23
The challenge came. It was quite close, coming from out there in the mist and the darkness, strong and cold and relentless. It pulled me across the room. I jerked open the door. As I stepped out into the night I heard Laurie give a whimpering cry. Ahead of me the pounding surf beckoned. I felt the unwanted constriction of fear but I felt something more—human pride and defiance.
It was chill and damp and dark as a mine on the beach. The heavy mist was moist against my face. I stood facing the pulsations of the alien mind and slowly, like the curtain rising on a play, the mist began to lift. With a fog's capriciousness, it rose above my head and stopped to hang suspended over the beach, revealing now the white curve of sand, the black swell of waves, the dim gray shapes of trailers, but still blotting out the hills rising beyond.
And I saw her—a slim, small figure some fifty paces away, standing very straight, a figure of fragile innocence. I thought with pity of the young girl she once had been, the girl now soul-destroyed, the human named Helen Darrow.
I felt no surprise. How easily I had been duped! I wondered if her parents knew what she was or if they too were puppets dancing on a string, playing a perfect pantomime of human life. And then I severed all these cords of thought, cutting off the smell and taste and touch of the sea air, opening my mind to the vibrations beating against it, seeing, not with my eyes, but with the sightless vision of the mind.
I saw a coldness which wore the mask of hate but had not hatred's feeling. My spirit shriveled at the sight of the ugliness, the vicious indifference of the alien mind. An instinctive repugnance made me recoil as if, feeling blindly in the grass, I had touched the cold white belly of a snake. At that moment the alien struck.
"Drown!" The voice spoke.
"No!" I shouted aloud. "Not this time!"
The alien lashed out again, its overpowering vibrations forming words that were in my mind but not of it. "Drown! Drown yourself!"
My feet dug into the sand. I braced myself against the thundering echo in my ear.