He was right. On his feet he was so dizzy he could barely stand. But his thirst was so great that he managed to stagger to the pool, fall to his knees, then lie down and drink.
It looked up at him from the bottom of the pool.
He jerked back so quickly that inadvertently he used his right hand to push himself, and a blast of raw agony lanced up his arm to his shoulder, followed by a terrible wave of nausea.
He lay down again, rolled over on his back, and closed his eyes.
She was there.
He could see her face as clearly as if she stood before him. Young, the woman’s features still a bit blurred by the child’s. Almost, not quite, ready for love. Rose-petal skin, spun gold hair, lips like autumn rose hips, and eyes warm and blue as a summer sky.
Somewhere in his mind he laughed at himself. All the poetic banalities, and yet all love.
Women, he remembered someone in the warrior society saying. Oh, yes, there are always women. Women for pleasure, women for breeding—very important that. Women for work, all the ceaseless cooking, washing, and cleaning. All the worrisome, monotonous tasks women are so good at. Women. Don’t worry about women.
Her eyes looked into his. Oh, yes, they were the summer sky, an arch of cloud-filled crystalline light over a green, warm world. The smell of horses, saddle leather, dogs for the chase. Woodsmoke rising from cooking fires, venison, wild boar on the spit; salmon leaping in the streams or smoking over an ash fire. All good things. Comrades, friends, food, drink, and even deadly quarrels. The glitter of edged steel in knives, swords, spears glowing, drinking in the light as it sang in their blades. All … all in those warm, sky-blue eyes.
For a moment, fear, anxiety, and dread vanished and he was at peace. Then he remembered what he had seen in the water, and the fear returned with a rush.
His eyes opened; he looked over and down into the pool.
He wondered if the water could be poisonous, because there was more than one—at least a dozen skulls looked up at him from the bottom with the empty stare of the dead.
He remembered a bleak joke someone had told him once: they cannot choose but stare because they cannot close their eyes.
A small bird, very like a finch clad in gray and black, landed on a lily pad and drank. Then, with a flick of its wings, flew away.
The water was very clear and that was how he knew they were there in the first place. He could see to the bottom.
They were all scattered among the stones, looking up at him. At least a dozen skulls. Odd that they should all look up at him. None were on their side or facedown. He was sure he could tell them from the rocks that covered the bottom if they were mispositioned. But none were. Each one gazed up through the clear water at the sky or at his face. He drank again.
No, the long-ago deaths hadn’t polluted the water. He felt better, much better. Then he thought the water might help his hand, so he slowly eased it below the surface.
Yes, it did, cooling the angry heat in the tissues and soothing away the throbbing that accompanied every moment.
He sighed, a forlorn breath of relief, but then he noticed the forest had gone quiet around him.
No, no, that wasn’t good. He was an alert woodsman, having been brought up in a world where the ancient forests were still a viable presence and large, almost endless tracts were as yet untouched by the human banes of an ax and fire. Where hunting was an avowed necessity, serving as an important source of meat harvested to keep his scattered people fed.
He knew the forest.
Birdsong ceased, and in a tree nearby a flock flew up as though frightened by some distant sound. He did the human thing. He stood.
He was in a brushy, open woodland with rather thin, stony soil. He could see nothing except perhaps a waver in the air of the sort that appears above hot fire.
It was coming. And he was shaking inside.
A small deer flashed past him, leaping the oblong end of the forest pool. And in the distance, he could hear the tearing of brush and trees as it moved through the undergrowth, steadily ever toward him.
He went to one knee and drank quickly, sucking the water from his cupped hands. The wind changed briefly, bringing the thick, heavy odor of decay to his nostrils. An owl, awakened from its midday sleep, glided past him on silent wings, and he knew whatever path it chose to take, everything fled before it.
But he was the special one. The person it was bent on catching.
He had been here before. Through this particular awakening before. But his mind was fogged with illness or drugs. He couldn’t remember.
Something like wind but not wind began to twist and fling the branches of a stand of aspen saplings across the pool, and he knew it was here. The stench was a thick, almost gaseous, cloud over the water and so strong in his nostrils it gagged him.
A dilatory hare burst from a copse nearby and tried to run around the pool. In its flight, it ran directly in front of the horror.
Something of the creature’s terrible substance must have touched it, because the hare exploded into a red ruin. Blood and bits of flesh flung into the air, spattered his face.
Without wasting any more time, he turned and fled at a dead run through the trees. The thing couldn’t move very fast. He had ascertained that … yesterday?
He dimly perceived that he had expended much too much energy trying to get away from it. So when he was well clear of the pool and on a game trail leading away from the water, he dropped his pace to a walk and began to think again.
He tried to remember, but looking into his memory was like peering down a long, dimly lit corridor drenched in fog. Some things from yesterday were clear—his own nightmare terror, for instance. But others were only shadows, images that faded in and out like a sea bottom seen from a cliff.
She wouldn’t like this, he thought. She? Who? What she? All he could remember was that she would tell him to use his brain—think, not simply flee mindlessly from the ghastly darkness that hunted him.
