by Michael Shea
Throughout her concentration on this scene, Sharon began to feel something like a prestorm vacuum in the air. The sky, still flawlessly blue, seemed to over-arch her with an ever more terrific emptiness. She found that the smallest movements of her fingers required an aching effort, and their performance of her will seemed to occur at ever greater distances from her silently panicking soul. She lowered the glasses and looked around her. We had calibrated the light-cables with yellow tape, and she saw that Ernst and I had now drawn down sixty feet of cable.
Feeling like someone who fights to concentrate in searing heat, or cold, Sharon dazedly searched the pack. She could read the faces— was it an illusion?—of individual campers: retired couples, teenagers, a mother here or there huddling over a small child. And she thought she saw in them the image of her own dawning terror. Their panic was of the mute, paralyzed kind that glitters far back in the eyes, which shift only fitfully. They had seen something unspeakable, yes—but they now felt the imminence of something more terrible still.
Again Sharon lowered the binoculars. Her heart began to race. She had been wrong. It was not the sky that radiated this new dread, but the lake’s surface. The sky contained only a kind of echo of a tremendous pressure that swelled against the wide blue interface of air and water. The lake's wide mirror, all forty square miles of it, tensed to be delivered of That Which Should Not Be. In the binoculars, Sharon mechanically found Hargis’s boat again. His men had collected another rifle and a handgun. The picture of Hargis expertly breaking down the weapons seemed, in the vast frame of this new fear—vast as the dammed waters beneath them all—a thing without menace. He clearly meant to reapproach her position, and return her fire, and it seemed all but certain to her that he was a good shot—and none of this had urgency, or even meaning for her.
Then came a moment when she knew, suddenly and viscerally, that the doom in the water had a focus, a precise target: the same people whose small, sharp-etched faces rocked in her lenses. And in the instant this conviction filled her, she saw those faces, as one, turn their eyes to the water near them. Sharon scanned and saw—surrounding the flotilla—a seething opacity, a boiling ring of murkiness in the lake water.
Even as she identified its configuration, the annular mass rose and swelled till it bulged a full meter above the surface. Its color was one that Sharon knew. She had seen it blaze at night decades past, blaze from the trees of a beloved playmate’s farm, all through the last autumn of her girlhood. The ring’s substance was liquescent, and endlessly it shuddered, melted, rippled, while its overall form remained constant.
A chorus of agony and understanding arose then—faintly, Sharon heard it as the far-off crowd voiced a unanimous prescience of unspeakable pain. The trees had instructed the campers’ unconscious minds in the potential dimensions of horror, and swiftly, swiftly they had come to intuit how great an agony they might expect from the force that assailed them in this new way. Before the ring's apparition Hargis had already begun to make his way to the flotilla’s perimeter, and now Sharon saw him calling for a laneway while he swung his boat around and backed its stem as close as he could get it to the ring without making contact. The man was quick and resolute, whatever else he was, and he saw the necessity for an immediate assault on this prison, before his flock’s control dissolved completely. He gunned his remaining engine. By using the enclosure’s full diameter in which to gain speed, he managed to strike the ring's opposite side at better than thirty miles an hour in spite of his boat's disability. The utterly dead stop to which the ring brought this charge pitched two men out sprawling upon the gelatinous barrier, and they too stuck fast with an instantaneous adhesion.
And they did more than this. They underwent a change that raised a mindless shrieking from the trapped flotilla. The two men were bare-skinned save for tennis-shoes and cut-off trousers, and when they began to suffer an impossibly accelerated version of Arnold’s fate, the blackening and fissuring of their flesh was sharply visible against the luminescence of that ring of vampiric jelly. Howling, they shriveled like crickets on a skillet, and when, in moments, they seemed no longer men at all, but merely the shrunken ashes of men which should be voiceless, they howled still.
