But then, right away, other things began to happen. Where the stream had been softly and romantically whispering along beside them, it acquired a new voice. Lots of new voices. Still holding Jennifer’s hand, Keith stopped short and scowled at the water and said, “Now what the hell...?”
The night began to fill up with weird noises. With snarly sounds and hissings and whimperings apparently being made by strange, unaccountable shadow-shapes that were appearing in the water. Every now and then one of the shapes surfaced enough to be halfway visible in the moonlight.
They were creepy-crawlies of one sort or another, Keith decided. Insects, bugs, water-spiders—about what you’d expect in such a stream. But they were bigger than any he’d ever seen before. Bigger than they had any right to be.
“Keith, what’s happening?” Jennifer whispered, hanging onto him. “What’s going on here?”
Keith didn’t know how to answer her. As they stood there staring wide-eyed at the stream, the unnatural sounds got louder and they saw more shadow-shapes that didn’t make any sense in such a place. It was as if the whole river had suddenly come alive in some weird, threatening way. As if many of the tiny, harmless creatures that normally lived in such streams had all at once grown in size and were either angry or confused about what had happened to them.
Then all at once Keith and Jennifer heard their names called and saw Reverend Beckford hurrying down the gorge toward them.
“Wait!” the Reverend shouted, waving at them. “Wait for me!” His yell bounced off the walls of the gorge in a string of echoes as, out of breath, he hurried to catch up to them. When he did that and got his breath back, he said, “I’ve decided to call on the people in the other cabins now, this evening, so they can join us at prayer in the morning. I’d be pleased if you two would come along.”
“Reverend, look!” Jennifer cried, turning to point to the river. “Something’s happening here!”
But it wasn’t happening any more. Evidently the Reverend’s yell had put a stop to it, the way a rock dropped into a pool would scatter a school of minnows. The oversized insects or whatever they were had fled, and the only sounds now to be heard were the normal ones made by any stream travelling over a rocky bed.
With the moonlight showing them where to put their feet, the three of them walked on down the gorge to the first of the other cabins. Smaller than the one they were using, it was built up against the cliff wall with a flight of steps leading up to a short veranda. They climbed the steps and the Reverend knocked politely on the door, but there was no response. Keith looked at his watch. The Reverend knocked again, louder, and Keith said with a frown, “They can’t be in bed; it’s only quarter to eight.” Then he walked along the veranda and peered in through a window.
So far as he could see, no one was home. “Maybe they’re at some other cabin,” he said. “Most likely all the folks who use these cabins of Lindsay’s are friends. Maybe they get together in the evenings.”
The Reverend said he thought that was probably so, and the three of them went on down the gorge to the second house, but no one answered his knock there, either. At the third, which appeared to be the last, they were truly surprised when they found no one at home.
“They’ve got to be here somewhere,” the Reverend said. “You heard what Howard Lindsay said: he checked in town before we came, and some of his factory people are out here this weekend.”
“You suppose they all got together and went someplace for dinner?” Keith wondered aloud.
Jennifer shook her head. “That wouldn’t make any sense. I mean, why would they come here for a weekend in the wilderness and then go somewhere to eat? There are no restaurants around here.”
“Well, like Keith says, they’re probably together somewhere,” the Reverend said. “We’ll just have to try again in the morning.”
It had been a long walk and they were weary by the time they got back to Howard Lindsay’s cabin. The others—Lindsay, Big Mary and the boy—were seated there in front of the fireplace. Reverend Beckford told about the empty cabins. Then Jennifer spoke of what she and Keith had heard and seen before he joined them.
“Noises? Shadow-things?” Howard Lindsay said with a scowl.
“You sure you didn’t just get carried away by your imagination? This gorge can be pretty spooky at night if you’re new here.”
“We heard what we heard,” Jennifer insisted. “We saw things that weren’t natural.”
“Maybe he’s here!” said young Davey Sewell.
“Maybe who’s here?” his mother said. “What are you talking about?”
“Satan. What if he came because we prayed to Jesus to fight him again? He and Jesus fought in the Bible, didn’t they?” The boy’s face glowed with excitement. “Maybe he wants a rematch!”
“Now, now,” Lindsay said, “what you two heard was just the different sounds the river makes at night. I’ve heard them many a time.” He lifted a big tumbler of water from the floor beside his chair and looked through it at the logs blazing in the fireplace. “I don’t care if our river wants to screech like an owl or wail like a banshee,” he said with a grin. “This is the best damn drinking water—begging your pardon, Reverend—in the whole of creation. I never can get enough of it when I’m here.” He aimed his grin at Big Mary and Jennifer. “You women and your bottled stuff!” he snorted. “I bet if you was to have both kinds tested, you’d find that what I’m drinking is a whole sight better!”
Big Mary heaved herself up from her chair and said, “Well, you go right ahead and drink all you want of it, Deacon, but I’m dead beat and going to bed. Goodnight, all of you.”
“If that goes for the rest of you, I believe I’ll turn in, too,” Reverend Beckford said, making it a question by hiking his eyebrows up.
They said it did, and the evening was finished.
* * *
Those bunk-beds in Howard Lindsay’s cabin were not the most comfortable in the world. When Keith opened his eyes and saw by the moonlight in the room that the Reverend and Howard Lindsay were still asleep, he thought his aching back must have been what waked him. Then he heard a noise outside the window next to his bunk. Someone was out there walking around, it seemed.
Puzzled, he got up and stepped to the window and looked out.
With the moon directly overhead, Deeprock Gorge was almost as bright as day, except the light was sort of unreal. What was out there was even more unreal, though. Keith grabbed hold of the window ledge and felt his eyes bulging in their sockets.
“Lord Jesus!” he heard himself whisper—and he was not a church-going man.
Just outside the window stood a naked man holding what looked like a tree-limb. He was about to use the limb as a club to smash the window, it seemed; at any rate he was holding it aloft in both hands and looking at the window. But what he was was more terrible than anything he might be thinking of doing.
He was big. Big all over. And not just huge but lumpy, as if he was made of rubber and someone had blown too much air into him. As for his head, Keith stared at that in total disbelief.
It wasn’t natural in any way. It was, in fact, a mass of enormous lumps or bumps that all but hid the eyes and most of the mouth. Massive, malformed swellings they were, from which the man’s eyes blazed like twin red coals and the left side of his mouth—all that remained visible—was curled up over teeth that were like the fangs of a serpent.
As Keith stared at him, half-paralysed, the man took a step forward and voiced the sound that must have waked Keith in the first place: a long, loud snarl of rage or hate or fury that actually made the window rattle.
And he wasn’t alone.
Coming up behind him, on his right, was a naked woman, and she too brandished a tree-limb club. She might have been a pretty woman once, but now she had the same lumps all over her body that the man had, and something even uglier. Big tufts of hair grew out of her cheeks and breasts and belly: long, black, bristly hair that made her look like some kind of wild animal. Or something that was in the process of becoming an animal but hadn’t quite finished. She too was snarling or hissing or whatever the sound ought to be called... because it wasn’t just one sound now, or coming from only those two throats. At least half a dozen other things that had been men and women came plodding into view even as Keith stood there petrified at the window. All of them had clubs.