Whichever it was, she went through moonlit darkness toward the sea, past the tea-dark pools and the marshy places, through the rustling bracken, toward the roll of stones upon the sea shelves, the incessant grinding of gravel beside the waves. Which was, tonight, making a curious sound.
She stopped, confused. A curious sound. Not the usual one. This was flattened, muffled sounding. As though some enormously thick bandage had been pressed down upon the world.
She crouched, making herself as small as possible, then crept silently into a nearby tangle of bracken from which she peered out through slitted eyes. Near on her left, she heard a clack-chitter-chitter-clack as a small shelled creature made its laborious way across an outcropping of stone. From some distance to her right came the shrill cries of the seabirds in their spiraling gyre above the hammered sea. She was not far from the rim of the cliff. Not far from the cave itself. Perhaps a few hundred yards, all told. Still, better not move. Better merely wait to see what this oddness portended.
Whatever-it-was went on being odd. She turned her head seaward. The bird cries piped without resonance. Even the sound of the waves was wooden and flat, reaching the ear as a single impulse, a slap with no following susurrus. Everything seemed damped. And then, moving to the left, between her and the sea, a wallowing darkness, a silent, heaving immensity.
The thing had no edges! She could not see its shape. Though it swallowed stars, they were not thickly enough strewn to show an outline. At the advancing edge, a star winked out, then another, and at the trailing edge one winked into being, then another. Huge it was. Like a building. Yet moving …moving soundlessly. Invisibly.
She burrowed her face in her hands and did not look up for a time. When she did so again, the darkness had turned inland, toward the camp. Before her the stars winked out, one by one.
She could run, perhaps, and warn them! She could sneak quickly along under the bushes and get there in time to tell them …what? That a monstrous shadow was coming?
Her flesh tingled, as though an electrical field had been generated around her. Her hair stood on end. Her breath left her lungs in a sudden rush as the air pressure increased, more, and more, and more, then was suddenly gone, leaving her gasping into her cupped hands, desperately achieving silence.
The shadow was between her and the camp, approaching it from the south. She squirmed silently, turning so that she faced the camp. Everywhere, shadows.
Shadows. Immensities.
One approached from the north. And another yet, from the southeast. Wallowing darknesses, with no distinguishable features, no identifying characteristics …
Except the taste coating her tongue. Like carrion and cold and something hideously oily-rancid. She held her nose. It was not smell. The taste flowed between her teeth, making her salivate profusely, a copious, mucilaginous spit that trailed sickeningly from the corners of her mouth and refused to be spat away. The taste of moldy mastodon. The flavor of Behemoth. The savor of absolute immensity.
“Are you getting this?” her shadow mind mocked the distant observer, the monitor on Dinadh, the evaluator at Alliance Prime. Despite terror and discomfort, her rebellious ego thumbed its nose at that distant watcher, wherever, whenever it might be. “God, I hope you’re getting this. This is them, fellows. The Ularians. Just taste them!”
She almost screamed, for she felt it then. A vibration in the soil beneath her. Perhaps she heard it too. So deep a sound. Once and again. And again. The sound of earthquake breeding but not breaking. The sound of unimaginable hooves, slowly treading.
A shriek from the direction of the camp, only momentarily human. More surprise than pain. Cut off in midhowl. The darknesses gathered thickly there, around the camp.
And at this evidence of purpose concentrated away from herself, Snark scurried silently on all fours toward the sea, toward her landmark stones and her polished branch, throwing only one terrified glance behind her when she arrived there, seeing nothing toward the camp but the absence of stars, hearing nothing, smelling nothing, but tasting … oh, that foul grizzly smell, that flavor of old fur, long and matted, of bloody hooves and a hugeness past belief.
She dropped into the cave in one frenzied movement, then thrust her head outside to spit into the ocean far below, scraping her tongue with her fingers, taking out her knife and using the back edge of that to scrape with, only then able to stop retching. The taste was still there, but diminished. Here it was diluted by the sea air, by its salt tang and chill cleanliness.
She crawled under her blankets and was still as any animal petrified by fear, self-hypnotized into quiet. Time passed. The plod of those unimaginable feet came again, then once more. In her reverie, the shapes against the stars assumed form, like a puzzle her unconscious kept probing at. Maybe they weren’t really that big. Maybe they had like … wings. Bats looked a lot bigger than they really were. And birds. Perhaps, in the daylight, one could see that they were quite imaginable, only with wings. If they returned in daylight.
Except that winged things did not plod in that obdurate, inescapable way. Did not stalk across a world as though it were a pasture.
Light flushed the horizon and she squinched her eyes shut against it, refusing to admit the audacity of daylight. It was still night, she told herself. Still safe dark, hiding dark, friendly dark.
Sunlight allowed no such fiction, for she had forgotten to wall herself in. The sequined surface of the sea flashed into her eyes, blinding her. She emerged slowly, cautiously, drew down the branch, and lifted herself to peer above the rimrock across the moor. There was the camp, as she had left it, all the landmarks as she had last seen them. Nothing else. No residue of the disgusting taste.
