Steve rode on ahead, and it was a good two hours before John Logan noticed that the huge pines were beginning to thin out. Slowly the mood of the day before crept over him. Even a line of aspens, flaming with the touch of the first high frost, did nothing to cheer him.
The trees thinned, became gnarled dwarfs, spurring his imagination. They huddled against the rocks, clinging with rheumatic limbs to the cruel stone, huddled as though convulsed with secret laughter. Their reaching limbs were twisted arms, bearing gnarled fingers. It seemed as though they pointed at the two riders and carried on a hushed and furtive conversation about the foolish visitors from the world below.
Lichens and mosses scabbed the rocks. The frost-cracked boulders shaded patches of fresh snow, and also the veined fatty gray of last year’s ice. The horses panting in the high, thin air labored over a rocky rise and John Logan gasped.
Ahead, stretching up and up was an unbroken expanse of jumbled harsh rock and, almost overhead, was the snow-capped peak of the mountain.
“Pretty?” Steve asked.
“It’s... breathtaking, Steve.”
“This is timberline, Johnny. Now we ride parallel to timberline along this here shoulder of the mountain and maybe we find a better place to go a little higher so we can look back down across the country. Ought to see a hundred miles on a day like this here.”
A moving speck disappeared high among the rocks.
“What’s that?” John asked.
“Mountain goat, I guess. Maybe we can get a shot at one. You know how to handle that carbon you got there?”
“Yes. I looked it over before we started.” He grinned. “I look the part even if I don’t act it.”
The going was very difficult and, in spite of the frigidity of the air John Logan found that he was sweating. The horses were cautious, afraid of the loose rocks. The timberline was on their left.
They came to a deep gash down the face of the mountain. It was about forty feet deep, but only five feet wide. Steve looked it over. Johnny pulled up beside him.
“How do we cross that?”
“Guess we jump it. I was just looking at that far side there. Might be slippery. Hate to have this critter stop sudden and pop me down that there cut.”
John saw what he meant. The near side of the cut was rough, but reasonably level. The far side was smooth, and gray-green with moss. The smooth area, gently rounded, was an oval about sixty feet long and thirty feet wide. Two humps of rock, twenty feet apart, parallel to the cut, jutted up out of the smooth, greenish oval about forty feet beyond the far edge.
“I can make it okay,” Steve said, “but I don’t want you trying it. I get over there and I can see some place where you can circle around to me. Okay?”
“Fine,” John said.
He edged his horse over to one side. Steve rode back the way they had come, spun the horse around. It was then that John Logan noticed the utter stillness. It was too quiet. In the forest there had been small, murmuring noises, frequent rustlings. Up here on the rocks there was the stillness of the tomb. He could hear each pebble displaced by the nervous hooves of Steve’s horse.
His increasing fear of the landscape rapidly turned to a crescendo. He realized that he was trembling. Cold sweat ran down his ribs.
He wanted to call out, to tell Steve not to try the jump, but he was afraid Steve would think him foolish. The whole high, cruel world of rock and pale sunlight seemed to gather obscene force, to pause, tight and malevolent.
Steve clucked to the horse, lifted it into a gallop toward the edge of the deep cut. His brown face was intent, his eyes narrowed as he clattered by John Logan.
As he neared the cut, John Logan felt the screen bubbling up in his throat, felt his nails biting into his palms.
The red-brown horse arced up.
The far side of the cut, the mossed oval, smooth surfaced, tilted up with reptile speed, tilted up away from the gap while horse and rider were in midair. John heard the scream, but it came from Steve’s throat.
Horse and rider fell sprawling down into a red, wet cavity that was lined with sharp, yellow-brown fringes of rock. The great upper jaw shut with a thick, wet chomp that shook the solid rock.
In the second before his horse reared and screamed, John Logan saw that the two knobs of rock he had noticed were in truth eyes. Great, blooded pupils stared at him with massive indifference, and, as his horse wheeled away, he saw the crusted lids slide slowly up, turning the bulging eyes back to two knobs of stone.
The horse fled at suicide pace across the shattered rock. The flight lasted for ten seconds before a foreleg was jammed down into a crack, the bone splitting cleanly as John Logan was catapulted into blackness.
He swam slowly back to consciousness. His cheek was against the rock and blood was crusted across his lips. He vomited from shock, then painfully got up onto his knees. There seemed to be no broken bones.
His wristwatch was shattered. The sun had changed, and he judged that it was midafternoon. He stood up, reeled and fell, stood up again. The horse was fifteen feet away. Dead. The head of the animal was at an odd angle.
He stood very still and listened. No sound broke the silence. The clear air daggered his throat and lungs. The horse lay on its left side. He pulled the carbine clear of the boot, slammed a shell into the chamber and walked drunkenly back toward the cut where Steve Fowler had jumped into the red mouth of death.
John heard a hoarse voice in his ears, found that with blood-caked lips he was saying, “The stone lizard. The stone lizard.”
His mind had retreated so that it seemed he was watching himself go through motions that should have been impossible because of his fear.
He stood, swaying, ten feet from where Steve had jumped into nothingness. He wondered why they hadn’t seen the telltale shape of it. The rounded oval of the head, caked with green moss. The eyes that bulged. The long back, ridged with rock, the obese bulging sides, the stumps of legs buried in the loose rock.
It was like a mirage. At one moment he could see, clear and evident, the shape of horror — and the next moment it would be indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape. Mosses grew on it. Last year’s ice was runneled down a fold in the rock of its flank.
He remembered Steve’s clear eyes and his smile and he stood in the desolate stillness and cursed the monster, cursing with a fury that made saliva run down his chin.
Kneeling then, he took aim at one of the rock knobs. He took aim at the film of thin rock he had seen slide slowly up to cover the blood-red left eye.
He tightened slowly on the trigger. The slug smacked dead center and he heard the thin, high whine of the ricochet. He squinted at the place where the slug had hit. It seemed to have scabbed off some of the rock, left a cleaner place where the rock was raw.
All fear had left him and his hands were slow and steady. Aiming at the paler spot on the incredible eyelid, he fired again. Once again the ricochet, but the movable film was pocked a bit deeper.
His teeth sank painfully into the inside of his underlip as he fired again. A splinter of rock buzzed close to him.
The fourth shot did not ricochet. He knelt, his fingers white on the stock, saw the black hole in the rock, saw the viscous fluid jet from the hole, running down the eyelid film like melted tar, mixed with blood.
Motionless he crouched, saw the quiver that shook the mound of rock, heard the clatter as fragments of rock scabbed off, rolled down the sides of the bulging belly. The far edge lifted, but not so far as when Steve had jumped. A gout of rank, nauseating air billowed around him, air with a taint of sulphur and a hint of rot.