He looked down at himself as he walked along. His shirt was nothing unusual. Most men wore something like this for everyday wear, a linen shirt that was almost a tunic. It hung to just above his knees. Trousers reinforced at knees and rear with deer hide, the trousers reached to just below his knees. His lower legs were wrapped in wool held in place by deer-hide crossed garters.
He wore good boots, several thicknesses of leather tanned to softness and held in place by the same cross gartering that tied his leggings.
The thing was slow, yes. And as long as he maintained a fast walk, he could keep well ahead of it.
He licked his lips and found blood on them and was alarmed for a second. Then he remembered the unfortunate hare.
What to do now?
The answer came back as if she had spoken it. First, stay alive. He laughed a bit and was surprised by the sound of his own voice.
He looked around, but in this mixed woodland he couldn’t see much.
Climb a tree.
A wave of fear swept over him. No. It might catch him aloft. He didn’t know if it could climb, and “didn’t know” wasn’t a good enough guarantee that it couldn’t. He must avoid being cornered at all costs.
Aside from that, he couldn’t think of anything productive to do but what he was already doing—following the game trail.
She’d taught him to do another thing, a difficult thing. But she’d begun young. How young was another thing his buzzing head wouldn’t tell him. But she had taught him to push his fears into the back of his mind while he did what was necessary at the moment. So he did.
The trail wound on through a thick copse of birches, through an almost evilly dark growth of scrub pine, down into a dry creek bed, where it continued along the bottom for perhaps a half mile. Then it emptied into what must have been a small lake in springtime and was now a bog. Large clumps of tall reeds and cattails replaced the trees. He couldn’t see any more of his surroundings than he had in the forest.
But again he was used to wet grou
nd. And the trail went on.
Cress grew in the shallows, and he saw that was because the water in the black lake, as his people called bogs, was running sluggishly downhill. He plucked a bunch of the cress, washed it off in a shallow pool, and ate it as he walked, threading his way around deeper pools. He could tell where these were, because clumps of yellow iris and water lily pads grew in them. Above the water, dragonflies hovered, their transparent wings glinting in the sunlight.
A beautiful place, this black lake. He would have liked to linger here if he hadn’t so feared the terror behind him. He would have fished in the deep pools and caught frogs in the shallows.
His boot kicked something, and he saw it was the trunk of a downed tree. It occupied a ridge of high ground between two deeper pools.
He kicked at it again and opened a nest of grubs tunneling in the rotten tree. He didn’t give it a second thought. He paired them with the cress and ate both.
Why not? he asked in his mind. Bears do and am I not a bear?
Then he shook his head. How am I a bear? But both cress and grubs were food, and he was quite literally starving.
He picked the rotten log clean. But by then he heard the cries of birds fleeing the creature that pursued him.
And he found he must hurry.
A little farther on, he came to a nest of duck eggs, the mother having fled ahead, frightened by what hunted him. They were fresh, and he consumed them greedily.
The bog began to become a rain forest. Wet, dank, but cool and thickly overgrown with moss and so many kinds of ferns he couldn’t put names to them. It was an achingly green place that glowed in the distant sun like a scattering of emeralds dusted with diamond dew.
Behind him, he heard the wild, sawing cry of an alarmed waterbird, and its shadow covered him briefly as it flew. He had taken time with that log, and now he knew he must run again.
He did, and so the day went. He found his way to a higher pine forest, and since this was a patch of climax forest, he was able to make better time. But the ground was rising and he found that on the steeper grades the effort drained him.
By late afternoon, he was nearly to the point of falling but knew he must press on. Soaking his hand had eased the pain for him, but the day’s walking and his sometimes inadvertent use of his fingers, and sometimes the whole hand, brought back the swelling and much of the pain.
He tried to ignore it, then told himself he was a fool. If he lost the use of it, he might be in dire straits indeed. So he improvised a sling from a piece of vine and found his discomfort much relieved.
Then he ran into the skulls again.
The last one was set on a post made from the trunk of a young birch. The assaulted tree, its top cut off, had begun to grow again, and the skull stared out at him from a nest of branches. Some had come out through the jaws and the eye holes.
The thing was toothless, and the man who must have been its living embodiment looked to have been very old. The rising bark from the broken tree was growing up to cover it.
He found himself saluting it.
I am but young, he thought, and will never have the privilege of your years.
To his surprise, he found himself answered, as a sigh like the breath of a powerful wind went through the trees. But there was no wind. The air was still and the sun was hot on his back.
He thought of the girl again, those warm eyes.
How sad, he thought. I may never see her again.
He was sure she was not the one who had taught him the craft of survival.
He went forward then, and saw his cage.
The forest ended at a cliff with at least a half-mile drop to the valley below.
He climbed quickly to the top of a cluster of boulders near the spot where the skull was being engulfed by the birch tree and saw nothing that reassured him that he might eventually escape. He was on the edge of a plateau that backed up to a sheer cliff so high its top was lost in the shadows of misty blue cloud.
The plateau formed a shelf. It held water, a bog, and the small forest, because there was a depression in the middle. But then it rose at the edges and tall cliffs fell away into a fair green valley below.
