Soon Pantucci started getting restless again. He looked back over his shoulder. 'Ralf, we're being watched.'
'Is that right? Well, try to look your best.'
A kilometre later, the trail narrowed to a trace so tight they had to lean forward to pass. But there was a plangent breeze sifting through the forest.'How much farther?'
Autway waved his hand, a gesture like wind in a sapling. 'You go through dat brake up ahead and you dere. But go slow, man. Go slow.'
Pantucci pushed through a tangle of hedge growth, and Ralf shoved Autway after him. On the other side, they stopped and looked out across an expanse of pools with water green as fire. There were half a dozen of them, ellipsoid, mirror flat, separated by huge mamo mocked trees and grasslands swaying in a fumy and spiritous mist. Beyond them, the horizon jazed into jungle. A green glow hung in the sky, waving over the rim of the world.
Pantucci was gazing into the water, ensorcelled by pale sketches of coral shaped like ladders. There was a nutant look on his face. This is a dream,' he said.
It is eerie, Ralf thought, focusing on a drowsy sound - the whittled-down thunder of waves shogging to shore faraway. He looked hard at the glades of blue trees, some growing out of the water, bent like witches. He had to shake his head to snap out of it.
With the barrel of his gun, he turned Autway around. The gangan's face was calm and dark as amber.
'Where is it, pop?'
'With dat which came from it.' The seamed face grinned cretinously.
On the opposite side of the nearest pool, from behind a massive shaggy tree trunk, the long man with black skin emerged. He was naked, elongated, unreal, and there was a sheen on his shoulders that made them look like glass. It was a peculiar body light that addled the air around him. He glided through the grass like an apparition, his arms writhing, unjointed, undulant. Even as far off as he was, rounding the turn of the pool, it was obvious that he was not human. The flesh was crumbling off his bones like soaked bread, and the bones themselves were long and rubbery.
Ralf fired without thinking. The bullet stopped him. Or seemed to. But the wrinkled air around him kept coming. It was like a sheet of rain - static, warped air, transparent but vibrantly distorted. As it approached, a whistle, very high, far, faraway, twined in their ears. Before anyone could move, it became a shrill-pitched wail, a projectile nose-diving through the atmosphere. Then the trembling sheet of air swept over them, and the intensity jumped to a spinning siren. The whine became a needle skewed between their eyes, crashing them to the ground, fluttering rags. The ringing agony drilled into the bones of their teeth, shook vision to splinters, exploded louder with each heartbeat.
The shriek was white hot, and they knew it would kill them. Nyarlathotep was screaming.
Then, like a slamming door, the wailing stepped. But their ears kept roaring. They were deaf as sod and would have sat there in the rusted grass swaying like old women except for what they became aware was happening around them. All three of them saw it at once. Ralf quivered like a gong and Pantucci let out a pitiful moan. Autway began to laugh, then to howl.
Henley's black and distorted body was writhing on the ground in the most inhuman way, the head bending backward to the feet, the waist twisting full around. There was a vast greasy hole in its torso where the bullet had struck, and that gap was widening and ripping. The body was peeling away, cracking open like a pod, droozing a quivering cheesy bladder - the delirious, gelatinous body of Nyarlathotep.
It was massive. By some abominable infusion, it swelled to twice the size of the body it hatched from.
Its surface was covered with something sticky, a black sap, bubbling, running off at the sides, carrying with it a bed of pearls, shiny curdled clods of milk, thick clusters of eggs. Something like pinworms needled over the gummy black silk, glimmering with a rabid bacterial fire. The body it pulled from was reduced to a cake of filaments that crumbled and lapsed with blue volts to dusty embers cooking in a soft camarine light. Then the thick singed-grease odours wafted across the field to them, and Pantucci began to retch.
Ralf couldn't take his eyes off the thing. It was hovering a few meters off the ground, its jelly sac bloated with webs of blue-pulsing veins. Tendrils, lionred, fiayed open around mouthlike gaping seams that writhed below the bulbed body. The tentacles were pushing it off, into the air, and it was lifting, its hideous rippled hulk was rising up over the puddling mess of its cocoon.
Ralf heaved himself to his feet. He wanted to flee, to bolt like wind, but another horror had fixed him.
The pond was churning. Dense forms were rising to their shadows and breaking the surface.
Webbed appendages lashed among the foaming waters - fiat faces, lizard-eyed shark maws splashed towards the shore. Autway was standing before them, his arms outspread, his wild hair whipped by his ecstatic movements.
The forms that were bobbling towards the bank were soaked black with the leakage and seepings of a putrid hell. Autway was savagely dancing, and Ralf heard him - he knew it was impossible, his ears were gluey with blood - but nonetheless he heard his cracked voice vomiting its laughter in his skulclass="underline" 'Nightroarer! Domn mine enemies. And corry me. Corry me afar de dream. Vever dos miroir!
O Nyarla! Sonde miroir! Nyarlathotep!' And then he was gone. A humped, bubbling gob lurched out of the pool and sprawled over him. For an instant, Ralf thought he could see his shocked, screaming face in the milky translucence, then there was only a red cloud in the midst of a throbbing amoebic thing.
Pantucci bellowed and clutched the attache. With a whipped run, he scampered along the rim of the pool towards the forest. A beaked, squid-headed mauler slobbered to shore and with gangling limbs pursued him. He was crying as he ran and, desperately, he heaved the attach~ away. But it was no good.
The creature was on him, all the seams and pleats of its throat fibrillating insanely as it hoisted him up with one pincered, blotched arm. Even after the greenscaled beak crushed him, he was kicking spastically, swivelling his arms.
Ralf almost choked on his fear. A gun in each hand, he backed off into the forest, blasting several rounds into a gaping eyeless sucker-mouth. He burst through the hedge and broke into a frantic clipped run. Howling and sobbing, he hopped among root-tangles, lashed through hanging vines, and slammed into a thick thorn bush, shredding his jellaba, tearing his flesh to be free, and kicking off into the gravedark forest. He could hear nothing. He was still deaf and too terrified to glance back. But there were vibrations. Dull, thudding, deadfall sensations that reached him through the ground.
Ralf lunged over the rotted shell of a tree, felt his leg catch on something, and saw the green-tangled ground jerk towards him. His guns flew out of his hands and vanished in the ferm growths. Rude hands banged him on to his back, and he stared up into the gnawed and lacerated face of Duke Parmelee. Hi-Hit Chuckie Watz was standing behind him, his face puffed up, scabby, the lower lip merely a crust. They were both holding heavy butcher's knives.
Wildly, Ralf tried to communicate with them in the forced medality of the deaf, but all that he could voice was whimpers. The Duke stooped to start in with his knife, but something beyond the trees distracted him. It was Hi-Hat who screamed first. Ralf saw his face stretch with horror as he shuffled backward. His foot tangled, and he fell to his back. Before he could rise, there was a blurred flurry, and a huge segmented bulk with frantic legs and membraneous wings descended on him. The Duke gawked bug-eyed and was still gawking when a lamprey with stalk-eyes lolled on to his back. He fled crazily this way and that, shrieking, trying to stab the slug-ball off his body, but it clung to him, melled into his flesh.