough, tall grass.
There was no wind, but the grass was rippling and he knew that the rippling
motion of the grass was caused by many moving bodies, foraging in the grass.
Out of it came a savage grunting, as if a thousand angry hogs were fighting
for choice morsels in a hundred swill troughs. And from somewhere farther
off, perhaps from the river, came a deep, monotonous bellowing that sounded
hoarse and tired.
Enoch felt the hair crawling on his scalp and he thrust the rifle out
and ready. It was puzzling. He felt and knew the danger and as yet there was
no danger. Still, the very air of this place-wherever it might be-seemed to
crawl with danger.
He spun around and saw that close behind him the thick, dark woods
climbed down the range of river hills, stopping at the sea of grass which
flowed around, the hillock on which he found himself. Off beyond the hills,
dark purple in the air, loomed a range of mighty mountains that seemed to
fade into the sky, but purple to their peaks, with no sign of snow upon
them.
Two things came trotting from the woods and stopped at the edge of it.
They sat down and grinned at him, with their tails wrapped neatly round
their feet. They might have been wolves or dogs, but they were neither one.
They were nothing he had ever seen or heard of. Their pelts glistened in the
weak sunshine, as if they had been greased, but the pelts stopped at their
necks, with their skulls and faces bare. Like evil old men, off on a
masquerade, with their bodies draped in the hides of wolves. But the
disguise was spoiled by the lolling tongues which spilled out of their
mouths, glistening scarlet against the bone-white of their faces.
The woods was still. There were only the two gaunt beasts sitting on
their haunches. They sat and grinned at him, a strangely toothless grin.
The woods was dark and tangled, the foliage so dark green that it was
almost black. All the leaves had a shine to them, as if they had been
polished to a special sheen.
Enoch spun around again, to look back towards the river, and crouched
at the edge of the grass was a line of toadlike monstrosities, six feet long
and standing three feet high, their bodies the color of a dead fish belly,
and each with a single eye, or what seemed to be an eye, which covered a
great part of the area just above the snout. The eyes were faceted and
glowed in the dim sunlight, as the eyes of a hunting cat will glow when
caught in a beam of light.
The hoarse bellowing still came from the river and in between the
bellowing there was a faint, thin buzzing, an angry and malicious buzzing,
as if a mosquito might be hovering for attack, although there was a sharper
tone in it than in the noise of a mosquito.
Enoch jerked up his head to look into the sky and far in the depths of
it he saw a string of dots, so high that there was no way of knowing what
kind of things they were.
He lowered his head to look back at the line of squatting, toadlike
things, but from the corner of his eye he caught the sense of flowing motion
and swung back toward the woods.
The wolf-like bodies with the skull-like heads were coming up the hill
in a silent rush. They did not seem to run. There was no motion of their
running. Rather they were moving as if they had been squirted from a tube.
Enoch jerked up his rifle and it came into his shoulder, fitting there,
as if it were a part of him. The bead settled in the rear-sight notch and
blotted out the skull-like face of the leading beast. The gun bucked as he
squeezed the trigger and, without waiting to see if the shot had downed the
beast, the rifle barrel was swinging toward the second as his right fist
worked the bolt. The rifle bucked again and the second wolf-like being
somersaulted and slid forward for an instant, then began rolling down the
hill, flopping as it rolled.
Enoch worked the bolt again and the spent brass case glittered in the
sun as he turned swiftly to face the other slope.
The toadlike things were closer now. They had been creeping in, but as
he turned they stopped and squatted, staring at him.
He reached a hand into his pocket and took out two cartridges, cramming
them into the magazine to replace the shells he’d fired.
The bellowing down by the river had stopped, but now there was a
honking sound that he could not place. Turning cautiously, he tried to
locate what might be making it, but there was nothing to be seen. The
honking sound seemed to be coming from the forest, but there was nothing
moving.
In between the honking, he still could hear the buzzing and it seemed
louder now. He glanced into the sky and the dots were larger and no longer
in a line. They had formed into a circle and seemed to be spiraling
downward, but they were still so high that he could not make out what kinds
of things they were.
He glanced back toward the toadlike monsters and they were closer than
they had been before. They had crept up again.
Enoch lifted the rifle and, before it reached his shoulder, pressed the
trigger, shooting from the hip. The eye of one of the foremost of them
exploded, like the splash a stone would make if thrown into water. The
creature did not jump or flop. It simply settled down, flat upon the ground,
as if someone had put his foot upon it and had exerted exactly force enough
to squash it flat. It lay there, flat, and there was a big round hole where
the eye had been and the hole was filling with a thick and ropy yellow fluid
that may have been the creature’s blood.
The others backed away, slowly, watchfully. They backed all the way off
the hillock and only stopped when they reached the grass edge.
The honking was closer and the buzzing louder and there could be no
doubt that the honking was coming from the hills.
Enoch swung about and saw it, striding through the sky, coming down the
ridge, stepping through the trees and honking dolefully. It was a round and
black balloon that swelled and deflated with its honking, and jerked and
swayed as it walked along, hung from the center of four stiff and spindly
legs that arched above it to the joint that connected this upper portion of
the leg arrangement with the downward-sprapling legs that raised it high
above the forest. It was walking jerkily, lifting its legs high to clear the
massive treetops before putting them down again. Each time it put down a
foot, Enoch could hear the crunching of the branches and the crashing of the
trees that it broke or brushed aside.
Enoch felt the skin along his spine trying to roll up his back like a
window shade, and the bristling of the hair along the base of his skull,
obeying some primordial instinct in its striving to raise itself erect into
a fighting ruff.
But even as he stood there, almost stiff with fright, some part of his
brain remembered that one shot he had fired and his fingers dug into his
pocket for another cartridge to fill the magazine.
The buzzing was much louder and the pitch had changed. The buzzing was
now approaching at tremendous speed.
Enoch jerked up his head and the dots no longer were circling in the
sky, but were plunging down toward him, one behind the other.
He flicked a glance toward the balloon, honking and jerking on its
stilt-like legs. It still was coming on, but the plunging dots were faster
and would reach the hillock first.
He shifted the rifle forward, outstretched and ready to slap against
his shoulder, and watched the falling dots, which were dots no longer, but
hideous streamlined bodies, each carrying a rapier that projected from its