Yet let them rest now, he thought, as long as they are able. He rose and went out onto the cliff-side path. In the early light the stream below seemed far away and he saw how it ran southward into the shadow of another cliff on the other side. It came to him that if they reached the top and went south upon the plateau, they would find a place that matched the map that Echo had drawn.
Maybe it is not hopeless after all, he thought.
But when he reentered the cave and saw Moms ministering to Echo, massaging his sister’s swollen feet and crooning soothing encouragement, he felt anew the weight of the responsibilities he had taken on and doubt crept over his spirit. Moms and Echo looked at him expectantly and he made himself smile as he began to arrange their scanty breakfast.
And so, in a short few minutes, they were out of their shelter and struggling up the path that grew steeper with every step. Vern realized that they would have to stop often to rest and that the duty of mollifying Echo’s fear would grow more onerous, but there could be no turning back now.
The weather was in their favor, with a mild blue sky and little wind, even at this height, and they made better going than he had reckoned they would. At the last sharp turn before the top, Vern told Moms to stop for a rest and mind Echo while he went up to see what lay before them on the plateau.
The path they had been climbing was steeply graded, but the last eight feet or so had been cut into steps. These gave Vern an opportunity to peek over the edge, exposing only his head, so that his view of the prospect was at ground level. The area before him extended about fifty yards on three sides; the turf was short grass, composing what was traditionally called a “bald” in these mountains. At its south end was a long border of wildflowers — ironweed, jewelweed, bee balm, and the like — and these water-loving blooms held the promise of a spring. Beyond the flowers was a stand of low firs which cut off the long vista of the south.
There were no signs of shoggoths or other animals or of the Old Ones. A preternaturally peaceful silence reigned over this grassy bald.
Vern returned to the switchback in the path where Moms and Echo and Queenie waited. Moms was crooning earnestly to Echo, and Queenie snuggled against the pale girl, as if she, like Moms, were trying to stop Echo from looking down toward the stream.
Vern did not know why he whispered the report of his discoveries to his mother and sister. Maybe the information was too happy to speak of in normal tones. Moms whispered too: “Oh, I do hope there is water.”
“We will let Queenie go up first,” Vern said. “If there is water, she will find it.”
So it was Queenie who led the way to the gentle greensward, bounding up the weather-rounded steps and springing joyfully over the edge. By the time Vern brought Echo and Moms into the sky-tented field, the dog was already halfway to the border of flowers. She had smelled water.
Moms crawled onto the level surface, to sit cross-legged and receive Echo as Vern handed her up. Then Vern squirmed over too and the three of them sat for a few moments, to rest muscles and joints and to gaze back toward the way they had come, down the twinkling stream and over the tumbled, bushy hills, and through the shady glades and hollers to the foot of the treacherous but hospitable cliff. They shared a feeling of achievement. Whatever happened next, they had come this far safely, answering the summons. They had overcome great odds, greater than they had realized during their hard march.
Then Vern stood and turned toward the south and gazed upon a different world. Behind him was a landscape of forest, mountains, and green-blue valleys. Before him, beyond the flowers and the little firs, beyond the edge of this brief plateau, lay a vast panorama of immense, sky-spearing, cyclopean structures. So tall were these angular monuments, oblongs and cubes and spiry pyramids, that clouds obscured some of their tops. Their angles were all wrong, so that Vern experienced a fleeting vertigo.
Wrongness — that was the first salience that attacked his senses and his instincts. He could not estimate how far away these structures stood, piled one past the other in an infinitely regressing series, because they seemed to be erected in a different kind of space than that which obtained here on the plateau. They seemed also to inhabit a different kind of time, so that if you traveled toward them — that is, if you could travel toward them — you would leave behind the now you were in and stand in a different now, a kind of time to which your body, mind, and spirit were direly unsuited.
This knowledge flooded into his mind and gut all at once, as if from a suddenly unveiled black star.
He did not cry out; he did not swoon. But the sight of this monstrous, incomprehensible landscape, mindscape, was so alien that he fell to his knees. Then he fell forward on his hands, retching and heaving for breath and grasping the grass in his fingers as if these handfuls of turf were his only desperate handhold upon the planet.
I will not look up, he thought. I will not look at these things.
He heard from behind a muffled moaning and knew that Moms and Echo were gazing upon this nightmare prospect. It was Moms who had uttered that soul- stricken, heartsick moan. She was standing upright, hugging herself with both arms, and silver tears streamed gleaming upon her cheeks. There was an expression of desolate comprehension in her eyes. She must have known better than Vern could know what these gigantic shapes that crushed the southern horizon implied and that what was implied had to be the thing she most loathed and feared, except for the striking-down of her children.
“In their own image!” she cried.
Vern understood. The Olders were remaking the world, the whole planet, in accordance with their icy intellectual designs. They were not building machines and monuments upon the planetary surface; they were reconfiguring the molecular structures of the world, from core to crust, from pole to pole. Earth was in process of losing its identity. No longer would it be an earth; it would be an alien object, an implement or instrument, a tool whose purposes might be unimaginable.
Moms stood transfixed with horror, but Echo was not shrieking in terror, as Vern had supposed that she would be. She too was transfixed, but her expression was one of wonderment. Those unthinkably huge planes and angles and cleavages that folded inward and projected outward simultaneously in momentously slow formings and reformings exercised upon the autistic mind the same hypnotic fascination that a flickering light or a wind-trembled branch or a lightly dancing snowfall would produce. The fascination might be different by enormous degree, but it would not be different in kind from that which other and more familiar phenomena brought upon Vern’s sister.
When he saw that Echo did not lose herself in terror, that she was not beating her face with her fists as she did when fear was too terrible in her, Vern came to himself a little. Even with the calming image of Echo before him, it took an effort almost beyond his powers for him to collect his senses and something of his reasoning power.
He walked slowly to where Moms was standing and knelt and took the canteen from the book bag she had dropped in the grass. He grasped it in both hands and, keeping his gaze firmly turned toward the ground, never raising his eyes to the mind-wrenching panorama, trudged into the little marshy area outlined by the ranks of wildflowers.
In a minute or so, he came to a thin, oily streamlet that oozed among clumps of marsh-grassed turf. He bent and filled the flask and tasted the water. Musky and muddy, it was not toxic. He drank a little more before carrying the flask back to the females. Queenie bounded out of the herbage and trotted along beside him. No more than Echo was she disturbed by the sight of the world in ruin.