Pets: The People of the Pit

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Insert:North of us a shaft of light shot half way to the zenith. It came from
behind the five peaks. The beam drove up through a column of blue haze
whose edges were marked as sharply as the rain that streams from the
edges of a thunder cloud. It was like the flash of a searchlight
through an azure mist. It cast no shadows.

As it struck upward the summits were outlined hard and black and I saw
that the whole mountain was shaped like a hand. As the light
silhouetted it, the gigantic fingers stretched, the hand seemed to
thrust itself forward. It was exactly as though it moved to push
something back. The shining beam held steady for a moment; then broke
into myriads of little luminous globes that swung to and fro and
dropped gently. They seemed to be searching.

The forest had become very still. Every wood noise held its breath. I
felt the dogs pressing against my legs. They too were silent; but
every muscle in their bodies trembled, their hair was stiff along
their backs and their eyes, fixed on the falling lights, were filmed
with the terror glaze.

I looked at Anderson. He was staring at the North where once more the
beam had pulsed upward.

"It can't be the aurora," I spoke without moving my lips. My mouth was
as dry as though Lao T'zai had poured his fear dust down my throat.

"If it is I never saw one like it," he answered in the same tone.
"Besides who ever heard of an aurora at this time of the year?"

He voiced the thought that was in my own mind.

"It makes me think something is being hunted up there," he said, "an
unholy sort of hunt--it's well for us to be out of range."

"The mountain seems to move each time the shaft shoots up," I said.
"What's it keeping back, Starr? It makes me think of the frozen hand
of cloud that Shan Nadour set before the Gate of Ghouls to keep them
in the lairs that Eblis cut for them."

He raised a hand--listening.

From the North and high overhead there came a whispering. It was not
the rustling of the aurora, that rushing, crackling sound like the
ghosts of winds that blew at Creation racing through the skeleton
leaves of ancient trees that sheltered Lilith. It was a whispering
that held in it a demand. It was eager. It called us to come up where
the beam was flashing. It drew. There was in it a note of inexorable
insistence. It touched my heart with a thousand tiny fear-tipped
fingers and it filled me with a vast longing to race on and merge
myself in the light. It must have been so that Ulysses felt when he
strained at the mast and strove to obey the crystal sweet singing of
the Sirens.