With mimes and face-pullings they explained that they were hungry and exhausted. They tried further to explain they were lost, cursing themselves for leaving their phrase-book in the VW. She didn’t seem to understand very much of what they said, but sat them down beside a blazing fire and put a pan of food on the stove to heat.
They ate thick unsalted pea soup and eggs, and occasionally smiled their thanks at the woman. Her husband sat beside the fire, making no attempt to talk, or even look at the visitors.
The food was good. It buoyed their spirits.
They would sleep until morning and then begin the long trek back. By dawn the bodies in the field would be being quantified, identified, parcelled up and dispatched to their families. The air would be full of reassuring noises, cancelling out the moans that still rang in their ears. There would be helicopters, lorry loads of men organizing the clearing-up operations. All the rites and paraphernalia of a civilized disaster.
And in a while, it would be palatable. It would become part of their history: a tragedy, of course, but one they could explain, classify and learn to live with. All would be well, yes, all would be well. Come morning.
The sleep of sheer fatigue came on them suddenly. They lay where they had fallen, still sitting at the table, their heads on their crossed arms. A litter of empty bowls and bread crusts surrounded them.
They knew nothing. Dreamt nothing. Felt nothing.
Then the thunder began.
In the earth, in the deep earth, a rhythmical tread, as of a titan, that came, by degrees, closer and closer.
The woman woke her husband. She blew out the lamp and went to the door. The night sky was luminous with stars: the hills black on every side.
The thunder still sounded: a full half minute between every boom, but louder now. And louder with every new step.
They stood at the door together, husband and wife, and listened to the night-hills echo back and forth with the sound. There was no lightning to accompany the thunder.
Just the boom — Boom — Boom — It made the ground shake: it threw dust down from the
door-lintel, and rattled the window-latches.
Boom — Boom — They didn’t know what approached, but whatever shape it took, and whatever it intended, there seemed no sense in running from it. Where they stood, in the pitiful shelter of their cottage, was as safe as any nook of the forest. How could they choose, out of a hundred thousand trees, which would be standing when the thunder had passed? Better to wait: and watch.
The wife’s eyes were not good, and she doubted what she saw when the blackness of the hill changed shape and reared up to block the stars. But her husband had seen it too: the unimaginably huge head, vaster in the deceiving darkness, looming up and up, dwarfing the hills themselves with its ambition.
He fell to his knees, babbling a prayer, his arthritic legs twisted beneath him.
His wife screamed: no words she knew could keep this monster at bay — no prayer, no plea, had power over it.
In the cottage, Mick woke and his outstretched arm, twitching with a sudden cramp, wiped the plate and the lamp off the table.
They smashed.
Judd woke.
The screaming outside had stopped. The woman had disappeared from the doorway into the forest. Any tree, any tree at all, was better than this sight. Her husband still let a string of prayers dribble from his slack mouth, as the great leg of the giant rose to take another step —Boom —The cottage shook. Plates danced and smashed off the dresser. A clay pipe rolled from the mantelpiece and shattered in the ashes of the hearth.
The lovers knew the noise that sounded in their substance: that earth-thunder.
Mick reached for Judd, and took him by the shoulder.
‘You see,’ he said, his teeth blue-grey in the darkness of the cottage. ‘See? See?’
There was a kind of hysteria bubbling behind his words. He ran to the door, stumbling over a chair in the dark. Cursing and bruised he staggered out into the night —Boom —The thunder was deafening. This time it broke all the windows in the cottage. In the bedroom one of the roof-joists cracked and flung debris downstairs.