I lay there for a little while, liquidly tired, listening to sounds already ancient before man dressed out his first skin. Skirlings… rustlings… basso frogs (frog legs for breakfast?)… snarlings… thrashings… screams, sometimes cut short…
I’m not sure just what awakened me. Maybe it was the impact of the club as it crushed Gordon’s skull, or Finklestein’s movements as he stirred from sleep during the final second of his life when the crude club rose and fell once more.
The first thing I consciously heard was an absolute silence. The writhing violence of the ’Glades had come to a total halt, and the silence, so sudden, was a ringing in my ears.
And while the silence deafened, the darkness became a gagging odor like something out of a slimy pit that had formed when the earth was young. It was the steam from the excretion of dinosaurs, the musk of a female creature long dead, the fetid effluvia of some unspeakable thing.
My first impression of the source of the smell was of two hairy, columnar legs standing beside the open-sided tchiki. As I reared up, spun, drew the trench knife, enormous hands grabbed the front roof and ripped it away.
I rolled through the open side, bounced to my feet away from the monstrous thing. I glimpsed Gordon and Finklestein sprawled in the open glade, their heads shattered. The thing had dropped its tree limb club to smash the tchiki and get to me. Its shadow engulfed me. I had an impression of a hairy black humanoid shape, about nine feet tall. Then I was enveloped by massive arms, and the smell of the thing shot down my throat, through my guts.
Maybe I screamed in a very un-Marinelike way. I’m not sure. I had the nightmarish certainty that I was going to be crushed and carried to some time-forgotten lair as dinner for a couple of hungry cubs.
The creature mewled, gibbered, and resisted my thrashings by crushing me against its sickening mass. I felt the tip of my knife bite into a yielding surface, and the thing barked in querulous anger and pain. For a second the embrace was uncertain, and I managed to break away.
I plunged through a thicket and ran. Heard my feet splash water and felt the slash of sawgrass. I looked over my shoulder at the shifting of shadows on the hummock, trying to separate the gigantic creature from the background blackness. It spotted me and called out, a bark-bark-barking note, high in pitch. The weird sound struck me as a pronouncement, a promise. I was the invader. I had hurt something that ruled here, and I must pay a price for that.
As I churned on through the sawgrass, my Marine training took hold of me again and my thoughts began to order themselves. Objective: survive the night; don’t get lost; return to the campsite and the short-wave transmitter. Obstacle: I could hear the slashing of sawgrass as the thing narrowed the distance in long strides. I had no hope of outrunning it. And no chance if I faced it squarely, even as large and strong as I was by everyday measurements.
The shallow water thinned out and was gone. Moist black sand became firmer under my pounding feet. Dense jungle shadows closed about me. The next hummock was a couple of hundred yards south of the campsite.
I veered in that direction, ducked behind a giant banyan tree and stood sucking for breath. The night was silent for a moment. The thing, I knew, had reached the edge of the hummock, its night vision searching for me. It bark-barked a note of angry frustration, as if demanding that I stop this foolishness and give myself up to it.
I heard the thud of heavy footsteps and knew the banyan was poor cover. I broke away, going deeper into the hummock, burrowing through a dry thicket. Never mind the sounds, the dry rattlings that revealed the direction of my flight; I had matches in my hand now.
Scratch. Pouf. Wink of fire. I dropped one after another in the brush as I ran. If the first one didn’t catch, I prayed the second or third would.
I burst out of the underbrush into a small clearing, changed directions, dropped belly flat, and wriggled into a maze of twisted pine trees. As I looked back, tongues of fire were lapping in the thicket. More than one of the matches had caught and touched off the dry grass.
There was a hesitant crackling, then a soft roar as more of the tinder-dry brush flamed. I saw the humanoid silhouette towering at the further edge of the thicket. It barked again, looking this way and that, still searching for me. Then it reeled back as the flames swept toward it.
I wormed down to the water’s edge. This time. I didn’t run. I stayed low, on all fours below the level of the sawgrass. Several yards out, I took my bearings. The Big Dipper, the North Star — I wanted to keep Polaris directly behind me and move due south. A subsequent trip due north, when I had the chance, would return me to the campsite and short-wave transmitter.
Half an hour later I crawled onto another hummock, sprawling, taking painful breaths. Looking back. I could see the dark image of the monster towering above the sawgrass. Quarter of a mile behind me now. Slogging back and forth uncertainly, mewling and whining in the same angry frustration as before.
I lay, hands knotted, silently begging the creature to turn east, west, north — any direction but south. The fire had made it lose sight of me and it seemed to be searching haphazardly. I was beginning to hope that the odds now were several dozen compass points in my favor.
Then I saw it come to a standstill. Its processes were working, crystallizing. As if with sudden decision, it began to move toward the hummock where I lay. I backed off, the sick emptiness working again in my belly. I wondered if the thing could smell me as I smelled it, and if my own odor was equally repulsive.
Always south… keeping the invisible, tenuous lifeline of direction between me and the transmitter. Every furlong, every hellish mile increased the risk of losing my fix on the campsite and transmitter forever. From a distance each hummock looked like all the others. How many hummocks? Ten thousand? If I did lose direction, the transmitter would become the proverbial needle in a haystack.
The night became a nightmare of fatigue, sawgrass and water, lattices of iron-hard mangrove in impenetrable tangles. Forever due south, Polaris winking behind me whenever I could see the sky.
Finally I collapsed under a great live oak, too exhausted to get up, too frightened to feel safe where I was. I lay there, my cheek against rotting humus that a week ago had been avid green vegetation, listening. Waiting for the echoes of giant footsteps.
But they didn’t come, and I realized that my cars were trying to tell me something. Yes… once more the swamp shimmered with its normal predawn sounds; it no longer crouched in silence because the thing was there. The creature must have lost my trail…
My spry old grandmother was at my bedside, her face filled with concern in its soft cloud of fine gray hair. I was ten years old and my temperature had been a hundred and three, and my grandmother was smiling and touching my forehead with a cool cloth. “Hi there, Mr. James C. Kelly! I do declare, the delirious boy who had a franzy is back with us, the nasty old fever all gone. What are we having for breakfast, Jimmy the Rugged?”…
Then my senses struggled up out of the dream, and there was merciless sun-glare, dappled through gnarled pines and shaggy wild palms. There was timeless emptiness and the hiss of insects. I wasn’t ten; and the “franzy” had been for real. A hint of the creature’s smell from the moment of close contact still clung to me, nauseatingly.
I sat up, took hold of a knotty sapling, and pulled to my feet. The sun was still low in the east, but the morning was already a shroud of heat.
Working against muscle stiffness, I walked across the narrow island, keeping the sun on my right. I looked north — and a small, bright jolt went through me. I was anything but lost. In the distance a thin feather of pale gray smoke high in the sky marked the location of the hummock I had set on fire. I had picked up a spin-off dividend. The masses of green stuff on the hummock would smolder and smoke for perhaps days — a beacon two hundred yards south of Point E, the campsite.