And here, after a long and bodiless amazement, Sharon herself moved. She set the binoculars down, and took up her rifle. We had not foreseen the necessity of procuring a telescopic sight, and no sooner had she seen the two smudges of form swaying across her sights, than she racked the gun again in despair. She must watch until she could aid. She must leave us to our work. The understanding struck her that here was nothing less than a diversion of the Enemy’s power from us to another target. She saw that we had drawn down seventy feet of cable, and now it appeared that the Enemy was launching an attack that would take some time, and she thought: Dear God, is that the price for killing it? Fifty families?
And then the Enemy erupted amidst them, a sudden branching from the waters at the very center of the ring. Sharon took up the glasses again and watched as a bristle of spiked and shaggy legs, each meters long, seized the gunwales of three different craft and pulled mightily down, capsizing all three. The water squirmed with people, and the barbed limbs scythed them under. Instantly, four other craft were toppled, and their squalling occupants pitched into the unclean, phosphorescent brew of the imprisoned waters.
The Enemy worked entirely from beneath the surface, its jointed, claw-tipped limbs its only visible parts. It moved with stupefying speed, and shortly, no craft rode upright—all lolled, showing their keels to the sun. The glowing barrier had sunk somewhat, while still the Enemy worked beneath. Everywhere, people scrabbled for purchase on the glistening hulls, as more and more of them—flailing with sudden horror—sank just beneath the water and hung anchored in a subsurface manner that held them fast despite their most desperate strugglings and clawings toward the beautiful, indifferent sky. And Sharon watched, holding her post, seeing what she must, and waiting until the Enemy turned its attention to herself.
Soon, both the barrier and the captives of the underwater webbing had all shallowly submerged, to where the agonal turmoil could only occasionally break the surface. Then the capsized craft, as if they were being nudged apart from below, began a sluggish dispersal, leisurely disbanding. The sunken turbulence of webbed-in victims began to drift in unison, as if towed by some underwater root that they all shared. Their direction of drift was toward Sharon’s position.
Smoothly that poisoned and fettered crew approached her, bumbling suddenly just under the water-ceiling and breaking through it now and then when their mummied, sluggish hands or legs stretched with special violence toward the sunlight. Sharon understood that now there was no need for strategy, because her time with the Enemy had come. All that lay in her power to do against the alien would now be called for, and it would suffice to save her, or it would not. This realization came to Sharon less as an idea than as an oddly vivid zoographical image which she found herself recalling. It was of a funnel-spider’s web, a wide-mouthed cornucopia whose flared end was the scoop for prey, and in whose slender end the animal crouched and waited. Gathered under the predator were taut, infinitesimal threads that ramified out through the silken bowl, finely discriminating nerves which precisely mapped any capture's point of impact with the snare. And Sharon knew she had struck against, and now stood poised upon, just such a treacherous fabric. The little net whose glowing snarls still towed the clutch of campers nearer to her—this was but a detail in the Enemy's true web, which was forty miles square—the lake itself. But this was a web whose neural system ran two ways. Here the victim felt the presence and position of the predator whose snare it was, just as precisely as the latter felt hers. She remembered the obscene puppetry she had witnessed the day before, and understood the even fouler spectacle the Enemy intended to tease her with now. Didn't her adversary fear to lose some of his prey to her Enfield, or was he testing for just this, to see if she had nerve enough—having seen what had just passed—to defy hi
m still? The slime-shackled, blackened mannikins had now drawn within a hundred yards of her, and the towering sun gave her chilling glimpses of their entanglement. The Enemy, Sharon’s nerves told her, hung just beneath the gaggle of prey. She put down the glasses and took up the rifle. She would force the Enemy’s bluff, wait for him to bring his precious human booty within range. She saw that we had drawn down a little more than a hundred feet of cable.
In her state of hallucinatory oneness with her alien adversary’s imagined web she was so sure of what his moves would be that she felt a kind of immunity to the horror of confronting them. She watched for the moment when the alien would re-elevate the squirming nest of his prey for her to behold, and expected this with such certainty that when it occurred, she began smoothly pumping slugs into the ghastly flock without pausing to receive the mind-breaking enormity of their plight. With dreamlike efficiency she strewed balm upon those unfortunates, and exploited every instant which the Enemy required to retract his rash offering, though he moved to do this as soon as the first shots rang out. She felt reasonably certain she had dispatched at least five persons before the entire cluster was withdrawn below. This time it did not hover near the surface, but sank steadily down and out of sight. Sharon glanced at the cables: a hundred and ten feet.
