But I soon opened them again. Alice seemed huddling strangely up to me; she
was almost pushing against me. I looked at her and my blood froze at the
sight. One who has chanced to behold on the face of another a sudden look
of intense terror, the cause of which he does not suspect, will understand
me. By terror, overmastering terror, the pale features of Alice were drawn
and contorted, almost effaced. I had never seen anything like it even on a
living human face. A lifeless, misty phantom, a shade,... and this deadly
horror....
‘Alice, what is it?’ I said at last.
‘She ... she ...’ she answered with an effort. ‘She.’
‘She? Who is she?’
‘Do not utter her name, not her name,’ Alice faltered hurriedly. ‘We must
escape, or there will be an end to everything, and for ever.... Look, over
there!’
I turned my head in the direction in which her trembling hand was pointing,
and discerned something ... something horrible indeed.
This something was the more horrible that it had no definite shape.
Something bulky, dark, yellowish-black, spotted like a lizard’s belly, not
a storm-cloud, and not smoke, was crawling with a snake-like motion over
the earth. A wide rhythmic undulating movement from above downwards, and
from below upwards, an undulation recalling the malignant sweep of the
wings of a vulture seeking its prey; at times an indescribably revolting
grovelling on the earth, as of a spider stooping over its captured fly....
Who are you, what are you, menacing mass? Under her influence, I saw it,
I felt it--all sank into nothingness, all was dumb.... A putrefying,
pestilential chill came from it. At this chill breath the heart turned
sick, and the eyes grew dim, and the hair stood up on the head. It was
a power moving; that power which there is no resisting, to which all is
subject, which, sightless, shapeless, senseless, sees all, knows all, and
like a bird of prey picks out its victims, like a snake, stifles them and
stabs them with its frozen sting....
‘Alice! Alice!’ I shrieked like one in frenzy. ‘It is death! death itself!’
The wailing sound I had heard before broke from Alice’s lips; this time
it was more like a human wail of despair, and we flew. But our flight was
strangely and alarmingly unsteady; Alice turned over in the air, fell,
rushed from side to side like a partridge mortally wounded, or trying to
attract a dog away from her young. And meanwhile in pursuit of us, parting
from the indescribable mass of horror, rushed sort of long undulating
tentacles, like outstretched arms, like talons.... Suddenly a huge shape,
a muffled figure on a pale horse, sprang up and flew upwards into the very
heavens.... Still more fearfully, still more desperately Alice struggled.
‘She has seen! All is over! I am lost!’ I heard her broken whisper. ‘Oh,
I am miserable! I might have profited, have won life,... and now....
Nothingness, nothingness!’ It was too unbearable.... I lost consciousness.