In this residential section of the city there was at this hour no traffic in the street. The shouting crowd had disappeared. Sonya led us to the main street level. The pedestrian bridges were above us.
An unnatural silence seemed to hang about the dark, somnolent city, as though it only seemed sleeping and was wide awake. A tenseness was in the air. The houses were dark, but in almost every window I fancied that figures were watching, faces peering out.
We avoided the lights. Mounted the hill for a block or two, then turned into a very narrow street of shadows.
The houses here, the back of houses, I assumed, were blank, two-storied walls.
We passed each of them hurriedly. My heart was thumping. Sonya had said that these were merely back entrances to inner courtyards of the houses. But it seemed, to my sharpened fancy, that in every one some horrible lurking thing was waiting to spring upon us.
Sonya was leading. She was taking us through a back way to her home, to get the vehicle that would transport us to the island. We were nearing the end of the alley; it opened ahead of us into a broad street with a dim glow of light illumining it. To our right, just ahead, was a courtyard entrance: a yawning cave-mouth of emptiness.
We had almost reached it when Sonya abruptly halted, checked our advance as though she had struck some invisible barrier, stopped, and shrank backward, pressing against us. And her hand in terror was over her mouth to stifle a scream.
I saw it then, what she was seeing. A thing, something monstrous, lurking in the blackness of that cave-like house entrance, a thing huge, of vague, grotesque outline, an upright thing, with a great balloon-like head, bobbing from side to side, two eyes glowing in the darkness. And below them, where a neck might have been, two other smaller eyes, green, blazing points of fire.
In all my veins the blood seemed freezing, prickling needle-points of ice exuding through my pores, my scalp prickling at the hair-roots. I was stricken with fright and horror. But an instinct, so that I scarcely realized what I was doing, made me pull Sonya soundlessly backward, sweep all three of the girls behind me and downward. And as they sank to the pavement, I crouched tense in front of them.
The thing seemingly had not heard us, or seen us. It advanced out of the darkness of the doorway; in the dimness of the outside light I saw it more clearly, a thing like a great upright animal, ten feet tall, perhaps, and monstrously cast in human mold, with thick, bent legs. It had a long, thick trunk with wide, powerful shoulders and a deep, bulging chest, and arms that dangled nearly to its knees.