Page:Weird Tales Volume 12 Issue 05 (1928-11).djvu/104
"What I stared at was strange beyond imagining. Above him hovered—no other word quite conveys the instant impression I received of conscious movement—a something more resembling an appalling thunder-cloud condensed, or compressed, to an undreamt-of solidity, if such a phenomenon was possible, than anything else I can call to mind. In conveying to you a mental picture of this thing I am handicaped by having to describe something that has no counterpart in human experience and benumbs the brain with its staggering incomprehensibility.
"Viewed as a living entity it was enormous; I should judge fully thirty or forty feet in diameter, though its circumference was irregular and its outline so ragged that in many directions it might be much more than this figure. It seemed to rise from its edge to a dome center considerably higher than the stature of the hastening man beneath it; while underneath it appeared slightly hollowed.
"You understand I am giving you the sum of the impressions I retained after the encounter, and not merely my first instinctive observations; for it would be tedious, if not impossible, to separate my earlier impressions from later surety.
"At the moment my only emotion was amazement; though intertwined with my amazement there lay a shrinking, a loathing, of its abominable hue, which, save at the murky edges, was blacker than ink, or coal, or night—the black I should imagine we mean when in the phrase 'Black as Death itself' we endeavor to convey a profundity beyond all art to picture.
"Daimler of course heard me; in that quiet enclosed spot my voice seemed swollen unnaturally.
"'Look out, Messinger! The thing is alive—it's going to attack, I think!' he cried hurriedly and breathlessly.
"'Alive!' I exclaimed; and although instinctively I knew that it was indeed a living thing, yet the spoken word shocked me exceedingly. 'Nonsense! It's queer, but—quick, Daimler, run! It's dropping!' I shouted in a panic of sudden fear that strangely contradicted my curt refutation of his assertion.
"An instant realization of his great peril had come upon me as I saw the outlandish hovering thing that kept pace with his steps—by what means it moved I have no notion—abruptly fall for at least a third of the space between them. It fell just like a stone! No planing, or slanting swoop like a hawk at its quarry, but in a flash it was thirty feet lower, and the soughing swish of its passage was very audible.
"As I called, Daimler leapt forward and commenced a frantic dash toward me, and at the same second I rushed to meet him. Exactly how I expected to aid him I can not say, or indeed what manner of offensive I could summon in the slightest way effective against such a monstrous creature. The action was merely a blind impulse, the age-old urge of combination—the human species versus all comers.
"What this thing was dumfounded me, but I was convinced it was utterly malignant; for so close was it now that I glimpsed the sinuous rippling that agitated its ragged edge. The thing was visibly throbbing with vital life; even through the dusky pall I had seen that every inch of its surface was swelling, subsiding, and again heaving tumultuously with the apparently aimless convulsions of a gigantic bunch of knotted worms. Possibly part of this perception arose in a later impression; I can not be certain, for everything passed in a whirl in those tense seconds. But one detail I can state with certainty occurred in its rightful sequence: the sound that was emitted coincidently with its abrupt