Cthulhu's Reign

more faith in him than he had in himself. Or perhaps she only pretended to, bolstering his confidence.

In any case, they must find a place to eat and sleep and to try to hide. Tonight was not as cold as last night and they would be warmer if they went into the woods a little way from the cold stream. He wanted to get some distance from the sound of it too, so that they might better hear anything moving through the forest.

That thin shrilling, the nerve-wracking piping of the shoggoths, had not come closer and Vern estimated that the group of them must be at least two kilometers away. The dreadful sound carried far, especially at night in these otherwise silent mountains. But the sound was close enough to cause Echo fearful distress.

He did not know if she had ever seen one of the creatures. Probably she had not, for the sound of their shrilling would recall their image and that would send her into paroxysms. He had seen them only once, two of them, as they fell upon a deer and did not devour so much as absorb it. Shapeless or nearly shapeless they were, composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles, and these would be about fifteen feet in diameter when spherical. Yet they had a constantly shifting shape and volume, throwing out temporary developments — arms, pseudopods, tentacles — and forming, deforming and reforming organs of sight and speech. Tekeli-li was the word, as nearly as Vern could approximate the sound with human phonemes, that they spoke to one another almost continuously, though the slight variations in pitch and timbre he was able to perceive suggested that this one utterance was capable of a plenitude of meanings. That word had been recorded by the old historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

He had been stalking the same deer himself, a young doe that had not learned caution, and had been so horrified when the monsters burst out of the foliage upon their prey, that he swooned away for a few moments. That was a piece of good luck. If he had cried out, they would have made an end of him.

They would have ended the lives of Moms and Echo too — and of Queenie, for there was an intense detestation of those creatures for dogs and of dogs for them. Shoggoths, as the humans supposed, communicated telepathically with the Old Ones their masters, and the presence of Vern in that glade where the doe was ingested, or rather, digested, would have been made known. Then the Old Ones would come to search this part of the forest and they would unfailingly find Echo, though they might not comprehend the origin of her kind of mind- pictures.

Echo had tired of walking and clambering over the rocks and Vern and Moms had taken turns carrying her for the past hour or so. She was in Moms’ arms now and, as the four of them came to the edge of a large streamside boulder, Vern signaled for Moms and Echo to stay behind, while he searched for a suitable place to last out the night.

They had arrived at a fairly level place on the mountainside. The stream widened out here and was less voluble over its stones. If he could find a spot forty or so yards from its edge, they ought to be able to hear forest sounds clearly and to distinguish those that signaled danger. A cave would be ideal, but this place could offer nothing like that.

There was a dense laurel thicket bordering a ferny glade, and when he skirted it, he found a small opening. Echo would be frightened to crawl into this little tunnel in the foliage, but she would not be terror-stricken. He explored it for about fifteen yards and then could go no farther, the tightly meshed branches and twigs forming a prickly wall. Cozy, Vern thought. He realized that it had sheltered an animal not long ago, perhaps a fawn or maybe one of the black bears common in these hills. It would be a good place. Maybe they could even chance a tiny fire.

But when he brought the family inside this den, he decided against the fire. The smoke might not easily be visible at night, but they would have to crowd closely to the flame and Echo would be so transfixed by the sight of it that she might not be able to communicate. Flashing water, trembling fronds, twinkling lights — these sent her into a trancelike state, so fixedly that she could concentrate on nothing else.

So Vern and Moms tried their best to approximate the evening routine they had clung to when they lived in the cave. He crawled out of the brambly little tunnel to “scout,” while Moms primped Echo and combed her hair. Then Vern returned with a tin flask of water and Moms opened the canvas bag with the decal that read University Bookstore and brought out jerky for Vern and herself and smoked fish for Echo. Sometimes Echo’s teeth were painful and she would refuse to chew the dried deer meat.

After this meal, Vern and Moms arranged leaf piles for bedding. The fallen laurel leaves were thick here but made unsatisfactory mattresses, cold and slick and noisy. Uneasy sleep was guaranteed.

Now Moms took Echo in her arms and held her closely. This was their quiet time and Vern wanted to use it to question Echo, but he could not think how to ask what they needed to know.

“What voices do you hear inside?”

She shook her head, not meeting his eyes, and Vern looked to Moms for aid.

Moms said, “I know that we need to know what to look for, the source of the call or summons to her, but I don’t know how to ask, either.”

“If it is a person or a group of people, we must see them before they see us,” Vern said. “If we don’t like the look of them, we won’t make ourselves known.”

“But if we approach closely, they will sense we are there. It may be that they already know we are traveling toward their signal.”

“Shiny,” Echo murmured. Then she turned the word into a little song. “Shiny, shy-nee, shiny, shy- nee.” She was carefully not looking at Vern or Moms.

“Shiny?” Vern asked. “What is shiny, Echo?”

For a long time she only repeated the word, but at last added another. “Wall. Shiny, shy-nee wall. Shine wall.”

“Go there?” Vern asked. “Are we to go to a shiny wall?”

She nodded and looked at him and smiled. The picture in her mind of this shiny wall made her happy.

“Is it a too-bright?” Moms asked. “Does it hurt Echo’s eyes?”

Slowly she wagged her head no. “Wall of shy-nee,” she said.

“It must be a place,” Vern said. “Maybe a building.”

“Yes,” Moms said. “A structure of some kind. Are there any buildings positioned by a ravine that would not be built by the Old Ones?”

“I don’t know,” Vern said. “I had thought that all the human things in this area had been destroyed. Maybe it is not a building but a machine. If it looks like a wall to Echo, it could be a big machine.”

“Only the Old Ones have large machines now.”

“They would not be sending a call to Echo. If they knew where she was, we would already be killed.”

“Let us suppose that it is some sort of machine made by someone other than the Old Ones. If they wanted us to come to their machine, why didn’t they place it or send it close to where we were?”

“I don’t know,” Vern said. Then in a moment: “Maybe because if things don’t work out, if something goes wrong, we could still get back to our cave and be safe there, since the Olders don’t know about it. If this shiny wall was discovered by them, they would search close by and find our cave.”

“Perhaps,” Moms said. “Anyway, we have decided that we should answer the summons. Does the singing of the shoggoths seem to be getting closer to us? It may be that we need to find this shiny wall soon.”

“As soon as we can,” Vern said. “Let us try to get some rest.”

He had not said “sleep” and he suspected that Moms’s night was as unrestful as his own. Tekeli-li had sounded continuously and the shrillness came from different quarters. It seemed to be advancing upon them, but perhaps that was an illusion brought on by anxiety. Queenie did not behave as if shoggoths were closing in and Vern trusted her senses.

The morning routine matched that of the evening, except that Vern actually did scout, trying to make sure the area was free of traces of the Olders and to acquire an idea of the topography they were to travel through. He found a tall poplar with one branch low enough to give access to the upper branches and climbed easily. The months of outdoor survival had given him a wiry, purposeful musculature and a sureness of foot, hand, and eye. He was not even breathing heavily when he made it to the nearly leafless top and stood on a sturdy limb.

From here he could see the stream as it wound out of the holler, disappeared around a bend, and reappeared below, all whitewater and jumbled rock. Above the stream at that point reared a cliff, its level top a treeless, grassy sward. He decided it would be more informative to leave the streamside and climb along the ridges to that cliff. Even if it did not border the ravine shown in Echo’s map, it would offer a prospect of the southern reaches, so that if they did return to streamside, he would have some notion of where they were located