She almost exulted in the deadly fixity with which she was now regarded by the still invisible alien. The entity had not subsided. It hung, a fiery blur, some meters under water off our boat’s port bow. Eagerly she returned its concentration, knowing that the longer she engaged it, the longer Ernst and I would have to ferret out the threshold of its lair, and drop its death therein. And as she waited for the Enemy to move, it was with a kind of priestly awe, as much for the power defending her— whose alien coolness she felt against her flesh—as for the equally timeless and unearthly power of the thing which she opposed. Something born far across the starry gulfs was about to rise against her from the water, and something from that same freezing vastness was with her in the boat, and she herself was no more than a battleground on which they met.
Inchingly, the Other neared, still not clearly visible. Its dreadful shadow came gingerfooting closer, and the vast, psychic webbing that contained them both tautened and shifted as Sharon, bodilessly still, read every tension. At length the alien had drawn quite near the boat.
In that penultimate silence, Sharon felt horror begin to grow in her, sudden helpless panic like the carnivorous burgeoning of a parasitic larva in the hollow of her stomach, but at precisely the same moment, she felt also the quickening of her personal will, and out of her horror, the flame of her life-long hate was rekindled. And then she called out to the thing still hidden in the water:
“Oh yes, I know you! It’s been more than fifty years since I first saw the color of you, and learned your nature, and I’ve never forgotten them, not for a single day of all those years. So why are you hiding like this? Do you think you're frightening me? Teasing me with the terror of seeing you? If so, why, don't be silly! Don’t be shy—come out and greet a body that will rejoice to meet you. Yes sir. Come out, Master Spider. Come face me if you dare. Face a woman who has dreamed and studied and schemed, who has longed to face you for so long. Why is it that you seem to be... nervous about meeting me?”
Under the water off her bow there were now submerged corruscations whose pattern had grown somewhat less vague. They seemed to sketch a huge-bodied, multibrachiate shape. But still the Enemy waited, testing her minutely through the neurons of the immaterial
web embracing them both. Sharon began to taunt it further, in a crooning sing-song which she spoke of wonderingly afterward, as if that sneering utterance, in such a moment, could not have been her own.
"Is something wrong, Enemy? Does something about me give you discomfort? Pain? Eh? Does something here, when you feel for me with your greedy mind, does something here seem to stab into you, cold and sharp? Does it hurt, hellspider? Come closer I tell you—don’t be afraid of startling me! I like you, I want you near me, where I can touch you. I want to touch you for little Danny Simes, and for Hazzard, my brother, and for so many others! What’s the matter? Are you really afraid of me, Enemy?”
The shape was clearer, nearer the surface now. With infinite slowness it focused as it rose. The jewel-like eyeknobs, the huge, couched fangs, the spiky, horripilating abdomen—as gradual, it seemed, as the growth of plants, these things rose toward the light. And as they rose, and their unholy color showed brighter, Sharon found within her a fury such as she had never known. Hate scorched through her like grounded lightning, fixing her where she stood. Smoothly, as it broke the surface, it reared back on the obese buoy of its abdomen, and raked its legs greedily at the sun. Unclean immensity—shape of Hunger, remorseless and absolute. It was a blasphemy merely that such a being should wear the noon light’s glory.
Hate had scalded her heart clean of fear. The funnel-web’s tenant had now come forth to the limit of its snare, and Sharon found she understood the predator, the unmistakable curiosity with which it came inching near. And she understood it was her stillness, her defiance, that brought it so carefully investigating. If it yet had fear of the Elder Sign it was surely but a vague one, a qualm, a doubtful sense of unusual power about this woman. The Enemy probed for panic, the squalled pleas that it so relished with its feeding. Delicately, gracefully, it laid one barbed leg- tip upon the gunwale.