Beyond the valley the red ball of the sun was going down over another mountain range. The peaks were tall, higher than any he had ever seen in his life. Their tops were white and clad in thick fog.
From where he stood, he could look back at the thing pursuing him.
As the sun sank lower, it ceased shining directly into the trees on the plateau. It flared on the treetops and the mountain behind them.
The shadow of horror began to waver, then lift. The thing seemed to lose energy as the light failed.
And he heard a sort of screaming rise from it, as though it protested the encroaching night. A screaming like the sound of so many voices. Not one single word could be understood, but rather a cacophony of rage rising toward the pale moon that had begun to show at the horizon.
His memory told him the hunter was impotent at night and must return to whatever place it had come from until the sun rose. But he remained, his eyes searching the distant valley below for some sign of human presence.
In the twilight, he thought he saw a faint light in the distance and a wisp of smoke. It just increased the loneliness that was an abysmal ache of sorrow in his heart.
On his way back, he took the path the thing had worn through the forest while pursuing him. Occasionally he passed the carcass of some bird or animal that hadn’t been swift enough to get out of the thing’s way. None were salvageable as food, until he came to a fawn. The thing was practically dismembered, the head was missing, but the body was intact.
He made a knife quickly, using a cobble to flake a bit of granite. The flakes offered sharp edges, and he was able to butcher the carcass.
He consumed such organ meats as he could find in the viscera, some of the heart and liver, then ate the raw muscle meat of the young animal. Raw meat is tender, and he was crouched single-mindedly over his meal when he heard the sound of distant laughter.
He looked up abruptly.
“Can he hear us?” The whisper was female and full of delight.
“Look at his face, my dear. Of course, he can,” another voice chimed in.
“How very cruel—he knows he’s being watched.”
“That’s because I want him to know.” This voice was masculine.
A volley of feminine giggles followed. But then, like a curtain dropping, the voices and the sense of presence disappeared.
And he knew that he was being tortured, subtly, cleverly but brutally and skillfully. Tortured—and someone was very amused by the process.
A victim has to shoulder the burden of another’s hate, and it lay heavy on his mind as he finished eating his fill and then collected the long strips of meat he’d managed to cut from the carcass. He would hang them in the holly bush to dry. He wished for a little salt. They would cure better with salt. But salt or not, cure they would, if the sun shone, so he hurried on with his plunder. He was too tired to think through the ramifications of what he’d been allowed to know.
He sank down into the pile of dead leaves under the holly bush. But before he slept, he remembered the girl with the sky in her eyes. And her image followed him into darkness.
He didn’t know who he was, and except in the most general terms, didn’t know where he was. The next three days were perhaps the most hellish of his life.
He woke knowing the thing would be after him again. The only respite he received from it came in the gray hours of morning, before sunrise, and during the cool blue dusk when the sun went behind the distant mountains. Whenever the sun was high in the sky, he must run. And he did.
It materialized in the open forest as the long rays poured down past the treetops by the new light of morning.
It made noises, sometimes a muttering as of many voices speaking in tones too low to discern words.
At other times, when it was frustrated, it screamed, also in many voice
s. The things that most often frustrated it were the skulls, and Arthur understood they warded it. It could not sink into the pool or the bog because they looked up at it through the dark water. It could not pass the edges of the cliffs that bounded the edges of the plateau because the skulls were distributed all along the precipice.
He knew, because for the next week, he crisscrossed the plateau and explored every inch of the forest cover on top in search of a way down. But he found there was none.
He even thought of destroying one of the skulls on the edge and hoping it would leave. But he was reasonably sure he saw plowed fields and sometimes smoke rising in the distance. So for the time being, he shouldered the responsibility of being the evil thing’s keeper.
It didn’t move very fast, so any alert animal could avoid it. But this didn’t hold true for infant creatures—fledgling birds, baby rabbits, fox kits, fawns, or even wildcat kittens. It destroyed those and anything else it touched, even trees, although in most instances it seemed to find its way around them. This didn’t prevent it from ripping off limbs or, more commonly, denuding them of leaves, fruit, or flowers.
He improvised a sling from the fawn skin and tried rocks against the writhing ball of movement he saw at its core. It looked very much like the air over a fire, troubled by the rising heat, and he sensed it must be the heart of the terror.
The first rocks simply bounced away, or were bounced away.
But then he stood his ground and took better aim.
The thing gave a wild series of hideous shrieks, and the rock exploded, as the rabbit he’d seen killed by it, sending sharp fragments in all directions. One sliced open his cheek and another just missed putting out one of his eyes. A third laid open a two-inch gash on his arm.
He tucked the sling in his belt and ran, flying through the forest until the thing was only a soft growl in the distance. He crouched down near a dry ravine and cleaned his bloody arm and face with some dried moss, panting and wondering how long he could survive this endless chase. And wondering if he had the courage to do one of the two things that would end it—either waiting until the twisted core of diabolical energies overtook him or, as an alternative, leaping from one of the broken, rocky ledges that edged the plateau.
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