Shadowland. Spider World 06 by Colin Wilson

But in that case, how had it prevented Niall from sliding off? There could be only one logical explanation: that the creature possessed enough control to divide itself into two halves, one of which remained static, like the saddle on a horse, while the lower used its own peculiar mode of locomotion.

Its transparency brought to mind something that had happened in the Delta. After he had communed with the goddess, Niall had experienced a sense that the Earth itself had become transparent, so that he was clearly aware of surging waves of vital force. This had been accompanied by a sensation that he called “double vision,” as if he possessed two sets of eyes, one of which saw the solid material world, while the other could see through it to the deeper reality that lay underneath. And since this was related to the trick of “looking sideways” in order to see elementals, he now tried applying it to this pulsing mass of slime that was waiting patiently like a tethered horse.

The result shocked him. The slime-creature began to dissolve, as if it was turning into water. As it did so, its distinctive smell became overpowering. Seeing it dissolve was like watching a block of ice melt very quickly. Within less than a minute it had vanished; all that remained was a clear liquid that soaked the grass as it trickled toward the lake.

Suddenly he felt tired, as if his own energy had drained away. The past ten minutes had involved a tremendous effort of concentration. He wanted to sigh and close his eyes and let his energies return.

He picked up the sleeping bag, whose surface was wet, and climbed the hill toward the place where he had been sleeping. The ground was wet where the creature had passed, but when he bent and touched the grass, the moisture felt like water, without the viscosity he had expected.

His pack was where he had left it, and its surface was dry; apparently the creature had felt no interest in it. Since the ground where he had been sleeping was wet, he moved the pack to a spot a dozen yards away. An instinct told him there was nothing more to fear from the lake, but that it was important to get a good night’s rest. Within a few minutes he was asleep.

It was past dawn when he opened his eyes, and although the Sun had still not reached the top of the hill behind him, it already was bathing the moorlands to the west. He climbed out of the sleeping bag — noting, as he did so, that it was covered with a faint layer of whiteness that smelled fishy — and pressed the catch that caused it to fold. His throat felt dry and he was ravenously hungry; he would have appreciated his usual breakfast of newly baked bread with butter and honey. Instead, he took a mouthful from the flask of well water, and once again felt oddly invigorated. It tasted, if anything, even better than when fresh from the well, and had a smell that reminded him of green things — of grass and leaves and young shoots. Moments later he was no longer hungry.

The Sun rose above the hilltop while he was repacking his knapsack, and illuminated the hillside and the green surface of the lake. He was struck by its beauty and by the soothing peacefulness of the landscape. He noticed something else: in the morning sunlight, the dewy grass looked brilliantly green, yet in the slight hollow where he had first fallen asleep the night before, the grass had the same faint chalky tinge that he had noticed on the underside of his sleeping bag — the side that had become damp with slime. Obviously, the whiteness was some deposit that was formed when the slime dried out. What puzzled Niall was that this area of whiteness extended over an area about twenty feet wide. The slime-creature Niall had seen in the moonlight had not been half that size.

Intrigued by the puzzle, Niall followed the trail of chalky grass downhill as far as the lake. It remained about twenty feet wide to the point where it vanished into the clear water.

Niall shook his head. How could a creature that was at most eight feet long leave a trail twenty feet wide?

The solution dawned on him, and made him feel like cursing his obtuseness. The creature must have been capable of reducing itself to a thin layer, so it could insinuate itself under him like a sheet of water.

What had happened, then? It must have wrapped itself around the sleeping bag, since the whole bag showed traces of whiteness. Fortunately, Niall’s head was inside the waterproof pouch that was intended for a pillow. The slime-creature might still have covered his face and suffocated him — but then have lost its prey, since Niall might have struggled and escaped. That, he could now see, is why it had decided to carry him back to the lake and drown him before eating him.

And why had he experienced no intuition of danger the night before? Had it exercised some curious hypnotic influence to soothe him into a sense of confidence?

Now suddenly Niall had no doubt that the slime-creature was the origin of the pollution of the sacred lake. Like all living creatures, the slime shed millions of cells over the course of a lifetime. But whereas the skin cells shed by human beings are already dead, the cells of this simple organism remained alive; the only reason the creature abandoned them was that its vitality was not great enough to sustain more than a certain quantity of cells — otherwise it could have gone on spreading until it filled the lake.

But as he stood staring over the lake, Niall was troubled by one more question. Why had the creature suddenly dissolved away? At the time it had happened, Niall had assumed that this was the creature’s own way of escaping the domination of his will — a kind of suicide. Now, on reflection, he realized this was unlikely. It was impossible to imagine a slug committing suicide, and this creature was even simpler than a slug.

Therefore, it had been destroyed by some will other than its own. But whose? And why?

This question continued to preoccupy him as he shouldered his pack and set his course for the northwest. When Asmak had taken Niall on a mental “reconnaissance” of the country between the spider city and the Gray Mountains, Niall had carefully memorized the route, and later reinforced the memory with the use of the thought mirror. So now he had at least a clear sense of his direction.

Outside the valley of the green lake, the moorland was uneven, irregular, and unattractive. The ground itself might have been designed as an obstacle course, and Niall frequently stumbled over tussocks of thick grass, twisted roots, and stones that stuck up out of the turf. A few ravens wheeled in the sky, but he could sense no elementals, not even a hostile spirit like the one that had shown so much resentment when he thought of choosing its rock as a campsite. The lack of elementals probably explained the roughness of the terrain and the coarseness of its vegetation.

After an hour of plodding through this uninspiring landscape, with an unseasonably warm October sun playing on the back of his head, his legs were beginning to feel heavy and he was longing to take his weight off them. But the ground was either too wet or too rugged. Finally he saw a flat stone, about three feet across, and flung himself down with relief. As he did so, he caused the stone to tilt, and a small rodent scampered out from under it. Before it reached the safety of a thorn bush, a large raven startled Niall by swooping down on it, killing it with one blow of its beak, and carrying it out of sight.

He took from his pack the parcel of food and ate some of the hard, crunchy pastry. As he was eating, the raven alighted on a gnarled tree a dozen feet away and watched with lively interest. It was a big bird, which stood more than two feet high, with a dangerous-looking ivory-colored beak.

Niall drank some of the well water, and began to feel more relaxed. He had often seen ravens of this size in the desert, and admired their sharpness of vision, which enabled them to see the movement of a mouse from a quarter of a mile in the air. Idly, simply to pass the time, he tried “looking sideways” at it, to see whether his faculty of double vision would reveal anything beyond its physical reality.

Looking with double vision seemed to create a second pair of eyes, which showed the soul of things rather than their appearance — the chameleon men possessed it to a high degree, which was why they could see elementals. On this occasion, it showed him only that this bird was a typical scavenger, always on the lookout for any kind of food. But because of his contact with the minds of the chameleon men, Niall could also catch a glimpse of himself from the bird’s point of view — this odd bipedal creature that carried its food on its back, and ate sitting down instead of in the more sensible position of standing upright. The bird’s chief preoccupation at the moment was whether he might leave a few crumbs behind. Looking at himself from behind the raven’s eyes, Niall even noticed that he had allowed his pack to fall on its side, and that the flask of mead had rolled out.