Sharon’s rage was like a blossoming in her veins that swelled even while it lightened her body. Her heartbeat was a striding, militant drumbeat, and her blood sang in her ears like shrill, delirious flute music. In this moment the thing which she had all but lived to destroy, and which had touched so mortally those other lives so close to hers, touched for the first time—teasingly, testingly—the border of her own personal being. The contact of that barbed tarsal hook with the boat fired an impulse of reaction through her nerves as swiftly as one of her own neo-cortical commands might have done. She stepped forward and pressed the Elder Sign against the Enemy’s claw.
A depth-charge might have burst just under the boat, so powerful was the Enemy's response. To call it a recoil would be to suggest a bodily withdrawal, but what Sharon saw was more like an explosive liquefaction, an instantaneous dissolution of form, with a simultaneous thrusting-away of the Enemy’s material from the stone that was so swift as to resemble an intense magnetic repulsion. She saw its body re-coalesce in the tom water twenty yards off her bow. Even as it re-formed it writhed, as in some abysmal agony. It hung thus an instant, in a boil of movement, and then it dove. "It’s going to ground, down to its well,” Sharon told herself. She saw that we had now drawn a hundred and fifty feet of cable off the drum.
XVI
When diving in the ocean, one may find darkness, and weedy obscurity, but there will always be absent a certain claustrophobia that goes with diving in lakes. The oceans possess Earth, but Earth possesses the pent water of lakes. Water is life's cradle, but Earth is its grave. The darkness of deep lakewaters is always—to me at least—sepulchral.
At some sixty feet it was quite dark, for the waters were fairly rich in algae. We had found that sitting astride the lights—each as big as a beerkeg—was the most efficient way to have them always manageable, and at the same time give our arms more freedom. I held the rifle in the crook of my right arm, and the cable with my left hand. Ernst too held the cable with one hand, the signal cord and third talisman in the other. He had the charges wrapped around his lightcable just above his perch, solving the problem of his extra encumbrance. We went down carefully. Both our age and the infrequency with which we dove warranted very careful pressure-adjustment.
We meant to arrive clear-headed and competent to act.
I have noticed a certain feature of the fear of attack in the water—it seems to be concentrated in the legs. How panicky these poor nether limbs still feel without the firm shove of the earth against them. Psychologically speaking, I suppose that they are always feeling the primal dread of the void. This
was certainly what I felt in my own, as we descended now. All menace, it seemed, lay concentrated in the region just below my feet. We went down faced outward from each other, in order to spray the widest possible arc of light. The beams thrust out some twenty to thirty yards, creating an ashen lucidity that was slightly turgid with plankton. The beams were rather tightly focused, neither illuminating more than a few square yards of water. We swept them slowly, incessantly, as we descended.
When we had descended perhaps eighty feet I became aware, with a shudder of revulsion, of entering a sharply demarcated new zone in the water. I can describe it only as a zone of cold rottenness.
That the water should be colder was of course attributable to our greater depth. That it should be somewhat more viscous, curdled- seeming, was also to be expected as we neared the drowned forest and its inevitable superincumbent soup of vegetable decay. But this murkier water had a quality beyond—behind— these explainable physical conditions. It had a slightly corrosive feel to the skin, and I felt a faintly nauseating effervescence permeate my blood. Decay down here was not a simple biological accumulation—it was an active, predatory presence.
I tilted my light to be visible to Ernst in its side-glow, and pantomimed a horrified shudder. My friend nodded a vigorous confirmation. We combined our beams now, straight below, and saw a huge old tree beneath us. Descending farther, and probing out laterally with our lights, we uncovered a landscape of such trees—or rather, the nightmare simplifications of trees, huge, spiky, leafless amputations. These were too big for orchard trees, and from this we inferred we had not precisely targeted our dive on the old Simes property, and had descended on some of the adjacent woodlands.
