shape or sharpened to an edge. There was no way to preserve foodstuffs, so Vern had laid several fish traps in the stream below the waterfall. An early autumn rain had washed away two of them, but there were three left, though only one now contained a trout.
We have enough to travel a short way if we must, he thought. He thought too about how people used to discard all sorts of good things, now useful for the family. That time was a world ago and the kind of time it had existed within could never return.
But if they were to travel, answering that summons, where would they go?
He looked at the drawing again. The line segments crowded near the wavy line upon its left- hand side, but on the other side they were set farther away. So if the wavy line was indeed a stream that sparkled intermittently, the right bank was farther from its center. Or maybe that was just the angle of vision. If the right bank only appeared to be farther, it would mean that the stream was deep in a ravine and the map showed it from the right-hand side. The stream they lived beneath ran to the south and as it rolled down the mountainside, it had cut, over the millennia, deep declivities. Vern thought that if they decided to answer the summons, they should follow the stream, descending the mountain until they found a place that fit the map.
He sighed. It was all very chancy, but this was the best interpretation he could come up with. He would talk it over with Moms in the evening. Now he would go to his daily chores, gathering food and fuel where he could and collecting any shard or scrap or leaf or root that might help to keep them alive. Then this evening they would hold council and decide.
This was the best part of the day for them, although Echo, if she were overtired in the evening, would be fretful for a tedious time before settling to nestle in Moms’ lap. Vern and Moms were by this hour good-tired, the cessation of the long, active day pleasant after their labors were accomplished. This was the hour they talked, making plans and sometimes recalling the good things they had stored in memory.
During this time they would also debate courses of action, and this evening Vern had asked Moms whether it would be wise to try to find the place Echo had depicted.
“You say it is an invitation or a summons from someone or some people we cannot know,” Moms said.
“That’s how I make it out.”
“She is not in a state. She is not frightened by this. message.”
They watched Echo. She had gone back to the circle and was playing with the sand, pouring the grains into one hand and then into the other and letting them spill through her fingers. Over and over she did this, over and over, while crooning a wordless song.
“That is one reason I think I should try to find it.”
“You?” Moms asked. “That cannot be. It would have to be the three of us together.”
“I could go find it and, if I can figure out what is going on and see whether it’s safe, then I could take us there.”
“But if you did not come back, Echo and I would perish.”
“If we all go, we all might die.”
“That would be better.” Her eyes moistened and she turned her head away. Vern heard her taking deep breaths to calm her emotions.
“It would be hard traveling with three. Faster for me to go and come back and go again.”
“But you can’t be sure you have found the right place unless Echo is with you. She will know the place when she arrives there.”
“She might not.”
“Whoever is sending the message now will tell her when she has arrived.”
“What if it is some plan of the Olders to draw humans out?”
“You have already rejected that idea or you would not even consider going. And if there was any slight hint of the Old Ones about it, Echo would smell them out. She is more sensitive to them than we are.”
“Could they not find a way to disguise their presence?”
“I don’t think so. I can’t pretend to understand their psychology; I don’t know that such a concept can even apply to them. But when I try to translate their ‘attitude,’ if I can call it that, to our terms, I would describe it as
“Yes.” Vern let the image of the star- headed monstrosity slip into his mind and then imagined its disappearance before it could bring up his emotional temperature. But their handiwork, all those immense towers and cyclopean, steeply sloped pyramids with ridged ramps, all that bewildering hyper-geometry of almost unvisualizable angles — these images and many others he allowed to register in his mind. They would not attract the attention of a probe, for they were only pictures of things that existed and any animal might be gazing upon them. “Yes,” he said, “we are only minor pests to them. But we know that they have enemies much more powerful than we are. They have battled Cthulhu and triumphed and were defeated and then triumphed again. This is something I heard once long ago. It may be that this call — this invitation or summons — is intended to entrap an enemy more dangerous than humans.”
“But in that case the call would be cast in terms utterly alien to us. I do not think Echo could even react to it.”
Again Vern looked at his sister. The world outside had darkened as the hour deepened and the sound of the curtaining waterfall seemed to grow louder. Echo, with her silvery long hair and porcelain-pale skin almost glowed ghostlike in the dim cave. She had stopped pouring sand and was gathering it into little mounds spaced out evenly from one another. After mounding a fifth small pile, she stopped and sat up cross-legged with her hands in her lap, looking toward the cave mouth.
“Well, what do you think we should do?” Vern asked.
“It is time to go to sleep. Maybe you’d like to scout around outside a little. Maybe when Echo goes to sleep tonight, she will receive another message and maybe it will be clearer than this map diagram she drew.”
Moms’ suggestion was what Vern had expected. He supposed that prudence was probably their best policy, but he was apprehensive. Someone or something knew of their existence. They went on with their hardscrabble daily lives as if the Olders did not know about them, keeping as closely as possible to narrowly settled routines, to behavior that did not arouse their feelings or require unusual degrees of mental activity. Quietude was their only camouflage. If they had to journey, the stress of traveling with Echo might rouse attention, but if pursuers were closing in, there would be no choice but to travel.
It was dark here; the detestable five-pointed orange moon was not in the sky — and he was grateful for that. Skirting around the waterfall by a familiar but barely traceable pathway over the rocks, Vern walked a little way down the stream edge. Then he stopped and breathed in the night air that was growing ever colder with the season. He shivered. The scraps of canvas and plastic and cloth Moms had spliced into a motley robe-like garment was draughty, to say the least. He hugged his chest.
And then he thought he heard a sound different from the customary night noises. A thin, high yelping far, far away. Perhaps the Olders had introduced an animal new to this forest, some strain of wolf, or an animal of their own engineering.
Then he heard it no more and decided that his imagination was overly exercised. He turned and headed back to the cave where Echo and Moms would be ready for sleep by now.
Despite his apprehensions, Vern was sleepy. Although his day had been physically a little less active than usual, anxiety had depleted his mental energy. He lay for a few minutes, listening. He could tell that Moms was not asleep; she was surely thinking through their discussion. Echo was asleep in her own way, though sometimes Vern wondered if she ever actually slept, the way that he and Moms and Queenie did — as Queenie was doing now, her large head laid on her large paws.
Almost as soon as he closed his eyes, he began to dream. His viewing floated like an invisible balloon, bodiless, and traversed one of the Olders’ cities, if that was what they were to be called. He envisioned entering underground through a huge doorless opening. If he were making this journey in his body, his every nerve would be pulsing with fear as he passed tremendous pentagonal pools of unknown black liquids and drifted through rooms filled with curious and inexplicable utensils of myriad sorts. Then there were colossal caverns of intricate machines at whose purposes he could not guess. They were all motionless until he came to one larger than the
