Joao dropped to his knees and flung both arms about a tree-bole. His brown face when the light fell on it was shiny with sweat, his eyes dilated and blind-looking. Dalton slammed the heel of his hand against the man’s shoulder and got no response save for a tightening of the grip on the treetrunk, and a pitiful whimper, “Assombra-me—it overshadows me!”
Dalton swung the flashlight beam ahead and saw nothing. Then all at once, not fifty yards away, a single glowing eye sprang out of the darkness, arched through the air and hit the ground to blaze into searing brilliance and white smoke. The clearing in which it burned grew bright as day, and Dalton saw a silhouetted figure clutching a rifle and turning its head from side to side.
He plunged headlong toward the light of the flare, shouting, “Thwaite, you idiot! You can’t—”
And then the currupira spoke.
Its bellowing seemed to come from all around, from the ground, the trees, the air. It smote like a blow in the stomach that drives out wind and fight. And it roared on, lashing at the wills of those who heard it, beating and stamping them out like sparks of a scattered fire.
Dalton groped with one hand for his pocket but his hand kept slipping away into a matterless void as his vision threatened to slip into blindness. Dimly he saw Thwaite, a stone’s throw ahead of him, start to lift his weapon and then stand frozen, swaying a little on his feet as if buffeted by waves of sound.
Already the second theme was coming in—the insidious obbligato of invitation to death, wheedling that this way … this way … was the path from the torment and terror that the monstrous voice flooded over them.
Thwaite took a stiff step, then another and another, toward the black wall of the mato that rose beyond the clearing. With an indescribable shudder Dalton realized that he too had moved an involuntary step forward. The currupira’s voice rose triumphantly.
With a mighty effort of will Dalton closed fingers he could not feel on the object in his pocket. Like a man lifting a mountain he lifted it to his lips.
A high sweet note cut like a knife through the roll of nightmare drums. With terrible concentration Dalton shifted his fingers and blew and blew….