outlines of everything were blurred. Ferns faded into a fallen rock wall, its stones indistinguishable from the trunks of trees. The trees themselves receded into a greater darkness. The wind rattled their bare branches and I stared, my heart thumping.
Because suddenly I wasn’t looking across a twilight field, but into a pool, black and depthless beneath a haze of mist. I no longer saw my friends moving in the distance, but only their reflections on the water’s surface, flattened images stirred by a cold wind that made the hair on my arms rise. Within the dark reaches other creatures moved, recognizable by their shadows: the flash of a tail beneath the surface, the flicker of something like a wing. The hum of insects faded into the ripple of water on stone. I took a deep breath and tried to focus on something familiar: Hillary’s jacket chafing at my neck, the way my boots pinched…
It was no good. Dizziness swept over me. The meadow’s autumn incense gave way to another smell, the dank odor of standing water, rotting wood. My mouth grew dry, my tongue hard and swollen. Something horrible seemed caught in the back of my throat, a viscous strand of water hyacinth or old-man’s beard. I coughed; the putrefying smell grew stronger, moist tendrils thrusting against my tongue as I struggled to cry for help. In front of me the air billowed, liquiscent.
I screamed then, but it was like screaming underwater. In the distance three bright shapes shivered and disappeared. I blinked. In front of me shone an unwavering sweep of pure blue, so beautiful that my eyes filled.
Because I recognized that color: it was the blue that shades the sky sometimes in your dreams, the blue you see when a kingfisher dives and for an instant everything before you coheres into one thing, bird lake sky self: and then is gone. That is the color I saw then, and somehow I knew that this was the sky, a truer sky than I had ever seen, and that I was gazing up into it from the bottom of the deep and troubled mere that was our world.
But before I could fully grasp this, or wake to find myself drowning, something moved above the surface of the water.
I thought it was a falling tree, its branches clawing at the sky. But it moved too slowly for a falling tree, and when it seemed almost to touch the water it halted. No leaves grew upon its tangled limbs, and I realized that they were not branches at all. They were monstrous antlers. What I had at first perceived as the tree’s grotesquely gnarled bole was a head—not a stag’s head, but a man’s. His staring eyes were huge, the irises strangely variegated. Tawny yellows, moss-greens, the murky brown of leaves at the bottom of a lake; the colors radiating from a pupil that was ovoid, like a cat’s. His mouth was parted so that I could see the moist red gleam of his inner lip and the tip of his tongue. As he gazed into the water I trembled, afraid that he would see me there.
But after a minute passed a deeper dread filled me—because he did not see me at all, and surely he should? Surely it was impossible that something so huge would not notice another creature scant feet in front of it?
Yet it did not, and as this realization grew in me, so did my terror. That I could be so insignificant, that it was possible for me to move through the world and have my presence as unremarked as that of a spider spinning its web in the tall grass. And like the spider I could be casually destroyed, my passing neither mourned nor noticed by this monstrous being. An arm’s-length away from me the horned man dipped his head closer toward the water’s surface, as though he would drink there. He did not, but hesitated an inch or so above it. The surface remained smooth, the glassy air untroubled. Only those daedal eyes moved very slightly within its great head, as though it gazed questioningly upon its own image.
I shuddered. Because there was something horrible in that gaze, a sort of mindless potency that made me
Because suddenly I wasn’t looking across a twilight field, but into a pool, black and depthless beneath a haze of mist. I no longer saw my friends moving in the distance, but only their reflections on the water’s surface, flattened images stirred by a cold wind that made the hair on my arms rise. Within the dark reaches other creatures moved, recognizable by their shadows: the flash of a tail beneath the surface, the flicker of something like a wing. The hum of insects faded into the ripple of water on stone. I took a deep breath and tried to focus on something familiar: Hillary’s jacket chafing at my neck, the way my boots pinched…
It was no good. Dizziness swept over me. The meadow’s autumn incense gave way to another smell, the dank odor of standing water, rotting wood. My mouth grew dry, my tongue hard and swollen. Something horrible seemed caught in the back of my throat, a viscous strand of water hyacinth or old-man’s beard. I coughed; the putrefying smell grew stronger, moist tendrils thrusting against my tongue as I struggled to cry for help. In front of me the air billowed, liquiscent.
I screamed then, but it was like screaming underwater. In the distance three bright shapes shivered and disappeared. I blinked. In front of me shone an unwavering sweep of pure blue, so beautiful that my eyes filled.
Because I recognized that color: it was the blue that shades the sky sometimes in your dreams, the blue you see when a kingfisher dives and for an instant everything before you coheres into one thing, bird lake sky self: and then is gone. That is the color I saw then, and somehow I knew that this was the sky, a truer sky than I had ever seen, and that I was gazing up into it from the bottom of the deep and troubled mere that was our world.
But before I could fully grasp this, or wake to find myself drowning, something moved above the surface of the water.
I thought it was a falling tree, its branches clawing at the sky. But it moved too slowly for a falling tree, and when it seemed almost to touch the water it halted. No leaves grew upon its tangled limbs, and I realized that they were not branches at all. They were monstrous antlers. What I had at first perceived as the tree’s grotesquely gnarled bole was a head—not a stag’s head, but a man’s. His staring eyes were huge, the irises strangely variegated. Tawny yellows, moss-greens, the murky brown of leaves at the bottom of a lake; the colors radiating from a pupil that was ovoid, like a cat’s. His mouth was parted so that I could see the moist red gleam of his inner lip and the tip of his tongue. As he gazed into the water I trembled, afraid that he would see me there.
But after a minute passed a deeper dread filled me—because he did not see me at all, and surely he should? Surely it was impossible that something so huge would not notice another creature scant feet in front of it?
Yet it did not, and as this realization grew in me, so did my terror. That I could be so insignificant, that it was possible for me to move through the world and have my presence as unremarked as that of a spider spinning its web in the tall grass. And like the spider I could be casually destroyed, my passing neither mourned nor noticed by this monstrous being. An arm’s-length away from me the horned man dipped his head closer toward the water’s surface, as though he would drink there. He did not, but hesitated an inch or so above it. The surface remained smooth, the glassy air untroubled. Only those daedal eyes moved very slightly within its great head, as though it gazed questioningly upon its own image.
I shuddered. Because there was something horrible in that gaze, a sort of mindless potency that made me
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