He was cramped in tension, his nerves uselessly braced for some crushing, malevolent impact; it didn’t come, and after several seconds he cautiously let himself relax a little.
He hitched himself up to a less painful position and looked around for Byron. After a few moments he saw him, perched on a rock above Crawford and to his left, chewing his knuckle and staring down at him.
“Aickman,” Byron said, just loudly enough for his voice to carry across the abraded slope, “it’s important that you do exactly as I say—do you understand that?”
Crawford’s stomach was suddenly icy, and his muscles had tightened up again. He managed to squeeze the word “Yes,” out of his rigid lungs.
“Don’t move—if you move, it’ll get you. You can’t slide away faster than it can jump onto you.” Byron stretched and reached under his jacket.
“Where,” said Crawford stiffly, “is … it?”
Byron had drawn his pistol, and was looking closely at the leaves and dirt around him, as if he’d dropped something. “It’s—do keep calm now—it’s right over your head. I suppose you could look, if you can do it slowly.”
Crawford felt drops of sweat run down his ribs under his shirt as he slowly forced the muscles of his neck to tilt his head up; he saw the upper slope, bristling with trees that obstructed a view of the road, and then he saw the outer branches of the tree he was braced against, and finally he gathered his tattered courage and looked straight up.
And it took all of his self-control not to recoil or scream, and he was distantly resentful that he couldn’t just die in this instant.
The thing was clinging upside down to the trunk, its projecting snout only a few feet above his face. It had no eyes, nor even eye sockets, and its corrugated gray hide and anvil-shaped face were anything but mobile, but he could tell that he had excited its profoundest attention. A mouth opened under the snout, exposing teeth like petrified plates of tree fungus, and the creature began to stretch its neck downward.
“Lower your head,” called Byron tensely.
Crawford did, trying hard not to be sudden about it and he let the motion sweep his gaze across Byron’s perch. Byron was kneeling up on the rock and aiming his pistol in Crawford’s direction, and Crawford saw that a stumpy section of tree branch was now projecting from the muzzle.
“God help us both,” Byron whispered, and then he screwed his eyes tightly shut and pulled the trigger.
The deafening bang and the spray of splinters struck Crawford simultaneously,
and he convulsed and lost his balance and slid away from the tree; and though he was able to dig his fingers and toes into the dirt and drag to a stop five yards farther down the slope, he couldn’t make himself lift his head until he heard the creature fall heavily out of the tree and then begin to crawl uphill, away from him.
The thing, he saw then, was moving slowly on all fours toward Byron, lifting its long legs high over its body with each step, as if it were crawling through deep mud, and audibly snuffing the air with its upraised, elongated face. The young lord had stood up on his rock and was waiting for it, his spent pistol gripped clubwise in a white fist, his face even paler than normal but resolute. Crawford wondered why he wasn’t scrambling back uphill, and then remembered his lameness.
People were calling now from up on the road, but Crawford was busy digging a fist-sized rock out of the slope, and he had no breath to answer them. The effort of flinging it upward made him slide another yard downhill, but he had thrown accurately—the stone thudded against the nightmarishly broad back of the creature.
He coughed out a hoarse cry of triumph—which became a grating curse when he saw that he had not even slowed the monster down.
“Save yourself, Aickman,” said Byron in a voice that was flat with control.
With despair Crawford realized that he was not going to obey. His heart was still pounding alarmingly in his ribcage, and he knew he could accomplish nothing, but he began climbing uphill after the slow, snuffling, misshapen thing.
Peripherally he noticed a silent flare of green above him and to his right, and he paused to look.
It was morning sunlight in the top branches of a pine tree; dawn was finally, belatedly, coming to this west-facing mountainside. Beyond the tree was a slanting ridge that stood higher than the rest of the slope, and on the humped spine of it dew glinted dazzlingly in the brown carpet of pine needles.
He shifted to look back at Byron and the monster, and something jabbed him painfully in the side; he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out an uneven fragment of his broken shaving mirror.
And an idea came to him. The nature of sunlight changed sometime, Byron had told him four days ago when they’d been discussing the nephelim, and now it’s bad for them; and Crawford remembered, too, stories he’d heard in childhood about trolls who turned to stone at the first glint of dawn, and vampires that had to retreat into the earth to hide from the sun … and he remembered that Perseus had found a mirror useful in defeating Medusa.
He tucked the mirror fragment back into his pocket and resumed his scrambling crawl—but he was moving toward the sunlit ridge now, away from Byron and the monster.
Behind him he could hear Byron calling taunts at the indomitable thing, but Crawford didn’t look back until he had reached the ridge and climbed up the projecting tree roots onto the rounded hump of it.
He was in sunlight now, and he fumbled the broken pieces of mirror out of his pocket and held up the biggest piece—but he could no longer make out Byron or the creature in the dimness below him. In panicky haste he caught the sun in the glass and began sweeping the bright spot of reflected glare back and forth across the shadowed hillside.
He heard the earthquake-roar again at one point, and with desperate hope he jerked the spot of light back to where it had just been—and though it was what he had hoped for, he shuddered to see that terrible head turn slowly toward him, and he nearly flung the piece of mirror away. The thing in the light shook its head and resumed climbing, flexing and stretching its long legs in the air—Crawford could now see Byron, only a few yards above the advancing form—but Crawford forced his hand not to shake, and to hold the spot of light in the center of the broad back.
The thing stopped again, and again the trees shook to a roar that was like a mountain shifting on its hell-foundationed base. Now the figure turned around and began ponderously levering its bulk across the slope toward Crawford.
He almost dropped the mirror and ran. Smoke-colored slabs of tooth were bared in what was unmistakably outraged fury, and its pincers were tearing up head-sized chunks of dirt, and even splitting stones, as it advanced toward him; and he knew that physical damage was not by any means the worst thing to be feared when facing such an entity as this. But he held his ground and forced his bladder to stay tight and kept the light centered on the thing’s neck … where he could now see a torn spot, probably where Byron’s branch-missile had struck it.
The thing was getting closer, and the shifting roar of its breathing now sounded like a distant, valley-filling orchestra; was the thing singing? Crawford found himself following the theme, and the tragic grandeur of it caught at the breath in his throat; lyrics sprang spontaneously into his mind, coruscating tapestries of language as intricate as the depths of an opal, and it seemed to him that this must be some antediluvian march composed by sentient planets to celebrate a wedding of suns.
But the music was fading, as if a wind had sprung up between himself and the vast but far-distant orchestra. The long-legged thing was only a few yards away now, but it was moving much more slowly, and it seemed to Crawford that a gold and purple aura was flickering around its head; and at last with an audible crack it froze.