He broke off suddenly. He was staring at something behind me.
I turned, my heart quivering inside my chest.
Shapes—monstrous, pallid, unclean shapes—were closing in upon us.
XI
Battle and Retreat
I doubt if any writer, however accomplished, has ever done full justice to the emotion of terror.
To mention the icy chill at the backbone, the sudden sinewless trembling of the knees, the withering dryness of throat and tongue, is to be commonplace; and terror is not commonplace. Perhaps to remember terror is to know again the helplessness and faintness it brings.
Therefore it must suffice to say that, as I turned and saw the closing in of those pale-glowing blots of menace, I wanted to scream, and could not; to run, and could not; to take my gaze away, and could not.
If I do not describe the oncoming creatures—if creatures indeed they were—it is because they defied clear vision then and defy clear recollection now. Something quasi-human must have hung about them, something suggestive of man’s outline and manner, as in a rough image molded by children of snow; but they were not solid like snow. They shifted and swirled, like wreaths of thick mist, without dispersing in air. They gave a dim, rotten light of their own, and they moved absolutely without sound.
“It’s them,” gulped Jake Switz beside me. He, too, was frightened, but not as frightened as I. He could speak, and move, too—he had dropped Pursuivant’s head and was rising to his feet. I could hear him suck in a lungful of air, as though to brace himself for action.
His remembered presence, perhaps the mere fact of his companionship before the unreasoned awfulness of the glow-shadowy pack that advanced to hem us in, gave me back my own power of thought and motion. It gave me, too, the impulse to arm myself. I stooped to earth, groped swiftly, found and drew forth from its bed the sword-cane of Judge Pursuivant.
The non-shapes—that paradoxical idea is the best I can give of them—drifted around me, free and weightless in the night air like luminous sea-things in still, dark water. I made a thrust at the biggest and nearest of them.
I missed. Or did I? The target was, on a sudden, there no longer. Perhaps I had pierced it, and it had burst like a flimsy bladder. Thus I argued within my desperate inner mind, even as I faced about and made a stab at another. In the same instant it had gone, too—but the throng did not seem diminished. I made a sweeping slash with my point from side to side, and the things shrank back before it, as though they dared not pass the line I drew.
“Give ’em the works, Gib!” Jake was gritting out. “They can be hurt, all right!”
I laughed, like an impudent child. I felt inadequate and disappointed, as when in dreams a terrible adversary wilts before a blow I am ashamed of.
“Come on,” I challenged the undefinable enemy, in a feeble attempt at swagger. “Let me have a real poke at—”
“Hold hard,” said a new voice. Judge Pursuivant, apparently wakened by this commotion all around him, was struggling erect. “Here, Connatt, give me my sword.” He fairly wrung it from my hand, and drove back the misty horde with great fanwise sweeps. “Drop back, now. Not toward the lodge—up the driveway to the road.”
We made the retreat somehow, and were not followed. My clothing was drenched with sweat, as though I had swum in some filthy pool. Jake, whom I remember as helping me up the slope when I might have fallen, talked incessantly without finishing a single sentence. The nearest he came to rationality was, “What did … what if … can they—”
Pursuivant, however, seemed well recovered. He kicked together some bits of kindling at the roadside. Then he asked me for a match—perhaps to make me rally my sagging senses as I explored my pockets—and a moment later he had kindled a comforting fire.
“Now,” he said, “we’re probably safe from any more attention of that bunch. And our fire can’t be seen from the lodge. Sit down and talk it over.”
Jake was mopping a face as white as tallow. His spectacles mirrored the firelight in nervous shimmers.
“I guess I didn’t dream the other night, after all,” he jabbered. “Wait till I tell Mister Varduk about this.”
“Please tell him nothing,” counseled Judge Pursuivant at once.
“Eh?” I mumbled, astonished. “When the non-shapes—”
“Varduk probably knows all about these things—more than we shall ever know,” replied the judge. “I rather think he cut short his walk across the front yards so that they would attack me. At any rate, they seemed to ooze out of the timber the moment he and I separated.”
He told us, briefly, of how the non-shapes (he liked and adopted my paradox) were upon him before he knew. Like Jake two nights before, he felt an overwhelming disgust and faintness when they touched him, began to faint. His last voluntary act was to draw the blade in his cane and drive it into the ground, as an anchor against being dragged away.
“They would never touch that point,” he said confidently. “You found that out, Connatt.”
“And I’m still amazed, more about that fact than anything else. How would such things fear, even the finest steel?”
“It isn’t steel.” Squatting close to the fire, Pursuivant again cleared the bright, sharp bodkin. “Look at it, gentlemen—silver.”
It was two feet long, or more, round instead of flat, rather like a large needle. Though the metal was bright and worn with much polishing, the inscription over which Pursuivant and Varduk had pored was plainly decipherable by the firelight. Sic pereant omnes inimici tui, Domine. … I murmured it aloud, as though it were a protective charm.
“As you may know,” elaborated Judge Pursuivant, “silver is a specific against all evil creatures.”
“That’s so,” interjected Jake. “I heard my grandfather tell a yarn about
