Then the log straightened, began to stand up, the boulder uncrouched.
Instinctively Percy’s hand reached for the piton hammer at his side, and when he touched its head he saw them as they were. Gasping inarticulately, he jerked the hammer free and hefted it, backing away.
Not a log, but bleached bones and tendons, what had once been a man. And the croucher was clothed in sodden rags and still had a face, though shriveled back, exposing the long teeth in an eternal grin. And behind others were stirring, more than four.
In a spasm of repugnance, Percy swung at the first two as they closed on him. Though neither was touched, the hammer passed within inches of the bleached one, who shrunk back and emitted a moan of so desolate a timbre as to nearly rob Percy of volition.
He forced himself to move against that tide of despair, and fled. At the break he was too busy finding handholds and footholds to look back. What made it more terrible was the muteness of his pursuers; all he could hear were soft slitherings and the rattle of pebbles.
When he was several yards up he glanced back. His route had led him out onto the face, and the bleached one was crawling lizardlike up a parallel rib, while the others were scrabbling out below, the nearest peering up and grinning through tangled hair and beard, once red but now like dried seaweed.
Climb!
When he looked across again, the lean one was almost level with him, trying impotently to find a way to him around the smooth bulge of a spur.
And then Percy was stopped; no matter how he groped, he could find no handhold. But there was a crack. He unclipped a piton and pounded it desperately in while the scrabbling below came closer. The piton rang solid, and he pulled himself up, and then there was another foothold and another handhold.
They sounded near, too near to take time to see.
Then he heard the desolate moaning again and looked down. The bearded creature was just below the piton, its hand extended toward it. As Percy watched, the claw recoiled, the creature stopped and began to retreat, the others shifting below him.
When he looked down again they were coming again, but using routes bypassing the piton. On the right the tatter-bearded thing was ahead, further down on the left the one in dark rags led his own file of spidery horrors. At least the lizardlike one that had been climbing the parallel rib was stopped, baffled by an overhang.
Against all training Percy looked up. Only fifteen feet!
Less than his own length from the top he had no handhold, and had to drive in another piton. Between hammer blows he heard the scrabbling coming toward him on the right. This time the piton would not retard pursuit.
He dragged himself up, found another handhold, got his foot on the piton, up and up, and began to drag himself over the edge. His hips were over. Just ahead were the three pitons and the sling with which he had anchored his rapel.
He grasped the sling, pulled himself forward, found the head of a piton with his other hand.
At the same moment something closed tenaciously on his ankle and began to pull him back. Percy hung on for dear life. But the pull was inexorable, untiring. And he was tired. The piton dug into his palm—
The piton! They had avoided the one below. And then a line out of his boyhood reading flashed into his mind: “Cold Iron is master of them all,” and he let go with his right hand and groped back, while the grim pull stretched his other arm till the shoulder seemed half out of its socket. He slid his piton hammer out, and reached down toward his ankle with it, but stretched as he was between his left hand clenched on the sling and the pull on his ankle, he couldn’t quite reach; he could feel the hammerhead against his calf.
Win all or lose all, there was only one thing to do. Letting go with his left hand, he curled his body around, and struck at the thing on his ankle.
For an instant he thought he would be dragged over, and then the moan was cut off, and his ankle was free from the crushing force.
He lay panting on the shelf, weak with strain, until he had the courage to crawl to the edge and look down. The cliff sparkled in the sun, light laughed from the blue waves of the Minch, the trail below was empty of all threat.
He looked at his ankle; the cloth of his trouserleg was twisted and driven into his boot, and when he pulled it away, he saw why. Something fell out of the cloth as he pulled the cuff up, and after he examined the curve of indentations in the leather, the yellow tooth was merely objective confirmation of the horror. If it had been an inch above the boottop and broken the skin, Percy was sure no antitetanus, antivenom, or antibiotic would have saved him.
He put on his gloves before he picked it up, wrapped and knotted it in a handkerchief folded double, and began to limp up the Pass of the Dead.
At first all Angus Donnan said when Percy told him he’d had a fall was, “Must have been a bad one,” but when he invited Percy into the bar even though it was late afternoon, and sat him down for a glass of his best malt, his glance at the climbing gear was knowing. “Now that’s medicinal, Mr. Percy, and even if it’s between licensed hours, I consider you a benighted traveler. Precisely where did you fall?”
Percy took a fiery gulp, but his shudder came before the whisky hit his throat.
“Was it perhaps some place you shouldn’t have climbed, some place you were warned against?”
So Percy told him the gist of it, watching Donnan’s face for signs of disbelief. But the innkeeper listened solemnly, not saying a word till he was done, and when Percy put on his gloves and unwrapped the tooth, looked at it with dour interest. “Aye. You’re a lucky man indeed. Would you mind telling one other man of this?”
“Who?”
“He’s called Daft Rabbie,” then seeing the look on Percy’s face “but he’s no daft at all. I’m thinking you’d like to change your room—the room next to ours is empty, and I know the knowledge would be a great comfort when you’re going to sleep.”
Percy was ready to say he wasn’t a child, but thought again, and gratefully accepted.
When the pub opened again at five, Percy went down and stayed. He wanted company, and the regulars had accepted him. He ate his supper there, but drank sparingly, still shaken enough not to let down his guard. Near closing time a giant of an old man came in, long gray hair hanging from under his knitted cap, but when he took it off Percy saw he was bald. “I heard you were asking after me,” he said to Donnan.
“Aye,” said Donnan, and beckoned him closer so he could speak in a low voice. Then he led him over to Percy’s table. “This is Rabbie MacLeod, Daft Rabbie.”
Percy could see why Angus had insisted he was misnamed; MacLeod’s look was like a hawk’s, though without the ferocious fixity. “As soon as we’re closed I want you to tell Rabbie what happened.”
Daft Rabbie and Percy drank the whiskies Percy ordered, talking desultorily till Donnan gave the ten-minute warning. Even on such short acquaintance, Percy felt comfortable enough with MacLeod to share silence with him.
Afterwards, by the one light left on in the bar, Percy told the old man his story while Angus cleaned up quietly, so as not to miss a word. This time he went into more detail, and Rabbie now and again moved his head assentingly. “Aye, that’s what I saw,” he said at the end, “that’s what I saw myself forty years ago when I looked down
When Percy brought down the handkerchief in his gloved hands and unknotted it, Angus came over, and the three of them stared down at the relic.
“Not with the help of this,” said Percy. “It’s a souvenir I can do without. But what to do with it?”
“I’ll fetch the paraffin,” said Angus.
So it ended with the three of them out on the hillside in the night. Percy soaked and resoaked the handkerchief and the bare rock around it, and then touched a match to it. As they watched the flames shifting in the wind, Angus said, “Let’s not talk of this.”
“Indeed not,” said MacLeod. “I know better now, and there’s no reason for you to be Daft Angus and you to be Daft Harry.”
